Business Intelligence for Business People

5 Ways to Save Organizations Millions

2010-11-06T18:00:00.000-07:00

Update: I believe in giving credit where credit is due so it should be mentioned that this post was inspired by another blogger, David Crandall of Heroic Destiny (www.heroicdestiny.com) and on Twitter: @davidcrandall. He has good content on growing your blog through interviews, which I have also found successful over the years through my 10 Q&A posts with executives. Thanks David!

Two Sides of the Same Coin

We've worked in the field of Business Intelligence for years, cumulatively decades. During that time, we've helped clients save millions of dollars.

We've also been in management positions as the recipient of information from Business Intelligence systems. During those times, we saw business people frustrated, limited, and spending millions of dollars on systems they didn’t have to.

You Are Not Alone

We believe passionately in efficient and effective businesses; and business people being empowered with their own information. Some of you might be thinking, “We have a Data Warehouse and cubes and reports! We have what we need so what are you talking about?”

Excellent question but first I want to share with you WHY I’m even bringing this up. We sat with a prospective client today talking about their current problems. I mentioned they weren’t alone, that I’ve seen this in many organizations, and proceeded to mention a few examples. Then it dawned on me.

I don’t want to tell people “you’re not alone” anymore. I don’t want to share examples of business disempowerment. Instead, I want to tell them they are one of the few left doing it that way!

So the best way to bring about this kind of change is to give away the knowledge. This is scary in an “information is power” industry but the gains/benefits/change out weigh the competitive edge we may lose.

Getting Back to Saving Millions

So what exactly are we giving away? We are sharing with you three ways to start the change within your own organization. We have five ways but we’re keeping two for some competitive advantage!

The goals are to a) save money by reducing costs and automating repetitive tasks, and b) make better decisions with readily available, fresh, accurate information.

Here are three specific ways that can change your organization and save money:

1. Identify significant points of interest

It’s more than asking what reports they need. People require different types of information to base their decisions upon. Look for places where it’s difficult to find answers. Analysts, key individuals, management are good places to start. They may not even know the points of interest they are missing so focus on what’s known first. When points of interest are identified, better decisions can be made.

2. Free people to do more creative work

When someone is doing repetitive tasks, the same task over and over, this is a candidate for automation. When tasks are automated, it frees people to do other creative work or spending time analyzing and producing answers. Find tasks that copy data into spreadsheets, use side of desk documents or databases, or manually aggregate numbers from reports. There is enough work for people without having to do repetitive tasks.

3. Aggregate One or More Sources

Bringing sources of data together will have roadblocks. Privacy of information,who controls the data, who has access to the data are hurdles that can be overcome with the right tack and skill. The benefit is being able to manipulate and translate the data into information. Data quality improvement and aggregating multiple sources can give more accurate answers but are not always needed.

Common sense should prevail for this point. And lots of it! I’m reminded of the adage, “when you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail”. So keep in mind a centralized data warehouse isn’t always the answer. If one already exists, adding to it isn’t always the answer either. Think: efficiency, value versus cost, and that the business is constantly changing. Typically data warehouses are unable to keep up to business change.

And here's a bonus point for 3.5 ways that we're giving away.

Different Tools for Different Roles

Finding the available tools in the Business Intelligence market is hard. There are so many. However, choosing the ‘best fit’ tool can be even harder when you include the politics, costs, and persuasive sales people. We’ll talk more about this in a later post.

You may have realized while reading this post that these techniques do more than just save money, they also help your decision makers. We find when we go through this process with clients, they come away with a focus on what they really need to know and the importance of giving decision makers and analysts access to the information.

LucidEra a casualty of poor design

2009-10-27T15:33:00.000-07:00

The rumors could be more than rumors for the SaaS BI company that focused on analytics for Salesforce.com. LucidEra used a variety of open source BI software to address a market need. People wanted SaaS BI and were paying for it. So what was the problem?

If you haven't heard, the rumor is that LucidEra is no longer in business.

I want to say rumor until someone from the company verifies it. However I've heard from a couple sources now, which is good enough for me to publish this post. Plus their blog is down. Some Salesforce.com customers are looking for BI vendors again. And senior executives have moved onto other companies.

What went wrong?

Rumor #1: LucidEra had more servers than NetSuite!

One advantage that SaaS should bring to the table is ease of scalability. Without that you're just on-premise software in someone else's data center adding servers for new customers. SaaS architecture needs to have automated scalability.

Rumor #2: Not a multi-tenant architecture.

A few things could have taken them away from a pure multi-tenant architecture. The open source BI software, like Mondrian, may not have lended itself well to multi-tenancy. (Maybe someone technically savvy could verify or refute this?) Another issue can be the data model design. Replicating data models for each new customer isn't multi-tenancy. I'm not sure why or where LucidEra moved away from a pure SaaS model. But that's what I'm hearing.

Rumor #3: Customers loved them and their product.

If you want to please your customers, find out how LucidEra did their sales and customer support. They are an example of how a SaaS business needs excellent sales and customer support AND savvy engineers and architects.

At least this casualty wasn't because of the economy or so the rumors go.

BI only used by 8%, what is the point

2009-08-10T11:49:00.000-07:00

It's hard to hear about the proverbial glass ceiling with the Business Intelligence (and data warehousing) industry. This ceiling acts as an invisible force stopping the industry from moving up or beyond it's current paradigm. Perhaps the holy grail is on the other side; or maybe this is the end. And really there are only two choices: assume the ceiling cannot be broken and live happily or innovate around it breaking past the barrier and into more chaos and opportunity.

Shawn Dolley mentioned Netezza's new blog, Previously Impossible. They quote a survey that shows just over 8 percent of employees actually use BI tools. And this is for BI-using organizations! The article also talks about the inflated usage statistics by BI vendors (they want to show value and sell more user licenses - usage is a must-have metric).

Many people mention the high cost of BI/DW. I wouldn't mind that so much if there was equal value in the results, the ROI. I think any MBA would be hard pressed to find positive ROI with only 8 percent of employees using such a costly system. However, companies pay for large BI/DW initiatives either out of necessity or ignorance.

Let's say it's out of necessity with the mounds of data being captured daily.

Now what. There is a need for information but there is still much pain with BI pre and post implementation. Some vendors will jump on the "low cost" wagon with starter kits, blueprints, configuration tools, cheaper hardware, etc. The problem I hope more people are looking at, the real glass ceiling problem, is addressing the question, "why are so few using BI?"

Look at how many people use Google to research or find information. Google's search success is because it's easy and quick! When my father who is 73 can find stuff that's a testimonial! Alternatively BI is still too confusing for the general employee. Dashboards. Analytical cubes. Reports. Forecasts. Anytime you need more than a few hours training (and re-training when you haven't used it for a month), it's too much. This, of course, assumes "BI for the masses".

So will BI ever get to the ease and simplicity where my father could determine the best deal of potato chips and dip mix combination near his location?

10 Questions with Bruce Armstrong, CEO Kickfire

2009-06-16T14:49:00.000-07:00

When you talk with a person who has worked for successful companies and spent time as a venture capitalist sitting on multiple boards, you tend to actively listen to the stories and glean what insight you can. When I spoke with Bruce Armstrong, CEO of Kickfire, it was such a conversation.

Bruce is looking to take Kickfire and disrupt the data warehouse market. Their product, as Bruce put it, helps bridge MySQL (which doesn't understand data warehousing) with data warehousing (which doesn't understand open source). He is now in the midst of a David and Goliath battle with Teradata -- his former employer.

Question: Hi Bruce. Care to describe this battle with Teradata?

Answer: Actually, Tom, we believe the battle is less with Teradata’s existing high-end data warehouse business and more for the vast, under-served data warehouse “mass” market out there. As such, we don’t plan on taking the battle directly to Teradata or anyone else, but rather create a new market by providing affordable, easy-to-deploy data warehouse and data mart appliances for the mass market. The mass market for data warehousing includes rapidly growing small & medium businesses as well as departments in larger organizations who simply can’t afford either their own Teradata machine or in a lot of cases even the charge-backs from central IT to time share on a Teradata machine. So, we hope to be complementary to Teradata, but realize there may be some skirmishes for budget dollars in the market today!

