November 12, 2008
BI Market, BI Solutions, on Demand BI
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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.
November 5, 2008
BI Market, BI Strategy
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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.
November 3, 2008
BI Infrastructure, BI Solutions, on Demand BI
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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.
November 1, 2008
BI Strategy, Data, IT Strategy
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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.
