Is Business Intelligence dead?

Neil Raden posted recently an article entitled " BI is dead! long live BI".  This adds to the trend of declaring some technology or trend as dead:    Earlier this year I wrote a post in this blog, entitled: "Is mapReduce dying?" in which I also indicated some references to claims such as  "SOA is dead" or "ERP is dead". Actually nothing in the IT industry dies quite easily,   I guess that COBOL, which is about my age, is still alive  today, and may outlive me.   What Neil claims is that the success of BI was much less than the hype created around it, and its adoption was around 10-20% in large organization depends on the survey.   This is consistent with other opinions,  James Standen reported  on a survey that found that the the actual adoption is lot less than the percentage claimed  by BI vendors are. The picture at the top of this page is borrowed from his post "Business Intelligence adoption low and falling".     

Neil claims that BI does have a future, but its future is in doing it as part of a decision management framework, not as a stand-along service consumed by people.   When talking about decision management, it has a role to analyze historical data, but doing it within a context of a specific decision.  This can be used to provide input to decision or to reinforce or refute assumptions.  

I think that this is an interesting perspective and in a way has some similarity to event processing which also transitions from stand alone technology to part of a bigger game.   I have discussed it in the past, and still stand by the conclusion that stand alone event processing will stay as a niche, but the mainstream will be part of bigger games.  I have investigated recently the current list of "bigger games"and will write on it in one of the future posts,  however, I see the same observation as valid for BI,  current BI will remain a niche, while the mainstream will move towards embedded BI.   More -later.