Question: You started as employee #16 at Teradata who boasts Walmart as a customer. Was that your start that brought you to running Kickfire today?

Answer: Yes, I was at Teradata for 15 years, Tom. I worked my way up from programmer to President after we went public and were acquired by NCR/AT&T. I spent almost 10 years in the field working with customers – including Walmart – so I developed a pretty good idea of what they are looking for at the high end. After Teradata, I was GM of the Server Group at Sybase where one of the products I launched was Sybase IQ, the first column-store database on the market. Later, I was EVP of Sales & Marketing at Broadbase – the second column-store database on the market and a pioneer of data marts. Since then, I have been involved in doing due diligence for a lot of the data warehouse startups, including Netezza, Greenplum, and Vertica.

Question: What did you learn from Teradata back then that you are applying to Kickfire today?

Answer: While I learned many things at Teradata that are applicable to Kickfire, the key concept for me was just how different the data warehousing high end is from the mass market. At the high end, once you’re able to break into the market with a new approach, it quickly becomes less about technology and more about services and support. Large customers just simply demand more hand holding. In the mass market, it’s just the opposite. Customers in the mass market expect the product to be highly packaged – easy to buy, install, and manage. They simply can’t afford lots of services and support, so the product needs to deliver high performance in a plug-and-play way.

Question: You have years of history in the data warehouse industry. Care to explain what makes you think the data warehouse industry needs changing?

Answer: While I believe every sector of the data warehouse market is looking for more performance, faster deployments, and lower cost, our goal at Kickfire is not necessarily to change the data warehouse industry but rather to enable more people in the market to take advantage of the benefits that come from data warehousing. Again, we’re going after an under-served market with rapidly growing small and medium sized businesses and departments in enterprises that simply can’t afford Teradata or Netezza. The change that’s required to enable the mass market is to get high-end performance out of a mass-market machine. Kickfire achieves this through our patented parallel-processing SQL chip. In a single chip, we are able to get the performance of dozens of general purpose CPUs. So, in the same way that NVIDIA has radically changed the dynamics of the graphics industry by encoding the graphics processing language in silicon, Kickfire has the same opportunity in the data warehouse industry.

Question: There have been recent acquisitions. Sun purchased MySQL. Then Oracle purchased Sun. Should the MySQL community be concerned?

Answer: We do not think so. We believe that with Solaris, Java, and MySQL, Oracle now has the kind of assets they will need to truly make Microsoft worry. With MySQL, Oracle will finally be able to undercut Microsoft as well as to dominate the high end in databases. As such, we think Oracle is going to continue to invest in MySQL. In fact, Oracle has already proven to be a good steward for InnoDB, the most popular MySQL storage engine they bought several years ago.

Question: About Kickfire, how does this chip technology bridge MySQL with data warehousing?

Answer: MySQL has become the de facto standard for online businesses by virtue of its open source business model and the fact that it has increasingly become production-ready for transaction processing applications. For data warehousing applications, though, MySQL remains very primitive. As such, customers struggle with database volumes as small as 50GB when it comes to reporting and analytics. The primary technical issue with MySQL regarding data warehousing is that MySQL does not have any query parallelization capabilities. This is where Kickfire comes in: using MySQL’s pluggable storage engine API, Kickfire takes over a query from MySQL and provides parallel-processing with the SQL chip allowing queries to run 10x – 1000x faster.

Question: Are you getting any response from the MySQL or data warehouse communities? Are they seeing potential benefit?

Answer: Yes! We have a large and rapidly growing pipeline of opportunities in the MySQL community. One of our early customers, Mamasource, has been using MySQL for years to drive their online community website. However, when it came to analyzing the clickstream data about their community in order to improve the user experience and increase ad revenue, MySQL hit the wall at less than 30GB of data. With Kickfire, Mamasource is now able to run their queries on average 20x faster and up to 600x faster for complex queries. More importantly, Mamasource can now scale their data warehouse to over 300GB, which allows them to increase from just one month of data to a full year.

Question: It's hard to ignore Microsoft. How does Microsoft with SQL Server fit in the Kickfire world view?

Answer: Microsoft and Oracle are the predominant databases in the mass market today. As MySQL continues to penetrate the market (at a rate of 70,000 downloads a day, by the way), Kickfire will be brought into more and more Microsoft and Oracle shops. As such, one could imagine us building more specific features to co-exist with those databases in addition to MySQL.

Question: You spent time as a Venture Capitalist. We won't hold that against you but what are your take-aways from being a VC?

Answer: My time as a venture capitalist was really more about board work than investing. As an operator, the VC firm I was with was interested in my ability to help identify interesting spaces, provide input on business plans and teams, and then work with portfolio companies from a board perspective in order to help generate value for shareholders. A lot of what I did was to dive deep into each function (sales, marketing, development, etc) of the portfolio companies and provide input to the boards (including the CEO’s) on where things could improve. Having served on 20+ boards, I got a pretty good idea of what works and what doesn’t work in start-ups and rapidly growing companies. The lessons I learned were really quite simple:

make sure you have a big market opportunity;
understand very clearly who your customer is and why they should buy from you;
build a very high quality product;
regularly assess your market position and look for ways to change the game in your favor;
don’t be afraid to tell the truth about the business – there’s always more than one way to create a market leader.

Question: It’s been a pleasure talking with you Bruce. Do you have any additional links or information about Kickfire you want to share?

Answer: Thank you – the pleasure’s all mine. Please come visit us at www.kickfire.com!

13% achieve BI objectives

2009-03-16T15:31:00.000-07:00

I'm tired of reading posts about business intelligence needing "an army of consultants", concerns about "losing control over our BI system to a third party", and only 13% achieved their business intelligence objectives.

Or Boris Evelson's quote, "Business intelligence is still an art much more than a science."

Or Hound of the BI-skervilles stating that data is safer inside a company's firewall than outside in a professional data center.

Based on these comments, the way business intelligence is being done today just doesn't make the grade. There are all kinds of statistics to support this.

So where will the change come from? The generation of young people coming into the workforce has the power of change behind them. They do things differently. Chat, instant messenger, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter are their tools. They are information consumers with search, investigation, collaboration skills.

So what about those people and companies wanting to keep and hold onto the status quo.

They say improve and maintain.

I say destroy what we know and reimagine!

They say, "BI needs an army of consultants."

I say, "your scope is too large and unrealistic."

They say, "you need control over our technology."

I say, "leverage the internet and don't reinvent the wheel."

They say that "BI is more an art than a science."

I say, "find repeatability and gain from economies of scale or be one of the 87% of unsuccessful projects."

They say, "we have people with years of experience in business intelligence."

I say, "I love smart, innovative, talented, internet saavy people wanting to turn BI upside down."

They say, "data is safer behind your company firewall."

I say, "what are they smoking. Data centers specialize in security."

They say, "users have a fear of the technology."

I say, "you're using the wrong technology for that audience."

They say, "radical change takes a decade."

I say, "radical change takes a minute. Those hanging onto the past want it to take longer."

They say this is a rant.

I say this is our reality.

The Net Generation

2009-03-12T22:22:00.000-07:00

Don Tapscott is entertaining to watch. He always is pitching his latest book. An eternal salesperson. Today it was Grown Up Digital. Don is calling the Net Generation the generation of kids after Gen X. These kids have grown up with the internet, Facebook, and Twitter. Now that 80 million of them are coming into the workforce, they will have the power to change business and our way of life.

This will affect companies and governments in significant ways. I was inspired to write about change in the healthcare industry.

