Forrester On BI Mashups

This is the second time in as many weeks that I am writing about a research report that has crossed my desk. This may be a trend - or a sign that I am relying on other people's opinions when I should be drawing my own conclusions. Only time will tell.

Forrester is a research organisation that I have long admired as they have a track record of producing some real insights into the business uses of information technologies. A July 2009 report entitled "Mighty Mashups: Do-It-Yourself Business Intelligence For The New Economy" by James Kobielus continues this tradition.

This report gives you a good overview of the why and how of business intelligence mashups. In essence they can give an organisation a greater capability to self-service their BI needs. This is something I believe is the key to unlocking greater value from your BI investments.

Mashups wont replace pre-canned reporting or well thought out analysis by statistical experts, but they have their place, and if you want to learn more then I recommend starting by reading this report.

Comments

[Joan]

This sounds like an instneetirg topic. API's have a lot of potential for leveraging shared data sources, for defining a shared base of content and services that scholars can then repurpose and extend (possibly with some technical help, possibly by learning to do it on their own) to present their own analysis and interpretation without having to create the entire project from scratch. Perhaps we could spend some time talking about the design principles for creating RESTful APIs as well as the some of the benefits/drawbacks to these approaches (e.g., what are the sustainability implications if I create a project that depends on someone else's API). For the hack-a-thon, it might be useful to have one or two project domains in mind. I'd be interested in walking through a general purpose API for representing digital facsimiles. I think that might be something that is broad enough that we can get both technical and non-technical people working on and yet (hopefully) have something cobbled together in an hour or so. I'm sure that there are other instneetirg projects out there as well. Are there other types of resources that people would be interested in hacking up?