It’s been an incredible pleasure to work alongside some of the most influential people in high tech over the years. They share a few things: vision, passion, and the ability to drive innovation.
Howard Dresner is the Chief Research Office founder and Dresner Advisory Services. Howard was my first acquaintance over 30 years ago at DEC. The challenge for the company was to be successful in organizational information systems, information access, and decision support system solutions.
This was also Data Warehousing’s early stages. While they all worked together, these were made up of different components. To explain complex solutions, we used “marketecture” concepts.
Since then, I have understood it as an “inside-out” concept versus an “outside-in” one. We started with the products and ideas and worked our way up. The missing element was a simple unification concept easy for people to grasp and use.
I am proud to say I was in the room the day Howard Dresner coined the term and joined Howard’s BI team at the beginning of this year. It has been great to work in BI again, even though I never left, given the importance of data and analytics in marketing.
We are now in our thirteenth year of Dresner Advisory Services. This allowed us to reflect on the state of BI and the changes we have seen over the past three decades and discuss the future.
A: In the end, we are heading to “information democracy,” where all stakeholders have instant access to relevant, actionable, and timely insights. While many people are enamored with tools, and they do have some great ones, the vast majority of users still need access to actionable insights.
A: I have not seen any software companies wanting to enter the services industry. Nevertheless, most/most people are concerned about customer success. Having some service capability is crucial. Many/most service organizations are looking for higher-margin businesses, such as software. System Integrators (SIs) in the BI space will not only leverage existing software but also create some of their own “added values” to support higher margins.
A: Leadership in this space is not defined by technology. It is essential to have a vision at all levels of leadership for how information and insights are used to align stakeholders with the strategy, mission, and objectives of the organization. Technology is essential but can also be an enabler of a more visionary and evolved organization.