More from Don's book. In 1983, only 7% of households owned computers. By 2004, the number had grown to 44% and a whopping 60% of those households had children. Now 100% of American schools provide internet access. 75% of teenagers between 12 and 17 years old have mobile phones.

Technology is like the air for Net Gen children. Technology has fostered a new way of communicating, accessing information, and entertaining oneself. They are not obsessed with technology and in fact use it as we would use the tv. It's just where you go for news and entertainment, except the internet is where they go for interactive fun, friends, and communication.

So where does this leave business intelligence?

Well, Net Gen kids have had to search for, rather than simply look at, information. This forces them to develop thinking and investigative skills. Unfortunately the tools they use are nothing like pivot tables, analytical cubes, reports, forecasting models, or statistical tools. Their tools are collaborative. The internet and its global reach is unique. And the world is enabling global communication.

Maybe you will say BI 2.0 is the answer. Although I'm not sure I have seen a truely collaborative platform for corporate data. Sure, some products allow you to tag reports and provide comments. However true collaboration in business intelligence I have yet to see.

Can BI be recession proof

2009-02-24T16:22:00.000-08:00

Seems 2008 was a good year for business intelligence companies. Some of you may not want to read that others are prospering, while many struggle (or at least worry about the future) but business intelligence could be a beacon of light for IT companies.

Here is a small sampling of growth numbers for traditional on-premise vendors that I found. The article also said the business intelligence market is larger than Forrester's estimation of $8.5 billion.

SAP Business Objects posts double digit growth.
IBM Cognos reported 12% revenue growth for first nine months.
Microstrategy growth at 8%.
SAS Institute growth at 5%.

For many companies, these could look like great numbers in these economic times! I hope you are apart of this growth in some shape or form.

Then I thought about the numbers (briefly). Typically B2B sales take several months, maybe 6 - 10 months or longer to complete. Meaning these growth numbers are from sales initiated in 2007 or early 2008. Really not when the recession was causing havoc. So the true test to the resilience of business intelligence will be the 2009 numbers.

"Is anyone looking to buy in 2009?", is the real test.

While growth numbers may or may not be interesting. What could be very interesting would be to compare SaaS BI company growth with traditional on-premise. Get the real numbers out there. Of course, the size of revenues may be apples vs oranges but the percent growth would be interesting, yes?

Here are the 60 fastest growing companies, which SaaS vendors comprise much of this growth. The link is near the end of the post, if you're not interested in healthcare on the internet. Unfortunately I haven't found comparable numbers I could use (send some along if you know of any - we could do quick collaborative analysis).

As an aside, I am reading more and more about business intelligence being an add-on to ERP packages. The first link above mentions the BI market of $8.5 billion doesn't include BI tools packaged with ERP, HR, and customer analytics applications.

I think it's inevitable that on-premise BI's future will be an attachment for ERPs. Where that leaves enterprise-wide BI, I'm not sure. Perhaps the value of enterprise-wide BI will be for large organizations with deep pockets to pay for the on-going costs.

If you're looking for emerging bright light technologies, check out:

predictive analytics
business activity monitoring (or complex event processing)
text analytics
column-based databases

Enjoy!

Don't live in the past, predict the future

2009-02-04T20:07:00.000-08:00

If Jethro Tull is "living in the past". And hindsight is 20/20. Then you're reading this blog in the moment to learn how to predict the future. From a business intelligence perspective, that is.

Thanks to Accutate for providing this short article on Predictive Analytics.

"Predictive analysis can be an extremely useful tool for many different types of businesses. In fact, where there is any type of data warehousing there should be implementation of a business intelligence program that includes predictive analysis. However, in order to learn how your business can profit from this facet of business intelligence, you are going to have to understand exactly how and why predictive analysis works.

The main idea of predictive analysis is to use current and past data to predict future events. The goal of the statistical techniques used in predictive analysis is to determine market patterns, identify risks, and predict potential opportunities for growth. In addition, data relationships can be reordered to determine the most plausible outcome of possible solutions and patterns can be recognized that might have the power to alter the outcome of a probable event.

One of the most important aspects to reliable predictive analysis is data quality. The information provided by predictive analysis can only be as effective as the abundance and accuracy of data available. Data quality is absolutely necessary to the process of predictive analysis. In order to attain accurate business intelligence, companies must maintain quality data. Predictive analysis requires both past and current data about many different things including customers, businesses, products, and the economy. All of this information is used to draw relationships and patterns between sets of data. If the data is accurate and well maintained, then the business intelligence produced will be high quality as well.

In the past, predictive analysis was mainly used for newly emerging technologies. However, in recent years these practices have quickly started to become common for mainstream businesses. There are a few differences between the ways that these techniques are currently used and how they were used in the past. One of the main reasons for these differences is why companies use predictive analysis. In the past, these techniques were used for long-term analysis of market and consumer trends. However, in recent years, the mainstream implementation of predictive analysis techniques has tended to focus more on immediate, tactical uses. Because of the “real-time” nature of this business intelligence, more and more companies are using predictive analysis as standard in making predictions about particular industry markets and consumer trends.

Some of the industries that have started utilizing these business intelligence techniques include telecom, insurance, pharmaceutical, and financial industries. All of the companies in these different business sectors have been able to use predictive analysis to make the right decisions to move their businesses in a positive direction. These processes can help with economic predictions as well as predicting the behavior of businesses and consumers. This type of information, made available in an efficient manner by business intelligence, is understandably invaluable. It can turn a simple prediction into intelligence that is more precise than even the most educated guesses. Predictive analysis with appropriate attention paid to data quality has made it easier than ever for businesses to make accurate market and consumer predictions and thus smarter decisions for the growth of their company."

Microsoft bundles BI software - what they are doing unveiled

2009-01-29T09:55:00.000-08:00

The inevitable nature of big companies is to lock customers into their suite of products. For instance, Oracle started with databases, now bundles financial and integration software with their database. Customers are told it's easier to use their add-on, value-add products than use another vendor and get into compatibility issues. Add-on, value-add products are sometimes free, enticing you even more.

So it comes to no surprise that Microsoft has announced they have tightly bundled their BI software, PerformancePoint Server, with their document management software, Sharepoint. Joined at the hip, you cannot buy one without getting the other.

Comparatively to other BI vendors, Microsoft has the only bundled BI, document management, workflow, collaboration software on the market (I think). IBM Cognos, SAP Business Objects, and Oracle Hyperion are behind with this endeavour - they haven't tightly integrated BI with their other software.

Each of these competitors to Microsoft have similar software breadth but Microsoft's tight integration is a step ahead. It may take years for IBM, SAP, and Oracle to properly integrate BI, document management, workflow and collaboration.

But what about the customers? On the surface, the tight bundling can be viewed as positive. You could be using Sharepoint and now want some BI reporting. Or maybe you have PerformancePoint reports and need to manage documents.

Tackling both BI and document management pieces is challenging. Without considering planning, governance, and skillsets, you will most certainly encounter serious setbacks. Or worse your vision is restricted to an unimpressive rollout.

Here are some problems you may encounter with tight bundling of BI and document management.

Standardizing on Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, SAP technologies requires highly paid IT resources and/or consultants (not great for this economic climate)
Very different skillsets are required to build Sharepoint sites vs PerformancePoint reports (need to hire more staff and/or pay for more IT training)
Goverenance and best practices are very different for managing BI vs documents (different knowledge needed, so twice the effort)
Locked into sole-source agreements (difficult switching BI or document mgmt products for a better and more cost effective product in the future)

Putting those concerns aside, there are positives in Microsoft's story. Microsoft's price point is unbeatable when compared to other on-premise vendors. This can offset additional costs (see points above) and make your entrance into Document Management and Business Intelligence a little easier.

The question is whether the competitors - Oracle, SAP, IBM - will compete directly by integrating their products with BI. Here's my thoughts on where these companies are going.

