BI is Dead

Posted: April 1st, 2016 — but sadly, not really an April Fool’s

In 1989, Howard Dresner — later a Gartner Group analyst — proposed “business intelligence” as an umbrella term to describe “concepts and methods to improve business decision making by using fact-based support systems.”

This year, despite BI continuing to be the #1 priority for CIOs (for the 9th time in 11 years), Gartner has been using recent BI Summit keynotes to proclaim that BI is dead. As explained in a recent Magic Quadrant report,

“The BI and analytics platform market’s multiyear shift from IT-led enterprise reporting to business-led self-service analytics has passed the tipping point….During the past several years, the balance of power for business intelligence (BI) and analytics platform buying decisions has gradually shifted from IT to the business.”

IT involvement in BI is now deemed optional:

“The evolution and sophistication of the self-service data preparation and data discovery capabilities available in the market has shifted… toward tools that do not require… involvement from IT.”

A more detailed report explains:

“A traditional BI platform usually requires a lengthy, IT-led enterprise data warehouse development effort as a prerequisite… However, the democratization of analytics… has changed the paradigm of BI delivery… Users now prototype data models and test new data sources in the context of existing data structures without needing IT staff.”

Tools that do require some form of IT intervention are no longer considered BI*, and no longer appear on Gartner’s BI Magic Quadrant — they have been relegated to a Enterprise-Reporting Based Platforms Market Guide. (Although, somewhat confusingly, these tools are still considered by Gartner to make up the lion’s share (75%) of the $16Bn+ BI Market).

Analysts explain that traditional attempts to get a single view of data are pointless:

“Are you saying that we don’t need a centralized truth?”
“Absolutely, never worked, doesn’t work, will not work.”

And Business Intelligence Competency Centers (BICCs) are also now dead. The term was coined by Gartner in 2001 to indicate:

“A cross-functional organizational team that has defined tasks, roles, responsibilities and processes for supporting and promoting the effective use of Business Intelligence across an organization.”

But:

“When Gartner started to cover BICC as a trend over 10 years ago, it turned out to be one of the biggest success factors for BI programs. Consolidation, focus and centralization were key themes. Create critical mass for BI… But as we stated in our Summit keynote: “all good things must come to an end”.

Gartner says current BICC organizations that continue to talk about “users” are IT-centric laggards (despite the 148 mentions of the word in the latest Magic Quadrant report…) and refers to them as BI-nosaurs that must evolve or die.

are you a bi-nosaur

The BICCs that persist, and who continue to get considerable value from IT-led reporting, have been compared to the main characters in the movie The Sixth Sense

I see dead people

What’s happening here?

Since BI clearly isn’t dead — Gartner has just updated its definition of the term, under which the vast majority of today’s “BI” no longer qualifies — why is Gartner using the kind of hype that it typically condemns in vendor marketing?

The most charitable view is that Gartner feels it has to exaggerate the demise of BI in order to get customers to pay attention to the changes before it’s too late. And Gartner’s arguments are more subtle than the truncated quotes above would seem to indicate (but when you lead with “BI is dead”, you can’t really get defensive when people miss the subtleties).

Gartner has taken the bold step of saying that solutions only qualify as “BI” if it’s possible for business users to tackle the end-to-end journey without any IT help — while at the same time admitting that:

“IT-modeled data structures… promote governance and reusability across the organization” and “In many organizations, extending IT-modeled structures in an agile manner and combining them with any of the sources listed above is a core requirement”

It seems clear that most organizations intend to continue to deploy IT-led tools, while taking advantage of the new technologies. During a recent Gartner web seminar to explain the changes, attendees indicated that while more business agility was necessary and desirable, it would take some time to become reality in their organizations:

gartner too early

[note there was no “the MQ should have stayed the same” option…]

And they did not believe that IT-led BI would decrease — in fact, the exact opposite:

gartner more IT led

And that the ideal result would be a mix of IT-led and business-led BI:

gartner role of central IT

[Note that Gartner is not against IT-led BI — but says IT should only use tools that could be used by business people directly]

Easy, self-service access to data has always been the goal of business intelligence. And doing that successfully has always meant balancing the needs of business people with the need of IT, as representatives of the organization as a whole.

In the past, the best solution available involved less-than-agile data warehouses, semantic layers and OLAP cubes. Modern technologies such as in-memory and data discovery go a long way to remove the barriers to agile BI — but there’s no magic wand to eliminate the core business problems of mis-aligned, bad-quality data, common business definitions, and data governance.

IT clearly still has an important role to play in providing data to business people. How important is it that they use the same tools as business people? Do the new approaches warrant a redefinition of the term BI? Do the upsides of new agile tools outweigh their relative lack of effective governance mechanisms? I’ll let you decide — but as Gartner itself emphasizes, it is important to:

“Separate hype from the real drivers of a technology’s commercial promise”

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* The MQ uses “Modern BI”, but Gartner has made it clear it considers this term synonymous with BI & Analytics.

