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BI in Action Blog
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April 10, 2008
Key Performance Indicators and More Key Performance Indicators
How are we doing? Is that new BI system making a difference for us? As many of you have probably already heard through various seminars and trade journals, you can't tie business intelligence and enterprise data warehouse to the business until you have key performance indicators, or KPIs, in place. KPIs help measure the impact of a BI/DW effort in tangible business increments, such as numbers of widgets sold to particular customers, or decreased error rates, or decreased customer complaints, and so on. Claudia Imhoff points to a new site that actually provides an entire library of KPIs, available for adoption at no charge. The KPI Library -- "Where good KPI definitions meet." (Free registration required to view entire library.) The site now has close to 1,000 KPIs, spanning 16 business areas, including finance, governance and compliance, human resources, IT, legal, outsourcing, and procurement. Typical KPIs in the library include the following: - % of (preferred) suppliers not used in last 12 months ...I should make sure my clients use this one :-) - Market share gain comparison % - Ad click-through ratio (CTR) - Cash dividends paid - Share price - Perfect Order Measure - Average customer recency - Average number of trackbacks per post - % of service requests posted via web (self-help) - Total energy used per unit of production - Cumulative Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) Posted by joemckendrick in BI • Management • Performance Management | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0) March 15, 2008Is 'Business Intelligence' Still a Relevant Term?
Okay, over the years, many have joked that 'business intelligence,' like its cousin, 'military intelligence,' are oxymorons. But BI has stuck as a defining umbrella term for all the activities that pertain to the gathering of data and presentating as information of some use to decision makers -- be it through Excel or intelligent portals or dashboards. Lately, Colin White, who has been instrumental in putting the 'intelligence' into business intelligence, has questioned whether BI is still an appropriate moniker. He notes that 'business analytics' seems to be a term with more traction from a business perspective. Business users, he observes, "always seem comfortable with the term business analytics, but often view BI as a vague and imprecise technical term." Colin says that the term "operational analytics," for instance, is seen as more "dynamic" than "operational BI." True, analytics seems to have more of a hard-hitting and more focused tone to it than the more amorphous BI. And some vendors say the term BI has been getting watered down with all kinds of solutions, including simple reporting tools. Does "analytics" better define or describe the new breed of sophisticated tools and capabilities now arriving on the market? Posted by joemckendrick in BI | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0) August 17, 2007By the way... 
I have begun a multi-entry discourse/diatribe about getting back to basics and first principles as the foundation of a truly effective strategy for business process management (BPM). I believe this argument applies equally well, if not more so, to BI efforts. So I humbly yet eagerly encourage you to visit the "BPM in Action" blog, and check out my entries on "BPM Back to Basics." And feel free to comment liberally! Posted by mdortch in BI • Business Intelligence | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0) July 11, 2007To 'Compete on Analytics,' Intelligence Has to be Shared
I just published an article in the latest issue of Database Trends & Applications on "competing on analytics," and wanted to share some findings and conclusions with you: The challenge: In theory, companies are now capable of capturing and analyzing the details of every minute transaction and event that occurs within their walls. Although businesses are being inundated with data, much of it is the wrong data. It's not timely, and it's not getting to the right end-users. This is perhaps one of the most vexing challenges to “ competing on analytics,” now seen as a key strategy for attaining competitive differentiation, and well- documented in popular books by industry experts such as Tom Davenport of Babson College. Consider some of the challenges cited in a recent survey of 296 data applications managers I helped conduct and analyze in partnership with Unisphere Research for the Oracle Applications Users Group (OAUG). The survey, underwritten by Cognos, found that a paradox exists in most organizations today. Decision-makers are overwhelmed by information overload, but at the same time, there isn't enough of the right information available. Ninety-one percent of executives, in fact, said that their decision-making capabilities were stymied by a lack of complete information. Yet, three out of four also report they suffer from 'information overload.' Identifying and separating out the pieces of data that have the most value may be like looking for a particular piece of straw in a haystack. Add to this the fact that most end-users do not have access to the latest BI tools, and still have to go through IT or other departments. The majority of respondents to the OAUG survey, in fact, report that it takes more than three to five days to get a report out of IT. Overall, the survey found, fewer than 10 percent of employees have access to BI and corporate performance management tools. Marc Andrews, director of strategy and business development for unstructured information at IBM, told me that most companies are "still only touching the surface of business intelligence. The number of