As an industry follower and advisor I tend to focus on the here and now of BI and PM rather than pontificating about long-term outlooks and market predictions.

But every once in a while I let myself sit back and daydream about "the next big thing".



A confluence of circumstances made me do so recently.  I was in New York City at a performance management seminar.  I lugged along my laptop because I needed to do some writing on the train and I brought my blackberry to stay connected to email, IM, Facebook, Twitter, and Google Alerts.  Of course opening the URL to an interesting Google Alert took 45 seconds to render and after I zoomed in a few times about half the text was legible but that meant I had to scroll left and right to read the article.

After a few minutes of frustration and an eye-strain induced headache I remembered I had brought my laptop.  I booted it up so I could browse my alerts without a magnifying glass.  However, there was only one wireless network available and I have an ethical issue with paying the $14.95 ransom the Hyatt charges for access.  If you travel at all you have probably felt my pain.

How Useful is Mobile Access to Information?
So I gave up and went in to hear the keynote presentation and low and behold a major topic was mobile access to BI.  The demonstration of a user interacting with a dashboard on a blackberry had a big "cool factor" but I soon had a deja vu moment.  Like my challenges earlier in the day, there just wasn't enough real estate on the screen to do any real analysis.  It was tantamount to an alert because all you could really do was forward it to someone with a full size screen to investigate.  Still cool but not the real intent of mobile BI.


A View into the Future
When I got home that evening and was able to read my Google Alerts on a full size screen and there I found a link to a video called "The Sixth Sense" which was recorded back in February and shows technology that would address all the information access issues I had experienced that day.  I suggest you take a few minutes to view this video from MIT Labs, it will make you say "I want that!"  If you are short of time skip forward to the 5 minute mark and watch from there.

 
Pervasive Performance Management
In my opinion this video is a great example of the potential of technology to enable truly pervasive BI and performance management.  It is the fusing of traditional BI, unstructured data access, contextual and guided search, and virtual screens.  The video is focused on the consumer but think about what this would do for productivity and decision making in the mobile and virtual enterprise.

The technology to accomplish this exists today, just take a look at the product innovations of the traditional BI vendors around unstructured data, the guided navigation capabilities from companies like Endeca, and the virtual screen technology shown in this video.  But you won't see a combined experience like this tomorrow or even next year.  It will take a maturation and marrying of these different technologies and the evolution of business culture to embrace it.  But it really is possible.

I'm looking forward to the day when this all comes together but for now I'm heading back to the reality of today and bringing my laptop and my blackberry (and my magifying glass) on my next trip.