The BIG Blog

Good Things Happening With Bashups [BI Mash Ups]

Mashups are common in many areas today, and are now invading the BI space.

Mashups are one way of resolving the ever present problem of data isolation. Mashups help provide context to data, adding significantly to the value of data.

From a technical perspective, the integration of BI and the contextual data is not overly complicated, the more important consideration is data quality. This is more a business issue around agreement on common definitions both for data and performance indicators.

Typical examples of Bashups include:

• BI analytics with GIS information – for example, a retailer can analyze market data within a certain radius of a potential store.
• Integrated search and in-memory analytics - will make it easier to index large amounts of structured data and build high-performance analytical applications against increasingly large data sets.
• Insurance Services - Linking health claims data and wellness program data - enabling employers to analyze the cost effectiveness of different programs and benefits.
• Financial services  - sales CRM data with product data – enabling customised sales proposals for specific customers in just a few minutes, then tracking of the proposal through its lifecycle of authorization and extension of product trials.
• Software Sales - In one instance, just tracking software trials enabled one company to reduce the trial to customer conversion time from an average of 75 days to between 36 and 40 days.

This level of data analytics sophistication is propelling businesses to better enforce standardisation, so that future bashups can be created.

Mash Up Technology includes:

• JustSystems
• Serena Software’s MashUp Composer

And to add to the presentation of these more advanced BI solutions, gaming interfaces are now being used to graphically improve the presentation of information

Oracle CRM R16 Taking Ownership of Social Media Space

Just yesterday, I also attended a presentation by Oracle on their upcoming CRM Release 16. Gone are the days when CRM was just a contact management tool with a few nice pipeline management tools. Such tools failed to live up to expectations, being largely dependent upon the entry of data by sales persons. This entry rarely happened, and the value of the tool declined in popularity. Just as web services reinvigorated ASP hosted applications into the realm of on demand Software as a Service, so too has web 2.0 spurned a new perspective on CRM tools.

Oracle have embraced the social networking world as not so much a nice to have – but accepting that this is the way the new generations communicate. Whilst many organizations still shudder at the thought of lost productivity due to personal indulgence in instant messaging tools and social networking sites; those who dared to indulge their staff have been surprised that the change in productivity has in many cases been on the positive side of the curve, and not the downside.

From an application value-add perspective, one cannot fully appreciate how social media features will integrate into business processes. But with a free 30-day trial on offer, Oracle are providing a place to play, without pay. Often, the mere fact that the solution ‘appeals’ to the normal habits and values of the users will help overcome the adoption issues around early CRM. Just how much this will be viewed as another ‘build and they will come’ is anyone’s guess, but Oracle must be given credit for jumping ahead of the curve and taking ownership of social media CRM. I for one certainly use sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn to find out about corporate personnel and mutual connections that may help smooth a business conversation – with Oracle CRM, such links are fully embedded into the CRM tool. Such linking can also include referral contact information and networks.

Another gem was the shared media library. For those of you who regularly build PPT presentations, you know how agonisingly time consuming they can be to put together. Using the media library in a Windows Vista looking environment, the user can identify presentations by subject using social tagging – then simply extract slides from multiple presentations to form the foundation of a new presentation in a tighter niche. This can then be shared back to the media pool.

Being a strong advocate of software as a service tools, the concern that such tools would be limited in functionality has not borne true. Earlier versions provided merely a basic skeleton of functionality and limited dashboard and reporting configuration. Not so with todays versions. Oracle CRM has added core BI functionality along with new functionality to support Prospecting, Campaigns and Media sharing.

At the communications interface, the mobile assistant currently deployed on Blackberry is being fully optimised to take advantage of the innovative media features of iPhone.

Oracles offering has also expanded at the infrastructure layer. Overcoming a common complaint in early SaaS models, where performance may be compromised by the running of long scripts by another party sharing the same server, Oracle has expanded the SaaS model into the dedicated server model. Even further, should a client feel they have sufficient security and QoS onsite, CRM R16 can be rolled out in the client environment.

So whilst the expanded functionality makes CRM R16 a very good tool for small businesses, it has not forgotten the large corporates with unique compliance needs.

This application actually looks fun! And I will certainly be eagerly awaiting case studies with feedback on how these new integrated social features perform. I expect some surprisingly positive results.

Find out more about Oracle BI here.

BI Drives Improved Sales Integrity

There are those who believe that business intelligence driven selling and marketing is leading towards a more depersonalised style of selling – yet in reality, the opposite is true.