business processes and the number of users across the organization that are leveraging the technologies is still only the fraction of the population potential.” Mark Lorion, director of product marketing for the Spotfire Division of TIBCO, agreed with this assessment, noting that “companies have yet to find an effective way to deliver BI capabilities to more than a handful of ‘power users’ who have the technical expertise to leverage BI tools. Instead, their employees are using spreadsheets and other packaged applications because the BI platforms are not flexible enough to suit their analysis needs or pace. BI tools frequently are not intuitive, and require heavy IT involvement to reconfigure cubes or generate new reports. Because they require IT involvement, they do not work at the speed of frontline decision-makers.” I spoke with the folks at BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee ( BCBST), who perhaps hit upon the best approach to broadening the reach of analytics -- they're employing multi-faceted approaches that leverage a wide range of data sources, and extend this capability to as many end-users as possible. BCBST, for example, offers account reporting to its largest groups, which allows the company to respond more effectively to RFPs to acquire new business and retain existing clients. In the article, I quote Frank Brooks, senior manager of data resource management and chief data architect for BCBST, who said that analytical capabilities currently delivered via the Internet to BCBST clients include utilization management through interactive reports and OLAP data cubes. BCBST plans to provide additional analytical capabilities for its account reporting packages, including national and regional benchmarking data from Blue Health Intelligence (a national data warehouse of BlueCross BlueShield Plans). “We’re now in the process of enhancing our business intelligence and analytical infrastructure to also support instant access to the results of text analytics and predictive analytics processing,” Brooks said. BCBST is taking a multipronged approach involving traditional business intelligence tools, as well as data mining, text analytics, and enterprise search to sift through a variety of company data sources to spot trends and patterns in service, claims, and utilization. Posted by joemckendrick in BI | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0) July 09, 2007BI, BPM, SOA -- and USERS!
I have just read the recent posting by my learned colleague and ebizQ blogmate Joe McKendrick, in which he summarizes some of the high points of the panel discussion that wrapped up the recent BI in Action Virtual Conference. I of course agree completely with what he and the other participants had to say about the links connecting BI, BPM, and service-oriented architectures (SOAs). I have in fact referred to what I and some others call "business knowledge management" (BKM) as the "missing link" connecting these three critically strategic areas. (You can read about BKM in more detail in some of the research located in the RFG section of the ebizQ Analyst Corner, as well as in previous postings of mine here and at the "BPM in Action" blog, particularly this one.) However, I, perhaps as usual, have something to add. It is equally critical, I believe, to remember that most useful BI, as well as most of the actual "heavy lifting" regarding BPM, resides in the hearts and minds of actual individual human users. Yes, of course, there's a lot of relevant "intelligence" resident in data and documents, and even within the IT systems and connections that support access to and manipulation of these. But all of that "stuff" is done by people who are trying to do jobs that drive the business. Those people are the ultimate consumers and beneficiaries of most if not all of the most significant services provided by SOAs as well. I know that Joe and everyone else involved in the BI in Action Virtual Conference knew and knows this. However, it can be too easy to take away from discussions about BI, BPM, and/or SOAs that some mix or subset of these technologies can simply, "automagically" improve things for users and/or the business. Would that it were that easy. BI, BPM, and SOA efforts must include specific, concrete elements focused on incorporating user input and feedback, from the earliest stages of development and deployment. Of course, all such initiatives are perhaps cavalierly assumed to be "designed with users in mind." However, IT and business decision-makers must also make overt and explicit efforts to incorporate user input and feedback, and include in their project plans steps and metrics focused on user productivity and satisfaction. BI, BPM, and SOAs are elements of larger business-technology ecosystems, within which things that affect some elements directly and/or indirectly affect all other elements. In such a context, users can represent the most maddeningly difficult elements of all to manage and integrate. (I have heard many engineers say without a trace of irony that a particular project or system would work just fine, if they could just keep users away from it. This may be true, but kind-of misses the point of the exercise in a business setting.) However, users and IT people in an enterprise are like cast and crew in a play. They may not understand or be able to stand one another, but without either constituency, you got no show. So make sure that everything you do (and most everything you say) regarding BI, BPM, and/or SOAs includes and addresses users adequately and directly. It may make things a bit more complicated, but it will help to ensure that they support rather than combat or ignore your efforts. Posted by mdortch in BI • Business Intelligence | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0) June 19, 2007How Best to Link BI and BPM?
