Business Intelligence Is Booming, Gartner Finds
At this week's Gartner BI Summit in Los Angeles, a packed downtown JW Marriot hotel witnessed a mix of briefings from Gartner analysts, case studies from a wide range of organizations and the latest numbers from the business intelligence market (which includes data warehouses and CRM analytics, per the Gartner system).
“The overall business intelligence market is growing at 9 percent per year and will be worth $81 billion in 2014,” said Gartner analyst Rita Sallam. “By 2020, that will rise to $136 billion.”
The Three Rs of Business Intelligence
During Gartner Vice President Bill Hostmann's keynote, he covered the three Rs of business intelligence: relevance, resources and renovation. He challenged business intelligence professionals to ask tough questions around these topics.
“Are we relevant in improving business decisions, do we have the right combination of resources, roles and responsibilities in order to succeed,” said Hostmann, “and, for renovation, how do we decide which information, analytical trends and new technology to focus on?”
He dove into each of the Rs during his hour-long talk. For example, he tasked business intelligence professionals with determining their role. If their vision of their role doesn't match up with the vision of management, their predictions and analysis are in danger of becoming irrelevant.
“Find out what your role really is,” said Hostmann. “What kind of decisions are you supposed to help the organization make? Then make yourself relevant and get yourself an agreed=upon measure of success.”
To be relevant, he added, avoid becoming lost in a mountain of possible analyses. Focus on a few select challenges that are important to management and solve those.
Hostmann’s final point concerned teamwork — having business intelligence staff working more closely with IT. Maybe in the old days, either party could get away with operating in isolation. But with information no longer residing in a single database repository and so much data coming in from so many unstructured sources, business intelligence professionals and IT must partner to solve ongoing issues.
“Business intelligence is a team sport,” he said. “You have to have IT and BI working together.”
Down to One Data Warehouse
While the bulk of presentations came from Gartner sources, they were broken up by the inclusion of a series of customer sessions highlighting business intelligence in the real world. Mohammad Rifaie, vice president of Enterprise Information Management at Canada-based RBC Financial Group, explained his journey from having multiple data warehouses throughout the organization to establishing one central warehouse called Data Warehouse Enterprise (DWE). Work began in the late '90s when information management was highly fragmented. Back then, the company had 10 data marts.
“If that madness had continued, we’d probably have more than 30 by now,” Rifaie said. “Putting all our data warehouse functions in one group really helped.”
By 2000, the DWE was completed. To get there, RBC invested a lot of time in data standards. No database is permitted, for example, that does not have an approved data model based on the bank’s standards.
“It’s like handing your blueprints into the city to verify everything is per code,” said Rifaie. “Standardization has paid big dividends.”
Rifaie uses a combination of ISO (International Standards Organization) standards as well as some developed by RBC. ISO contains a huge number of data standards for gender, country and other data elements. In some cases he chose to streamline the ISO data standards. For example, Rifaie believes ISO over complicates it with nine different gender codes. His bank reduced it down to just a few.
An advantage of standardization, he said, is reuse. In 2011, his group deployed more than 4,000 data elements, of which almost half had been developed previously. The morale: If you document the elements on a standard architecture, the rate of reuse rises.
RBC’s main production system contains over 145 TB of compressed data, over 57,000 users, close to 100 million queries annually. While the query rate rose a whopping 524 percent in the last six years and the user base by almost 500 percent, annual costs measured in total cost of ownership (TCO) grew just 2 percent.
“The overall cost per processing unit is 20 percent of what it used to be in 2006,” Rifaie noted. “A query costs us 16 percent of what it did before.”
The creation of this standardized data warehousing infrastructure has also enabled better business intelligence results. At a total cost of $100,000, an application to detect fraud uncovered $75 million in fraudulent loans and mortgages in one year.
Drew Robb is a writer who has been writing about IT, engineering, and other topics. Originating from Scotland, he currently resides in Florida. Highly skilled in rapid prototyping innovative and reliable systems. He has been an editor and professional writer full-time for more than 20 years. He works as a freelancer at Enterprise Apps Today, CIO Insight and other IT publications. He is also an editor-in chief of an international engineering journal. He enjoys solving data problems and learning abstractions that will allow for better infrastructure.