The old mode of selling was very much a tactical pipeline of script speak designed to lead a prospect into firstly feeling discomfort with the status quo, framing up a mental solution, aligning that solution to a product the sales person wishes to sell, overcoming objections and closing the sale. The script was very much crafted around raising the needs that directly aligned with the solution proffered, rather than the real needs of the client.

Business intelligence provides evidence of actual needs of the client, often before the client actually recognises that need themselves. It then provides a basis of configuring customised solutions for individuals, rather than whole market sectors. In this way, BI technology provides a more interactive and collaborative style of selling focused on the customer, rather than the product.

This is more in line with the current market values of participation and collaboration, rather than the more confrontational modes of selling used in the past. BI provides revolutionary insight into the lifestyles and buying habits of individual customers. It helps businesses integrate into the customers’ mode, rather than expecting the customer to align with the business mode.

The outcome of this change of focus from the solution to the customer provides far more value to the customer than ever before. And that increases personalisation rather than depersonalises the sales process.

Ebay Considering BI SaaS To It’s Traders

As BI on Demand, also known as BI Software as a Service [SaaS] is a hot topic with most BI solution vendors, eBay is not being left behind.  eBay’s own gigantic data warehouse, used for internal business intelligence (BI) analytics can be opened up to its trading customers to provide real time performance analytics. This emulates Amazons initiative with its family of Amazon Web Services. Most notable among these services are its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) application hosting service and its S3 hosted storage service.

eBay has a five petabyte Teradata data warehouse that adds 50TB of new data each day. This active data warehouse is capable of processing over a terabyte of data in just five seconds, allowing business analysts to build their own “virtual” data marts, currently used by about 5,000 business analysts in 100 groups inside eBay. A significant feature of these data marts is that whilst they run off the central data warehouse they were created without the help of central IT.

Business analysts create and upload their own mini-data warehouses using standard web and analytical tools such as those from Business Objects, SAS, Microstrategy and even Microsoft’s Excel. Once a prototype has run successfully for 90 days, they are converted by the data warehouse managers into production data marts with minimal rewriting. This process cuts the time to deploy by at least 50%, in many cases by up to 80%.

eBay are currently analysing problems that opening up the datawarehouse to outsiders will bring - such as how to minimise the time it would take customers to upload large amounts of data to eBay’s data warehouse. The solution appears to be to “couple analytics as a platform offering that has the data generating part sitting closer together”. Much of the self-service BI capability already came built in to the Teradata 5550 data warehousing software. The Teradata software provides workload management enabling “virtual” data marts to be partitioned and prioritised. All we need to do is build a web portal and simple interface.

Hence the possible hosting eBay’s BI-as-a-service on Amazon’s EC2 and storing users’ data on S3. Amazon is using EC2 to provide its own web-hosted database called SimpleDB.

Other current hot BI on Demand projects include Microsoft’s “Project Gemini” which plans to create an easy-to-use Excel-based tool that lets regular analysts build their own BI queries and dashboards.

Real Learnings From Real BI Implementations

There is a lot written on best in class practices for deploying BI in operational business intelligence projects. For some real world examples with more specifics on ‘How To’, this post on CIO.com India offers insights from several companies.

Two key requirements in most projects focus on moving data closer to the business and monitoring all data though a single system. However, in reality most projects have found that processes don’t fit neatly into single systems.

Data is still consolidated into a single data warehouse where formats can be transformed and analytic rules applied. For example, time-critical information such as production data is gathered more frequently and often supplemented with other types of operational data, however rather than using the data warehouse as the platform for real-time data analysis discrete software tools are used to analyze transactional data.

Attempting real time analyses typically requires a big infrastructure upgrade that may not be economically justified in many companies. Not all processes — or even most — need to be monitored in real-time. Latency schedules should not be driven from the data availability end, but rather from the information consumption perspective. Most businesses struggle to conume information on more than a daily basis. Unless the data relates to mission critical transactions, real time is not required.

Selecting the right kind of data for real-time analysis, is based around what information provides insight into completion rate baselines. Data providing insight into how customers are using products or how to optimize business processes is not always required in real time.

The Great BI Debate

I just finished commenting on a rollicking debate about BI - The Great Debate: Business Intelligence but suggest you click over to read all the comments, as they covered off many of the reasons that I wrote The Logical Organization.

I congratulate all on a great debate. All contributors made valid points, albeit from different perspectives. As a corporate performance consultant for 20 years I have developed an in-depth understand of technology and am often charged with vendor selection.