In eager anticipation of Wednesday's ebizQ "BI in Action" Virtual Conference, I wrote yesterday here about why BI needs BPM (and about why BPM needs BI at the "BPM in Action" blog). (Feel free to go and read or re-read either or both, after you register for Wednesday's event!) Today, in equally eager anticipation of a panel discussion to be featured at the Conference, I want to ruminate a bit on how best to achieve maximum business benefit by the combination of BI and BPM. The panel discussion is "The Role of BI in BPM and SOA," and is being moderated by my ebizQ colleague and blogmate, ebizQ VP of strategic services, and SOA maven extraordinaire Beth Gold-Bernstein. And of course, one of the most obvious and popular answers to the question "how best to combine/leverage/take advantage of BI and BPM?" is some variant on the "with an SOA" theme. However, despite all the wonderfully useful information promulgated about SOAs at ebizQ and elsewhere, there is no automatic connecting of the BI, BPM, and SOA dots, at least/especially not for most businesspeople. And in fact, how obvious do you want something called an "architecture" to be to users? When I'm in a building, I notice the architecture, but don't really care about how it was executed; I just want the building to remain standing, especially while I'm in it. So I'm going to take a slightly different view. I offer the observation that SOAs (and related technologies, such as enterprise service buses, or ESBs) are critically important to technological integration of BI and BPM "on the back end." However, users, especially business-focused users, no more want nor need to see most elements of an SOA than they want or need to see explicit elements of BI or BPM solutions or architectures. What they want and need to see are the usable results of these behind-the-scenes elements and efforts. So what's needed are dashboards and software-based services, including desktop widgets, that present to users information they can assimilate and act upon with minimal to no additional technical knowledge or help. These must be easily customized to meet the needs and expectations of multiple types of users, from senior executives to business and IT architects and strategists. They must be easily modified as needs and user types change. And they must be totally non-disruptive to business and IT operations. (That means desired or needed changes can be made without fork lifts or automatic weapons, and that all interfaces are driven by the same set of secure, up-to-date, and verified data.) Achievement of these goals requires a fair amount of heavy lifting in that aforementioned behind-the-scenes area. Whatever BI and BPM solutions are chosen must be connected via seamless, flexible interfaces, to one another and to the presentation methods and tools of choice. And those presentation methods and tools must be easily combined, mixed, and matched. Depending on environmental particulars, this could mean integration with one or more types of application, portal, service, and/or Web browser software and/or service. Fortunately, standards for such integrations, and tools supporting those standards – up to and including ESBs and SOAs – are beginning to improve, multiply, and take root effectively in many sizes and types of enterprises. And you can learn about many of these during the "BI in Action" Virtual Conference, and elsewhere across ebizQ. However, these solutions and standards are still evolving, as business needs and goals always are. This means that comprehensive and sufficiently fluid and flexible integration and presentation can still be challenging, even with an ESB and an SOA. So, what's really needed to integrate BPM and BI most effectively is a combination of carefully crafted, deployed, and enforced business processes, supported by the best available business intelligence. In other words, a holistic, proactive approach to what I and others sometimes refer to as business knowledge management (BKM). You might want to download and read a Research Note I wrote on BI, BPM, and BKM in preparation for the Virtual Conference, and keep some of this in mind during the panel discussion. And I'd be very interested in hearing about your own experiences with attempting to combine BI with BPM to better serve your business. But make sure to register for and attend Wednesday's event, before getting distracted writing to me… Posted by mdortch in BI • Business Intelligence | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0) June 18, 2007Why BI Needs BPM
This Wednesday is the ebizQ "BI in Action" Virtual Conference (for which you should register now, if you have not done so already). In the run-up to that event, I thought I would take on in this space and the "BPM in Action" blog some of what I consider the "big issues" regarding to and relating BPM and BI. Herewith, one of those – why BI needs BPM to deliver maximum business benefit and value. (My thoughts on why BPM needs BI, conveniently enough, can be found along with the musings of some of my learned ebizQ BI blogmates at the aforementioned "BPM in Action" blog.) There are several key elements in the "life cycle" management of BI, its supporting information streams, and what I like to think of as the larger and more valuable issue of business knowledge. These include, but need not be limited