Comments

19 responses to “BI is Dead”

  1. […] year, Gartner redefined the BI and Analytics Platforms Magic Quadrant, relegating traditional self-service and interactive […]

  2. […] Elliott, one Denis’ first employees just wrote an article commenting on Gartner trend: BI is dead: all about getting rid of IT in favor of self-service approach. I could have titled this article […]

  3. steffen Avatar
    steffen

    Applying the original principles, thinking, attitudes and basic instruments to data & info is a good way to outgrow some of the discussed issues

  4. […] seems an appropriate time to talk about why it’s important for business people to have modern BI tools that let them handle end-to-end business intelligence themselves, without having to call IT […]

  5. […] seems an appropriate time to talk about why it’s important for business people to have Modern BI tools that let them handle end-to-end business intelligence themselves, without having to call IT […]

  6. Reinaldo Abe Avatar
    Reinaldo Abe

    Nice post.
    Agree with your points and I believe that there’s still so much of maturity for organizations and IT structure to be leveraged, that the most basic questions are still to be answered.
    Trying to transform the layer of complexities in an organization in something easy to understand and scalable to attend individuals point of view, is far from being accomplished yet.
    BI implementations commonly creates a huge expectance but, taking a step back and look from a business perspective what adds value, is something that companies must do more often.
    The Gartner’s point of view might suggest that the key factor is the end users to be able to consume the data more efficiently. The industry’s modernization of platforms and UX is relying on a new and more analytical type of user and IT is relaying on good processes, methodology and governance continuously.
    The good thing is that the software players in the market are targeting the simplicity and, maybe this should be a good way for BI implementations to evolve and turn into a more mature term.

  7. Mark Sibley-Schreiber Avatar
    Mark Sibley-Schreiber

    It seems to me that except in rare cases such as perhaps Gartner themselves, truth per se is never a business priority. Control of information is. Of course, technology without a factual basis cannot exist. So it may be that “information technology” is an oxymoron.

  8. […] Read complete article at https://timoelliott.com/blog/2016/04/bi-is-dead.html […]

  9. […] By Timo Elliott, from: https://timoelliott.com/blog/2016/04/bi-is-dead.html […]

  10. […] analyst firms have been touting the death of the BICC. But even though the Business Intelligence/Analytics Competency or Center of Excellence […]

  11. shaun ryan Avatar
    shaun ryan

    Trying to deliver giant waterfall warehouses hasn’t done BI any favours. The discipline was slow to adopt intelligent meta data driven design, agile and continuous integration.

    Projects can succeed in short delivery cycles if done properly with the right people.

    Also it’s always been skewed towards the business. I worked for consultancies for many years. Generally we were business sponsored not IT department sponsored (much to their annoyance). It has always been the business that wants BI. This is what makes it specialised; the fact you have to span raw data, technology, information and the business.

  12. John Avatar
    John

    Ironically, back in the old days Business Objects was a self-service desktop tool with built-in semantic layer that did not require any IT 😉

    1. Timo Elliott Avatar

      Yup! I call it “Deski’s revenge…”

  13. Meredith Dart Avatar
    Meredith Dart

    The only way I can see “BI is dead” will work is if “data governance is alive”… but I don’t see that happening any time soon. That’s the boring stuff that business users don’t want to be bothered with, up until it hits them where it hurts.
    It’s not as if the concepts of BI or data preparation have ever been too complex for the average mind, just too fiddly and dull.

  14. Gopal Kumar Avatar
    Gopal Kumar

    Surely it’s moving towards enabling business users more and more capable of looking at data on his own, so that any type of new analysis can be done without waiting for IT to do scores of things. It’s in sync with basic tenet that IT is enabler for business.

  15. frank Avatar
    frank

    timo

    a nice and balanced point of view!

    frank

  16. […] gibt es einen neuen Artikel von Timo Elliott von SAP mit dem Namen BI is Dead. Impulshaft möchte man entgegnen “totgesagte leben länger”. Jeder muss ich der […]

  17. Jeff Pants Avatar
    Jeff Pants

    We have business data folks who can’t operate a pivot table. Where are all these users who are capable of using self-service tools? We certainly don’t have many of them.

  18. Brent Lightsey Avatar
    Brent Lightsey

    Fantastic summary, Timo! This very morning I’m going to give a presentation to my IT team emphasizing our key role as facilitators in a unique position to touch every part of the organization. While the data belongs to the business, why can’t IT take the lead in empowering them to do more with it? And how can Gartner simultaneously argue that data continues to grow in volume, velocity, variety, etc. while at the same time arguing that BI is dead because users now have tools somewhat more powerful client tools. Will they also be configuring hadoop clusters and setting up high-availability database environments? No doubt things are changing, but “plain old reporting” is not going away in the next 10 years.