Donner’s Daily Dose of Drama

There has been one single thing that I could not get out of my mind ever since I started entrenching myself in research about Open Source Business Intelligence for a conference talk. I am talking about what kind of products should be considered “Business Intelligence” in a wider sense, and what shouldn’t. I learned from Wikipedia that Howard Dresner coined the term “BI” in 1989 to “describe a set of concepts and methods to improve business decision-making by using fact-based support systems”. This is a fairly wide definition, but arguably, your operating system should not be included in this set of concepts and methods. Jasper Reports* should not, either.

Open Source Business Intelligence solutions are becoming serious alternatives to traditional proprietary licensed software with over 25 open source projects providing a wide variety of tools for data warehousing and full BI suites. The survey should answer the question if and how much of the overall market the Open Source products are about to claim. All logically valid responses will be counted in the survey. I will present the results at the First Annual Open Source Conference and Expo in New York City in June.

Thank you for your participation.

http://cdonner.com/survey/index.php?sid=1

Ilia Papas and I put this solution together about a year ago - actually, Ilia put it together based on my idea and prototype. Our article on Javaworld still generates some feedback and questions. I assume that there are people out there who would like to get their hands on a ready-to-use, configurable component as opposed to a collection of code snippets.

I recently evaluated the Microsoft Office Business Scorecard Manager 2005 (what a name for a product!). I was not so interested in the history of the product and the politics of Microsoft’s product strategy than in how the product could be used to create a corporate dashboard on Molecular’s intranet.

I will be speaking about Open Source Business Intelligence at the First Annual Enterprise Open Source Conference in New York, NY, on June 5. I am in the middle of collecting material, contacting vendors and putting together a high-level agenda for the session. Check back frequently for updates and previews on this topic here.