to, capture, definition, development, management, prioritization, refinement/revision, and retirement. Success with each of these elements requires effective, consistent processes – in other words, effective, consistent BPM. Effective, consistent processes are needed to identify, prioritize, and take full advantage of the intelligence in question. BI also needs BPM also needs BI to know what to do next. That is to say, beyond the elements listed above, those responsible for BI should always be looking forward a bit further than the nearest, hottest fire. BPM is similarly intended to help business decision-makers to address both immediate and longer-term situations and opportunities. If BI is to become and remain both responsive and proactive, it needs ways to become informed by and about any significant ripples or shifts on the BPM front. (For example, if monitoring indicates a sudden decrease or increase in the use of particular business processes, these may be linked to changes in or near the environment that can and/or should affect the information streams and/or processes supporting BI efforts.) Perhaps most crucial, though, is BI's need for BPM to provide meaningful context for BI. BI is both an end in and of itself, and a means to an end. The self-referential end for BI is to provide maximum knowledge about the business and events and developments that affect the business and its surrounding ecosystem. But what good is that, beyond providing some limited kind of validation and/or gratification, if it cannot be translated into action that furthers and serves the larger goals of the business? I'll take that one myself: no good at all. BPM, ideally, provides the context within which BI takes on "marching orders" that give it meaning and business value. At some enterprises, in fact, the BI-BPM relationship has become bi-directional. Input and feedback from BI efforts are considered part of information pool that drives BPM decisions, just as BPM efforts and their results increasingly inform BI decisions and processes. It is therefore incumbent upon everyone focused primarily on BI to expand that focus to include BPM. Ideally, that focus-expansion effort has already begun. Whether it has or not, this Wednesday's "BI in Action" Virtual Conference provides an ideal opportunity to step up your efforts to maximize the business value of every investment you make in BI and in BPM. Start by registering, and make sure to attend the keynote Webinar, "Business Intelligence: Driving Business Performance," as well as the follow-up presentation, "The Current State of the Business Intelligence Market." These will prepare you to intensify your BI and BPM efforts – and for the sure-to-be-lively panel discussion, "The Role of BI in BPM and SOA." I'll have more to say about that panel tomorrow, in my discussions of the other big issue relating BPM and BI – how best to link and integrate them. Meanwhile, though, make sure you register for and attend Wednesday's "BI in Action" Virtual Conference! Posted by mdortch in BI • Business Intelligence | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0) June 07, 2007BI, BPM, and SOA: Alphabet Soup that's GOOD for You!
As you may already be aware, there's a Webinar coming up at ebizQ on June 20, on the subject of "The Role of BI in BPM and SOA." (It's part of the upcoming "BI in Action" Virtual Conference.) Whether you were aware of it or not, you should definitely register and plan on attending. It will be a panel discussion hosted by my ebizQ colleague Beth Gold-Bernstein, which would be reason enough to attend. However, there are other good reasons as well. There should be little remaining doubt that business process management (BPM) and business intelligence (BI) are and will remain for some time principal applications, if not outright "killer apps," driving SOA adoption. Of course, a company can and should have good BPM and BI without an SOA. But for an SOA to deliver maximum immediate and sustained business benefit, a company must equip and support that SOA with strong, coherent, and integrated BPM – which almost by necessity and definition these days must include BI as well. As I see it, BI and BPM drive and support one another. BI is essential to make the best possible decisions about business process creation, orchestration, prioritization, refinement, and structure. Effective BPM, meanwhile, is essential to achieve and derive maximum business benefit from BI. Together, they form the foundation for what I've referred to repeatedly in my "BPM in Action" blog as human-centric business knowledge management (BKM). Now, for BI, BKM, and BPM to be of any real business value, they must pervade the entire enterprise – every element of the business and IT architectures and infrastructures. They must also be invisible to users doing their primary jobs. Which means the sensible place to park the features and resources that enable BI, BKM, and BPM is within an SOA, where an SOA exists. (Where an SOA does not exist, I think the most sensible place is within the applications and services those users use to do those primary jobs, but that's not the subject of this outing. It is the subject of previous rants in this space, however, in case you have way too much free time…) You can read all about BI, BPM, and SOA justifications, obstacles, and strategies right