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Ease of Use or Usefulness?
There is a rapidly emerging demographic in the BI workforce that prefers the power and simplicity of social networking and the Consumer Web over the distant echo of desktop computing. It's time to re-examine the decades - old fixation with ease of use in BI tools and turn our attention to the extended value they can bring to a wider audience without pleading with them to use them. The next wave of BI users have grown up with technology; in fact, it is an integral part of their working and social lives, and they are unforgiving of tools that can't deliver. Management needs to move IT out of its comfort zone of legacy BI solutions to seek out emerging solutions that are now already showing signs of promise.Historically, the BI industry struggled to make the case that businesspeople without technical knowledge or skill could easily become proficient in the use and mastery of their tools. In fact, to do so was central to their value proposition. So important was it to enlist the support of finance, marketing and other business-oriented staff, making things "user-friendly" was as important as making the software functional, often even more so. The focus on the concept of "ease of use" was the on ramp for getting people into BI software. To a large extent, they were successful. Surely, today's BI tools are considerably easier to use than writing a COBOL program was twenty years ago. But in the reflection of something like the Consumer Web - which is, after all, infinitely easy to use and is infinitely useful - how useful is BI today in comparison? How much more useful is it likely to get? Has the emphasis on ease of use eroded the usefulness of BI? In a rather blunt way of asking, have we dumbed it down to the point where it isn't very useful?
How do you measure ease of use? It's done on a person-by-person basis, a matter of taste. However, while opinions will vary, when the votes are in, the final tally is pretty predictable. Certain vendors always fare better than others in these beauty contests because the criteria for "ease of use" are pretty well understood and are often based on factors that have little to do with the more important, long-range issues of "usefulness" which ask whether things of value actually get done more efficiently than before. Opinions also clump around certain attributes, usually visual or processing metaphors that are familiar or comfortable, or simply the ability to export data to Excel with one click. Vendors know this and design accordingly.
The net effect is that BI tools are often selected at the beginning of an initiative and vendors sell fairly large, perpetual licenses, locking the clients in. BI success is usually measured by the number of BI licenses sold (not active) as a percentage of employees. BI licenses are spreading in organizations, and penetration may now be as high as 25 to 35 percent based on studies - but most participants are consumers of information prepared by a small number of active users. Relatively small numbers of workers actually create content with BI. Enterprise software sales cycles are driven by getting the big license deal up front, so ease of use has always been a more critical factor than usefulness. That would seem to imply that using BI is "easy" so long is you don't do very much. Creating new reports, metrics or KPI's, doing modeling or investigating relationships - that's for the power users or the go-to guys. The armies of well-informed decision-makers who get the right information at the right time seem to be mostly report readers and ease of use would seem to extend itself in a very limited way. If it were truly easy to use, it would be easy to use across the whole spectrum of functionality. But things are starting to change very quickly on two fronts.
First, the population of "classic" BI users, those who started with it in the first wave of BI and data warehousing, such as the middle managers and analysts in the '80s and '90s, are moving on and even leaving the workforce at a rapid pace simply due to demographics. They are being replaced by people who have a very different perspective on technology, who have had computers since junior high school, and are comfortable playing 3-D strategy games over the Internet while downloading music for their i-Pod while updating their mySpace.com site. They are demanding of technology and unlike their predecessors, they do not walk away if they find it "too hard"; they stick with it until the technology works for them. Dumbing technology down to make them comfortable is not a solution, so how will BI accommodate them?
That's the second front. Today, BI is firmly grounded in a combination of data-centric models and desktop metaphors. Yes, most have developed pure Web user interfaces, but the underlying conceptual models are still pure IT. Most BI software has not yet begun to adopt the concepts of Web. That's where organizations like 90 Degree Software, a Vancouver startup, come in with an approach that allows people to collaborate in a peer-to-peer fashion within their own social network and expose report content to each other without putting a burden on existing infrastructure. It's IM for BI: contact, collaborate, search and leverage. Their product looks at a report not as a single document but as a container of objects that can be threshed and decomposed by a semantic engine, identified and stored to be reused in myriad ways. Participants can semantically search each other's libraries for report elements when assembling a report or an analysis or a dashboard. When elements are out of date, such as a query when data has changed at the source, the status is flagged. Is this about ease of use? Perhaps, but the point is usefulness with no loss of function. Solutions like these will crash through the simple ease of use barrier into something truly useful, not just for the individual, but the organization, and even for the extended organization. Expect to see many more creative uses of Web 2.0, the Consumer Web, social networking and guided search in the very near future.
Ease of use is a concept that belongs with Y2K and "the mainframe." Our concerns today should be maximizing the potential of people who use BI, reducing duplication of effort, making work more interesting and challenging and improving everyone's performance and satisfaction while breaking down artificial barriers. BI has not done a very good job at that, but doggone it, it is easy to use.
Neil Raden is the founder of Hired Brains, Inc., http://www.hiredbrains.com. Hired Brains provides consulting, systems integration and implementation services in business intelligence, decision automation and business process integration for clients worldwide. Hired Brains Research provides consulting, market research, product marketing and advisory services to the software ndustry. Based in Santa Barbara, CA, Raden is an active consultant and widely published author and speaker. He welcomes your comments at nraden@hiredbrains.com.
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