InetSoft Participates in DM Radio Broadcast on the Consumerization of Business Intelligence

This is the transcript of DM Radio’s program titled “The Consumerization of Business Intelligence: How and Why,” recorded on April 18, 2018.

Eric Kavanagh: Ladies and gentleman, hello, and welcome once again. It’s 3 o’clock Eastern time on a Thursday, which means it must be time for DM Radio. Yes, indeed. My name is Eric Kavanagh. I will be your moderator for today’s event in which we are going to talk about one of these topics that we have been talking about for a really, really long time but, it's like, wow, we turned around and all of a sudden here it is; it has finally arrived. The Consumerization of Business Intelligence: How and Why.

So first of all, a quick nod to our sponsor. This show is brought to you by the MDM & Data Governance Summit. Big thanks to those guys. Hop online to www.mdm-summit.com for more information about all that. Of course, MDM is sort of tangential to BI; it’s an enabling technology. Data governance is something that goes hand-in-hand with lot of reporting and Business Intelligence. You learn a lot from all the different presenters at this show. It's a conference going on for years now. So it's a very professional, very well-refined program. We hope to see you there at one of the shows this year. Again, that’s www.mdm-summit.com. We tweet with #dmradio. So, by all means folks, send your tweets out there, questions, comments, and whatever you may want to say or discuss on the show today; feel free to send questions for our guests obviously.

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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.

Justin Kern: Eric, thanks as always. 12 years ago, what is that in BI years? Is that like 36 years?

Eric Kavanagh: 84 I think.

Justin Kern: 84 years. But I am glad that you kind of gave it that historical context, because it has gone by different names, different promises, over the last decade. And when we are on, in the media, we tend to be kind of on the leading edge of some of the trends, and this consumerization one has been historically one of the less abstract of the BI or data trends, an actual promise that business could use, could see, could have in its pocket additional access to data and business results. But in the last couple of years, as you said, it's actually come to the forefront. And I think that as you said, Apple can get some credit for that, but I think it's just the existence of that general in-your-face mobility. But you have these things, they are there, and now IT just has to deal with it I suppose.

But Bruce was at CES, the big Consumer Electronics thing, and I think it's in Vegas. He was there in January and he wrote a blog for our site, where he kind of said that this was the year where enterprise IT and all the vendors were kind of catching their breath over this consumerization trend. So it wasn’t so much the bloviating or the promises and that type of thing, it was the idea that we actually have these smartphones, we have these tablets now, we have these visualization tools, and now we just have to figure out how to deal with them. And I think that’s kind of the interesting promise and challenge ahead for consumerization, especially in very near term here, is figuring out how to make it work best and who is actually owning and dealing with it all.