As BI matures, companies should too

Business intelligence software is evolving into its older sibling, business performance management, a combination of planning, budgeting, reporting and benchmarking tools, according to the father of BI, Howard Dresner. At the same time, the main obstacle to BI or BPM adoption remains cultural rather than technological, he said.

Dresner coined the term "business intelligence" in 1989 while an analyst at research company Gartner Inc. At that time, the software industry was mired in acronyms like DSS (decision support system) and EIS (executive information system). Dresner was looking for a phrase that would elevate the debate around those terms and better define the access to and analysis of quantitative information by a wide variety of users.

He left Gartner in 2005 to join Hyperion as its chief strategy officer. Currently, pure-play BI software providers including Hyperion are seeing application vendors like Microsoft Corp. and Oracle Corp. try to muscle in on their turf, putting them under added pressure to offer more capabilities.

Dresner recently chatted with IDG News Service about the BI industry over the past 17 years. An edited transcript of that conversation follows.

IDGNS: Does today's definition of BI differ from what you originally intended?

Dresner: It's probably been redefined a little. It's all about ways to deliver information to end users without needing them to be experts in operational research. Early on, some companies tried to make the term even broader than quantitative information to include unstructured content. But it became clear that it was a simple problem which needed to be solved with structured content. That provides far more value to business than trying to boil the entire ocean. BI is in the middle, structured information at one end and the user at the other end.

A lot of things we talked about in 1989 were completely irrelevant. It started broadening and deepening. Back in 1989 only a select development group understood what it was about and were trying it. I felt like the lone voice in the wilderness for years. Some people said BI was a oxymoron.

IDGNS: Have the general improvements in computer technology made BI more readily adoptable?

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