By 7am this morning I had decided that my son had already watched enough TV for the day. I turned it off amid the expected complaints and started cooking breakfast. When he didn’t answer my calls to come to the table I found him in his room with his mum’s iPad watching ABC4 Kids on iView. When I asked him why he was watching TV when I told him not to, he replied with a straight face “I thought that I had time to watch Bob the Builder on the computer while you made breakfast, I am not watching the TV. “

It occurred to me that the proliferation of tablets and app markets will have a marked impact/effect on the expectations of users of enterprise analytic capabilities over the next few years. It will also lead to a larger number of these users as a generation of users that has always had information available on demand arrives.

The expectations of the next generation of analytic users will include a self-service market based model from which to access components of the enterprise analytic capability as required, as the well as high availability characteristics of the mission critical system that it will be become. These expectations will be coupled with assumptions regarding data quality (the data is correct), data freshness (the data is current) and that the determination to share the data is theirs to make.

The days of IT service delivery and demand management being able to respond to analytic requirements with a dollar figure in the millions and a time frame of months or years are over. The expectations and assumptions of the next generation of analytic users will need to form the high level non-functional requirements of enterprise analytic capabilities going forward. Not doing so will lead to broad reaching competitive disadvantages caused by the increased time and cost of decision making and issues with staff retention. 

David Pracy