INTERVIEW

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Gartner Group's Howard Dresner

Howard Dresner is an analyst with Gartner Group (www.gartner.com), a world leader in providing business technology research, consumer and market intelligence, consulting, conferences and decision-making tools. He has served in a variety of roles in the IT industry since 1980, and he coined the phrase 'Business Intelligence' when he came to Gartner Group in 1992. Information Builders recently spoke with Mr. Dresner to gather his insights on what Business Intelligence means today and why it is significant to the information management activities at most organizations.

IB MAGAZINE – Broadly speaking, what does Business Intelligence entail for most organizations?

DRESNER – Business Intelligence (BI) is a conceptual umbrella. Underneath it are a variety of technologies that support end-user access to and analysis of quantitative information sources. At the very basic level that means end-user reporting. It also includes OLAP (on line analytical processing), executive interfaces, end-user ad hoc query, enterprise business intelligence suites, and Business Intelligence platforms – which are essentially development environments for building custom decision support applications. There are also aspects of Business Intelligence in packaged applications.

IB MAGAZINE – How are changes in the overall IT landscape dictating a need for general-purpose BI technology?

DRESNER – Information technology has been with us for a long time, but the quality of our data isn't getting any better. In fact, it could be argued that it is in worse shape now because there are so many more data sources than there were 20 or 30 years ago. To complicate matters, many of those data sources arise from outside the organization – syndicated demographics information, Web log file analysis, click-stream data, and some types of ERP data, for example. Yet the challenge remains to take all these disparate data sources and bring them together into some sort of a logical whole that makes sense and represents the business. That's the task of Business Intelligence.

IB MAGAZINE – Business Intelligence is a rapidly advancing segment of the software industry. What are the key market drivers going forward?

DRESNER – The users are much more interested in computing, and more empowered than they were a few years ago. But they care less than ever about the "plumbing" – the underlying technology that ties it all together. Thus the importance of a well-integrated data infrastructure should not be diminished. If you don't lay down the right infrastructure, you don't have an extensible or flexible solution for users. Your solution may work for one application, but as soon as there is a change in the business, you can't respond. Business Intelligence is very hot now because data warehousing did a lot of market conditioning. Another factor is that the Web really has helped. Effectively we have a mass-deployable platform now, which means you have more decision-makers than you ever had before.

IB MAGAZINE – What are the essential ingredients of a well defined Business Intelligence strategy?

DRESNER – Consistency in how data is accessed and stored, so you can build a continuum of experience. If you don't have the benefit of all the experiences that have been collected from inside as well as outside the organization, you are at a significant disadvantage compared to a competitor that may have that perspective. You've got to start by laying out your roadmap: Where are you today and where do you think you want to be? Then determine what tools, technologies, storage strategies and so forth you will need to get there. Some of it has to do with the infrastructure, and some with the tools themselves. Having the appropriate methodology for different classes of Business Intelligence applications is important. You need to determine which products you are going to select, because there is no one product that satisfies all the needs easily. Then you need to deploy them appropriately. There are a lot of approaches to delivering information and applications over the Web. You need to have your own approach and not just take the vendor's assurances. We suggest that infrastructure needs to be able to support any number of tools and applications, and not be exclusively for one technology or product.

IB MAGAZINE – How is the world of Business Intelligence being changed by the Internet and Web technology?

DRESNER – Web technology opens the possibilities for the proliferation of Business Intelligence, but it places pressure upon the BI vendors to make sure that their stuff is really scalable and manageable. Much of it isn't. You still have to use a lot of human glue – a lot of programming – and retain a staff of IT pros to manage it all. In the future, these products are going to have to be much more elegant and manageable than they are now. I should be able to manage the enterprise through a single, very abstract console. You can't do that today. That is probably the greatest challenge for the vendors. With the advent of the Web, we have thrown all the cards up in the air, and we don't know where they are going to settle. When you look at the Web, and computing in general, there are more questions than answers now. And that is an exciting period in our history.

IB MAGAZINE – What are some of the upcoming advances you can foresee in the mobile computing area?

DRESNER – I think that the future is definitely wireless. It may not be today's generation of wireless, because that is very limited. Most of what you see in mobile computing today is merely existing applications that are delivered to mobile devices. But for wireless computing to become truly pervasive, the interfaces are going to have to change. We're certainly not there yet. It's like the old command-line interfaces: I have to learn some quirky language and adapt to the computer to get what I want. Ostensibly, the benefits are worth the investment, because I get my applications and my information delivered to me wherever I happen to be. But that still appeals mainly to a select set of business users.

IB MAGAZINE – What do you see as Information Builders' strengths in the BI market?

"WebFOCUS has transformed the company. When you look at all of the nuances of the BI market, Information Builders seems be on the right track" - Howard Dresner, Gartner Group

DRESNER – Information Builders' greatest strength is that they have been around for a very long time, so they understand the plumbing – the incredibly rich infrastructure at the base of all of this. A lot of the portal vendors don't get it – they don't have the same depth of experience. Information Builders grew up on mainframes. And all of a sudden, that experience is relevant again. The fact that Information Builders has remained private is another strength. They don't have to deal with the frustrations, the ups and downs, of dealing with Wall Street. They can focus on customers and they can focus on the market. Many other vendors pander to Wall Street or to venture capitalists. That means customers become secondary – a means to an end, instead of the end itself. In that scenario, top line counts more than bottom line – you have to generate as much revenue as possible just to drive the numbers.

IB MAGAZINE – How about on the technology side?

DRESNER – There are very few options on the market for getting data out of legacy data structures. This makes Information Builders' broad data access and integration technologies valuable. WebFOCUS is another real asset to the company. I think it has one of the better interfaces I have seen come out of Information Builders in a long time. There is a lot you can do in the WebFOCUS environment – a lot of capabilities that you would expect to find only in a client/server product. Yet Information Builders has created all that functionality in a very thin client implementation. That's because they understand server-centricity so well. Another advantage of Information Builders' BI products is that they still have a language underneath. Like SQL, FOCUS is a fourth-generation language. Everything generates 4GL code. It can be edited and it is bi-directional. The advantage is that you can audit that – you can do a code review to understand why things are working or not working. However, many organizations are gun shy when it comes to 4GLs, due to limited available skills and the perception that it is "old" technology.

IB MAGAZINE – How would you sum up the Business Intelligence market today?

DRESNER – There are a tremendous amount of opportunities, and also a lot of risks. The trick is hitting it right. Many of these venture-funded start-ups hop around because they are trying to find the right thread. If you only have a certain amount of funding and you have to pick just the right opportunity, it is easy to miss it because the marketplace is changing. And picking the right targets is much more difficult than it has been in the past. Not everybody has the luxury of placing multiple bets. Information Builders has an advantage of being private, with a lot of capital, and they can better afford to make long-term investments. They have also gone through somewhat of a transformation. Whether it was due to vision or luck, WebFOCUS has transformed the company. When you look at all the nuances of the BI market, Infor-mation Builders seems to be on the right track.

David Baum is a freelance writer based in Santa Barbara, CA.