MI and BI

I met senior official of data management group of Pharmaceutical Company as part of my consulting engagement. He came up with requirement called consumer analytics. Different pharmacy chains their products in market. He would like to get POS data from these chains, cleanse it, analyze it and mine the data to further insights. As we know there is no customer in this kind of situation, its traditional business intelligence coupled with market intelligence seems to be solution.

I always feel that very soon there seem to be convergence with BI and MI. By definition BI is with in walls of business where as MI is out side information.



If BI can be integrated with MI and analyzed it would solve lot of problems for businesses. This is more of case with situation I am mentioning above. Technically I am looking for SOA enabling external MI to be consumed and integrated with internal BI. There are lot of databases and market information available out side such as IMS for Pharmaceutical sector. I see most of these are still desktop applications that needs to be downloaded and installed. If these can be consumed as web services then accessing MI would be easier for companies.

As I work through my consulting engagement through available resources, I look forward to have a day where key MI tools deliver data as web services.