In the coming decade Business Intelligence solutions must change to meet SMB requirements for more information. A wide range of application software vendors today recognize a ramping increase in the demand for information. These vendors are working to understand their customers’ biggest pain points in terms of accessing and analyzing information and are developing product roadmaps for the next decade that will address these challenges. One of the biggest changes that will be necessary to provide the information that SMBs increasingly require will be for vendors to alter or amend the role of database administrators, and specifically to change the way they think about security.
In the past, application developers of all types have focused on automating specific business transactions and processes. In the coming decade, the focus will shift to delivering functionality that gives SMBs visibility into that information for use in making better decisions. To do this, database administrators will need to shift the focus on security from keeping unauthorized people out of the database to providing better data access to more people who need it. This is not necessarily the way database administrator’s align with business imperatives. If more information is required, and that demands more access to the database, but the technical gatekeeper won’t allow any further access, then you have a stalemate, and BI projects are littered with examples of failed projects because of administrative red tape. The database administrator of the future surely must have the database integrity and data security as fundamental to their role, but a third part needs to become equally important , and that is to give people access to data so that the right information gets to the right people at the right time.