Business intelligence at the crossroads: Convergence or confusion ahead?

Business Intelligence (BI) innovation may have stagnated given the combined forces of a down economy and the mergers and acquisitions that have reshaped the BI vendor space. To catalyze needed innovation, a new challenge is issued that focuses on advancing global services growth. That challenge is contextualized as one requiring piecemeal advancements within specific service industries before generalization to aggregate service categories like B2B, B2C and self-services. While advocating this stepwise approach, the concomitant emergence of what is referred to as the 'servitizing' of BI is addressed. This refers to notions of 'analytics as a service,' 'data warehousing in the cloud,' 'elastic data marts,' etc. While applying the service metaphor to BI (as in servitizing BI), and while addressing growth in the global services economy, there will be significant confusion surrounding BI innovation in the years ahead. Three case studies are used to demonstrate the advocated investigative approach.