Web 2.0: How Will It Impact Business Intelligence?

Web 2.0 is an up-and-coming trend in Web design and development, and more and more companies are beginning to embrace it in order to leverage the full potential of the Internet.  Web 2.0 uses communities, hosted services, and other shared Internet resources to facilitate faster and broader information exchange both inside and outside the enterprise.  Through the use of advanced programming frameworks and technologies like Web services, JavaScript, and AJAX, as well as social networking sites and other communication venues, Web 2.0 enables a virtually unlimited range of Internet collaboration capabilities.

Many industry experts see Web 2.0 as the next revolution in business intelligence, and expect it to transform reporting processes in ways that few technologies and methodologies have been able to in the past.  Gone will be the days of information access and analysis that was limited by the constraints of internal data and traditional back-end systems.  Instead, a new era of BI will emerge, one that allows users to supplement internal information with data from a vast array of external sources like blogs, wikis, and RSS feeds.

So, what will be some of the best ways to apply Web 2.0 techniques to BI environments? Web 2.0 will most impact business intelligence via its ability to allow companies to create more rich Internet applications for reporting and analysis.  With Web 2.0-enabled reporting environments, users of any kind – even non-technical users – can access and interact with information with almost no boundaries.

For example: 

• Use of wikis, blogs, and other collaborative workspaces will allow users to instantly publish and share reports and other critical business content. 
• Incorporation of RSS feeds into data marts and warehouses will serve as an additional information source in reports and analyses, providing an endless stream of real-time information.
• Development of BI environments using advanced Internet frameworks will accelerate deployment, improve system performance, enhance robustness of the user interface, increase speed of data delivery, and ease integration with other business applications.
• Combining BI with various external sources – through use of mashups – will expand the depth and breadth of the corporate information that already exists.  Mashups can also be utilized to enable rapid creation of composite BI services. 
• Use of “tagging” techniques will make reporting content available and easy to find over “everyday” Web sites such as Yahoo and Google.  This will facilitate collaboration with customers and external business partners.

With Web 2.0, organizations can improve all facets of their business intelligence environments.  The technical benefits are just the beginning.  Access to, interaction with, and sharing of vast amounts of vital and timely data will be significantly increased, and as a result, the end user experience – and the value that BI can add to the business – will be dramatically enhanced.