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Main | May 2007 »

April 30, 2007 Spreadsheets: Can't Work With'Em, Can't Work Without'Em The love-hate relationship with spreadsheets chronicled by my esteemed colleague Joe McKendrick and others is both a symptom and harbinger of many of the challenges presented by those pursuing or considering business intelligence (BI) or business analytics (BA) efforts. So I thought I'd stick my ladle in the soup and muck things up a bit further. All in service to you, the beleaguered reader, of course. 1. Blaming spreadsheets for lack of success with BI, BA, or anything related is like stiffing your server because the restaurant's kitchen screwed up your meal. From what I've read, many spreadsheets contain no formulas at all, and an uncomfortably large percentage of those that do contain formulas contain errors. Estimates of error-containing spreadsheets range from 20 to 50 percent, depending on who you ask (and what error-reducing solution they're touting). 2. Spreadsheets aren't going away because…well, because they just aren't. They're familiar and comfortable, even to those who only know enough about them to use them as glorified (albeit more neatly formatted) scratchpads. (Anybody remember the promise of the "paperless office?" Well, when I was a Yankee Group analyst in the 1970s, our august founder, Howard Anderson, was fond of saying we'd see paperless bathrooms first. Perhaps frighteningly, between hot-air hand driers and the "hands-off" commodes now found in Japan and elsewhere, he turns out to have been right.) 3. It's not the spreadsheet, it's what's in it. That's true for the data being entered or imported, and for the formulas being used to manipulate that data. This means that there must be well defined, consistent, and enforceable policies and processes in place to govern how business-critical spreadsheets (and the formulas and information they contain) get managed, populated, secured, shared, and used. In other words, they are critical intellectual property (IP), and must be managed as such, across their entire respective lifecycles. 4. Spreadsheets are likely to play larger, not smaller, roles in BA, BI, and related efforts at many sizes and types of enterprises for some time to come. As BA, BI, and related efforts spread from business analysts and other specialists to "civilian" business decision-makers, spreadsheets will be one of the most widely used tools to facilitate communication between and among those groups. Given all of the above, Cognos and other vendors are doing no more than responding to customer demand (and the inevitable) by increasing interoperability with and support of spreadsheets as BA and BI tools. In fact, the smartest BA, BI, and process management and optimization vendors will quickly include features that help customers surround those spreadsheets with the policies, practices, and processes necessary to make them reliable, secure resources. Those features may range from automation and validation software features to consulting services – but whatever form they take, there will likely be significant demand for them for some time to come. And don't even get me started about the "unstructured data" hiding in plain sight on all of those sticky notes… Posted by mdortch in BI • Business Intelligence  |  Permalink  | Comments (0)  | TrackBacks (0) April 25, 2007 Spreadsheets Aren't Going Away Anytime Soon "Cognos Makes Peace With Excel" That's the headline to Steve Swoyer's analysis on Cognos' latest product announcement. But, spreadsheets are the next step up from manual pen-and-paper. They're soooo 1980s. What's the automated BI tool vendor thinking? Last week, Steve writes, Cognos announced a new "Excel-friendly" spin on BI and PM—Cognos 8 (C8) BI Analysis for Excel, which it expects to ship sometime later this year. As Ventana Research principal Robert Kugler puts it, it's a "better-than-spreadsheet spreadsheet." Okay, Cognos, convince us. You've been telling us for years that the conventional spreadsheet is stone-age stuff. Delbert Krause, director of performance management product marketing with Cognos, admits that many business analysts, especially the financial folks, just love their spreadsheets. Hmmm. My wife is a financial manager for a local government, and she still uses spreadsheets every day. Okay, it looks like BI vendors, despite their best efforts, haven't loosened our grip on the venerable spreadsheet. Krause reports that Cognos is trying to help users users "analyze information in a way they’re comfortable with. [So they can] grab data from different sources, add data to a report that they want to do further analysis on that doesn’t exist in the report, either structured or unstructured data." Cognos says its better-than-a-spreadsheet spreadsheet is a controlled, repeatable, and dynamically refreshable spreadsheet alternative -- rather than having wildly proliferating spreadsheets running rampant across the organization. Posted by joemckendrick in Business Intelligence  |  Permalink  | Comments (0)  | TrackBacks (0) April 23, 2007 Business Objects, Cartesis, the Business Analytics/Intelligence/Process "Tarball," and "BI 2.0." Boy, I can't look away for a minute without 47 things happening… Business Objects and Cartesis: If you want to read a great initial synopsis of the announcement and early reactions, you can do no better than my learned ebizQ colleague (and editor!) Elizabeth Book's recent Integration Watch blog posting on the subject. My take: Business Objects is playing a