Over at Intelligent Enterprise, Niel Raden has some thoughts kicked off by Gartner's recent report on the future of BI,  "Emerging Technologies Will Drive Self-Service Business  Intelligence," which takes positions that Gartner analyst Kurt Schlegel reitterated and elaborated on in an interview with Doug Henchen and again at the Gartner BI summit in Chicago this last week.

I'm having some problems with a March 20, 2008 article titled "Gartner: Emerging Technologies Will Help Drive Mainstream BI Adoption." This has been the Holy Grail of BI vendors for over a decade — to increase the number of "seats" using their products, widely reported to be about 20 percent of an organization but clearly much less than that. What troubles me the most about this article, or rather, about Gartner's analysis, is the supposition that new technology is going to crack this old chestnut.

Raden goes into some detail about why he thinks each of the five technologies which Gartner identified (Interactive visualization, In-memory analytics, Search integrated with BI, SaaS and SOA) are insufficient to drive broad scale adoption of Business Intelligence.  If Business Intelligence remains as it currently is, he's obviously right--the pool of users who want what traditional BI offers is largly tapped out, and so broader adoption will mean that BI needs to offer something which will appeal to sets of users who, up until now haven't wanted or needed BI.  But it's important to point out that this fact doesn't mean there aren't opportunties for BI-like technologies to improve business processes.  Raden's partner James Taylor points out that mainstream adoption of Business Intelligence "would mean that everyone in an organization - down to the people paid minimum wage at the front line - are making better decisions thanks to the understanding an organization has of its data."  Since we're clearly not there yet, there will be opportunities to bring BI in one form or another to a much broader set of people than the current set of BI users.

As BI reaches past its core users, it will need to adapt to suit a broader set of needs and business processes.  And if you look at the five technologies which Gartner identifed, all of them either make it easier for non-traditional users of Business Intelligence to access and interact with their data (Interactive visualization, In-memory analytics, Integrated Search), or ease the support burden of additional users and use cases on IT organizations (SOA, SaaS).  It seems to me that even if these technologies aren't sufficient to drive increasing BI adoption, they do enable it.

In reality, what will drive increasing BI adoption are the same things that drive all business innovation--things like increasing competition, global challenges, tighter regulatory environments and other issues that businesses across all industries have to face.  The more interesting question is what will broad-scale BI adoption look like, and it's one I'll address in a subsequent post.