The BIG Blog

Tracking Buzz, Banter and Influence in Social Media

Whether it is buzz, rants and raves, voice volume, sentiments or trends. When one delves into social media, there is the danger you may get lost and never find your way back out.

There are those who claim that influence cannot be measured, however much of ‘influence’ measurement depends upon the outcome the originator desires. If it is to create awareness or get market feedback, then a great toolset for providing that data is web based service application ScoutLabs.

Whilst I could find little evidence that SocialLabs provide real ‘analytics’ as claimed, they have come up with a great way for businesses to cut through the maze and locate the trails of impact that influence initiates.

Possibly a little pricey for small businesses – the lowest plan at $US99 a month to follow 5 search streams will possibly not be sufficient for most – yet the next plan, the Pro plan at $249 a month with 26 concurrent searches is a bit more than many SME’s can support. I would have liked to see something a bit more in between – say 12 searches for $125 a month. This would give more scope than 5 searches and remain more affordable.

But for corporates who pay more than this each month on getting market feedback via surveys and focus groups, SocialLabs offers a great service. Two plan features I do like is the unlimited user per workspace and the customisable template allowing agencies to offer clients access to their portal. Not sure how this works around restricting client views to certain search streams – but worth checking out.

And my condolensces on the passing of loved ScoutLabs team member Matt Ericson at such a young age.

More about ScoutLabs features on The Business Intelligence Guide

ScoutLabs Website

Fast Way to Calculate your BI Costs

PivotLink have a useful BI cost calculator to help you compare your current or potential BI costs against industry data published by TDWI.

Naturally, on-demand BI vendors PivotLink are keen to provide a comparison on the cost of on-demand BI compared to inhouse solutions, however I congratulate them on helping business and technical managers make this decision. As the author of  The Logical Organization, I support anything that helps businesses make better decisions.

So check it out here - it is very easy to use, and you can quickly see how each key component of your BI solution impacts your bottom line, including:

• BI software licensing costs
• Database costs
• Hardware costs
• Staffing costs

Note: The 2008 TDWI BI Benchmark Report: Organization and Performance Metrics for BI Teams 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.

SAS to Provide BI to SMB Market

SAS have announced their intention to provide SAS Business Intelligence Solutions to the SMB Market through a strategic hosting alliance with Qualex and nGenX. The hosted services will harness the processing power of the latest HP BladeSystem and VMWare technology, focusing on availability, security and the lowest total-cost-of-ownership.

The products will include:

• SAS Analytics Pro for Midsize Business
• SAS BI & EBI for Midsize Business
• SAS Data Integration for Midsize Business
• SAS Marketing Automation
• SAS Service Parts Optimization
• SAS Visual Data Discovery for Midsize Business
• SAS Analytics Pro for Midsize Business

See more details on SAS BI onDemand for SMB on  The BI Guide

Ignore It, Accept Defeat or Take Control

I am sure that most of you have been bombarded with blog entries and articles on how to survive the tough times. Although they all offer valuable advice, I have just watched a brief video by Elay Cohen, VP Product Marketing Salesforce.com, which I found extremely inspiring for several reasons. Titled ” Taking Control In an Uncertain Economy”, it resonates the same title message common in many of todays posts and articles, but the content was refreshingly simple. And that simplicity is what made the biggest impression. The opening statements were:

The three choices you have to respond to the current situation:

1. Ignore It,
2. Accept Defeat, or
3. Take Control

And the way to take control is to put the customer back into the center of your business

“Act on every lead, Win every deal, Keep every customer.”

