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« December 2007 | Main | February 2008 »

January 31, 2008 I Like This Quote: 'In BI, Strategy is Destiny' "In BI, strategy is destiny... or should be." With these words, Jill Dyche, a leading thinker and consultant in the business intelligence space, admonishes BI professionals to keep their work in perspective. "In our rush to proselytize our existing capabilities, we forget what’s in the business’ pipeline. Most of this has to do with the lack of sustained and regular business requirements gathering." Jill hits the proverbial nail right on the proverbial head. All too often, the emphasis in solutions is on the technology, and efforts go into making sure all the bells and whistles are ringing and whistling as they should. I see this as the greatest failing in service oriented architecture, and this is also a failing in data management. To be sure, businesses suffer from failures in imagination, too. As Jill puts it: "it also has to do with the business’ failure to think big. After all, you’ve reengineered your supply chain and you now have query access into your ERP system. And your CRM project is finished, right? (The answer should be no...) Irrespective of your industry or market segment, your customers are very likely taking you for granted, and their likelihood to attrite is—as 2002’s popular colloquialism put it—only a mouse click away." But, back to BI and data management side of things -- Jill observes that BI and data managers she has worked with have done stellar jobs in timely delivery of BI reports, speedy data loading, or changed data capture. However, she adds, how many can say they have effectively addressed any of the following business inititiaves? - "Real-time individualization of customers, support of customer do-not-solicit requests, or customer and product hierarchy management" - Customer support that is "tiered, fast, and relevant" - Knowledge of "who’s profitable within and outside of a household" - Knowledge of "ideal product mixes for an existing customer segment" There are incredible solutions out there now in the BI and analytics market. However, they won't help the business if they're not being leveraged to their full capacity. Posted by joemckendrick in Business Intelligence  |  Permalink  | Comments (0)  | TrackBacks (0) January 30, 2008 Wall Street Journal Columnist Heralds Death of 'Gut Instinct' "When we remember 2008, it’s likely we’ll utter the following epitaph: Here lies gut instinct, once the basis of all business decisions. That’s because 2008 will be the year that businesses finally gain access to data that’s good enough to take quick action on." Ben Worthen, writing in The Wall Street Journal, observed the findings of Gartner's latest CIO survey that point to increasing reliance on business intelligence tools, and sees the fading of a business staple: gut instinct. Is this a good thing? Of course, the very purpose of this blogsite is to promote greater automation in information-gathering and decision-making, versus making unsubstantiated decisions that could affect jobs, careers, and millions of dollars in organizational treasure. We are seeing great strides being made in BI -- the past few years have been very much a so-called "inflection point" in the progress of these systems. We now have digitized every aspect of business operations, from point-of-sale to production. We have all the data needed to look at where a business is, and to some degree, where it's going. Worthen spoke to Gartner's Mark McDonald, an author of the survey of 1,500 CIOs, who noted that for the third year in a row, CIOs said that “business intelligence software” was their top tech priority. Now, IT departments are rolling out new tools "that let managers make decisions based on these trends." But is it possible to rely too much on cold, hard, data and charts, versus instinctual serendipitous knowledge? I think great decisions will still need to rely on both. But even our decisioning capabilities -- acting on all this business intelligence data -- is getting a tremendous boost from technology. As ebizQ colleague James Taylor observes in his latest post, "traditional BI tools are not, perhaps, the best way to get competitive advantage." Instead, James advises, "Enterprise Decision Management (EDM), or Business Decision Management, is the approach you need - it's an approach for automating and improving high-volume operational decisions. Focusing on operational decisions, it develops decision services using business rules to automate those decisions, adds analytic insight to these services using predictive analytics and allows for the ongoing improvement of decision-making through adaptive control and optimization." BI is just data, but putting actionable decision-making capabilities behind it makes it a powerful competitive weapon. Posted by joemckendrick in Business Intelligence • Decision Support • Management  |  Permalink  | Comments (1)  | TrackBacks (0) January 24, 2008 Hey, Someone Forgot to Tell the BI Sector that Times are 'Tough' While commentators seem to be in a state of utter panic over recession talk, the business intelligence vendor community doesn't seem to have gotten the message. There seem to be plenty of funds flowing to BI. For example, IBM has been pouring money into the sector -- it just acquired Cognos, of course, and just the other day announced it was acquiring AptSoft, an event processing platform and tools provider. Then, there's last week's announcement that Sun Microsystems is buying MySQL, the open-source database provider, for $1 billion. Claudia Imhoff observes that money is flowing to many smaller BI vendors as well. "In just the past few weeks," she wrote on January 23rd, "BI and MDM [mater data management] companies have scored big -- like almost $80 million BIG! ...Certainly says a lot about the confidence venture capital firms have in our space." Claudia provides examples of big BI-related deals going down, including ParAccel snagging $20 million on December 10, 2007 to further fund their Analytic Database product. "The funding will be used to expand engineering, sales and support, and to open their Cupertino office according to Scott Humphrey, their marketing communications person." Greenplum - another data warehouse appliance company like ParAccel - just received $27 million in venture capital. "And this only 11 months after a $15 million venture round," Claudia points out. "They plan to use the new funds to continue development on Greenplum's database and to expand their sales and marketing efforts, especially internationally." Claudia also points to Siperian, a developer of MDM software, which announced that had closed and "oversubscribed" $25 million. The additional funds "will be used to expand their European presence, develop their channels and further advance their MDM Hub technology." Claudia sums up the state of