The phrase chaos versus control may conjure up more images from a Get Smart movie than business intelligence, but that concept is at the heart of a new release of the Cognos business intelligence suite from IBM.

Version 8.4 of the Cognos business intelligence looks to empower end users of the software by making it easier for them to customize and expand on the reports generated by the system. Those extensions to the reports can then be rolled back up into the system and easily shared with other users.

What Cognos is trying to do is strike a balance between a top-down methodology that emphasizes the way a business analyst wants to structure the way a business operates and the empirical knowledge of the people that are closest to the business.

The challenge is finding a way to do that in a way where chaos doesn't ensue because the bottom up customer reports coming in from end users are now in conflict with each other. And potentially far worse, all those custom reports could render any attempt at data governance in compliance with any number of regulations hopeless.

There has always been an inherent tension between end users and the corporation when it comes to business intelligence applications. The company prizes structure above all else, but all too often that structure does not reflect the actual experience of the people that work for the company. As Web 2.0 technologies comes to enterprise applications, it's only a matter of time before end users gain more individual control over how the data is structured inside these applications. But not everybody back at corporate headquarters is going to be overly excited about every effort to extend the business intelligence application in ways that might not be conducive to running a well-ordered financial structure that would pass muster with an auditor. Finding a balance between the needs of the end user for flexibility and corporate managers for structure requires a combination of art and science.

One other Web 2.0 technology incorporated into the latest release of Cognos 8.4 that is worth commenting on is the inclusion of search technology that makes it easier to find instances in the database that match a given set of business patterns. That means instead of having to constantly reinvent the wheel, end users can more easily find report structures that match a given set of criteria, which makes it easier for them to find specific reports or re-use the structure of those reports to create new formats.

Most of this functionally is becoming available now because Cognos, along with rivals such as SAP, have been steadily moving to turn business intelligence software into a piece of middleware that has hooks into every data source in the corporation. As that layer of business intelligence software continues to expand, the hope is that business intelligence applications will continue to get smarter about the business processes that today they just don't really know enough about.