OLAP is quite old fashioned. The “online” part is especially odd when you are referring to off line tool. I suppose this is “off line on line analytic processing”. Also the term “processing” harks back to the days when computers were exotic and expensive, and batch processing was high tech. Today processor cost almost nothing and we tend to think more in terms of the user.

Business Intelligence seems to mean the data companies use for analysis. It has a slightly spooky overtone. But more important it overlaps the term “business intelligence” meaning information about companies. This is painfully obvious at aggregation sites like Alltop, where the business intelligence as it is meant here gets swamped by news sites. I blogged about this recently. Also business intelligence is a mouthful and the abbreviation, BI, has issues with ambiguity as well.

And as Seth pointed out already, “analytics” gets swamped Web analytics.

So maybe someone should come up with a new name?

Talk about colorful history.

I mentioned a while back that Dorrian and Earle and I worked in the same software company back in the early 80′s (about 100 of us), but it was only two months ago I found out another interesting connection. At the Tableau Software conference, someone approached me and said “Hi Neil.” I had no idea who he was. Then he asked, “How’s Susie?” That’s my wife. “How are Mara, Aja and Jake?” Oh boy, those are my three oldest kids (I have five). So I figured I must have known him from New York, because we had only three kids when we moved to California. With a little chit-chat I finally figured out that he was one of the SE’s who worked for me in New York and was also the first person I hired into my consulting company when I started it in 1985.

Then he asked me, “Do you remember a salesman in our office named Joe?” I sad, “Sure, Joe Germanotta, I remember him well. Flashy dresser, big personality.” Steve said, “Do you remember that he and his wife had a baby girl when you were still working there?” “Sure,” I said, “we all chipped in and both her a baby gift.”

“Do you you know who that baby is now?”

“Nope,” I said, “no idea.”

“Lady GaGa.”

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With my colleague, David Arnott, I published a paper on the rise and fall of the term “Business process reengineering” which also matched a product life cycle curve.

OLAP is a great example of that – early its just for innovators, later as it becomes more established there are variations (ROLAP, MOLAP etc) just like a consumer product – think blue lines in tooth paste to make one brand seem different or better to the others. Now its in decline and it’s being replaced – this isn’t a passive process either I don’t think – it is driven by the vendors. They do have products to sell and using the same terms for years and year doesn’t work, so its no accident that popularity of the terms matches a product life cycle.

One last comment, I think Tom Davenport’s book on analytics has been an important boost in the rise of the use of that term in our context – Seth’s comment about its use in web analytics is a good point, but I’ve always thought of web analytics as a subset of what we do anyway. The term has been around for a very long time but is as you show is only now becoming popular.

POD