In these difficult economic conditions, companies are increasingly challenged to keep margins up and protect their bottom line. In good times, when executives make a decision, ensuring a positive outcome is not as crucial as it is now. A wrong decision now can wipe out the company. So executives are looking more and more towards IT to provide them with the right information at the right time so that they can make good decisions and sustain the organization in these tough times. In addition, IT has problems of its own, including budget constraints and data proliferation. To deal with such concerns, companies are considering Business Intelligence (BI) implementations. But examining BI from a platform perspective reveals that an organization can enhance its BI solutions by adding search technology, which brings the ability to include unstructured data in analyses.

BI is a broad term that includes technology and processes for collecting, integrating, analyzing, and reporting on data. Its primary purpose is to support decision-making. BI is oriented to work with structured data like transactions, inventory, and catalog information. Traditionally, BI tools have been very complex and required special skill sets, so only a few could actually use them.

Search technologies are designed to find information from semi-structured or unstructured data like document files, blogs, and wikis. Also with the emergence of Google, search interfaces have been designed with everyone in the mind; even a novice computer user can use search to find answers.

Since both technologies have a common theme—finding relevant information in the world of data—bringing BI and search together will pay added dividends. These dividends can be in 2 areas: increased adoption of the technology by a broader user base, and improved value in the results these technologies produce. The advantage of the former would be to empower everyone, from information workers to executives, and ease their day-to-day decision-making. The advantage of the second would be that more BI tools would include some unstructured and semi-structured information along with structured results. This combination would provide some context along with BI’s numerical results. And search tools could produce some BI results along with the unstructured results.  

If you are investing on one technology, you should also consider the other because you can get added advantage with minimal extra effort. At the core, both technologies use similar products: BI uses Relational Database Management Systems (RDBMS) to manage and produce useful information; search also uses RDBMS to store search indexes. If you want to focus on BI, you can do so and include BI to mine unstructured information (crawled indexes) from search. Similarly if you want to focus on search, you can leverage existing infrastructure and have search technologies crawl not only the unstructured and semi-structured information, but also the structured information used by the BI tools.