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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.

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.

Businesses Not Leveraging Their Performance Technology

It astounds me that even in these disquietening times that businesses are not leveraging their assets as well as they should be. In spite of investment in BI remaining reasonably steady, the business utilization of BI solutions remains relatively low. After a review across studies and articles to validate my own findings the general status quo is:

• Business executives are still not recognizing the strategic competitive advantage that analytics tools provide, and only half of executives admit to being reasonably technology savvy in using the tools they have
• Of those users who are engaging with BI tools – only slightly over 10% are using them effectively
• And only one quarter of executives consider themselves sufficiently educated in business technology

For many companies today – the power is in the information they have about their markets and customers. Yet for most companies it seems that power is neither tapped or controlled. Until executives recognize the need to gain more insight into advanced technology and how it can be used to energize their current performance, this situation is unlikely to change. Too many still see technology as an underlying corporate facility that manages communications and hosts standard operational software. Yet IT has quietly bubbled its way up from the basement to the boardroom, to be one of the most powerful strategic assets a business can have.

I guess if todays older executives refuse to engage with their technology assets, companies will have to suffer the bland performance of today, until their current executive team is replaced by younger generations who recognize the value and engage enthusiastically with IT.

Avoid the KPI Crazies

BI tools have developed significantly over the past few years, and one positive move is the ability of end users to create and publish their own dashboards. The benefits of self pubishing dashboards include:

1. Rapid deployment of BI tools to meet individual needs – no input from IT is required
2. Customization of the dashboard to a user group of 1
3. Instant update of dashboards to meet changing needs

However, there are also a few drawbacks. Firstly, KPI clutter – too many KPI on a single dashboard. This is a common mistake my many new users of dashboards as they seek to add more and more value. In reality, they are reducing the value by reducing the visibility of primary KPI with a lot of clutter. Just as we saw the aptly name ‘spreadmart’ fever, we are now seeing evidence of the KPI Crazies.

The number of KPI depend very much on the type of business, department or role. However, as a general rule of thumb the max is 10. Many dashboards provide all the necessary information in just 4 KPI. The key is to recognize the difference between KPI and KRA. KRA refer to key results areas. KRA’s are more operational in that they refer to key activities and people contributing to a process, whereas KPI are more exact, referring to the outcome of processes that contribute directly to strategic goals.

Consider Albert Einstein’s quote:

“Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.”

Check out more common BI Program Mistakes

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.

Advanced Technology Believed to Be Key To Solving Country’s Problems

According to a recent Harris Poll, most Americans believe that advanced technology” will play a critical role in solving many of the country’s problems. The top 4 technology driven catalysts to recover from the current slump include:

1. Innovation and “technology sciences” in education  – 73%
2. Investing in hybrids and alternative fuels - 71% – acting as a support for the failing U.S. auto industry.
3. Production of “green products and services” – 67%
4. Management of medical records – 67%

Source: Harris Poll

Overcoming Common BI Program Mistakes

The business environment is a complex interplay of internal and external forces that must be supported by agile, efficient and compliant technology. Business intelligence technology is the most affected capability by under-performing IT infrastructure and stagnant, poor quality information.

In an attempt to provide a quick fix to an organizations business intelligence needs, common errors come into play that not only prevent the speedy solution, but can plague a more robust BI program implementation.

The most common BI Program mistakes largely involve incorrect assumptions: Read the rest…