In the case of SAP Business Objects, it's natural direction would be to simply use Business Objects as the reporting engine for the SAP application (do away with SAP's current BW). Perhaps keep Business Objects as a stand-alone BI product set... perhaps.
Hyperion is a natural fit for Oracle Financials. Hyperion was deeply entrenched within the financials of large companies. But Oracle has many other products that could work along side Hyperion's BI. For instance, SOA/messaging integration replacing traditional ETL (or parts of it).
As for IBM... guessing where they are going is just a gamble. I don't have any insiders that could give me hints. IBM and Cognos were working together prior to the acquisition and you look at the breadth of products, consulting division and R&D coming out of IBM... well your guess is probably as good or better than mine.

Why the auto industry sells lemons

2009-01-02T14:32:00.001-08:00

Let's start the year off with something fun. And Happy New Year everyone.

I was sent this Calvin & Hobbs comic strip about lemonade stands and business [you can find the full strip below]. After I had a good chuckle, it got me thinking. How often is the 'lemonade stand' used as an example for business? Surprisingly quite a few.

In Donald Trump's "The Apprentice", Donald gave each team $250 dollars to start a lemonade stand. There are 3,233 book results from Amazon for 'lemonade stand'. Countless blogs on the subject -- how to be a Lemonaire and Umpqua Bank funding kids starting a lemonade stand.

However Calvin's lemonade stand highlights well known problems with business. One could apply this to the automobile, financial and oil & gas industries. Companies in these industries are either having troubles currently or problems are looming (of course unless your government simply bails your company out).

What are the problems through Calvin's eyes?

Stockholders demand monstrous profit for their investments.
Presidents and CEOs demand exorbitant salaries.
Employees demand high wages and all sorts of company benefits.

Not to be flippant using a comic strip from 10+ years ago to emphasize problems with business today but one must admit there is truth in Calvin's statements.

Here's an idea for those who can navigate Web 2.0, mashup, and BI. The SEC is requesting company filings via XBRL and making them freely available online. What if BI was applied to analyze executive salaries across companies and industries. Or compare financial costs of employee salaries and benefits.

Would there be answers to why the Ford company didn't take the bail out but GM and Chrysler did?

Why would someone do this?

Think of the comparisons that can be done. Comparing trend increases or decreases of salaries. Have union salaries and benefits brought down GM and Chrysler? How does the auto industry compare to the oil & gas industry for executive salaries? Could predictions of bankruptcy be made for other companies because of the comparison made with GM and Chrysler?

[this post used copyrighted Calvin & Hobbs material]

Is Business Objects losing ground?

2008-12-18T14:23:00.000-08:00

"Urgent: Time is running out". The title to an email today from Business Objects, an SAP company. I'm on their mailing list so I get emails once in a while.

But what was so urgent that I couldn't miss out on today? Perhaps they were informing me of a Christmas charity that needed donations to save the Congo children. Maybe a holiday offer of free software licenses? They say it is urgent so it must be important.

Where's the value

So what did I get that required me to jump out of my seat and click on the link in the email before time ran out? I have now "opt-in to receive emails from BO". Wow, time truly was of the essence (I'm trying to contain my sarcasm). I will receive "announcements, events, product offers, technical tips, and other vital information for SAP customers." [I thought I was already signed up, which is how I received the email in the first place??]

Lame campaign

Anyway, this was a lame marketing campaign from BO's marketing department (maybe this is from SAP's marketing department...). Anyway the technique of inducing urgency and fear is decades old and rubs people the wrong way. Our time is valuable, so if it's "urgent", it had better be.

Fear within Business Objects

This could also point to a fear coming from within BO/SAP, although I cannot substantiate this claim. I base this on history where fear marketing comes from companies that are losing ground to competitors. Or they simply go delusional (like the automakers who continued marketing the same gas guzzling vehicles when the economy and environment were screaming for change). They are detached from their customers.

I suspect Business Objects has a strong revenue base from existing customers and services so I'm not trying to induce fear that BO will be asking for Federal bailout money. But maybe they are seeing declines in new customers and new license revenue.

For instance, I think it is safe to say they failed with their Insight Portal (sorry I can't find the link), failing with their Information On Demand, and I don't see them getting much uptake from their BI On Demand web portal.

Until something more substantial comes out, I'll wait for future correspondence from BO like a 7 year old child waiting for Santa on Christmas Eve.

Strategy for starting Business Intelligence

2008-12-18T11:45:00.000-08:00

There is much focus needed by different skilled people to create a new Business Intelligence system. Sometimes we get lost in the details ('forest through the trees'). More importantly, if your boat isn't set in the right direction from the beginning, you may end up sailing around for far too long and costing you more than it should.

I was reminded of this recently by Mark Fillmore from Actuate. Below is an article that talks about starting a Business Intelligence strategy. Obviously it's best to use strategic thinking from the start but even with an existing BI system, these thoughts can help refocus your BI plans.

Making Business Intelligence Work for You

Companies large and small can benefit from a well thought out business intelligence strategy, but developing that strategy can sometimes be more challenging than implementing a business intelligence program. To make sure that your company is getting the most out of your BI program, make sure that you define your goals and have a plan for the information you generate before you start collecting and analyzing data.

First Steps

Assess your current system of data collection. How you collect your data will make a difference in how complete your information is, which will in turn affect the results of your business intelligence program. Make sure that if you need historical data on your company or customers that you know where it is and how to access it. You’ll also need to take some time to understand your business needs and make a rough road map for how you would like your business to transform. Focus your attention on a few operational objective that can be achieved both short and long term.

Planning Your Strategy

Start with your vision of where you would like your company to be in 3 to 5 years. Pick specific goals that can be achieved with the assistance of a good business intelligence program. These goals should have measurable success rates or key performance indicators. You will use your key performance indicators (KPIs) as milestones for how close you are to accomplishing your goals. You can then set up your information infrastructure to collect the necessary data that can be analyzed and turned into information, which can be used to make effective decisions for your company.

In order to pick the most worthwhile goals, you must understand what the desired end result is. You will have to ask yourself what you will do with the business intelligence information your program generates once you have it. Otherwise, you will have a vast amount of information and no way to strategize around it. In companies without a comprehensive long-term plan, decision makers react to the information they get from their data without understanding the far-reaching consequences of their actions.

Another important thing to think about before you implement your program is what your options are once you have the information. Often companies have an idea of how they want to move forward and are looking to the business intelligence information generated by their BI program to support their current strategy. They soon learn that the information is not always in line with their current plan. Brainstorm all possible outcomes of your business intelligence program and think of ways that your company can improve based on the different results. You probably won’t be able to come up with every single possibility, but you will be prepared to think creatively when your BI program starts to generate useful information.

Lastly, remember why you are implementing this program. Business intelligence can be a huge asset to your business, but if you focus on the data and not on what the data can do for your company, your energy is misplaced. Before you become overwhelmed with data warehousing and data integration initiatives, take a step back and refocus on your company’s goals.

Everything as a Service

2008-12-04T23:39:00.000-08:00

The trend has been coming for some time, so I've decided to coin the term "Everything as a Service". It started with SaaS (software as a service), which Salesforce made popular, and the "as a Service" has found it's way into many marketing tag lines. Do a Google search just to see what turns up...

Software as a Service
Platform as a Service
Integration as a Service
SQL as a Service
Monitoring as a Service (RedHat pdf)
Information as a Service
even Desktop as a Service?
and now Everything as a Service!

And you can quickly go from "as a Service" to cloud computing conversations these days. It is turning into an elite club who use jargon to create this new technology industry. I'm not slamming the concepts, just the proliferation of marketing "as a Service". And I would say they all sell their "services" the same way. We're cheaper than traditional. We have the expertise, so you don't need it. Just plug us in and leave anytime.

Marketing campaigns aside, of particular interest is Information as a Service (IaaS?). DM Review explains IaaS as:

"Information as a Service, means you can deliver Business Intelligence snippets to a wide variety of applications and users, when they need it. Rather than 10 or 20 percent of your company's employees accessing your BI repositories, all of your employees can gain access to it — and not just through a query and reporting tool."

