Business intelligence data no longer confined to the enterprise user

Business intelligence will come to every level of the organisation, and then to consumers, states CTO

Organisations are beginning to make their business intelligence (BI) data available to customers outside of the business, according to Stephen Brobst, CTO of data warehousing and analytics firm Teradata.

An emerging trend for BI technology sees the data, which before now had been largely used inside the enterprise, consumed by customers via mobile devices, smartphones and tablets.

In an exclusive interview with Computing at the Gartner Business Intelligence Summit 2011 in London yesterday, Brobst stated that the most advanced users of BI are looking to use it to strengthen relations with customers.

One such user, international bank Wells Fargo, uses a Teradata system to provide decision support capability to retail customers, for example.

"As a consumer of retail banking you could use your smartphone to access data on your bank's data warehouse, and use it to make personal banking decisions.

"This area is likely to explode. Consumers tend to be more sophisticated than enterprises in the use of mobile devices," added Brobst.

He argued that this "consumer intelligence" will increase the pervasiveness of BI within the business.

"The vast majority of people in the business don't want a BI tool, they just want an answer."

BI is also spreading inside the enterprise, with most organisations now realising that they need to provide strategic decision-makers with access to information, but it needs to be sourced by linking the right pieces of software.

Brobst provided the example of a call-centre rep making a decision on the best offer to make a customer. Rather than exit the call management application she should be able to go into a BI tool within the application and run a query - this would require integration within the operational CRM.

"In this case, the analytics and operations CRM need to play together."