business intelligence and data management, which are must-haves, whether the economy is booming or busting: "Am I enthusiastic about our industry? You bet I am. Corporations all over are realizing now more than ever in these stressful times that their very survival depends on their ability to make the right decisions. What better time than now to invest in the very companies that make that possible?" Posted by joemckendrick in BI Vendor Watch  |  Permalink  | Comments (0)  | TrackBacks (0) 'Agility': Can It -- Should It -- Be Measured? The BI vendors -- and analysts and pundits -- talk incessantly about the 'agility' new BI and analytics systems deliver to the business. BI and analytics deal with precise measurements and benchmarking of data. But the lofty goal of agility is something that doesn't seem to have a precise measurement. Should it? So, what exactly is agility, and how do we know when we have it? That's the intriguing question put forth by Cliff Longman, chief technology officer for Kalido: "The industry talks about 'agile' systems, and 'flexible IT'. Could someone propose a way to BENCHMARK agility?" Cliff suggests that perhaps agility should be measured in the amount of time it takes to change an application may be a yardstick for agility. "Some people would say that adding a new hierarchy to an existing BI application in less than a month is 'agile'. Some would say that only less than a week is 'agile'. Some say that only less than a day is agile." Is there a way of putting a quantitative value on agility of business systems? Readers, we'd love to get your thoughts on what, exactly, is meant by 'agility,' and how that can be measured, if at all. Posted by joemckendrick in Management  |  Permalink  | Comments (0)  | TrackBacks (0) January 23, 2008 New Approaches to BI are Brewing Consumers are a fickle lot -- tastes may change from day to day. How do you keep them engaged with your brand and drive the market, and keep on top of business operations from across the globe? A real-time data warehouse helps. Katrina Coyle, BI manager with Molson Canada, recently explored the ways her company is leveraging new technology approaches to keep up with fast-changing trends across the beverage market. Her presentation was part of a new ebizQ Webinar I moderated, addressing the fast-changing world of business intelligence, which also featured noted author Don Tapscott and SAP's Lothar Schubert. (Audio replay available here. For highlights of Don Tapscott's remarks, check out my previous post here.) "We’ve been brewing beer for a very long time," Katrina noted, stating that "when you’ve been doing something as long as we have, you get a lot of habits that are pretty well ingrained. Trying to shaking the business out of those habits is a challenge." Molson's strategy to transform its organization includes reaching out to a new generation of younger adults through Web 2.0-based marketing strategies, and leveraging service-oriented architecture and data warehouse approaches to build its brands across the globe. An important emphasis is real-time analytics, Katrina said. "We are constantly having to shift and change and shift and adjust very quickly to changes in the marketplace, " she explained. "We all have to be extremely agile. You can’t spend a week trying to figure out whether the promotion is successful. You have to be able to react within hours." It used to be that companies didn't know if a promotion was successful until then end of a quarter, if then. Real-time analytics can look at patterns and trends and provide insights if something is working or not, enabling a quick change in direction. For example, one trend that Molson was able to jump on fairly rapidly was a sudden craze for cold beer in UK pubs -- long bastions of warm beer. Katrina explained that each of its global sites have their own go-to-market models, but all this information needs to be rapidly assimilated. "We have a data warehouse, with lots of information coming in different ways," she said. "It's not necessarily all coming from a centralized ERP system. We also have data coming in from AC Nielsen, for example. "We’ve got to bring that data in, and make sure that it has a harmonized look, so our business can actually make tactical decisions on it." By adopting in-memory technology available through SAP's BI Accelerator, Katrina reports that Molson has been able to move data quickly through its data warehouse. "We’re able to process data now in real time in our warehouse -- we’re not tied to a load once a day or once a week." (Audio replay available here.) Posted by joemckendrick in Business Intelligence  |  Permalink  | Comments (1)  | TrackBacks (0) January 19, 2008 Tapscott: Web 2.0 is Reshaping Business Intelligence I had the opportunity to moderate an ebizQ Webinar on the fast-changing world of business intelligence, with noted author Don Tapscott, Katrina Coyle, BI manager with Molson Canada, and SAP's Lothar Schubert. (Audio replay available here.) Don Tapscott, who broke new ground in 1996 with his book, The Digital Economy: The Promise and Peril of Network Intelligence, and recently co-authored Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything, said BI is on the verge of a revolutionary transition. Tapscott sees the Web 2.0 world -- with its high degree of collaboration -- changing the face of BI, to "collaborative intelligence." Prior to the introduction of Web 2.0 methodologies, he explained, internal data had "been accessible in various limited ways through traditional ERP reporting systems, MIS and business intelligence." Now, Tapscott continued, "for the first time, this is all being supplemented by massive quantities of additional data that is created through these new models of collaboration, as consumers and employees use the new tools of collaboration -- wikis, blogs and social networks." "The marriage of this new accessible data with the firm’s traditional internal data creates an unprecedented challenge, as well as an opportunity to gain insight into the behavior of the company’s most important stakeholders, and to translate that knowledge into success in the marketplace." The speed of Web 2.0 processes is also changing what end-users expect from BI approaches as well. "Think about if you do a Google search, you get the results back instantly. If the results took half a minute, or five minutes, or 10 minutes, you’d probably stop using Google so much. Traditional BI was kind of like that -- which is part of why we didn’t use it so much Because you’re calling out to a disk, basically." In-memory technologies are also making new generation BI technologies lightning fast as well. Audio replay of the ebizQ Webcast, "The New Paradigm for Business Intelligence - Collaborative, User Centric, Process Embedded," is available here. Posted by joemckendrick in Business Intelligence • Management  |  Permalink  | Comments (0)  | TrackBacks (0)