bit of catch-up, from the perspective of the consolidation and integration of related functions that has been going on for some time now. (See immediately below for more.) However, with Hyperion off the merger-and-acquisition (M&A) table, Cartesis may turn out to be the most complementary, least problematic alternative currently available to Business Objects. Whether or not that company can assimilate Cartesis smoothly, and produce meaningful synergies from the merger rapidly, definitely remains to be seen. Meanwhile, here comes that "immediately below" I mentioned immediately above… The Business Analytics/Intelligence/Process Tarball, and "BI 2.0:" As I have said numerous times in my blog at the ebizQ "BPM in Action" Web site, several previously separate disciplines are hurtling towards one another rapidly. These include business activity monitoring (BAM), BI, business process management (BPM), business process optimization (BPO), and even elements of identity and IT infrastructure management. The resulting tarball (a term derived from the "tar baby" of the Uncle Remus stories by UNIX folk) is something I've taken to referring to as business knowledge management (BKM). But another way to look at it is as a kind of "BI 2.0," as Joe McKendrick quotes Business Objects CEO in Joe's recent posting here. But here's where this starts to become some serious fun. "BI 2.0" is precisely like "Web 2.0," "Enterprise 2.0," and any of the other "terrible twos," as Joe delightfully and correctly describes them. What all of these "2.0" constructs have in common is the requirement for what I call an "IT 3.0" enterprise architecture. To paraphrase what I've described previously elsewhere: "IT 1.0" was all about big central computers hardwired to dumb terminals. "IT 2.0" was all about smarter clients, smaller servers, and less tightly coupled connections – but still had a predominantly systems-centric focus. "IT 3.0" is about three things: people, tasks, and information. All other IT and business infrastructure elements must render themselves otherwise invisible in their support of securely linking people to the information and resources they need to perform the tasks that drive the business. In this context, BI is critically important – but only an admittedly significant sliver of the larger tarball. The goal is to create business and IT infrastructures that together enable the capture, documentation, integration, rationalization, retention, and sharing of the knowledge inside of people and business processes. That knowledge can then be used to improve and refine business and IT operations continuously. That's what "BI 2.0," "IT 3.0," and BKM are all about. And success with any or all of them will require some new, improved takes on "business intelligence" that extend far beyond any vendor's particular solutions or technologies. There perhaps just may be some human-centric factors and issues involved as well… Posted by mdortch in BI • Business Intelligence  |  Permalink  | Comments (0)  | TrackBacks (0) April 20, 2007 'BI 2.0' -- It Was Inevitable Welcome to the Terrible Twos -- and talk about growing pains. A new generation of technologies, born in this century, are out of the crib and getting into every nook and cranny of the enterprise, knocking over everything that isn’t nailed down. There's Web 2.0, Office 2.0, and Enterprise 2.0 -- merry mashups and wild wikis that make computing fun for techies and non-techies alike. (Some even attempted to introduce the use of the term SOA 2.0 -- but were quickly stomped down.) But these Terrible Twos are more than fun and games, they represent the future of business as we know it. David Precopio said it all in a post a couple of months back, noting that the 2.0s “are real and will drive how organizations communicate with customers and business partners now and in the future. For many companies, these 2.0 technologies will determine whether they are in business in five years.“ Web 2.0 employs online, collaborative tools and environments -- such as blogs, wikis, mashups, and Software as a Service -- to provide access to services across the global Web. Companies that can harvest and leverage these capabilities may realize significant competitive advantage. Now, John Schwarz, CEO of Business Objects, speaking at the AIIM/On Demand trade show in Boston, has taken the Web 2.0 concept and added a BI twist -- "Business Intelligence 2.0." Schwarz said that current BI software is the next step above document tracking, helping users to fix the inefficiencies in how they save and share their data. Future BI suites can be far more powerful using Web 2.0-style technology and behavior, Schwarz said. For example, BI software could use social networks to give users the power to pool resources and buying power, he said. Next-generation BI software could rely on a large community of individuals to contribute to a database and correct their own mistakes, in a model similar to the Wikipedia.org online encyclopedia. Business intelligence could, then, truly represent the collective intelligence of an entire community of users. This could greatly expand its capabilities, which still remain limited to power users and analysts within the walls of their respective enterprises. Posted by joemckendrick in Business Intelligence  |  Permalink  | Comments (0)  | TrackBacks (0) April 18, 2007 BI in Real Life: What's it All Mean? My esteemed ebizQ blogging colleague Joe McKendrick posted some interesting results from an InformationWeek survey of 500 IT executives regarding BI. Herewith, some