"Intelligence is a term describing a property of the mind including related abilities, such as the capacities for abstract thought, understanding,communication, reasoning, learning, learning from past experiences, planning, and problem solving." [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence]
Why is abstraction relevant? It helps us narrow down the myriads of information coming in from the world into our limited sensory and memory capacity. Abstraction helps us recognize patterns, without getting bogged down too much into infinite detail. It helps manage boundaries in information processing. The distinction of similarities and differences is vital for human understanding. It is the spirit out of which the Ying/Yang philosophy evolved.
Abstraction fosters re-use and adaptability.
In the marketing realm around "Business Intelligence" much emphasis is put on silver bullets, such as "the tool" or "the method", solving all your B.I. needs. Amazing how these claims of solving needs are made before even knowing the individual customer these are marketed to.
I guess to a certain point, these solution providers determined that there are common patterns to address, and they created and market a common solution for these kinds of problems. The purpose of a tool is to abstract a specific problem, so the tool can be re-used across any particular instance of a need. Generic vs. specific.
Yet, the abstraction of B.I. tool providers are still very specific. They assume the problem space to be very narrow. "Your company needs a Data Warehouse". Why? For what business purpose? Isn't there a deeper business opportunity than just slicing & dicing numbers across dimensions? Numbers without context are useless as metrics. Can your tool help me establish context between what is good, and what is bad, for my business?
Will any technology, software, database be capable enough to tell me what I should do, from a business perspective, instead of just spewing out numbers, or information without context?
So, to put the call for more Abstraction in Business Intelligence into context, let's step back for a little bit, and re-evaluate what we are trying to do in the bigger picture of our businesses. Why do we have a B.I. initiative? Have our B.I. programs become a self-fulfilling prophecies? Let's ask ourselves if there isn't a more generic way to address the challenges, and focus on more adaptable approaches, instead of getting bogged down in the granular details of technology and present-day tool capabilities.
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