“Are Advanced Analytics Returning To Business Intelligence?” asks Seth Grimes

"Ease of use and accessibility are essential to widespread acceptance of BI, but simplicity has unfortunately come at the cost of analytic depth." argues Seth Grimes in this IntelligentEnterprise Article. "BI's online analytic processing (OLAP) focus has meant neglect of valuable approaches to problems that involve nonlinearity, uncertainty, indeterminacy, and time complexities."

Nigel Pendse, of The OLAP Report, agrees.

"Without any scientific basis, I'd say that use of stats in business analysis has been declining over the years. Today's mainstream BI products typically offer less stats functionality than their 1970s predecessors, presumably because few people used [the statistical capabilities] ... In my own experience, apps that used advanced stats and predictive models have been less successful, in business terms, than simpler ones."

It's a good article and worth taking a look at, especially if (like many of us) your main experience of Business Intelligence is OLAP reports against a relational or multidimensional datasource. A major trend in the BI market over the last few years, has been the packaging-up and bundling of query and reporting tools with application suites such as the Oracle E-Business Suite, Peoplesoft and SAP; most of the effort has gone into integrating the tools and making them easier to use, rather than adding to the feature set and moving beyond pure OLAP analysis.

It's often an observation of long-time Express users that tools such as Discoverer, Reports and the Intelligences are somewhat 'dumbed down' versions of pure MOLAP tools such as Express and Essbase. To an extent, if you take in isolation the traditional OLAP features (slicing and dicing, preaggregated summaries, ability to create models) up until recently this was true, but advances with Oracle 9i and now 10g are making the distinction between MOLAP and ROLAP less obvious. However, as Seth Grimes points out, there's a whole world of analytics and statistics out there that recent toolsets have chosen to ignore, in favour of broadening the appeal of business intelligence.

However, the move towards techniques such as Six Sigma and Business Performance Management have lead to a resurgence of interest in techniques such as nonlinearity, uncertainty, indeterminacy, and complex time hierarchies. According to Seth,

"Nonetheless, mainstream BI tool vendors have quietly beefed up stats capabilities, responding to external pressures