The BIG Blog

4 Key Questions About Business Intelligence

Sometimes, in amongst all the hype and confusion of new technologies it pays to revisit the basic questions…..in this case we are looking at business intelligence [BI]….

What is BI?

• Why do I need BI?
• What BI tools do I need for what purpose?
• How do I select a BI solution?
• What is the best way to implement BI?

I will answer each of these questions in following blogs

What is BI?

Business intelligence is a capability, supported by a software suite that provides insight into your business and its operating environment to support more productive and more profitable decisions. It helps to filter out personal biases and irrelevant past experiences to isolate the most meaningful data that relates directly to the decisions you need to make for today and the future of your business. BI differs from standard reporting in that reporting adopts an historical perspective to show what has happened in the past. It does not tell you why it happened, or whether it may happen in the same way again in the future.

Why do I need BI?

A business is designed to move forward, not backward. Using backward facing information to drive a forward facing business doesn’t make sense and can lead to massive mistakes through incorrect assumptions, and decisions made for political rather than logical reasons.

BI removes human frailty from decision making as much as possible, allowing for evidence-based decisions to drive your business. This alone helps to cleanse your business of personal ego patching, destructive hierarchical power-plays and overzealous enthusiasm driving you into activities that do not support your productivity and profitability goals.

BI significantly reduces decision risk and helps you streamline both your operational and marketing activities to those that produce the most value for the least resources expended.

BI Vendor SAS Top Business Performance Solution – Q4 2009

BI vendor SAS was designated the leader of business performance solutions in the Q4 2009 Forrester Business Performance Solutions report.

It received a perfect score for cost and profitability analysis and also the top score inproduct strategy and vision.

In spite of scaling back operations in the past year, SAS has still maintained its focus on truly understanding what drives cost, profit and value without subrogation of key business capability.

SAS enables businesses to model future scenarios to help them predict and optimize potential situations and make fact-based decisions.

According to Forresters Research’s report “planning, forecasting, financial reporting and performance measurement solutions are essential for addressing economic uncertainty”.

Forecasting heps cope with market volatility, even in times of economic slowdown or uncertainty. For identifying leading indicators, and using these to forecast rather than relying on lagging indicators contained in traditional reporting, companies are better positioned to identify opportunities and threats and respond ahead of the curve.

SAS for Performance Management is currently implemented across more than 1,500 customer sites, and includes:

• Dashboards and scorecards
• Financial consolidation, budgeting, planning and reporting
• Cost and profitability analysis
• Human and IT capital analysis
• Customer and supplier intelligence
• Enterprise risk management
• Sustainability management
• Advanced analytics

For more on SAS BI Solutions

Across Forrester’s 89-criteria evaluation of business performance solutions vendors, IBM Cognos, Oracle, SAP, and SAS Institute took the lead based on their breadth of functionality and strength of their business intelligence foundations.

Virtualized Data and Automated Discovery

In an IT world that is rapidly becoming virtualized at the hardware and software levels it is not too much of a stretch to envision virtualization at the data level – easy to dream about, not so difficult to create, or is it?

As businesses continue to struggle to capture, clean and transform their data into a format best suited to BI tools, the adoption of BI in critical decision making is stalled.

BI visualization tools are being increasingly integrated directly to applications, relational databases and cubes, using web services and SOA, with innovations such as columnar databases are promising to overcome the format and power constraints that are holding BI adoption at sub par levels.

Virtualized data would abstract the data from its source silo structure, and instead present as a consumable entity regardless of ETTL processes it may have to pass through to become usable to the end BI tool. This abstraction supports the concept of automated discovery, where data from any source, in any format is consumable by BI applications.

With over 80 percent of information relevant to daily business decisions now unstructured, such advances in data management innovation are critical to overcoming current constraints. Omniture, Web analytics vendor are about to release a product to monitor API traffic on the Web, and a lot of keyword tracking to measure application traffic and consumption patterns. This would, for example, allow online retailers determine the best page layouts to sell more products. This comparative intelligence can be fed into BI analytic or visualization tools to add to customer profiling data.

SAP’s Business Objects Explorer also tracks end user activity across related topics at one location and aggregates it with related data feeds. Explorer is data feed agnostic – leaning towards the type of abstraction that defines virtualization. Information may be drawn from text, voice, video, transaction data or anything else as a mashup of structured and unstructured content with mapping providing contextual relevance.

No amount of ‘intuitive interface’ design will match human capability, but a lot can happen behind the scenes that surpasses the ability of humans to correlate relationships between massive volumes of data in very short time intervals. This contextual mapping has advanced far beyond the traditional integration of data warehousing and is heralding another major leap in BI infrastructure capability.

IBM Cognos Express – Integrated BI & Planning Tool for Midsized Businesses

I attended the Cognos Performance 2009 presentation this morning and was very impressed with the new ‘Express’ Version, developed to target mid-sized businesses. Running on a standard Windows platform, IBM Cognos Express provides an affordable BI solution [meaning very short payback period] without compromising on the technical or functionality richness of its parent solution Cognos 8.

Express appears to provide a robust, complete BI solution and provides an on-site alternative to OnDemand BI. In addition to BI functionality – reporting, analysis, dashboard, scorecard, Express includes the critical planning, budgeting and forecasting capabilities.

