Meyer: Where do you think Business Intelligence will be in 5 years?

It is a difficult question to pin down in a very precise way just because Business Intelligence is not a definable concept, or market place, or industry.  It isn't a single thing.

From my perspective, one trend that we all clearly have is that the direct access to information has increased hugely and that this is producing a situation of "disintermediation" of the traditional processes of information of various sorts being kind of circumvented by people having direct access themselves, whether it's the Google phenomenon or simply blogging.  The part of the market that it is really disintermediating is the traditional newspaper and to some extent the television as well with was the previous disintermediatory force.   

So I think it is changing the business in the sense that it is forcing providers of business intelligence and indeed all information analysis very much up-market in terms of the increased demand for the quality, reliability, accuracy, and analytical quality of the information.  It's classic development of a commoditization of one part of the market which forces you to differentiate yourself.

There is a surplus of information in this market and in the commodity part of it but a shortage of good reliable analysis of it, and also a continued desire of clients, customers, readers, whatever, to pay somebody else to do it for them as long as it is of increasing quality and they can't easily do it themselves.  The real question for provides is their ability to do it better than the increasing commoditized part of the market.  This is a simply way to look at it.  But it is also the challenge for the CIA or MI6.  A test for them is to ask, is what they are doing any better that what you can read in the Economist, The Financial Times, or the New York Times?  Increasingly it is not.

The challenge for them is to have deeper analysis and accurate information.  It is increasing because more of us are moving into this market and it is true that private sector companies like your own are doing that analysis and therefore undermining the position of the State sector.

So what is it doing to the private sector?  It is putting greater demand on the quality of analysis and presentation which is a lot to do with reliability and credibility but also has to do with your closeness to the things you are writing about.  The words data mining or pontificating from a far is not good enough.  You have to be very much local in your sources of analysis which is the pressure on a magazine like the Economist and global network of people who are close to the story and doing the analysis directly for us other than stringers or providers.  That is one trend.   

The other general thing you can say about it is the slogan, think global act local.  The requirements of the readers in the mass market for a consultancy has become global they have become more aware of the risks and opportunities coming to them from a wider range of sources.  That is only going to increase; that steps up every 5 years.  At the same time the requirement for the actionable business intelligence gets them into markets, pushes off threats, and actually requires more local knowledge.  The paradox of the global market is that you actually need to know increasingly more and more about your customers, about the individual, about the local nuances, the local supply situation, and the things that determine the local demographics.  You can't take the lowest common denominator approach because there is more competition and more sophistication so that the pressure to improve that local expertise is increasing.

Meyer: Can you talk a little more to the difficulty of defining BI?

I think that term intelligence is misleading.  It is really about understanding. 

Meyer: Could it be we need to package the whole BI concept in intuitive terms?

It could be.  We always need to find simplifying tools that aid our understanding.  There was a slogan used by our editor in the 50s that our writers had to simplify then exaggerate.  It sounds like you are manipulating and distorting.  There is no doubt we are all looking for ways to get through the noise of data information and provide ourselves with simplifying constructs.  This is what understanding is.  There has to be a process in which understanding is continually challenged by new data and that finds data that disagrees with your simplified analysis and makes it an exciting phenomenon rather than a threatening one and that challenges you to think again and get deeper rather than form another grandiose thing or try to define it away as being almost like it doesn't exist.

For example, in the car industry, the competitors to Japanese transplant factories, in Britain and Germany used to treat the productivity numbers coming up in the factories as being inherently infeasible and therefore rather than challenge the way they were thinking about how they were doing things they sought ways to define them out as irrelevant as they were clearly a product of a special circumstance or a poor data.  There was a period of denial that expired after a while.

Meyer: Any closing thoughts on this topic?

I think BI needs a new name.  The other question is how proprietary is it.  I do think the whole process is integral to the way companies operate.  You do have the constant tussle as to the degree it can be an out-sourced activity, which providers like SAS are seeking to build on to the degree that is part of a competitive advantage and you have to make it proprietary.