Informatica Perspectives

People have been using the term “business intelligence 2.0” for a few years, but it’s described in different ways. In Business Intelligence 2.0: Simpler, More Accessible, Inevitable Neil Raden says:

"…the current era of BI is coming to an end and will be succeeded by a BI 2.0 era that promises simplicity, universal access, real-time insight, collaboration, operational intelligence, connected services and a level of information abstraction that supports far greater agility and speed of analysis. The motivation for this "version upgrade" for BI is the need to move analytical intelligence into operations and to shrink the gap between analysis and action."

Charles Nichols writes, in BI 2.0: The Next Generation that:

"BI 2.0 is a term that encapsulates several important new concepts about the way that we use and exploit information in businesses, organizations and government. The term is also intrinsically linked with real-time and event-driven BI but is really about the application of these technologies to business processes."

BI 2.0 is not really about a new generation of BI tools to perform analytics but getting more comprehensive, consistent, correct and CURRENT data.

Data and its integration have finally arrived, but it is disguised as BI 2.0! We can finally interweave data from the data warehouse with real-time and event-driven data via our data integration efforts. BI vendors have been able to access data from anywhere for years but that does not produce any tangible benefit for the business unless the real-time and event-driven data is consistent with the data warehouse data. In order to achieve that consistent state, you have to use common data integration processes when you gather data from any data source.

In the old days (a couple of years ago?!) companies had separate BI/DW and enterprise application integration efforts using different tools, processes and rules. This resulted in overlapping efforts, producing inconsistent data at a high cost. These efforts typically overlapped, but since they were done by different people using different tools on different architectures with no common processes, standards or policies the result was inconsistent in data or application silos.

With the advent of ICCs (Integration Competency Centers) and robust data integration suites, companies can eliminate integration stovepipe efforts and work towards enabling one data integration backbone. Common people, processes and procedures work towards data integration.

BI 2.0 sounds cool and makes you think you need yet another BI tool. Of course that BI tool has to be the latest and greatest BI tool on the market today but don’t be fooled, it is really not about BI 2.0 but rather DI 2.0 (Data Integration 2.0.)