Event: Microsoft PerformancePoint Server

I'm off to the MS office in Victoria to attend a launch event for the PerformancePoint Server. I am very sad to have missed the big launch event at which Professor Robert Kaplan was the keynote speaker. I'm considering what position this product has in our BI strategy.

Business Intelligence, information and decisions

In The Great Decoupling McAfee talks about the break between the right to make decisions and the flow of information. In the past information has been expensive to create and deliver and therefore access to this information was restricted to those who make decisions. Clearly this is founded on the fact that information is what underpins decisions. However, as communication costs fall the ability to deliver information is certainly not a barrier and it become possible to give more information to more people. Although this may enable some decentralisation of decision making it doesn't require it.

What prompted me to come back to McAfee's post was a post by Larry Dignan, Business intelligence: The next frontier. There's nothing too surprising here as he talks about BI and links with Enterprise Search. Referencing another of his posts, Peter Biddle: Enterprise social networking ready for lift-off, Dignan comes to the conclusion, "Over time, I could see some of those aforementioned approaches (BI + social networking + search) merging together perhaps with a company like Autonomy."

Then there's the Semantic Web and SOA folks, call the BI department ASAP: an interesting addition to the discussion.

How does this play into your overall strategy for BI?