The BIG Blog

Dashboard Layout Flexibility

One of the frustrating things about many dashboard development software programs is their rigid grid structure that constraints good dashboard design. One might be able to size portals to suit, but are burdened with set margins and spacings. Set grid patterns are a nightmare when you want to size and position KPI to demonstrate relative importance and interrelationships.

Line spacings are also a drag, along with limitations on font formatting – the whole line has to be the same font type, size, weight. This doesn’t work well if you have a dashboard chart title, with a subtitle that adds some required extra information. Read the rest…

MicroStrategy Business Intelligence In the Coud.

Being passionate about both BI and Cloud it’s exciting for me to see Microstrategy launch their Cloud-based BI solution. The platform is designed to support rapid development of business intelligence and mobile and social applications.

So just ho does MicroStrategy’s Cloud solution meet our expected features: Read the rest…

Tableau Leads the Field in Overall Success Magic Quadrant

Gartners Magic Quadrant for BI reports have become the default quarterly benchmark for BI vendors to assess their products against their rivals. Following 3-4 years of consolidation in the BI market, 2010 was more noted for the ability of BI solutions to combine an ease of use and flexibility with meeting IT standards. This was an attempt to overcome the greatest objection to BI applications – their complexity and difficulty in use. Its not always an easy compromise to provide a ‘simple, easy to use’ solution that still has all the required functionality. This is where User Interface design really becomes the driver – and sadly, an area that many solutions, not just BI fall down. Read the rest…

BI Solution Leaders Getting A Push From Below

Since the BI Vendor shakedown a few years back where a raft of mergers saw the Big 3 [IBM, Oracle and SAP] take hold of the majority of the market, the BI Vendor assessment grid has been somewhat predictable. Things actually got a little bit boring there for a while, as these mega vendors worked through how to apply their in-house talent to make the best of breed third tier BI solutions even better. Fast forward to 2010 and we started to see things get stirred up a little more. Whilst the Big 3 were busy trying to out-do each other with maintaining BI Solution independence, yet merge it more successfully with their respective ERP solutions, a few other major contenders have pushed through the market from below.

Without doubt SAS Institute was always a close contender, and of more recent time Information Builders held a respectable position, MicroStrategy was building solid support for its elegant BI user interface and Microsoft managed to maintain a reasonable market position based more on its partner and vendor channel strength, rather than anything stunning about its applications.

In the recent (Q4, 2010) Forrester Wave vendor assessment, all of these four vendors are now seen as BI Solution leaders.
IBI, Microsoft, and MicroStrategy have solid implementation success with BI platforms.

IBI’s WebFOCUS reporting platform [predictive analytic, data quality, master data management, and light data visualization capabilities] together with its iWay data integration connectors provide a near full stack solution.

Microsoft has improved its solution recently with the launch of SQL Server 2008 R2, with a much improved version 3 ReportBuilder tool support for Excel and improved event processing. Whilst I continue to maintain that Excel is not a suitable BI tool – the solution does offer a midground option for those not yet financially committed to a full BI investment. The other obvious benefit of using a Microsoft solution is the integration and interoperability with the popular SharePoint portal. However it is not that difficult to integrate a third part BI solution into a portal. The other element of Microsoft is in Master Data Management [MDM] with its simple to implement Master Data Services platform working well in a BizTalk environment to offer a full Service-Oriented model for improvement in data quality management, orchestration and data governance.

I don’t quite share Forresters overall seeming ‘equality’ between this group of BI vendor solutions. Whilst each are still struggling to differentiate their products at a technical level, business users still struggle to get to grips with the user interfaces, and dashboard design is still very lacking in supporting good design principles and the more effective graphical elements. However, progress is refreshingly swift overall, considering the complexity of the overall solution. I just wish there would be one application level solution that had all the components I wanted.

I am looking forward to the IBM event in a couple of weeks to see the new Cognos 10 release. I have always been a supporter of Cognos, so enjoy catching up with the latest demos – I’ll post my findings following.

MicroStrategy Mobile for iPhone and iPad.

The use of BI on mobile expands the value and usability of hefty investment in business intelligence.  Mobile BI empowers executives, workforce, suppliers, and business partners with actionable information anywhere, anytime. This has proven to reduce decision-making time, streamlines business processes and enhance collaboration.

With the more recent powerful ap-phones and tablets that support GPS and large  touch screens, it is now easier than ever to query vast volumes of data quickly and precisely. The previous limitations of “small screen devices” and low processing power have been largely overcome. Enterprise reports and BI dashboards are now readily available to the iPhone and iPad – and such technologies will rapidly expand the business intelligence market.

MicroStrategy Mobile is a logical extension of business intelligence and is engineered to support higher demand for improved speed and scalability of mobile BI applications. Microstrategy claims implementation takes only a few days, with applications assembled in a point-and-click fashion and no coding required. iPhone and iPad-optimized displays and controls are readily deployable across multiple applications.

MicroStrategy Mobile infrastructure supports new mobile app, leaving application developers to focus on creating the user experience.  Using a metadata-driven design approach enables rapid, point-and-click portability of reports between platforms, including iPhone, iPad, BlackBerry, web browsers, Microsoft Office, and Microsoft Windows.

For more on Microstrategy Business Intelligence

BI Vendors Partnering for BI in the Cloud

New Releases in The Logical Organization Management Insight Series

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

Open Source – Will It Transform the Software Industry?

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.

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

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