And with that, let's kind of dive in. So the topic of Consumerization of Business Intelligence, well gosh, 12 years ago, when yours truly first moved to Austin, Texas, to work for a business intelligence consulting firm, actually a data warehousing consulting firm, we were talking back then. It was called BI for the masses, right. We kept talking about how can we get these great insights, these data-driven insights to front-line workers, to more than just the C-suite, more than just the power analysts who get paid a lot of money to dive through all kinds of data and come up with great ideas, how do we get past that. And I remember the reports came out and it was anywhere from 5% to 10% of the enterprise was actually using business intelligence tools, leveraging those insights, which is a pretty small number. And for years and years, we have talked about this, and we can talk all day about exactly what happened and why things have changed and what's going on.
Obviously there are a lot of factors, and one that I’m sure we will talk about today is that form factor revolution called the iPad, the iPad and of course the iPhone, but more the iPad than anything else. Because all of a sudden, you have got this decent sized device, it's got beautiful graphics, you can carry it around, it's very light weight, it's cheap, you can do all kinds of fun things with it, and that kind of changed things in organizations because all of a sudden you had senior executives who wanted their iPad at work, and when the boss of a big company wants something, usually the boss gets something. And so that happened, and that’s why we got into this whole BYOD thing, Bring Your Own Device, that’s why we talk about this stuff today.
And lots of other things happened too, of course. The Internet has really taken off in terms of providing functionality for people to do various things like e-mail marketing, supply chain management, sales force automation. All of these Cloud-based services have driven people more online to get things done. And I am talking about reporting too. The web of course is a wonderful mechanism for reporting and ad hoc queries and so forth. Web is everywhere so if you get online, you have access to data if you have authority to get to it and so forth.
So there are lots of these things that are happening to create the consumerization of BI. But what are they and sort of why is this happening and what can you do about it? Well that’s what we will talk about today. So, let's bring in our expert guest host, none other than the inevitable Justin Kern, Senior Editor of Information Management Magazine. Welcome back to DM Radio.