1) BI is increasingly focusing on product and less on know-how. Product is easier to understand by buyers and sellers.

2) Despite the proliferation of standards and protocols that should make interoperability and interchange of intelligence a breeze, every vendor makes it difficult unless you buy a product that makes it easy. Why not make it free? The greatest value delivered to a business is in the speed of creation and exploitation of the insight not the widget that allows you share the insight. Wouldn't it be great if every BI vendor provided the same fabric to publish such outputs as Google type widgets? We should be making access to intelligence ubiquitous and open, the creation of intelligence needs to be de-coupled.

3) While too many vendors want to lock customers into their product strategy to ensure a healthy run rate business, too many customers seemingly want to be locked in. It's all about making implementation and support easy by commoditizing the architecture, design and delivery of business intelligence. Delivering Intelligence that will make a difference is a challenge that requires understanding and know-how that most businesses are investing less to acquire and retain at the same time that most vendors are offering it ‘out of the box’. Cause and effect?

For me, what it boils down to is this, the creation of outstanding technologies is better than ever to keep the business intelligence wagon rolling but the swarms of people jumping onto the wagon is less good than you think. While you see the passionate, committed professionals that have the knowledge, there are a rapidly growing class of BI practitioners across all parts of our industry that are the modern equivalent of the tailors in Hans Christian Anderson's The Emperor's New Cloths.

Growth in our industry and the increasing demand for what it can deliver attracts others that provide nothing more than the Emperor’s New BI Platform. To get to a place where we go beyond using BI to make an incremental dollar benefit to making a difference we require something new. We need an element of something I call Value Intelligence. Requiring more than technology, VI requires people with understanding, know-how and the courageous leadership necessary in building out the right infrastructure. While there are more people swarming into BI, there are less with VI than we need to make your vision the norm.