I’ve read about an 84-year-old farmer in North Dakota who reads pig spleens the way mainstream fortune tellers read tarot. Sadly, he doesn’t service the business intelligence industry.
If he did, we might have had more fun with predictions for 2008. Now we’re stuck with these: Consolidation will continue, smaller vendors will sprout, deployment will be easier, software as a service will take off, visualization will emerge… Did I miss any? Well, who cares?
Where are all the tech-savvy clairvoyants when you need one?
A friend of mine used to swear by someone she called “the common sense psychic.” She’d get her on the phone and tell her all about the problem of the day. Yes, said the psychic, and what happened then? And then? After a while, the psychic put the phone down and came back a few minutes later. Her perception was always right on, and no wonder.
In the trade, that’s called a cold reading. You gather facts and spill them back in such a way that you cover all the bases.
Foretelling the next 12 months of BI is a warm reading. What started to happen will continue to happen.
I myself was one of those year-end wizards, but I was able to produce little contrast with everybody else. Perhaps I should have consulted a horoscope and summarized all the signs, like this.
Your star is on the rise. Changes over the next three months will inspire you to expand your horizons. Though prospects look uncertain at the beginning of the year, give it time. The surprise opportunity thrusts you into the spotlight amid roadblocks. Just keep doing what you’re doing and you’ll be fine.
Oh, hell. Let’s cut the crap and skip to the one interesting and courageous prediction from any BI leader. It comes from Mark Madsen, who looks ahead and sees that goatees are going out of style.
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