The View From Here: BI Will Increasingly Migrate Into Applications
February 24, 2009
Michael Vizard has an interesting commentary at his eWeek blog Masked Intentions.He suggests that applications without business intelligence built into them are more or less useless. In most cases, however, this functionality must be added after the software is created. Vizard mentions the firm Actuate, which he says is enabling developers to incorporate BI modules into applications.
Vizard is right. Moreover, it is inevitable that BI will increasingly be built into software applications. 
The technical challenge of doing this likely is manageable. This transition – the way in which the BI functionality is routinely subsumed into the main body of the application – is a key to the industry’s future.
A company’s success or failure will be determined by how agilely it works through the business issues that accompany the migration of creation standalone products to scenarios in which that functionality is deeply integrated within a larger application.
This is a major transition, and there will be winners and losers. The transition from standalone discreet technology to a place closer to the core of the undertaking – the technological equivalent of being accepted into the club – can favor startups and young companies with fresher and more agile people, technology and operations.
These companies can become takeover targets of the companies that make the applications into which the specialized functionality is headed. The economies of creating and running software make this inevitable, and mark an important point in the maturation of the BI industry.
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At first glance, embedding business intelligence in every application this sounds like a great concept.
However, in thinking it through a bit futher, you lose the concept of Master Data or a single souce of the truth and you begin to duplicate the need for other services (security models, etc) for each application.
Also, wouldn’t you end up with multiple applications across your organizations all duplicating the same customer data, revenue data, shipping data, etc. with no agreed-upon single source? Duplicated data, and duplicatedsecurity models for each application would lead to a greater expense than consolidating all data into an Enterprise Data Warehouse and than performing business intelligence and analytics from the consolidated data. True, the trade off would be the loss of some agility while the data was being consolidated into an Enterprise Data Warehouse, but once the heavy lifting was complete to agree on common data definitions and one role-based security models, the data would make more sense when aggregated at the top levels and you could reduce the need for analysts trying to tie together all the disparate business intelligence results from multiple applciation.