The Arrogance of the BI Vendors

Is it arrogance, is it lack of interest, or do they not get it? You might think I am referencing Nic's post below with photo that seems to imply that Microsoft is the evil empire and PerformancePoint Server is the Death Star of BI. This, while plausible, was not where I was going.

I managed to carve out some cycles last week to spend time at OMG's Think Tank on standards for business process management - as in BPM. Not performance management. The think tank was by turns thought provoking and painful, often within a matter of minutes. It is always great to get a bunch of vendors and analysts together on a neutral site and watch the games begin under the guise of "helping the industry." If you want the blow by blow on who was thinking what, I recommend you check out Sandy Kemsley's blog. However, one of the things I found of interest was Colin Teubner's lunch keynote that discussed the relationship between BI and process management.

Colin is an analyst at Forrester Research, focused on business process management. He gave a lunch time keynote focused on BPM with two main discussions - the relationship between process and BI, as well as BPM intersecting with collaboration and information. Both are much longer topics for discussion, but Colin presented some more recent thinking from Forrester on the intersection of process and business intelligence. Colin suggested 5 specific use cases on how the two technologies work together.

1. Business intelligence on a process - analysis and reporting on process applications
2. BI triggering or changing a process - BI kicking off a process
3. BI inside a process decision - when executing a process, BI should help
4. BI to help humans work with process -more information is better to make decisions
5. BI to predict the future of process work - think trend analysis and data mining

Look for this to be a topic of further research from Forrester building on work that was started initially by Keith Gile (Now doing strategy for Business Objects) and Connie Moore, a VP and research director at Forrester. Colin is working on this with a number of contributors. Of particular interest were two of Colin's comments.

The first is that from the Forrester point of view, BI converging with BPM is a no-brainer. I tend to agree on this point and you can see this starting to happen with BPM companies introducing BI capability as core to their offering and partnering with BI vendors. MSFT performance point is also heading in this direction. See also the Spotfire acquisition by Tibco that I commented on when it happened. So what is the hold up?

According to Colin, one of the big issues around this discussion is the arrogance of the BI vendors. He noted that BI vendors should get it, but that they don't understand it well enough and they are too caught up with themselves. He was also specific that none of the top players really offered real process functionality today. This is a very interesting observation, especially when you consider how long BI vendors have been trying to explain their relevance and importance, especially relative to the ERP big guys. Guy commented on this here and here. Seems to be going on 20 years now. Nothing worse than a young adult with a sizable IQ and low self esteem.

Is this arrogance, insecurity, too much navel gazing, or not enough interest to motivate action? Maybe this is just as simple as the devil you know - much easier to deal with than the devil you don't and the associated multiples required.

I think this is an open question and something to watch. This post both catches me up on posting and addresses the open questions to me by my performance partners in crime. Now about this Death Star issue...