I acknowledge Nigel’s statement that we all agree that “when it is implemented well, business intelligence technology can and does stimulate better management and innovation”. I also agree that more focus needs to be on “how technology solves business issues” rather than how well the IO can manage queries. Nigel caps the major challenge that most BI vendors and business managers don’t recognise - “not enough businesspeople understand what the technology can do”. It’s very much a matter of they don’t know what they don’t know!

BI impacts processes and decision making in often revolutionary ways for many businesses. This aspect is rarely highlighted in BI vendor marketing presentations. They talk about better decision making – but do not state why or how. Having better data is not the answer. Using better data and embedding that use in every day processes is how decisions will become data driven.

I agree with Nigel that BI has been IT-led. This has largely been by necessity. Executives today that sign off on technology investments don’t have the time or desire to understand how technology works. But in failing to do so, they fail to recognise the significant value BI can have in the organization.

BI and performance management matter in ANY size company and decision making must be supported by facts, not individual recollections of what happened last time we tried that.

I don’t read that Nigel suggests that BI is not suited to SME, rather he rightly emphases the real truth that all business owners and managers [not just SME] “must make the effort to learn how they can adapt the available BI tools to their business needs”

Tony adds to this dilemma by pointing out one possible reason for this - that many BI vendors fall short in communicating the value of BI tools to the business – they tend to concentrate on regaling the many benefits of the BI features in terms of how they easily fit into the IT infrastructure and the performance power of the engines – Business people don’t give a hoot about any of this. They want to know only three things – how it makes me more money, how it saves me money, and how it will keep me out of jail!

As Paul says “Managers across all organisations of ALL sizes have the identical issues” But in saying this, business managers need to take more responsibility about IT as a critical business capability and get more savvy and knowledgeable about business technology in general. If they don’t understand how BI technology works – how can one expect them to trust and rely upon it to support their most pressing business decisions. They won’t do this if BI is seen as part of BI. I advocate BI as a separate function that provides capability across the business – just as IT or finance support aspects of all functions. In this way it provides a strategic and operational bridge between IT and the business. The more BI gets ‘operationized’ the more its value is released.

As Bob states one of the prime reasons that so many businesses “go to the wall each year is due to the lack of financial information”. But I would add that its not just financial information that is needed – but market information and operational performance information. Too much emphasis is given to financial reporting – when it is purely an outcome of good decisions around product development, marketing, supply chain, manufacturing etc etc. The closer to the source of the driver of performance the information can be monitored – the more likely any damaging flow on effect can be contained.

I got so frustrated by all these issues that I decided to do something to help resolve these problems so have recently published a comprehensive guide [“The Logical Organization”] covering all these important points – what BI does and what business managers need to know about the technology, but written in a way they understand. BI is about executing business strategy, business ownership of data as a valued asset, data quality governance, business process automation, evidence based decision making, personal performance management, effective planning and governance – and a whole raft of business competencies. Collectively, we all need to include more about these items in our communications about BI and move away from the tech speak that scares most managers away, and sends the rest to sleep.

It’s not about technology – it’s about accepting that the operational framework businesses need today is vastly different from 10-15 years ago and that BI needs to be integrated [using BI technology] at every critical point of performance. And that applies to any function, in any business [small – medium and large], and in any industry.

The Logic Evangelist

BI in Gartners 2009 Top Tech List

Gartner has released its Top Tech list for 2009, and BI sits at #9. This years top strategic technology is very much based at the infrastructure, rather than the application level with Virtualization, cloud computing, computing fabric, web-oriented architecture and unified communications. This has somewhat overpowered the strategic value of BI, but is significant to BI in that it focuses attention to the underlying capability that BI requires to perform at its best.

To be included on Gartners list, the technology must possess more than just inherent features and funcitonality. It must be capable of being applied across multiple platforms and have real value to business.

Virtualization - is transforming corporate IT infrastructure at both the server and desktop level.

Cloud Computing - is the buzz phrase in IT today, so it is no wonder that it hit the strategic list at number two. Cloud computing will have a signficant impact on the way technology is deployed in organizations and will add support to SaaS models in all application fields.

Comuting Fabrics - at number 3, [#8 in 2008] server technology ‘Computing Fabrics’ combines server technology resources to enable them to be dispensed with their underlying pools of small, medium and large servers. Blade servers have some computing fabric capability - being able to move memory and processor capability.

Following the top three are:

4. Web-oriented Architecture - impacting the SOA model for services delivery, this architecture uses Web standards, identifiers, formats and protocols.

