If you watched the opening ceremonies in Beijing, you probably would agree that it was an absolute marvel of human coordination. Putting any political differences aside, the ability to transform 15,000 human beings into a highly coordinated digitial and visual display was jaw dropping. What’s this have to do with Business Intelligence… I actually think that the coordination of the Chinese performers is the exact type of highly sophisticated orchestration that businesses should be seeing from their competitive data.
Coordinating millions of data points should be as seamless and as simple to the viewer (or user) as the experience of watching the outcome of 15,000 people in mass synchronization, with perfect execution. I’m not suggesting the process behind the scenes needs to be simple per se, but to the end benefactor, the user, it must be. After all, who cares about the preperation, what business users need is the action.
But instead, BI products require the user to be writer, producer and director of the entire event, rather than the person who ultimately is supposed to benefit from the experience of interacting with the technology.
I think the industry has had the process upside down and backwards. Maybe we can learn something from the spectacle of the opening ceremonies to try to find better ways to transform data into breakthrough innovation rather than trying to mold business users into mathematicians.
