The BIG Blog

4 Key Questions About Business Intelligence

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.

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.

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.

Microsoft Fighting Hard to Strengthen Position in BI Ranking

Microsoft has lagged in the business intelligence market, ranking fifth amongst main BI vendors last year in IDC rankings. In a strong push to gain more visibility in this rapidly growing market, Microsoft has announced two major projects to strengthen its position.

Project Gemini

Initial efforts from the desktop software giant were to more tightly integrate Excel with SQL Server and other back-end BI tools such as PerformancePoint Server or SharePoint Server. In it’s lastest move, Project Gemini will accelarate that effort with the aim of launching Excel based analytics mashup tools for Microsoft enthusiasts. Scheduled fro beta release late in 2009, the tools aim to provide capabilities such as in-memory, drag-and-drop, pivot-table-enabled dashboard and BI query access from Microsoft’s Dynamics 2009 ERP application. Sharing performance data will rely on browser based visualisation tools. Microsoft claims that the development will provide greater synthesis of Excel integration, ad-hoc self-service analytics authoring, collaborative publishing and sharing, and managed IT governance than currently provided by other major BI vendors such as SAP Business Objects, Oracle Hyperion, IBM Cognos and QlikTech – all of whom already offer BI/OLAP tools. A representative of Project Gemini, Kobielus claims “This is a game-changer for the BI and OLAP space, and will usher in the post-OLAP age of supremely versatile, deeply dimensional, user-developed analytics.”

Project Madison

Based on its recent acquisition of DATAllegro Microsoft is building a BI-focused version of SQL Server 2008, due for release n the first half of 2010. The preliminary version of Madison revealed at the BI Conference in Seattle last week, included a 150TB database running 24 separate instances of SQL Server 2008.

MS accepts it is playing catch up and is not aiming to compete with BI database giants such as Teradata, Oracle, IBM, Sybase, but with Excel being such a pervasive desktop tool, and the weakening economy driving companies to seek out cheaper and easier to roll out BI tools, the company seems confident they will have a market.

Ventana Research Recognises BI Needs With New Reports

Prominent business research company Ventana Reseach has launched a new area of research and benchmarks to focus on the need for business intelligence.

In a recent newsletter, Ventana confirms that it is responding to the “significant changes in our business and economic environment” and that “the pace of change seems itself to be speeding up” and acknowledged that the business environment is characterised by “longer-cycle changes – shifts in strategic issues that include an increasing shortage of talent, the aging workforce, pressure to green your business, global supply chain challenges caused by factors economic and political, and of course the incessant pressure to do more with less. Navigating these challenges has never been more complex and useful guidance never harder to come by”.

Recognising that information is power, they have created a new ‘educational center’ to help businesses become more informed about BI and performance management.

Business Imperatives

• Performance Improvement
• Compliance Improvement
• Profitability Management
• Cost Management

Business Intelligence

• Information Management
• Business Intelligence
• Sales and Marketing
• Operational Intelligence

The New ‘Type E’ Definition of Globalization

Globalization has traditionally been viewed as the west taking advantage of economically advantageous market resources in the East. This has forged collaboration in product design and manufacture, with ready access to low cost labor and proximity to huge new markets.

However, the balance of power of globalization is no longer tipped towards the West. Pockets of global advantage such as eastern markets China and India are embracing their resource advantages and making their presence felt in the ranks of global corporations.

This is forging a type E global market: competing with everyone, from everywhere for everything.
Rapidly developing economies with low wage rates were previously engaged in outsource models to manufacture goods and ship them back to the West; and receiving from the West luxury goods not available locally in their developing nations.

The new emerging global conglomerates are posing significant threats to mature multi-national companies, playing on the global stage and gaining global brand presence through mergers and acquisitions. Many existing companies are failing to recognize this new order and in doing so are not only taking steps to protect their turf, but are not open to recognising the new opportunities presented by this changing marketscape.

It comes back to our discussion is a recent previous post – if you are not scouting out over the horizon and monitoring spikes for change you are likely to be too late to intercept any forces impacting your performance.

Microsoft BI Now Powered By MS SQL Server 2008

Microsoft has announced the release of MS SQL Server 2008 with vast improvements in the development tools and wizards.

SQL Server 2008 promises “trust, productivity, and intelligence”. The main focus of the capabilities are in accessing data across any source using the data warehousing capabilities of SQL Server 2008 then using powerful new wizards and new design tools to build integration, reporting, and analysis solutions in a single environment.

The end result = actionable insight through a rich, personalized user interface. All with the familiar style of Microsoft Office 2007.

To learn more about MS SQL Server 2008 download a trial [search for SQL Server 2008 or go Servers > SQL Server 2008] or attend an upcoming PASS event.

Loyalty Programs – Should Retailers Re-Sign or Resign?

Retail and consumer companies are reviewing customer loyalty programmes as economic conditions threaten profit margins. Analysis as to whether the retailers are getting a good return on the schemes is being undertaken before retailers commit to signing up for a further agreement term with the program provider.

Retailers who subscribe to programs that are up for renegotiation are reevaluating the merits of such schemes.

Overall, it appears that such loyalty program are still performing but analysis has found that some customers who are not profitable are being rewarded under some schemes and that some retailers are carrying a high cost of retaining. Loyalty programs need to be managed correctly to gain the full return of their value.

Some programs – such as the petrol discount vouchers issued by supermarkets are not strictly loyalty programmes but a short-term inducement to customers.

The decision for retailers is in either accepting loyalty programmes as a business overhead or dropping them at the risk of losing business.