Self-Service Business Intelligence in 2011

The following is an excerpt from an interview between Mark Brunelli of Search Business Analytics and James Kobielus of Forrester Research:

How do you see the world of self-service BI progressing in 2011?

Self-service BI in 2011 will become the only BI approach that the new generation of information workers will ever encounter. Fundamentally, the way it’s going for us is that everybody wants to have the prestige clients on their desktop for BI -- an in-memory client like a Tibco or a PowerPivot or ClickView. So, what we’re going to see are these in-memory clients that support essentially [light] data mining with interactive visualization. [This will allow users] to bring millions and eventually billions of rows into memory and do some really sophisticated analyses. IT very much wants to go this route since IT doesn’t want to have to build cubes any longer. They don’t want to have to build all of the integration logic if the user can be given front-end tools that they can use to build their own visualizations and to pull data from the data warehouse.

I agree with James Kobielus that the widespread deployment and acceptance of self-service (i.e., "in-memory") business intelligence technologies have arrived...

Source: Brunelli, M (2011, January 28), The Top BI Trends and Analytics Technology Predictions for 2011, Search Business Analytics.