July 8, 2010
BI Theory
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Looking to boost your perspective on BI or dig deeper into the latest hot topics in business intelligence, then take a look at the agenda for the upcoming TDWI BI Executive Summit in San Diego, August 16-18th 2010.
The theme for this years summit is Agility, Alignment and Analytics, covering hot topics including:
- Agile BI
- Text analytics
- Analytic databases
- Distributed BI organizations
- Radical BI
- BI competency centers
- Advanced visualization
Early bird discount ends July 16, so check out the agenda now.
NOTE: I have no affiliate relationship with TDWI for this event – I just think they do a great job at providing a comprehensive view of business intelligence.
June 30, 2010
Analyst Reports, BI Program, BI Strategy
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I always look forward to the reports on BI from the Aberdeen Group to get a global perspective of how BI projects are being deployed and how well users are engaging with BI tools. The latest April 2010 report focused on TCO, in particular the cost per BI user. According to the report, during the previous 12 months, the average total expenditure per BI User*:
- Best in Class – $357
- Industry Average – $968
- Laggard $ 3,321
So just what is behind this significant variance in expenditure, what is it that best in class are doing at a lesser cost than other BI initiatives. According to other findings in the report Best in class BI teams:
- Had a clearly defined BI strategy – including a strategy for BI data management
- Had standard processes for gathering end user BI requirements
- Were 2.9 times more likely to formally develop BI knowledge and skills amongst users
- Were 1.8 times more likely to track BI project costs to budget
- Were 1.7 times more likely to automate the creation of reports.
The overall message is that BI TCO is not only about the technology. It is largely impacted by the transformational efforts made to define a BI strategy, manage BI project roadmap iterations, and to educate users on how to extract more value from their BI tools.
* The TCO View of Business Intelligence – How to Get the Most Bang for Your Analytical Buck. Michael Lock. April 2010.
You can find copies of this report on the aberdeen.com website.
June 17, 2010
BI Market, BI Solutions, Cloud BI
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Four open-source and proprietary vendors have forged a new partnership resulting in a cloud-based BI stack.
- Jaspersoft - open-source BI
- Talend - data-integration
- Vertica - analytics database
- RightScale - management software for cloud-based application deployments
Whilst the contractual relationship between the vendors may be tight, unfortunately the same cannot be said for customers. Customers need to form contractual agreements with each vendor. Each vendor will also be responsible for supporting their own technology. To ease the pain, the group has created a seamless sales that supports a ‘pay-as-you-go’ pricing model inherent in cloud computing.
Such an offering will not only attract smaller enterprises; departments in larger enterprises frustrated at the lengthy delay of BI deployment and the complex Capex business case sign off will find value in such a one-stop infrastructure to advance their use of data from spreadsheets and canned reports into an operational BI application. The stack will also provide an ideal ‘sandbox’ for enterprise IT teams wishing to experiment with BI analytics.
March 20, 2010
BI Program, BI Strategy, BI Theory, CPM, Cloud BI, Cloud Computing
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I am really excited to announce the release of two new additions to the TLO Management Insight Series:
- Leading With SPI
- Getting to Cloud
Leading with SPI – Driving Productivity and Profit using Strategic Performance Improvement
Leading with SPI provides a detailed, step-by-step guide to driving better strategic definition and more effective and efficient strategic execution. Using the powers of business intelligence, the key decisions of the business are focused around those points where real improvement can be made. SPI transforms the outlook of business leaders from a backward facing measurement system using traditional lagging indicators, to a more future focused KPI based performance improvement capability that delivers more opportunities to improve and move ahead of competition.
SPI starts with deconstruction of measurable strategic objectives to help focus the business on what’s most important, and by following a simple process, identifies the questions that must be answered at each key decision point.
The KPI used to measure performance are grouped around these key decision points, ensuring that what must be done, gets measured. And, gets focused upon!
Find out more about Leading with SPI by clicking here.
Getting to Cloud – Discovering New Business Opportunities with Cloud Computing
Cloud is the missing power base that underpins data warehouses and advanced analytics. So many businesses are either prevented from implementing BI solutions or stall early into the project through the lack of processing power or clean data quality management. Cloud provides the opportunity to leverage the significant benefits of BI, without reliance on outdated, overloaded IT infrastructures.
Cloud computing is so much more than a power base for BI – with its foundation in virtualization technology, it is the platform that will transform the competitive base of business. No longer will small businesses be constrained in competing against their larger competitors through lack of IT resources. Cloud remedies that.
Cloud also impacts the IT reseller market – rather than disintermediation of resellers, Cloud offers an expanse of new service and product opportunities that were previously beyond the technical or financial scope.
Getting to Cloud looks at the questions both buyers and sellers need to be asking themselves right NOW. It provides detailed ROI case analysis and savings data for use in business cases…and so much more.
Find out more about Getting to Cloud by clicking here
March 13, 2010
Analytics
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There is much debate over exactly what analytics is. A major proportion of this debate is purely semantics, as technical persons struggle to relate technology in business terms. In reality, the business doesn’t really care what it is called – they care about what it does. Analytics goes beyond traditional reporting and data mining – it passes by the what happened and where, and gets right to the why it happened. Using this insight, analytics and modeling tools can help predict the most likely outcomes of various future scenarios.
Reporting and data mining are a great place to start if you are just emerging on your Business Intelligence roadmap, but it is Analytics that will really drive your business to new competitive heights.
Find out more:
Advanced Analytics
Difference between Standard Analytics and Advanced Analytics
March 11, 2010
Analyst Reports, Cloud Computing, Pentaho
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Support for open source software has grown significantly over the past five years. Recently, Forrester Analyst Jeffrey Hammond claimed that open-source technology is now “a de facto standard” for IT, with many companies hoping to save $30K-$40K per server in 2010 by switching to open-source.
Open source solutions are bubbling to the top of many types of applications. Open Source BI solutions, lead by Pentaho offer the cost and flexibility advantages previously lacking in many packaged commercial solutions.
So just how will this model play out? Will applications become commoditized with revenue models moving from software to services? Will the Cloud help to drive this change?
Share your thoughts on this, I am interested to know what you think.
November 26, 2009
BI Strategy, BI Theory
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There are four main questions one asks in relation to 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. It reduces risk significantly and helps you streamline both your operational and marketing activities to those that produce the most value for the least resources expended.
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.
More in the next blog….
November 17, 2009
BI Theory
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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.
November 6, 2009
BI Infrastructure, BI Strategy, Data
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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.
November 5, 2009
BI Theory
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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.
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