In my opinion, IaaS by this definition is one path BI should move towards. Imagine a world where data is no longer viewed in tabular reports or analytical cubes. A world where analysts and IT are not the keepers of information. Analysts and IT need to play a part absolutely. I'm saying it just needs to be easier to access for business people and relevant to one's job.

Yes, we still need the ability to ad hoc report and analyze data. Because sometimes you just don't know exactly what you're looking for. But for most people, you just need the simple answer.

So does IaaS only pertain to Business Intelligence?

According to IBM, IaaS is about SOA. Another collision between traditional BI from DM Review and SOA thinkers like IBM. I would tend to agree with SOA as being IaaS enabled. There just isn't much out there about requesting data from your BI system as a service. You consume BI through desktop or web reporting tools. That's it. So IBM may be more correct.

However we do have SaaS BI. Here BI can fit within the software space and be hosted on the web, where BI is a service, of sorts. Not the greatest option in my opinion. How long will it take before Salesforce.com acquires a SaaS BI vendor and makes them simply a reporting tool for Salesforce CRM? Don't you think it's easy to think of SaaS BI as an attachment to applications, like SAP, Oracle Financials, and such? In fact, that is what happened with the on-premise space with Cognos, BO, and Hyperion. Soon these BI toolsets will cease to be open BI platforms. Once IBM, SAP and Oracle make them more proprietary, the choices will be narrowed.

Now back to my "Everything as a Service".

Do you think we are going there? Where everything we want - software, information, SQL, cloud computing - can be purchased for a monthly fee and plugged in when needed? I see the giants, like Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Sun, etc using their merger & acquisition engines to be that one stop shop for web computing, similar to what IBM, Oracle, and SAP did with the on-premise BI vendors.

Where BI fits into this picture is still unwritten. How much of a player BI will be, well that may already be written based on the recent on-premise acquisitions. So we can only wait and see how it plays out in the web, cloud, "as a Service" world for BI.

Worst practices, who's got them

2008-11-17T12:17:00.000-08:00

Learning from the mistakes of others is the way to go. No need to blaze a new path. It's all been done before. And BI has years of this "experience"; DW has "failures" from decades prior too.

This is backed up by Madan Sheina's article:

87% of BI projects in the UK don't live up to expectations.
25% of those projects are going over budget.
Only 50% of end users were satisfied with the BI system

Maybe you're planning to implement BI in your organization. Perhaps you have a BI system but you're not getting the benefits you expect. It's an unruly world in the BI space. Data is a major problem. Tools are another. It's costly and takes lots of your time and effort.

So what are you going to do about it?

You could read Peter Graham's posts about Kevin Quinn's "Worst Practices" whitepaper (saving you from signing up your email address).

Or read the following, which incorporates Kevin's ideas of worst practices but stays away from the marketing of a toolset vendor.

Let's start with the customers, or more specifically the business user. After all this is who BI is meant for. I figure adoption of BI tools is really low. I don't have a specific statistic but I find them difficult to use. People don't have the time to learn a new tool AND don't have the time to understand how to interpret the data.

Apply Tom's Spandex Rule: Just because you can wear spandex shorts, doesn't mean you should! (you know who you are)

Match what the people are asking for and reign in your project team. They can do it all given enough time. A zillion reports. Lots of dimensions, filters, and ranges. However, your BI system should provide what is being asked for. Stay away from the "it would be cool if..." until several years later when people want more.

Ah Excel.

Should you force people away from Excel to use this new BI system? Maybe. Maybe not. Some say Excel is preferred because of it's familiarity and simplicity. Well I think the majority of people who have used Excel don't know how to create a pivot table or know why they should use one.

So in my opinion, Excel is used because it is quick! No involvement from IT. They can do it themselves until it works for them. Typically they are looking to solve a business problem, they just need the evidence.

BI just made their lives a whole lot more complicated. Now they need to write a request for what they want. Then when they get it, it's in this strange BI tool. At which point they copy it into Excel and continue on. Granted they probably have more data than before and cleaner data for sure.

Which brings us to the data warehouse. Yes, a storage area for internal data. What about data external to the organization? Many would caution the use of external sources because of inconsistencies, not having control of the quality, difficulties aligning with the data warehouse, etc.

Let me ask you, "who is the biggest data provider in the world?" Google. What do they do differently? They allow the consumer to determine whether the data is relevant and give them access to everything. They've empowered people with information access.

We need to let it go. The days of the data warehouse or BI team or IT department controlling all the data should come to an end. The business should get access to information they want and need, internal or external, in a BI tool or Excel and when they want/need it.

For instance, Chevron has 200,000 employees worldwide and uses MSFT BI to deliver specific, targeted information to many of them. Starbucks uses Microstrategy to publish in-store metrics to every store manager. Boeing uses MSFT BI to provide manufacturing performance metrics for managers.

These are all extremely large organizations and yet they aren't pushing out tons of cubes, reports, and dashboards. BI is not a central focus for their employees but it does give them targeted information specific to their needs.

Remember Tom's Spandex Rule. Just because they could, doesn't mean they did.

10 Questions with Mark Windrim

2008-11-07T13:28:00.000-08:00

The "data warehouse for anyone who needs it" has gone open source. I previously talked with Miriam Tuerk, Infobright’s CEO, when the company launched. Recently I spoke with Mark Windrim, VP of Community for Infobright, who is at the helm promoting their open source data warehouse, Infobright Community Edition (ICE). Mark, as I discovered, has a history of spearheading initiatives from their infancy.

In the 90s, Mark started a community called MAGIC while working at Apple Computer. MAGIC grew quickly into one of the largest ISPs serving the Toronto, Canada region. At that time MAGIC was the largest Macintosh user group in the world. He left to join Newstar Technologies in 1996 (where he met Miriam). Newstar evolved and became BCE Emergis.

Now his focus is set squarely on building an open source community for Infobright. It won't be easy. Starting a community in an established company with an existing product - a paid product at that – can be even more challenging.

Question: So Mark, let's get right to it. Why did Infobright decide to go open source?

Answer: As you may know, Infobright built its technology underneath MySQL so we have always had open source roots. Open source has always been part of our plan. In terms of timing, we wanted to prove out our technology with early customers before releasing an open source version. We wanted to make sure it was highly scalable, easy to download and implement, and robust - not an immature project. We see a large untapped opportunity in the market to bring an ultra low-cost, easy-to-use data warehouse to many companies who don’t have the big budgets and resources needed to implement traditional solutions. Open source is the best way to enable them to try it.

Question: What does your community ecosystem look like today?

Answer: We’ve got our main infobright.org site that contains information about ICE. It supports a Wiki and forums where users can mingle and get support directly from Infobright and other community members. We have a great relationship with MySQL/Sun and continue to work closely with them in supporting the open source data warehousing community with ICE. Additionally, we are building partnerships with many organizations. Today, those partners include Pentaho, Jaspersoft and Talend, and we work with their communities in addition to our own.

Infobright also started to build out our integration communities through relationships with OpenBI in Chicago and Lincube in Stockholm, Sweden. Many more are to come. Both OpenBI and Lincube have extensive experience in implementing BI Solutions with open source offerings.

Question: What is the planned direction for your new open source community over the next few years?

Answer: We will be adding a great deal of educational content about data warehousing. The Infobright software itself will be enhanced and updated on a monthly basis. Since the ICE launch, we have already added a 32-bit version of the product and a new release has been posted to the community.

The goal is to create an environment where people can go to be introduced to data warehousing, as well as receive help both from Infobright and the community itself. We’ve begun offering free webinars as an introduction to data warehousing, and the response (and attendance, I might add) has been very good. Many of our community members are turning to us because their current platform is no longer able to meet their requirements, and they’re starting to build data warehouses as a result. Normally that is a very expensive proposition but open source, and ICE, has made it available to the masses. We want to be that go-to location when individuals and businesses need to know how to build these systems.