here at ebizQ, and about BKM, BI, and related issues, among other subjects, in the RFG section of the ebizQ Analyst Corner. But make no mistake – at many enterprises, including quite possibly yours or your client's or clients', BI, BKM, and BPM are going to be critical drivers and justifications for SOA efforts, today and for the foreseeable future. I expect the Webinar on June 20 will echo and delve deeply into these subjects, and urge you to register and participate. Meanwhile, you can expect to read more about how all of this stuff comes together – or not – here (as well as at my BPM blog)…especially if you care to contribute any of your own experiences, opinions, and thoughts… Posted by mdortch in BI • Business Intelligence | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0) May 14, 2007Microsoft and BI: Hmm
I, too, have been watching Microsoft's machinations in BI (and BPM) closely, and with much interest. However, I think the company is challenged to deliver truly pervasive BI, as discussed in Joe McKendrick's recent musings, by the same things that challenge Microsoft's still-evolving, still-muddled online/software-as-a-service (SaaS) strategy. Those challenging things? Microsoft's "jewels in the crown." Windows and Office (including Exchange), at least in their traditional "bits on disks" forms. I think Cognos, which announced just today BI offerings configured as an appliance and as SaaS, may be a better example of how BI is likely to pervade business architectures, infrastructures, and users. As reported by ebizQ here, Cognos has announced a new BI appliance, as well as BI as a service available for users of Salesforce.com's SaaS solution for customer relationship management (CRM). Both the BI appliance and BI as SaaS represent ways of insinuating BI into the normal workflow of most users, without their direct involvement or knowledge. As long as little to no changes are necessary to the way users do things, all the things they do can ultimately be analyzed in ways that feed BI efforts. In fact, pervasive, invisible capture of how users do what they do, and with what tools, is the best way to achieve the level of knowledge necessary to generate maximum business value from BI and/or BPM efforts. Appliances and SaaS may be the best approaches toward this goal at many businesses. I fear that Microsoft may take an approach to BI and/or BPM support with its aforementioned crown jewels that force IT decision-makers into choices they'd rather avoid. Just as an example, it is all but impossible to extend the power of Microsoft Active Directory's management of responsibilities, restrictions, rights, roles, and rules to non-Windows users, without a third-party offering such as those from Centrify and Quest Software. As another example, Microsoft is in the process of revamping its Dynamics applications line – another potential place for the company to park or hide BI/BPM features. However, Microsoft is making some of these applications available traditionally, or as hosted services from Microsoft partners, or as hosted services from Microsoft itself. (You can read more about this sticky situation in my "BPM in Action" blog.) Confusing? You bet. And it seems likely that Microsoft will face similar challenges with BI and BPM – and that those challenges will bedevil Microsoft customers, developers, and partners as well. It will be, as we analysts often opine prematurely, interesting to see if Microsoft can BI/BPM-enable its crown jewels in ways that generate revenue for Microsoft and straightforward business benefit for its customers and partners. I am hopeful, but not riotously optimistic, at least not yet. What about you? Posted by mdortch in BI • Business Intelligence • Microsoft | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0) May 09, 2007A Mildly Contrarian View of SAP, OutlookSoft, and Vendor Consolidation Generally
As noted in my colleague Elizabeth Book's Integration Watch blog yesterday, SAP AG plans to acquire OutlookSoft Corp. I have two opinions about this deal – one about what it means to SAP, OutlookSoft, and their immediately surrounding ecosystems of competitors, customers, partners, and prospects, and one about what it means more generally. Opinion the First: The primary intent of the deal is made obvious in the headline, subhead, and most of the copy contained in SAP's news release. SAP has decided that the person it wants to sell to is the CFO. Not the CIO, CTO, or other IT leader. Not the CEO. Not some idealized "coalition of the willing" including business and IT decision-makers. SAP is going after the keeper of the keys to the corporate coffers. From that perspective, OutlookSoft makes a lot of sense. That company has focused on the CFO from its inception, according to its CEO as quoted in the release. And both SAP and OutlookSoft are increasingly positioning the CFO as the person under the most consistent pressure to "meet regulatory requirements and drive efficiencies while at the same time playing a strategic role in driving the growth and profitability of the business." Now, this positioning may sound disturbingly familiar to many of you. It may sound more familiar if you replace "CFO" with "CIO" or "CTO" in the outreach collateral of many if not most other IT vendors. The point here, though, is that SAP has identified its primary marketing