Asking what data is needed often only leads to an electronic dashboard for previously available Excel reports. This merging of traditional BI into content will focus on the following areas:
- Alerting
- Predictive Analysis
- Process Awareness
- Content Analysis
- Event Monitoring
BI Market Evolution
Evidenced-based decision-making is spreading rapidly throughout organizations, according to Dan Vasset and Brian McDonough of IDC. According to the authors of the article, “Taking Lessons from KM to influence Business Intelligence Pervasiveness,” (KMWorld, April, 2009), the last IDC research suggests a statistically significant link between the analytic orientation of an organization and its competitiveness.
The IDC authors note that we are moving out of the initial phases which started with static, batch reporting in the mid-70’s, progressing to a focus on Ad Hoc Query, OLAP, and Data Warehousing into the 90’s, to where the market has been most recently been driven by Business Intelligence Suites and Analytic Applications, which focused on the following:
- Collaboration and Workflow
- Dashboards and Visualization
- Scorecards
- Lifecycle Management
Pervasive Business Intelligence
The Business Intelligence market continues to evolve by incorporating new components into business analytics solutions. What started out as standalone batch reporting and statistics tools have matured into broad suites of components that address data integration, query and reporting, advanced analytic and other related decision support components.
Some of those business analytics activities will be based on straightforward information access through reports, dashboards or alerts to various devices, or they may be enabled through search functionality within business analytics solutions. Other business analytics activities will include advanced analytic techniques for descriptive and predictive analysis of data, according to IDC.
The authors suggest that to improve decision-making, the demand and trend will be to expose as much of BI content metadata or information about the data directly in reports and dashboards, assuming it exists. Knowledge management practices have long extolled the need to understand business process reorganization and behavior changes, and linking that relevance with BI and analytics will serve us well as we make BI more pervasive throughout organizations.
The Enterprise Technology Convergence Council (The ETCC) is a forward-thinking community of knowledge workers who share a passion for providing technology convergence of structured and unstructured content - 
Enterprise Content Management (ECM) is generally viewed as the strategies, methods and tools used to capture, manage, store, preserve, and deliver content and documents related to organizational processes.
Content, Process Awareness Key to Pervasive BI - IDC