Will the BI portal last?

Almost all vendors have been moving to a consolidated web portal to expose BI assets to end users. I have to question the validity of making our users come to a portal when they clearly need to integrate intelligence into other aspects of their computer use. Is there a need to change the paradigm of "come and get" it BI?

I think to some extent there is a need to change how we think about building BI applications. We tend to extract out just the information requirements from our end users and neglect to capture their overall business process in the picture. If we look at this bigger picture, we will see opportunities to potentially automate decisions and to make the Business Intelligence technology more transparent in the process.

Today's BI platforms have capabilities to integrate directly within office applications, and through a service oriented architecture can expose any type of BI asset to any other application or service. There are even capabilities to expose reports as RSS feeds, that can even deliver content such as a fully rendered reports directly to the users reader software of choice. Let's use these capabilities to delivery more effective solutions and make the end user experience simpler.

We are hearing the catch phrase "pervasive BI" in the industry more and more. As people get busier and busier in their working lives, we need to provide them with the right amount of data to make the right decision at the right time. This is the promise of pervasive BI, take the strategy out of the board room and bring it to the front lines.

Yes, we will likely always have some type of BI portal to provide access to reports and other content. Let's not lose sight of other ways for our end users to interact with corporate information. By taking their overall process into account, we can integrate the required information in the most effective way for the organization.