5. Enterprise Mashups - up from #6, applies the wizardary of contentmashups to allow users to employ public APIs to quickly combine various services and capabilities; extending the flexibility business users have to combine data inside and outside the enterprise.

6. Specialized Systems - new to the list, includes all those specialized appliances for Java, data warehousing and other processes. Not quite sure where this one will end as it is a dumping ground for all the less significant technologies, that when applied together become significant.

7. Social Software and Social Networking - up from #10, these tools extend collaboration efforts across organizations.

8. Unified Communications - aligned to number 7 above, and down from the second spot last year, Gartner anticipates a major consolidation of communications vendors through unified communications.

9. Business intelligence - new to the list, although surprising it hasn’t made it in the past. However, the reality of BI has dawned with the increase in computing power making BI tools more effective and efficient. The focus on BI has moved from core analytics as a distinct function to operational BI, embedded into business processes supporting automated decision making and exception management.

10. Green IT - the top contender in 2008 has lost ground to the bottom spot but has not diminished in importance. Sustainability is now woven into the fabric of IT strategy and as such is no longer seen as a separate capability but an inherent requirement of all corporate operations and technology.

New Ownership Not Holding Back Cognos BI Innovation

Over the next few weeks I will be attending presentations from several BI Vendors updating the industry on the latest advancements in their solutions.

After the mass consolidation of the BI vendor market in 2007, the industry has been somewhat nervous as to how the larger parent companies would impact their new third party BI vendor subsidiaries. On the solution front, it seems that so far is more than so good.

At the Cognos 8 presentation this morning, under its new IBM flag, we were treated to a new level of user configuration, further releasing such tasks from the job sheets of IT. Whislt this may send shivers down the spines of many business managers fearful that further configuration features equates directly to more complication, it seems that in fact the opposite is true. Not only has Cognos expanded the user tool set, but it has further simplified the configuration with helpful wizards and user added notes.

Note facilities are great negotiation platforms upon which to build collaboration in BI. For instance, if we take the most horrendous part of any BI implementation – data quality, the tools provide for data stewards in each part of the business to take ownership of their data set and for local definitions of meta data definitions to be added to the standard business value library. Much of the territorial infighting over the adoption of one single business term for say “revenue” is that legacy systems with less flexibility in nomenclature still use alternative terminology such as “gross income” or just “income”. The tool allows for each part of the business to flag such values and add their local definition, to help their departmental users to feel more confident in what data they are reading.

This is just one example of the understanding of difficulties in BI implementation that have been carefully considered by Cognos in expanding its software capability. Read more about Cognos 8 BI here.

Ventana Research Recognises BI Needs With New Reports

Prominent business research company Ventana Reseach has launched a new area of research and benchmarks to focus on the need for business intelligence.

In a recent newsletter, Ventana confirms that it is responding to the “significant changes in our business and economic environment” and that “the pace of change seems itself to be speeding up” and acknowledged that the business environment is characterised by “longer-cycle changes – shifts in strategic issues that include an increasing shortage of talent, the aging workforce, pressure to green your business, global supply chain challenges caused by factors economic and political, and of course the incessant pressure to do more with less. Navigating these challenges has never been more complex and useful guidance never harder to come by”.

Recognising that information is power, they have created a new ‘educational center’ to help businesses become more informed about BI and performance management.

Business Imperatives

• Performance Improvement
• Compliance Improvement
• Profitability Management
• Cost Management

Business Intelligence

• Information Management
• Business Intelligence
• Sales and Marketing
• Operational Intelligence

The New ‘Type E’ Definition of Globalization

Globalization has traditionally been viewed as the west taking advantage of economically advantageous market resources in the East. This has forged collaboration in product design and manufacture, with ready access to low cost labor and proximity to huge new markets.

However, the balance of power of globalization is no longer tipped towards the West. Pockets of global advantage such as eastern markets China and India are embracing their resource advantages and making their presence felt in the ranks of global corporations.

This is forging a type E global market: competing with everyone, from everywhere for everything.
Rapidly developing economies with low wage rates were previously engaged in outsource models to manufacture goods and ship them back to the West; and receiving from the West luxury goods not available locally in their developing nations.

The new emerging global conglomerates are posing significant threats to mature multi-national companies, playing on the global stage and gaining global brand presence through mergers and acquisitions. Many existing companies are failing to recognize this new order and in doing so are not only taking steps to protect their turf, but are not open to recognising the new opportunities presented by this changing marketscape.

It comes back to our discussion is a recent previous post – if you are not scouting out over the horizon and monitoring spikes for change you are likely to be too late to intercept any forces impacting your performance.