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Immersive Intelligence: Discovering Your Company Through the Eyes of Your Data Warehouse By Richard Hackathorn | Bolder Technology Inc. December 6, 2012 You are responsible for your company’s data warehouse. It contains over 60 TB of data in a dozen subject areas, serving almost a thousand users – all the result of a decade of hard work. It has become critical to your daily business, driving several key operational systems and supporting your e-commerce website. You have struggled through several generations of infrastructure, but you have stayed current with the technology. You feel good about what your team has accomplished. Yet, you know that the potential of that data to your business could be so much greater. And, with each new data source and each new linkage across subject areas, the business potential of the data warehouse continues to multiply. Unfortunately, most of the data is never seen by human eyes, is seldom touched by applications, and only occasionally influences major business decisions. Even the new analytics only brushes lightly across the bigger tables. What if you could turn the data warehouse upside down and spread all those bytes across the ground? As bytes about customers spill out, the characteristics of customers are rendered in shapes, velocity, colors, textures, and even sound – conveying rich information about who they are and what they desire. Let us arrange these “customer objects” in a large football stadium, for example. We could assign their seats based on expected lifetime revenue, with the higher ones nearest the 50-yard line. When they enter our stores and purchase our products, they move from their seat and walk into the center field. In a similar fashion, we could render the other subject areas: suppliers, manufacturing sites, products, distribution channels, marketing campaigns, and so on. For each, we would carefully design the appropriate objects to convey the maximum information. We will need lots of space, like that of a large city spanning miles in all directions. Since your company is updating the data warehouse continuously, this city would appear to be alive, with motions and sounds reflecting the dynamics of our business. Finally, we allow real people -- business analysts, executives, key partners, etc. -- to wander around this virtual space, learning about current business practices and discovering insights into future business opportunities. As they approach objects, details emerge. As they touch objects, analytics surface additional information. The Immersive Intelligence Approach The above is a sketch of the Immersive Intelligence approach to understanding and managing a business. While traditional business intelligence (BI) fragments the business into small pieces, this approach starts with the entire context and then allows detailed analyses to occur within the context of the whole. A critical objective of Immersive Intelligence is creating this experience of “immersiveness”, or the feeling of “being there”. This feeling implies that the person senses a plausible reality inherent in this virtual space. By being immersed in this information-rich virtual space, the business reality conveyed by the data warehouse can be internalized personally and shared collectively. This reality should directly reflect the degree to which the data warehouse is trusted to be valid and complete.

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Just a few years ago, the implementation of the Immersive Intelligence approach was impractical. However, advances in real-time 3D rendering1 and virtual world architectures2 are rapidly maturing. In addition, serious game design has emerged with best practices for collaborative gamification, as exhibited in Fold.It3 video game. In fact, the technology has advanced so that the rendering of terabytes of data can be performed efficiently by rendering only visible objects. This is similar to database query processing where the optimizer ensures that only the data required by the query is access from disk storage. The Immersive Intelligence approach to BI is new and innovative. It has risks, but it also has the potential to revitalize our current investments in data warehousing. The challenge for Immersive Intelligence is to drive meaningful business insights through advanced visualization and collaborative analysis within this immersive virtual space.

--- Richard Hackathorn is founder and president of Bolder Technology Inc. He has over thirty years of experience in the Information Technology industry as a well-known industry analyst, technology innovator, and international educator. You can contact the author at richardh@bolder.com.

1 Such as Unity3D, CryEngine, Unreal, and other video game engines 2 Such as OpenSimulator, AvayaLive Engage, ReactionGrid Jibe, and other collaborative environments. 3 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fold.it  

Resources about Immersive Intelligence • A video (4 minutes) that contrasts the video gaming industry with 4-5 examples of emerging work in

Immersive Intelligence is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uY3el9WNjKg.

• The blog stream for the Immersive Intelligence Colleagues is at http://im-tel.org/, along with a vision statement.

• An article entitled “Create an Augmented Reality” appeared in Teradata Magazine and was co-authored with Bill Franks, Chief Analytics Officer of Teradata. It is at http://teradatamagazine.com/v12n03/Connections/Create-an-Augmented-Reality/.

Immersive Intelligence in a Nutshell Immersive Intelligence complements and extends existing analysis tools of BI using 3D virtual world technology to provide a collaborative facility for education, training, discovery, and problem solving. The facility consists of a limitless virtual space comprised of information objects rendered from the data of a mature data warehouse. This virtual space is:

• Persistent – providing an “always-on” active window into the data warehouse

• Rich – using high-density 3-D visualizations and other senses

• Interactive – responding to on-demand reporting and analyses

• Social – providing collaborative experiences among hundreds of persons

• Engaging – stimulating innovation with gamification of serious professional goals