There seems to be a lot of activity on the BI front these days.  As the world emerges from its recession darkness, BI is there to welcome it with open arms.   BI bloggers all over the blogosphere are making predictions for the new year and touting their top 10 trends and predictions for 2010; most of them share common advancements:  cloud BI tools, improved analysis and advanced visualization.

I’ve been glancing through these articles and started to consider what the future might look like in a sci-fi world.  So, taking these three advancements into account, this is my vision of Sci-Fi BI.

Cloud BI tools exploded into the market in 2009.  They combine the appeal of getting data out there quickly with a visual dashboard that contains the results of the analysis.  Dashboards contain all the classic elements of gauges, bar graphs, pie charts and the like, with some cool Flash widgets that make a dashboard super cool.  In a sci-fi world, this concept would be taken to the next level.

Let’s consider the advancement of data visualization over the past few years; I recently wrote a blog about a few of my favorite data visualizations.  Using tools like Adobe Air or Microsoft Silverlight allows for a more flexible and dynamic visualization application.   In the sci-fi world, data would be continuously added to a database/data warehouse or, even better, read directly from transactional systems; analytical tools would process the data and feed its results to a free-standing or web-based visualization application.  This application would be accessible through your computer or your smart phone; or a big screen in Times Square.  

The visualizations that you would be presented with would go way beyond the pie charts and gauges of a typical dashboard today.  Your business intelligence would be presented like a news ticker complete with advanced visualizations, and, at any time, you could glance at the images and get a feel at that moment for what’s happening at your business.   The tools might even “ding” you when something significant happens and you could immediately see what’s afoot.  Imagine your BI reporting in the same way news is reported.  You could even have a full-time analyst that adds BREAKING NEWS tickers.  

That’s how I see sci-fi BI.  I’ll finish with a J.G. Ballard quote “Everything is becoming science fiction. From the margins of an almost invisible literature has sprung the intact reality of the 20th century.”