Express answers the three basic business questions – whats happening, why is it happening and what is going to happen?

A fully integrated, low footprint solution for information driven decision making. Find out more, watch an online demo or get a free trial-  IBM Cognos Express.

Benchmark Your BI Costs

For those considering on-premise BI solutions, compared to on-demand BI solutions, estimating the cost against industry standards is a typical item in the business case. The following tool may provide you with the answers you seek.

A 2008 TDWI BI Benchmark Report, based on a web survey of 392 BI professionals, found that the median capital budget spending on BI in 2008 was $260,000 while median BI maintenance costs were $235,000.

To benchmark your BI costs against TDWI Median across:

• BI Software Costs – BI Software, Database technology, Updates & Upgrades, Annual Maintenance
• Infrastructure Investment – hardware costs, hardware & operational environmental costs, annual platform maintenance.

Take the PivotLink Challenge Here

Cloud Driving BI Mashups

I was just completing my upcoming book “Getting to Cloud” and decided to use BI as a great example as to how Cloud computing will enable more innovative BI.

One of the innovative developments Cloud enables, that supports self service BI is BI Mashups. Virtualization infrastructure enables a continuous background task to run searching for new data sources and fresh updates from existing sources to support BI mashups

Once a new data source is discovered, it is transformed to a common semantic model, and published to a BI-mashup registry. Users simply drag and drop BI reports, dashboards, and other analytics to their desktop.

Automated discovery is key to both the concept of BI mashup, and also to the concept of trustworthy data. It helps detect and remediate anomalies across disparate data sources.

Current vendors of automated source discovery include Composite Software and Exeros [recently acquired by IBM]. Other areas of innovation around BI will drive further consolidation in the BI market, as Cloud acts as the enabler of sourcing and transforming aggregated data into common formats for consumption across the complete set of BI tools.

Insights on Web 2.0 Adoption

Want a super cool way to look at how the different Web 2.0 technologies are being engaged by businesses, and which ones have grown in adoption over the past two years? McKinsey has recently launched a user definable, interactive to allow you to gain insight into many aspects of Web 2.0. For instance, find out the most powerful business tools in use today. Move the slider on the right
to see how each tool has gained in adoption since 2007.

Go play for yourself.

How to Set Up BI in the Cloud

I watch a lot of webinars and every now and then I come across one that really stands out. And one I really would like to recommend is:

A Guide to Building a Data Warehouse and Business Intelligence Solution in the Cloud

Recorded on July 9, 2009 by Open-source BI vendor Pentaho, Cloud DBMS vendor Vertica and BI Cloud systems integrator OpenBI, Ithe webinar provides a very insightful overview how any concerns around performance and security with Cloud have been overcome for use with BI applications. In particular, the webinar covers:

• Cloud overview (Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud)
• Operational expense vs. capital expense project funding
• Technology selection
• Provisioning BI hardware and software in the Amazon EC2 with Vertica and Pentaho
• How a BI demo was created and lessons learned using Pentaho and Vertica
• New BI opportunities enabled by the economic advantages of cloud computing

A segment I found especially helpful was the configuration considerations when setting up BI in the Cloud. This included security, cost management, user access, ETL, performance etc.

View the Webinar [52mins] here

Cloud-based BI Stack Partnership Deal

A new partnership recently announced between four open-source and proprietary vendors heralds a big step forward along the BI Cloud roadmap. Vendors Jaspersoft, Talend, Vertica and RightScale have formed an alliance to lead the integration stack of open source BI into cloud environments.

• Jaspersoft – open-source BI
• Talend – data-integration technologies
• Vertica’s – analytic database
• RightScale’s – management software for cloud-based application deployments.

At first light it appears the integration is at the technical and sales levels only. Customers will have to form form contractual agreements with each vendor; each vendor naturally responsible for supporting their own technology. This signals a hiccup in such a fast paced IT integration society.

But the good news is that customers will be able to use the pay-as-you-go pricing model integral in cloud computing. The offer is expected to be attractive to smaller enterprises that do not have a full developed BI capability and to smaller resellers or consultants who will add their domain expertise.

Cloud is also used by larger enterprises for periodic BI projects or experimental analytics outside their enterprise analytical framework.

Microstrategy Launches BI on Kindle

Whilst on the topic of Business Intelligence on Mobile – most BI Vendors are in the process of rolling out capability for small screen devices.

Recently, BI software vendor MicroStrategy announced that it will provide its business reports and dashboards on Amazon’s Kindle DX reader. Kindle is a simple platform for downloading and reading books provided by Amazon and other subscription content such as newspapers. Since it’s launch, software developers have been quick to look at what applications are viable on this platform.

Since Kindle is easy to use, easy to read and built on 3G connectivity, it makes sense as a delivery platform for business intelligence data.

Microstrategy already has an iPhone app to allow mobile access to reports and the dashboard, so Kindle is another step along the convergence chain between mobile and business intelligence. When BI becomes more accessible, it will become more acceptable. Since Kindle has significantly more power than most smartphones, hopefully Kindle BI is another push along the path to accessible BI.

Read Microstrategies Press Release

I expect to see many more business intelligence applications to appear on mobile devices in the very near future – so keep watch at this blog or follow me on Twitter.