Infobright will also be adding content about implementing an open source data warehouse through support of our partners. We’re already moving down that path and recently announced an open source bundle with Jaspersoft. Shortly you will see more of this as we try and make the on ramp to open source data warehousing as easy as possible.

Question: What challenges have you encountered starting an open source model within a company selling a paid product?

Answer: We had to engage the entire Infobright team in the vision of a different kind of company. Everyone’s job was going to change in some way and the venture would only be successful with 100 percent employee participation. To be honest, that education process was fairly complex. We implemented a comprehensive plan for the entire company over six months to ensure that everyone was on the same page, and that we had everything absolutely ready. We also researched other open source projects – both successful and unsuccessful ones to understand the best practices of open source. Those learnings have impacted everyone in some manner and through them we have developed guidelines for all to follow.

Question: Infobright's open source database was released in September 2008. So far, what has been the response?

Answer: Response to Infobright’s open source announcement has been incredible! Immediately after launch it became apparent that the community wanted a 32-bit version of ICE, even though we had previously thought that the software needed more memory in the form of a 64-bit version. We responded immediately by offering a 32-bit version, and it quickly became the hottest download on the site. Infobright is also receiving reports from community members that they are using ICE in ways that we never would have thought was a great fit for us, but the sheer volume of people using the platform is giving us some fantastic new insights into where we need to focus our future efforts. I don’t think there is a day that goes by where there isn’t an “oh wow” comment coming from a community member that loves ICE. Now the community is asking us for Windows support, so you’ll be seeing that coming down the pipe shortly.

Question: How has the open source initiative affected Infobright as a company?

Answer: As I mentioned earlier, the way we do virtually everything has changed. Infobright.org community members commenting on code, or recommending new features, has a direct impact on our product roadmap. With many more people using Infobright’s software, we are discovering new ways people can benefit from its use not previously considered. For example, we are now looking into use cases that didn’t make sense to us six months ago - such exploration is a direct result of community members having an impact on the organization. From a business perspective, the last six weeks has been a hockey stick in terms of number of new customers and revenue. By the end of Q1, we expect to have surpassed most, if not all, of our competitors in terms of number of customers using our product. And more users result in a better product – we aspire to deliver the best product in the market!

Question: Has the direction of Infobright changed as a result of being an active part of the open source community?

Answer: Yes, absolutely. The expectations of the open source user are different than that of the commercial one. The open source user demands from a technical perspective are very high – you can’t hide issues and weaknesses; your bug list is entirely public. They’re doing a phenomenal amount of testing and performance stress testing. All these insights benefit every part of Infobright as we add new features to ICE. Such feedback is even changing the types of webinars we present, which user groups on which we focus, and what features we add to the product. We also closely monitor a variety of metrics in order to determine the best ways to support the Infobright.org community.

Question: There is probably the value proposition of lower cost, less implementation time, and less maintenance effort. However, can an organization really run an enterprise-wide data warehouse on open source?

Answer: Every aspect of a data warehouse infrastructure can utilize open source technologies. A company can utilize Linux as the operating system and integrate with open source ETL tools like Talend or Kettle (Pentaho). Many open source platforms will use their own home grown ETL processes built upon Python, Perl, or Ruby (or C/C++, for that matter). The data warehouse can be built upon ICE, and users can use BI tools like Jaspersoft or Pentaho. Support is readily available for purchase or for free through community forums. Every one of these platforms is extremely robust and stable. There is no reason that an organization could not run their data warehouse using open source technologies.

And businesses are recognizing this. Open source BI is a fact of life in enterprises across industry. A recent Gartner survey highlighted that by the end of this year 69 percent of enterprises surveyed either plan to have implemented and be using open source databases. And in the area of BI tools, the number is 34 percent (a 100 percent growth over the previous year). These statistics were gathered before the recent economic downturn. Now, companies are even more pressed to find the fastest and most cost effective way to deliver BI and data warehousing solutiuons to their businesses – and that way is open source.

Question: What is the benefit to your partners and developers of being a part of Infobright's open source community?

Answer: In addition to the obvious and huge benefit to end users, the data warehouse is a key enabler of many enterprise applications. As such, our partners and developers will be able to achieve great benefits to their businesses and products thru integration with Infobright. Now organizations can accelerate their business by reducing the cost and time required for the data warehouse component and focusing their value on the application. Additionally, our partners and developers not only support our community, but they cross pollinate each other’s communities as well. With open source, there is much more willingness among partners to support each other.

Question: It’s been a pleasure talking with you Mark. Do you have any additional links or information about Infobright's open source community you want to share?

Answer: We really encourage people to get involved in our forums (www.infobright.org/Forums). There is a vast amount of information about ICE available there and we really appreciate reports on how people are using ICE. We’d also encourage people to look at Pentaho, Jaspersoft and Talend.

Wordle

2008-10-10T00:14:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Darren Cunningham for putting the word out on Wordle. It's a cute Java app that with the right words could give you something fun to play with.

Here's a link to the Wordle based on the BI for Business People blog.

BI in the year 2020

2008-10-07T20:10:00.000-07:00

A theme heard throughout the Microsoft conference was "thinking bigger about BI". I'm not sure the people from companies who are struggling to get BI started were interested in thinking bigger but I can appreciate their visionary approach.

A panel discussion was setup with a group of senior Microsoft partners to discuss and debate where BI will be in the future, in the year 2020. Moderated by Bob Lokken, Senior Director of Business Intelligence for Microsoft, the panel included:

Greg Todd, Senior Executive, Accenture's Information Management Services practice
Andrew Horgett, Sr. Manager, Microsoft Alliance Team at Dell
Mike Fahey, Director, HP's Product Development
Todd Price, VP, Hitachi's National BI Practice
Terje Rugland, CTO, Profitbase

There were a couple comments about collaboration, social networking, and instant messaging but I would say that is a year or two away from mainstream. Not exactly 2020. They talked about data mining, optimization of the DW, and being proactive. Sigh. These are current topics being worked out by innovative companies today.

However here are the top 10 predictions/recommendations I gathered from the discussion. I'll let you comment on whether you feel these are in line with what you see.

90% of BI will be delivered on mobile devices.
Much larger volumes of data, beyond terabytes, will need to be handled changing the hardware and software paradigm.
Information will be managed by business professionals and not technology professionals.
Do not listen to BI best practices that say "18 months to deliver" and "high costs for licenses/services". We need to think out of the box.
Envision a new role within an organization called the Information Architect (based from a Data Architect). This person understands the entire life cycle of information from where it comes from to where it ends up.
Better adoption of BI will happen when BI is integrated within productivity suites, like Office. BI will be an extension of business productivity.
BI should not be packaged with ERPs because the role for BI should be to integrate disparate systems. However Performance Management should be packaged with ERPs.
BI should be considered a service for business people. Business is used to leveraging services already. However IT is not yet matured to the point of understanding this role.
SaaS BI's success will be based on two serious roadblocks: Data Quality and Data Security.
Organizations will have 2 application footprints: ERP systems for capturing information and IRP (information resource planning) systems for massaging and delivering information.

Did this help with your future BI plans and 5-year implementation roadmap?

[Other MS BI Conference posts:
ETL World Record and 150 TB Fact Tables and
Ben Stein talks about BI]

Ben Stein talks about BI

2008-10-07T19:31:00.000-07:00

How many funny, engaging stories can someone tell in their first 10 minutes of getting on stage? Well Ben Stein surely approached the limit. Ben Stein has done many things on tv and off, been a lawyer, is a well established economist, writer, and columnist.

However for the MS BI Conference crowd of several hundred, his clarity on the financial crisis drew feelings of frustration over the financial community and government mismanagement. He referred to how the financial community could have used a little Business Intelligence -- and could definitely use some now. His clear chronological overview of how the financial community got into this mess (and brought us along with them) was responded to with claps and a few hoots of support.

