In 1994 Baseline defined the term “BI Portfolio” to illustrate the concept that business intelligence transcends a single project and become a set of capabilities deployed to the business over time. Developing a BI Portfolio takes equal parts discovery, business engagement and program management, but the whole is bigger than the sum of its parts.
With the BI Portfolio we knew we were onto something when a handful of vendors and competitors co-opted the term and our clients began asking us to design their portfolios for them. We found that the vast majority of our clients had between ten and two dozen applications in their BI Portfolios. If you consider this fact, then BI as a service becomes a more focused and sober discussion. We see BI as a service as a key ingredient in the BI bouillabaisse—but not the only one.
Yes, BI as a service is a spicy topic. It makes perfect sense for vertical applications—for instance the compensation reporting functions offered by Xactly, or revenue analysis from PivotLink—and thus often becomes the purview of a specific department. But BI best practice organizations will inevitably mix targeted SaaS offerings into a richer set of BI tools. We’ve seen over time that as companies become more mature with BI, they also become multi-disciplinary. Ad-hoc, predictive analytics, text mining, complex event processing, and knowledge discovery will eventually comprise the recipe for a robust BI Portfolio, which offers a range of functionality from both inside and outside the firewall.
Note: If you’re interested in learning more about the BI Portfolio, come to my full-day workshop, BI From Both Sides: Aligning Business and IT, at the TDWI World Conference in Las Vegas.
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