Howard Dresner: The Father of Business Intelligence Talks to EyeOnBI

Howard Dresner, chief strategy officer, joined Hyperion in 2005 from Gartner, where he was widely acknowledged as the preeminent authority on business intelligence. He graciously took some time out from his busy schedule to answer our questions.

EyeOnBI: Can you tell me about your role as Chief Strategy Officer? What’s the day to day work like? What are a couple of the long term projects you’re working on?

I’ve got my fingers in everything. I’m working closely with customers, doing a lot of market-facing activities. I’m also very actively involved in working with our CMO, the field, our chief development officer, M&A activities with our VP of corporate development, as well as some new initiatives that I’m driving.

But working with customers is the really fun part of the job, because they’re actually doing stuff with our products. They’re solving real problems. It’s a great opportunity to learn. It’s a great way to try to figure out what’s really a “best practice.” And I love organizations that make things happen.

For example, earlier this year we announced our Alliance for Performance Leadership, which is a sort of think-tank where we engage with key C-level customers, academia and our own internal faculty – with the notion of “raising the bar” for BPM best practices. We held our first roundtable in September and it was a great success. The next one is in February and we have high hopes. We are also under contract with John Wiley & Sons to produce several books – the first on the “BPM Revolution” as I like to call it.

EyeOnBI: What’s your take on Enterprise Open Source as it comes of age, specifically companies like Talend and Pentaho which are getting a lot of VC investment and buzz?

We track all trends in the market that can help our customers become more successful. We embrace several open source initiatives, including Linux, MySQL, Slide, WebDav and others, and have been delivering products for years that leverage open source in many ways. Regarding open source BI and BPM systems, so far it has not shown the speed of adoption that was predicted, but we are keeping a close eye on it, as we do with all trends that are of interest to our clients.

Open source BI and BPM operate on a couple of different business models: 1) offer a limited version of the software which is open source and the “full“ version must be purchased, 2) provide the software at no cost, but charges for all services – e.g., customization, implementation, training and support. The question is whether either serves the best interests of enterprise customers. So far, customers have not fully embraced either model.

EyeOnBI: Google has a vision of the future where you ask your computer a question and it is intelligent enough to answer, like in Star Trek. Is AI part of the future of BI? What does the BI software of the future look like for both administrators and users?

We’re always looking for was to make BI simpler – our goal is for BI to be foolproof for business users. Within the next year, business user search automation will be taken to the next level – to understand the meaning of data, where it is located, and generate new info – even if a user is asking for something someone’s never built before. It will automate what casual users are doing – making these things inherent to the system.

We continue to invest in many areas which will make BPM easier to implement, administer and use. You’re never really done on any of these fronts. System 9 represents a huge step forward. But we will not rest until BPM is completely easy and intuitive – taking a smaller slice of people’s time – while dramatically improving our customers’ business performance.

This interview will be concluded later this week.