Briefly Ben lays out the crisis with this:

"It started with the liberals wanting equal housing opportunities for every American."
"Greenspan pushed interest rates down and then banks couldn't make much money from normal mortgages, so they had to be creative."
"Banks came up with Side Bets. Basically banks bet on whether or not mortgage bonds would be paid or failed to be paid." -- Yes banks bet on whether you will pay off your mortgage.
"When house prices fell, costs of price swaps (the side bets) went up. This created such a huge loss that it dwarfed the financial impact from defaulted loans."
"Side bets are the Weapons of Mass Financial Destruction allowed by the Bush administration."

He summarized with "Wall Street has taken trillions out of the economy from everyday people over the years". Needless to say he doesn't agree with the people taking on the risk by giving billions in a bailout package.

Ben Stein also had good things to say but it was clear he was there for his entertainment and inspirational value... a BI tech talk he was not about to do. If you haven't seen him, then he is just like he is on his tv shows, like "Win Ben Stein's Money" and "America's Most Smartest Model".

[Other MS BI Conference posts: ETL World Record and 150 TB Fact Tables and
BI in the year 2020]

ETL World Record and 150TB fact tables

2008-10-06T11:34:00.000-07:00

At the Microsoft BI conference in Seattle today and wanted to give you highlights as I jump from session to session. One point will be about the world record.

MS Message: Think Bigger about BI

MS goal: accelerate decision making using structured and unstructured information.

Trends: Despite BI being on top of CIO spending list, there are less than 20% of people using BI? Why? Still not easy for people to use BI to get their job done.

MS Prediction: BI won't be on top of CIO spending list in the coming 3 years.

Okay about the world record. Microsoft recently set an ETL world record. I didn't even realize there were Olympics for BI but I guess there are. So by using SQL Server, they loaded 1 TB of data within 30 minutes. To put this in context, Oracle's last record was 1 TB within 45 minutes. Of course they are using SQL Server 2008 to accomplish this.

And on that note, Project Madison! If you're interested in large, large volumes of data, this could be the next big leap. An R&D partnership with DATAllegro who produces DW hardware, is building a combination of SQL Server and DATAllegro using massively parallel processing (MPP). They have loaded 150 TB of data with 1 trillion fact table rows using 14 servers. The live demonstration showed response times from Analysis Services reporting within seconds. Impressive.

More as I come across anything that is excellent.

[Other MS BI Conference posts: Ben Stein talks about BI and
BI in the year 2020]

10 Questions with Glen Rabie

2008-09-24T21:23:00.000-07:00

Being in the finance industry may seem boring to many but in Glen Rabie's case it gave him a unique perspective on the challenges a large financial company was having with their information.

Then a life changing event inspired him to become an innovative entrepreneur. Glen founded a company called Yellowfin where they are all about making it easy for people to get access to information.

Question 1: Hi Glen. So what motivated you to do something about improving the BI industry?

Answer: The light went on whilst working on a large data warehouse project for a global financial institution. The project, budgeted at $30M, only rolled out 300 licenses of the BI tool to an organization of 50,000 employees. This is where we saw the opportunity. Reduce the complexity and cost of deploying BI so that every person that needs access to data and analysis, to do their job effectively, can do so.

Question 2: Let's talk about the market. You had an interesting take on the recent acquisitions of Cognos, BO, and Hyperion. What should we expect to see from them with innovations?

Answer: The acquisitions and the high multipliers paid for them put the new owners in a delicate situation. Their primary concern will be to generate a return on their investment, which to do so will mean that additional investment in those products is likely to be stymied. What we have seen since the acquisitions is a greater focus on rationalization of product set rather than news of product improvements. I think this is what we can continue to expect in the short to medium term.

Question 3: Has Cognos, BO, and Hyperion already won the BI tools market? Is there room for new products?

Answer: The top 5 players only own 70% of the market. This compared with most IT markets, such as the database market, can be considered to be highly disaggregated. As for the remaining 30% this is the growing segment. The BI landscape is changing from the traditional high cost but smaller power user deployments to mass deployments. I do not believe that BO, Cognos or Hyperion have the business model to support this change, both in terms of pricing and deployment complexity. It is this which is creating the new opportunity for vendors of easy to deploy, price scalable and browser based solutions.

Question 4: Interesting that BI doesn't have a gorilla in the market. How does that affect our customers?

Answer: In reality BI tools are a critical piece of IT infrastructure. Making a strategic choice is crucial since not all BI tools are a fit for all business scenarios. Without a Gorilla in the market I think it forces customers to evaluate solutions and make business / technical decisions based on their needs. If a gorilla exists then there is a tendency towards ‘me to’ buying behavior. So the current state of play is actually good for customers.

Question 5: You think that BI is complicated but is making the tools easier to use the solution?

Answer: It is part of the solution. There are aspects that will continue to be challenging – not matter the size of deployment you still have to invest in the design of and build the back end processes to support front end analysis. So in terms of ROI the more users of your BI solution the better. Having easy to use tools that can be rolled out with little to no training to many, who then in turn utilize the BI infrastructure to drive business benefit is key. This is where Yellowfin focuses its efforts – it is not just about being easier to use per se, but also easier to deploy (via a browser), easier to administer and manage security etc.

Question 6: The BI industry promotes methodology for an enterprise view and consolidating across the enterprise (e.g. customers across marketing, sales, finance). Does this make sense for the management team?

Answer: Yes and No. The reality is that even in Global organizations Senior Management and the executive team are primarily responsible for and remunerated on their performance within their area of the business. Consolidating data, such as a single view of the customer may have little to no actionable impact for these Managers (Great for analytical Marketing and Customer relationship Managers).

However, for management having a single consolidated view of business performance is critical. The data may exist in data silos but the delivery and presentation may well be consolidated to provide a global view of the organization. This is a large distinction – consolidation of data versus consolidation of presentation.

Question 7: Where are you positioning Yellowfin in the market?

Answer: Yellowfin is positioned as a viable alternative to the traditional vendors – Cognos, Business Objects, Hyperion etc. Our focus though is purely on the presentation layer. We are not building a BI stack. There are plenty of great specialized BI components for ETL, Budgeting and Forecasting which is not our area of specialization. So for we are driven by developing very easy to use presentation layer which can be deployed for 100s and 1000’s of users. It is in this space that we excel.

Question 8: Should learning to use a BI system be as quick and simple as, say, CRM or even Google?

Answer: Yes – for too long there has been this aura surrounding BI that it is a hugely complex undertaking, but let’s be honest with ourselves – when it boils down to it BI is just charts and tables. Well Ok maybe a bit more complex but the mind set has to change, from being a hugely difficult task to making it easy. End users are becoming more analytical and demanding greater access to data - going forward embedded BI applications are going to be seamless to the end user. They will use these tools almost without being aware of them. For companies are not going to have the time or the capability to train the vast majority of day-to-day users in how to use their BI tools – they will have to be easy and intuitive to use.

Question 9: Where do you envision the BI market going over the next 5 or even 10 years?

Answer: he biggest change in the BI market will be the emergence and dominance of Embedded BI. BI as a standalone application is going to be a very small segment of the market.

Embedded BI is needed to support the 1000’s of organizational information stakeholders. Process oriented workers and customers want access to BI at the point when they need it to complete their tasks within the application that they are using for transactional purposes – they do not want to access an alternate application for their reports and data. It is this area of embedded BI that is really going to make BI pervasive, bite size, tailored to the business process and rich in collaborative functionality.

Question 10: Excellent talking with you Glen. Do you have any additional links or information about Yellowfin you want to share?

Answer: Thanks Tom, it’s been a pleasure. If you want to find out more then go to www.yellowfin.bi.

Introducing Business Intelligence Soapbox

2008-09-12T11:49:00.000-07:00

Started a website for people who believe that BI can be done better. This is in infancy stage but Gerad has already posted a very informative discussion. I hope you'll check it out.