further thoughts on what those results said and might mean. From Joe's post: "Half of the respondents intend to increase their BI budgets from 2006, and 40% say spending will remain the same." So 10 percent either plan to spend less on BI and/or have no idea at all what their BI spending plans might be. Hmm. More (semi-)seriously, I can't help but wonder about the 40 percent who plan to keep their spending where it is. Are they doing so because their earlier investments are already delivering sufficient business benefits? I'd find that hard to believe, based on anecdotal evidence from IT and business executives with whom I've spoken. More likely, they are leveling off from earlier spending levels to focus more on getting what they've bought to work with what they've got – and to deliver more clear, demonstrable, and measurable benefit. (As with business process management (BPM), I bet many BI efforts start blowing through money before success criteria and metrics are adequately defined and anointed as requirements.) Again, from Joe's post: "What are the most challenging issues around BI? A majority of IT executives, 53%, say their BI implementations are hampered by integration and compatibility issues. Along the same lines, 78% would like to see BI vendors better address integration and compatibility issues….Forty-eight percent say the tools are difficult to use, and 45% wonder where the ROI is with business intelligence." These results appear to underscore my point about slowing BI investments in the face of mounting integration challenges. Again, as with BPM, key challenges include difficulty of use, integration, and ROI. (By the way, I've heard said that given increasing focus on compliance, governance, and risk management, "ROI" stands less for "return on investment" and more for "reducing odds (of) incarceration." BI clearly has a role to play in all of these areas. But the tools are going to have to get easier to use, and gain greater forensic documentation and reporting features, to play those roles in ways that pass regulatory muster. Regulators hate deviations and exceptions, so consistent, efficient processes must support and be embodied in BI tools and strategies to avoid waving those particular red flags. My favorite results of the survey, however, are those that Joe saved for last. Almost two-thirds of respondents are considering acquiring BI from a software-as-a-service (SaaS) vendor, with 27 percent saying such an approach is "extremely likely." Well, Business Objects SA, BI solution vendor and purveyor of the wildly popular Crystal Reports, has offered CrystalReports.com, a Web-based report-sharing facility, for almost exactly a year now. More recently, Business Objects announced the ability to install and run CrystalReports.com access directly within Salesforce.com, Inc.'s customer relationship management (CRM) SaaS offering. So more BI-focused SaaS offerings are definitely coming. Whether or not these will be any easier or cheaper for IT and/or business decision-makers to mix, match, and integrate remains to be seen, and "mileage" will definitely vary. Meanwhile, though, those decision-makers should be spending less time and money installing purported "solutions" (and responding to surveys about them, for that matter!). They should be spending more time asking and answering the questions that will help them approach BI, BPM, and related issues from a perspective that focuses on benefit to the business, and cooperation among all affected constituencies. I bet that these challenges will make selecting a BI tool or vendor seem relatively simple – and result in a kind of "full employment act" for BI advisors, consultants, implementers, and even lowly pundits such as myself and Joe McKendrick. We'll see. Meanwhile, how is your organization pursuing BI, internally or for clients and customers? Let us know, and let's see where the discussion leads next. Posted by mdortch in BI • Business Intelligence  |  Permalink  | Comments (0)  | TrackBacks (0) Survey: BI is Hot, Hot, Hot There's no shortage of corporate dollars flowing to BI projects and technology, a new survey of 500 IT executives by InformationWeek confirms. Half of the respondents intend to increase their BI budgets from 2006, and 40% say spending will remain the same. Not only that, but IW also finds that BI -- notorious for being a fragmented field of endeavor with no clear vendors out in front -- is taking on more of an enterprise cast. About 25% reported that BI tools were scattered around their companies, down from 35% a year ago. Thirty-three percent say they have standardized their BI efforts to one or a few solutions. What are the most challenging issues around BI? A majority of IT executives, 53%, say their BI implementations are hampered by integration and compatibility issues. Along the same lines, 78% would like to see BI vendors better address integration and compatibility issues. Another challenges include tools complexity and business value. Forty-eight percent say the tools are difficult to use, and 45% wonder where the ROI is with business intelligence. Given the opportunity, most would prefer not to have to wrestle with software and implementation issues at their sites anyway. Close to two out of three, 63%, say they are considering acquiring BI capabilities through as Software as a Service vendor. Twenty-seven percent, in fact, say it's "extremely likely" they will go the SaaS route. Posted by joemckendrick in Business Intelligence  |  Permalink  | Comments (0)  | TrackBacks (0)