target, and is building and acquiring the tools it needs to deliver to the people in that role the information they need to achieve the goals noted above. This puts a two-pronged challenge in front of SAP's and OutlookSoft's competitors. Those companies have not only got to come up with similarly comprehensive, integrated solutions, but they've got to package and deliver them in ways that directly translate into benefit to beleaguered CFOs. A tall order, especially for those companies not already well versed in persuading that particular audience. But an interesting, perhaps constricting focus, given the large number of potential client companies out there that don't even have CFOs, but still have needs for comprehensive, integrated business intelligence and performance support. (SAP's work with Microsoft Corp. on "Duet" and that solution's expected progeny demonstrate SAP's covering of its bets in this regard.) So we'll just have to wait and see where SAP ultimately focuses most of its efforts and energy, and how well it does with this current positioning focus. Opinion the Second: This is simply another example of vendors responding with alacrity (if not panic) to increasing disappointment among their business customers with the BI solutions those vendors have been offering so far. The issue in a nutshell: what's needed is a comprehensive, holistic, and integrated view of everything that's going on in the business. What's also needed is the ability to focus on those things that represent potentially disruptive problems or opportunities to improve performance. Vendors scrambling to maintain and/or avoid losing market share and account control are seeking acquisitions, mergers, and partnerships to fill in and flesh out their solutions portfolios, in ways they hope align more closely with ever-evolving user demands and goals. Which should be good, more or less. But is nowhere near where it should be yet, nor anything like over. The number of independent companies continues to shrink, but I'm pretty sure there are new companies planning to emerge even as you read this. So expect the consolidation tango to continue – and use this period of turbulence and uncertainty to sharpen and refine focus on your own company's specific needs and goals. This will maximize the likelihood that when you evaluate candidate solutions and vendors, your criteria will take precedence over their marketing goals. Posted by mdortch in BI • Business Intelligence | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0) May M&A-dness
Wow! What a couple of weeks for BI with mergers & acquisitions coming out of the woodwork: Business Objects - Cartesis; Tibco - Spotfire; and most recently SAP - OutlookSoft. And if that wasn't enough, Microsoft also held its first BI shin-dig in Seattle, offering us a glimpse of its next generation SQL Server codenamed Katami -- which incidentally is the name of a cluster of volcanoes in Alaska -- which alas doesn't come near to the BI goodies that its predecessor delivered. Nevertheless when Microsoft picks its nose in BI, everyone is always eager to hand them a tissue... Given the heap of developments a divide and conquer approach is in order. I'll start with SAP and OutlookSoft. My official take: From a competitive market perspective this acquisition is also a near-immediate response to Oracle's recently completed acquisition of Hyperion Solutions. Both companies are looking to grow their market share in more corners of the enterprise applications space, but in contrasting ways. SAP is executing a series of small "tuck-in" acquisitions of niche players (Pilot is a great example) to flesh out the white spaces in its product lines. Meanwhile Oracle is going after larger blockbuster deals – it has spent $25bn on 30 different acquisitions over the past three years – that bring it technology, customers and market share. For example Oracle's acquisition of Hyperion is widely seen as a direct shot across the bow of SAP, targeting Hyperion CPM customers running SAP ERP systems. Oracle president Charles Phillips has even gone on record saying that "Hyperion's software will the lens through which SAP's most important customers view and analyze their underlying SAP ERP data." Unofficial Tidbits & Considerations -- When I interviewed Wilmington in a nice Embarcadero eatery in San Francisco this February he was adamant that the company's future was as an independent company. But he did however say "never say never" when it came to an acquisition talk. I guess that comment has well and truly come home to roost now. So I'll let him off the hook. Clearly SAP tabled a good offer that filled deep pockets. -- Will OutlookSoft pull the plug on the Oracle 10g support it introduced in April last year, and if will customers be forced into the arms of Oracle-owned Hyperion for their daily CPM dose? Now that SAP NetWeaver is the future BI infrastructure of choice for the Microsoft-friendly OutlookSoft system, will that mean late nights and strong coffee for SAP's internal development team? There's no sign of any previous integration being done between the two platforms before. -- What now of poor Pilot Software, who has seen itself shoved out of the CPM limelight under SAP?
Posted by madansheina in BI | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0) May 08, 2007It's BI 2.0, Stupid!
