Not many commentators have picked up on this but, as Office meets ERP systems, it will democratize business intelligence in much the same way that desktop word processors democratised document preparation. This will put a premium on people and innovation that can provide easy (situational) access and insight. Email and portals are the likely situational applications and mashboards, and insight will be provide by innovators like Metapraxis (board-level insight into company performance), Tableau Software (data and relationshop visualization) and CXO Systems (business and IT visibility).
Most of the time: What happens when business data is liberated?
Leaving aside the appropriateness of the term "democratizing" when applied to Microsoft Office System (is it still a "System?"), it is interesting to think of what can be done when horizontal front-end applications (like email or IM) can be extended to act as situationally-appropriate interfaces to multiple applications.
Disparate data sources can be united. Familiar workspaces and interfaces can be reused. Most importantly, the gap between information and action can be substantially narrowed, if not altogether eliminated.
All good stuff, of course, but big questions remain. For example, the hard part of uniting disparate data sources into a single place for intelligence and action usually isn't the front end, as much as it is the integration and transformation of data on the back end. Has this gotten any simpler in the last 15 years (and I just haven't noticed)? Familiar horizontal interfaces are far more capable than we might imagine, but isn't there a host of applications whose functional demands outstrip the ability of Office to act as the front-end?
