BI will be mainstream – Economist or Iconomist.

I thoroughly enjoyed an article by Gary Cokins, Manager, Performance Management Solutions at SAS, titled ‘Economist or Iconomist’ where he concludes that, ” in twenty years from now will we look back at the last half century and observe there were six IT eras: mainframes, minicomputers, PCs, ERP, the Internet, and now analytics? Forecast, predictive model, or speculation? My crystal ball is clear. Analytics will become mainstream.” (Read the full article) While my guess is that he is focused predominantly on the enterprize market, I believe his views will resonate very strongly for small and mid-size organisations’ in the next decade as well. His view that companies, ” are still relying on gut feeling, rather than hard data, when making decisions” is the same regardless of the size of the organization and this will change, not only because market pressures will dictate that decision makers will need to use the information at their disposal to drive better organizational performance, but also because BI vendors are aware of this growing trend towards using information and consequently will provide much more powerful, and more importantly, much more intuitive solutions to facilitate greater use of information. It’s a great article and well worth a read if you are considering the role of information in your business.