Call me stupid but am I the only one that's been reading a lot of articles and listening to lot of seminars about "Business Intelligence 2.0" and still doesn't get it? So-called 2.0 technologies – particularly the Web variety – are creeping their way to the top of conference agendas and no doubt many corporate IT meetings. Vendors and analysts are banging the 2.0 drum loudly, each throwing up their own definition of what 2.0 means – technically, metaphorically, and even by what it was not. One pithy gem offered by one so-called industry analyst at a recent BI Summit is that "BI 2.0 is not about more suppliers." Nice to know. But still leaves me in the dark as to what BI 2.0 is. Here are just a few of the topics that I've heard to be consistent with the BI 2.0 over the past six months: Real-time BI, an architecture that's been kicking around for a decade that refers to a fundamental shift away from latency-ridden "load-query-analyze" data warehouses towards proactive event-driven analysis; Pervasive BI, characterized by wide-scale web-deployment and user-friendly tools; Embedded analytics in business processes and operational business applications to drive smarter processes and close the gap between analysis and action; A new generation of self-sufficiency and interactivity that shifts the balance away from control away from IT departments towards BI business users. I could go one here. But the point I'm trying to make is BI 2.0 is a fluid term that can't (as yet) be pinned down to any consistent definition. And without that it becomes as esoteric as Edward De Bono's "Po" creative thinking system. The underlying technology components and concepts that seem to prop up BI 2.0 aren't necessarily new either. Yet this hasn't stopped BI vendors and analysts (yes we're also to blame) from attaching the BI 2.0 moniker to their products, marketing collateral and conference agendas – even in the absence of an agreed universal understanding of what it entails. So why does the industry feel compelled to use it? BI 2.0 is really a direct response to the Web 2.0 hype – another can of worms that's usually meant to refer to Ajax-style applications, greater user interaction with on-screen data and loosely coupled mash-up architectures and more. Taking a BI 2.0 tag onto your products tells the market that your BI strategy is somehow advancing. Anything Web 2.0 inherently implies modern technology and architectures that show you're not a Luddite when it comes to keeping up with the Jones' in the corporate IT world. By adding the 2.0 moniker to their products, BI vendors, particularly startups entering the market, also want to portray themselves as both visionary and disruptive forces. Why? Because it’s the only way they can hope to dislodge conservative IT dollars being spent on "safe" bets in BI like Business Objects, Hyperion, Cognos, Oracle, IBM, SAP, and Microsoft. If the market is poised to launch itself into a BI 2.0 wave, then whatever happened to BI 1.0 you might ask? When BI first hit the IT scene some thirty years ago, on one ever called it a 1.0 release. Yet three decades later, we're on the verge of longest major point releases in possibly the history of IT! But if you take a look at the laundry list of technologies now being thrown under the 2.0 umbrella – performance management, corporate portals, embedded BI, search, advanced visualization and predictive analytics – there's not much radically new in BI 2.0 that's not already been proposed sometime over the last five years. Therefore I'm wondering if in five years to come whether we'll be talking about a BI 2.5 point release or a full step up to BI 3.0, whatever that might be. Perhaps a better take on explaining this "version upgrade" of BI is a confluence of technical and business trends that have been evolving BI over the past decade, rather than thinking of it as a sudden sea-change in functionality, tools and how we build, buy or implement BI. BI 1.0 is certainly not done and dusted. And no one is going to throw away their maturing BI 1.0 investments overnight because BI 2.0 is built on the same technical foundation. Bottom line BI 2.0 is more hip than hype right now. BI 2.0 itself is a meaningless term that can mean whatever it wants to anyone – it's not even a standard and there's no request for comments around it. BI 2.0 isn't a product or platform and certainly can't be labeled as a specific point release since the underlying technologies it relies on are not new. Technically at least, BI 2.0 sounds like a classic case of mature Cabarnet in a new 2007 bottle. Posted by madansheina in BI | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0) May 02, 2007Cartesis Falls Victim to CPM Consolidation
