BI and Search

Today's news of the proposed acquisition of Yahooooooooo! by the Death Star, while not very BI/performance management related, still brings "search," and more directly "how does this impact BI and performance management" to mind.

Truthfully speaking, the announcement just a few weeks ago that Microsoft was acquiring a real, live, honest to goodness enterprise search vendor, FAST, is probably more directly related to our core topics here, but today's news re-emphasizes a point that several folks have noticed, namely that "search" has the potential to be the future interface of business intelligence.

Now despite attempts by other BI vendors to get into the realm of search (Business Objects' well intentioned, but unsupported "Intelligent Question" immediately comes to mind), and unstructured data, these efforts have been largely unsuccessful, in part due to the fact that the engines aren't optimized to find data outside of the data warehouse and data marts which which the search tools are associated. And companies like our friend Dave Kellogg's Mark Logic exist and thrive due to their ability to work across multiple data types and sources to scour information everywhere to get you the result you need.

But it's hard to escape the fact that there's a convergence in technologies going on here, and that the user interface for finding out what you need, as well as the engines that actually "do the finding" are quickly coming together. And whatever comes out of the other end of all this mish mash is only going to help information workers everywhere get ready access to the information they need--maybe by simply typing in a question into a search bar...