In this August print issue of Professional Security magazine article, Clive Talbot of Vindex asks this month: what does our future hold?
Over the past months you’ve read a number of themes from me covering a broad range of subjects. I have spoken about products and technologies, customers and our mutual responsibilities in both the commercial and the continuing value aspects and, not least, the constituents that both support and hinder our industry. The themes I have threaded through these narratives have been about taking responsibility, understanding, informing and sustaining customer relationships and, perhaps most importantly, the survival of the electronic security industry as we have known it.
This month, whilst keeping these themes in mind, I want to look forward to where the future will take our industry. What is it that technology providers – physical and logical, hardware and software, data management and integration – all have in common? They are all attempting to make the life of the user smarter faster and, hopefully, easier. A generic for all of this is Business Intelligence (BI) and even our security industry technologies are tools and sources for the implementation of BI. To understand what this means to us we must first of all understand what BI is. BI refers to skills, knowledge, technologies, applications, quality, risks, security issues and practices used to help a business to acquire a better understanding of market behaviour and commercial context. For this purpose it undertakes the collection, integration, analysis, interpretation and presentation of business information. BI applications provide historical, current, and predictive views of business operations, most often using data already gathered into a data warehouse or an integration platform and occasionally working from operational data. Software elements support the use of this information by assisting in the extraction, analysis, and reporting of information. BI aims to support better business decision-making.
Well, we sort of know this, so how do we take this and engage what we do with BI? I believe the essence of our message to the business user is that it’s your business and your intelligence. What do I mean by that? Well, there is no ‘intelligence’ as such in a business. There is a lot of information and much of it can be very sophisticated. But the information comes from so many sources via so many technologies that there is no holistic methodology to imply/apply the term intelligence to this information. The ‘intelligence’ comes in the interpretation of the information in context and, critically, this should be by each individual responsible for their own relationship with the information. So, now I’m getting to the point of my vision versus the generic term, business intelligence.
The wikipedia definition is good and it identifies that you can apply business intelligence to whole or partial elements of business. What we know is that all the so called business intelligence tools on the market are ‘all or nothing’ solutions and, typically, they are all or nothing of the partial elements of a business, not the whole business. Furthermore they present the information for interpretation or, at best, generate some after the event, one dimensional interpretation that is a ‘one size fits all’ approach. They have a further shortcoming – they are quantitative and not qualitative – rubbish in, rubbish out!
The future of BI is different. For maximum benefit BI tools need to be able to take information from (virtually) any source a business has (and additional sources can be added for better outcomes), combine that information with the other business information elements of time (linear and periodic), people (who they are and what they do), location and business process. They need to be flexible enough to draw on the information the applied intelligence of the individual user (each and any individual user) needs for their required outcome.
Whilst almost all BI tools (data warehousing and management or systems integration) are based on data acquisition and aggregation there is one that I’ve found that addresses the need for flexibility through its unique methodology of taking data only from the sources required for particular business outcomes – using the inductive logic of the user rather than the deductive logic of the data aggregator. That product is called Altworx. Altworx interprets the information as a ‘virtual user’ – the quality of the information is always a factor in that interpretation – no data is also data. AND Altworx does all this in real time whilst having all the smart tools for retrospective analysis, trending and benchmarking. The future of the electronic security industry is in becoming a part of the business technology and data infrastructure and we must embrace and engage with BI to do this.