Business Objects' swoop for Cartesis continues a consolidation trend in the business intelligence (BI) and corporate performance management (CPM) markets that shows no signs of abating. CPM is still a relatively immature market compared to BI. Most of the corporate spending on CPM (two thirds according to some estimates) is on services rather than software, which means that companies are still not getting enterprise CPM from a single vendor and continue to deploy and integrate multiple CPM applications from different vendors. As a result CPM vendors are now keener than ever to grow their suites either organically through internal development or (more likely) via merger & acquisition to provide enterprise-wide coverage and functionality. The consolidation also shows the convergence between BI and CPM in a single platform umbrella. All the major BI players today equally market themselves as CPM players. And every CPM vendors combines their applications with a BI platform, a transactional platform, or both. Yet the jury is still out on whether customers today are really looking for a single platform? After all CFOs and CIOs have radically different agendas. Many companies still regard BI and CPM as separate initiatives, run and managed by different people, even though they might be linked technologically. The reality is that CPM consolidation is being driven by software vendors that want to expand the functionality of their offerings, bolster their declining BI tools revenue streams, and possibly increase their buyout price. The latter is becoming an increasingly likely exit strategy for the remaining niche CPM vendors like OutlookSoft or Longview or Clarity as the market expands and matures. But that doesn't necessarily mean the end of the independent CPM market. Like the BI and ETL marketplaces, niche CPM vendors can only grow to a certain size when they're up against the larger software incumbents. SAP, Microsoft, IBM and others are also expanding their BI and CPM offerings and are formidable competitors. They are on the prowl for acquisitions as you read this. Posted by madansheina in BI | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0) Business Objects CPM - Full Steam Ahead
About three years ago I asked Business Objects how they intended to address corporate performance management (CPM), especially as its chief rivals Cognos and Hyperion Solutions were both aggressively targeting this fast growing segment of the business intelligence (BI) market. I was told unequivocally that the right strategy was to remain a "neutral" and "pure-play" business intelligence platform provider that supports best-of-breed CPM applications from partners. Fast forward several years, and that strategy has been quietly binned. Business Objects, recognizing the high-growth potential of CPM applications over BI tools, not to mention that it was quickly running out of CPM partners, was stirred into action and snapped up SRC Software in July 2005, ALG Software in September 2006, and last week Cartesis. SRC and ALG handed Business Objects a sound technological foundation for a competitive CPM portfolio. So why did Business Objects feel a need to dip into its pockets once again? What Business Objects CPM lacked was a stronger focus on financial consolidation and management reporting. Cartesis now fills that gap with a set of industrial-strength inter-company consolidation and reconciliation tools. The acquisition is really a competitive response to another recent consolidation event. The 800-pound gorilla in financially-oriented CPM is Hyperion, which is now being bought by Oracle. Cartesis' acquisition seems like a tactical counter move, targeting the same CFO audience that Hyperion is going after. It is also a clear signal to Oracle and other CPM rivals that Business Objects is ready to make strategic acquisitions to compete in financial CPM space. The acquisition also continues to diversify the company product strategy – taking it "up-market" beyond its core reporting tools business, which is stagnant, to more strategically focused and higher-value analytic applications. Rivals of course haven't pulled any punches in trying to put a dampener on the deal, arguing that Business Objects is playing catch-up in CPM and now faces a stiff challenge rationalizing a "Noah's Arc" of overlapping functionality between Cartesis and Business Objects' current CPM products, especially in the areas of consolidation, budgeting and planning, as well as integrating its CPM assets into its core XI BI platform. But then again Cognos and Hyperion have both struggled with the same issues themselves and have only just now started to unify their CPM and BI platforms after five-odd years of articulating a vision of an integrated platform. Competitor snipes aside, there are a lot of other positives to this deal. Business Objects has a fairly decent track record of absorbing companies and their technologies from a customer perspective – think Acta Technology for data integration and Crystal Reports for enterprise reporting. Business Objects also struck a good deal. The purchase price of $300m is less than two and half times revenue – not what you'd call a premium price-tag when you consider that Hyperion went for 3.7 times its revenues. But it's quite expensive when you think it paid only $100m for SRC. The French history of Cartesis should make it a good cultural fit for Paris-based Business Objects. Like Business Objects, Cartesis demonstrates a mix of European and US values and many of its sales and marketing staff will now re-join their former employer – which could be a good or bad thing for them. Finally Cartesis will now benefit from Business Objects' strong marketing which promises to unlock the full potential of its financial CPM suite. Posted by madansheina in BI | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0) April 30, 2007Spreadsheets: 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 23, 2007Business 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 18, 2007BI 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) |