It is easy for businesses to seek complex solutions to simple problems, and whilst the magnitude of the problem today is significant, the best response is quite simple. If your business does not have the tools to give you total transparency to know how well you are performing in each of these three key areas:

Act on Every Lead – Lead generation, Query to Response Cycle time

Win Every Deal – Deal win rate, Sales Cycle Time, Average Sales Value

Keep Every Customer – Customer Satisfaction, Support Tickets, Customer Retention, Churn Rate to Competitors

You need to know exactly what your cusotmers want, deliver it in the way they want it delivered, and do it better than your competitors. CRM and BI tools are NOT just for big businesses, and they are not only affordable by big business. With the Software-as-a-Service model:

• Simple – Customers do not need any hardware or software installed on premise, meaning implementation times are short and painfree.
• Affordable – Access to the tools is on a monthly pay-as-you go basis, meaning there are no hefty up-front licence fees.
• Effective – dashboards and screens are out-of-the-box configured, and easily customised by the business to start giving invaluable information in a very short time.

These tools convert the data you already have and are collecting on an hour by hour basis into usable, actionable information. If you can not see the change in state of your business in real time, you are going to find it very difficult to make the best of the current market environment.

The type of successes experienced by even large, cumbersome businesses are:

Sales Pipleline – 172% increase

Sales Growth – 70% increase

Team Productivity – 20% increase

It’s no longer a matter of not being able to afford CRM/BI tools – it’s a matter of not being able to afford to NOT have them.

I highly recommend you take 15mins to view the Webinar as a reminder as to what the core of your business is all about

For more information on SaleForce.com  solutions

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.

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.

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

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.

Will BI Float In The Clouds?

Just as business intelligence is revolutionizing business logic; virtualisation and cloud computing are revolutionizing computing power.

Cloud computing is the latest method of accessing computing power and according to ICT analyst IDC “this will be the prevailing form of ICT service delivery for a couple of decades”. Cloud computing is also known as onDemand applications and Software as a Service [SaaS].

The computing model has been transformed from in-house systems to outsourced, centralised systems and is predicted to become the norm for all businesses over the next 20 years. Even in remote countries such as New Zealand, media giant Google is to provide access to applications via the internet to 50,000 students, staff and alumni.

Google Apps

Google is just one cloud computing front-runner, as yet the market has yet to be measured but as a sign, Google claims to have 500,000 business customers worldwide for its internet-delivered Google Apps, and is reportedly signing up new ones at a rate of 3000 a day. Google Apps is very popular with academia, with education customers provided with free access rights to Google Apps Education Edition, which includes email, Google Docs (word processing, spreadsheet and presentation software), a shared calendar, instant messaging, website creation software and the ability to create a customised web home page using their own domain. This is providing a far superior service to that currently offered by most Universities.

Commercial customers are charged US$50 ($71) per user, per year.

For all organizations, cloud computing removes the development and hardware overheads of standard corporate applications and frees the IT resources to concentrate on more strategic technology.

Speed

The main constraint is relying on fast, reliable Internet access. In many countries, such as New Zealand, India, South Africa and Australia this is far from a current reality. Speed is the number one thing to users in terms of such services.

Reliability

Many businesses also have a perception hurdle to overcome if the servers hosting the applications and corporate data are hosted outside of their own country. Im most cases, large vendors of such services have extremely reliable geographic fail over redundancy and the location of the primary server is of little consequence. It is more of a emotive issue than a technological one.

Even Google doesn’t disclose where its data centers are located but it does reveal that its services network is distributed across global infrastructure …”for redundancy and availability and ensuring continuity of service.”

Google attempts to overcome the connectivity issues by designing its service to be efficient across all kinds of connections and ‘Google Gears’ – a platform that allows users to take web services offline. They are also investing in infrastructure to the overcome service latency and ensure services can be delivered at high speed in the Asia-Pacific region.

Other Cloud Contenders

Other companies such as Microsoft, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, SAP, EMC, Cisco and Oracle are building massive cloud services delivery capabilities. We can expect a major market impact within the next 2 to 3 years.

The BI Cloud

Cloud computing offers a major boost for smaller businesses seeking the insight of business intelligence. Most do not have sufficient in-house infrastructure or budget to sustain their own BI hosted solutions. SaaS models offer a viable alternative, even if the feature set is somewhat constrained.