by Angela Guess
Hjalmar Gislason recently wrote in ITProPortal, “When you’re driving a car, you spend most of your time looking out the windscreen: What’s ahead? When to turn? Any unexpected obstacles in your way? Every now and then you glance at the dashboard. But that’s just to check how fast you’re going, whether you’ve got enough gas, that the engine isn’t running too hot, etc. So why is it that in the world of Business Intelligence (BI) and visual analytics, we primarily focus on data from internal systems, providing a view on internal operations and past performance, while largely leaving data on the external business environment and the future out of the equation?”
Gislason continues, “Currently, we are in the third wave of BI platforms – the age of self-service visual analytics. Business users now have increased access to powerful visual analytics tools, and – although still somewhat at the mercy of the organisation they work for – the internal data to analyse… For historical reasons mentioned above, BI platforms, especially the solutions that stem from the first wave of BI, still seem to view the Internet as an afterthought. You can relatively easily sync BI platforms with various internal databases through ODBC connections and aggregate data from a variety of on premise enterprise systems. But if you want to integrate them into a simple online API – not so much. This is slowly changing, but the larger problem we need to work through is that much of the data on the internet, whether from public sources, financial and economic databases or market research companies, doesn’t even exist in APIs or other well-structured, machine-readable formats.”
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