The Third Wave of Business Intelligence Integration –

Unified Businesses Intelligence

The third wave of integration in Business Intelligence is beginning.

Historical forces in BI have driven centralization and expansion phases in architecture over the last 20 years.

1. Centralization:
   Corporations built data bases as enterprise data warehouses. We attempted to put all the data in one place hoping that it would be used for intelligence. There have been varying degrees of success.
   
   
2. Expansion:
   Data was exported to data marts to compute multidimensional metrics which truly enable companies to steer their businesses. This has been widely successful.
   
   
3. Re-Centralization:
   It is now a competitive advantage to put these valuable computed multi-dimensional metrics which are generated in data marts, and with which executives steer companies, into the enterprise warehouses to be used much more widely on the “corporate bus”. When they remain only in data marts they have limited distribution, and therefore limited utility.
   
   

Each centripetal or centrifugal wave has added value, made business more agile. Business Intelligence has gained credibility for managing companies for performance, and is now known as EPM, Enterprise Performance Management. For background, please see Howard Dresner, The Performance Management Revolution.

The thesis of this site is that EPM has just recently evolved to another inflection point. By merging metrics across environments, we now have the ability to develop new knowledge for enterprise management through the synergies of data warehouses and data marts. I call this abstraction across localized and enterprise databases the “Mart House”. This web site elaborates and contextualizes this idea.