Have a complaint? Air it. Have an idea? Share it. Start a discussion. Whatever, it’s up to you. Choose a topic and get involved.

Check out Business Intelligence Soapbox:
http://bisoapbox.ning.com/?xgi=iaxuExR

Stitch your information together

2008-08-25T17:32:00.000-07:00

The future is getting brighter for industries and non-tech people. There are numerous examples of complex technologies presented in a simple fashion and easy to use -- the iPhone and Google Earth are two examples that my 70 yr old father has picked up.

And thanks to Rick Rogers for showing the latest technology from Microsoft Live Labs (and University of Washington) that stitches 2D photos into a 3D view for people with little technology know-how -- Photosynth and here's a YouTube demo.

It's easy. Take photos of a room, for example. Select the photos you want for Photosynth. Photosynth then stitches each photo together to create a 3D view of the room. Easily move around the room in your new 3D world.

It's so easy I may even ask my 70 yr old father to do some "synthing".

However this isn't a review of the Photosynth tool, it's about innovation and improvement... for BI.

Now imagine what BI would be like if you could simply stitch your information together? Pull your customers. Drag sales volumes. Drop products into an information pot. Then BI does the rest. You then navigate the answers. Repeat with new information when ever you need to.

The question is could BI be made simple enough to support business people making decisions in a timely manner? (because it isn't that easy to use today) What if a CFO for a trucking company saw fuel prices starting to skyrocket (we know this can happen in an unpredictable way). The holy grail for BI would allow the CFO to drag a few information pieces together effectively helping decide within minutes whether to increase prices and by how much?

The point being that it's simple enough for a CxO.

Sure we can, you're saying. Just design those questions into the model and push the results into a cube and presto. Well what happens when the business doesn't know all the questions they could ask in the future? The issue comes down to flexibility.

Then more challenges are raised when businesses need to state their questions up front. The reality is business changes. New products, new objectives, new competition. In fact, this inflexibility is, in my opinion, the Achilles heel for BI and many integration styled technologies.

Realistically however, what can really be done about this. Who will overcome the data quality issue. What about conforming dimensions (i.e. people, places, things) across the enterprise. There are many challenges that are taken care of under the BI covers.

So where does that leave us. Can simplicity, real simplicity, be reached through new innovations or will the historical challenges impede progress. We may need more than new toolsets, it may require an entire paradigm shift in thinking.

Challenge the status quo and ask why things are done this way today. Could there be a better way? Let's pave the way forward to a less challenging, less expensive, yet timely way of providing information to those who want it.

"I'd rather be wrong..."

2008-07-18T10:20:00.000-07:00

The point I've heard a few times is, "I'd rather have a wrong number and work out a way to improve (move forward), than spend hours arguing/debating/analyzing what the right number is."

On one occurrence, a client asked me to sit in a mgmt meeting, while I was helping with their business re-org.

They reviewed departmental financial performance reports and a dept head, my client, disagreed with the result of one measure. Swore it couldn't be that low and below target. After a couple minutes of clenched-fists-in-the-air attitude with "I'm going to find out the right answer!", his senior exec boss speaks up briefly with the quote above (or something like it).

I don't know how you feel about this but I'm sure some of you are cringing at the thought of knowing numbers could be wrong in the warehouse and that you were asked not to find the problem. I could just see the perceived value of their BI solution going straight into the crapper.

However, there is something here worth investigating. In the senior executive's eyes, the value of the "historical" performance report, specifically the poorly performing measure, wasn't the accuracy of the number but the identification of poor performance. It was agreed that the number probably wasn't inaccurate enough to make the measure a strong performer.

[I know, red flags are going up but bare with me.]

Could they be sure the measure was a poor performer? No. To confirm this, it would involve the BI group and department managers/staff to verify. I.e. time consuming.

Are they making fact based decisions? Partially. They are moving into the planning stage based on a poorly performing measure.

Is the mgmt team doing what executives do? Absolutely. They are taking the facts as they know them and making a decision (gut-feel perhaps). But they are focused on moving the company forward.

And here falls one dilemma for BI to overcome.

In this example, BI ended at the report or chart or visualization. There was no integration into the management cycle to continue into planning. I'm not talking about the financial genius building a model to show various projections. I mean the outcomes of planning... tasks, deliverables, goals/objectives, etc. BI only comes back into the picture when new reports are needed.

For me, without better integration into the business processes and mgmt cycle, BI will forever by a reporting tool on steroids.

Another dilemma for BI?

The pain to verify numbers. The time/cost to produce new numbers. Anytime you need to involve your ETL developer or cube/report developer to explain how a number was generated costs time and money. It's not their fault, it's the tools they are forced to work with.

BI needs to move more into the "configuration" space. At least needs to move up a level or two in usability to where application building is today. With all the toolboxes, components, and hosted technology available, I feel that "I" could almost write a Web 2.0 app! (okay a very simple one... maybe).

The point being is the technologist's tools need another layer of abstraction/architecture (okay not sure exactly what to call this) to allow quicker time to value.

Caveat: Now don't get me wrong. I think BI has future potential and can provide value. (now here comes the tough love speech) But BI has problems and poor results are seen repeatedly. I want BI to improve so I'm not picking it apart because I have another agenda; I truly want success. Success through learning and change.

BI costs Fortune 500 millions

2008-07-14T08:28:00.000-07:00

I don't normally like to bring bad news up, although the Business Intelligence industry desperately needs a new guiding light. However there is always something to be learned from failures and bad news. Just like the first "F" I received in university... a wake up call for me that kicked me in the ass!

Dynamic Markets did market research, posted by TradingPattern.net and found that "BI failed to impact decision making in US and UK companies."

TradingPattern.net posts about industry risks and value creation. 218 operational execs and front line mgmt were surveyed. Some quick stats for you:

76% were forced to make decisions because not all the info was available in time.
63% believe that BI reports are simply reference documents used to justify after the decision is made.
70% do not receive reports that provide predictions about problems or potential opportunities.

Okay, those aren't great stats for an industry that promotes itself as "providing timely, accurate results to make fact-based decisions." A more alarming stat is the cost to companies -- the impact of inadequate intelligence.

$478,868 in lost revenue!

That really hits home for me. That doesn't include the cost to implement a BI solution in the first place. Now if we take a step back and look at the industry. There are a plethora of tools, consultants, methodologies, and training courses but for the Fortune 500, BI is hurting companies more than it is helping.

Now there may be some very valid reasons for this. Fortune 500 companies are large, very complex business with multiple departments all intermingled. They have high volumes of data that BI needs to distribute over a large geography. Plus just understanding their business to build a BI solution would be a tremendous effort. But as my papi would say, "you're giving into excuses."

So if we assume these stats are true and speak to the Business Intelligence industry in generalities, then we should be trying to figure out, in big leaps and bounds, how to make this work. There needs to be a vision... perhaps many visions on taking BI forward. Other software industries have gone through regular change and come out better for it. Isn't it time for Business Intelligence to go through it's paradigm shift?

BI has it all wrong?

2008-07-10T20:40:00.000-07:00

The BI market is showing a flurry of innovation and new companies over the last year or so. Usually stale industries or high customer pain forces new ideas to come to fruition. Reading blogs of people who actually work on projects or companies that do BI, you can hear some of this pain.

So what can be done to make the experience for customers better? Well thanks Rick Rogers for the link to The Future of BI, by Tom Gonzalez. Some excellent insights and he may be onto something with his ideas for dashboards. May not solve all the problems, but every bit helps.

BI eclipsed by another technology

2008-06-01T12:04:00.000-07:00

After reading an article on BI 2.0 thoughts came to mind that Business Intelligence has essentially become a fancy way to do organizational reporting. Nothing more. BI is simply -- reporting.

Don't confuse my simplification of BI with lack of value. BI can provide value when implemented correctly. However if you consider at a basic level, reporting displays information -- whether it's from one or more sources.

Now if I parking lot the "methods" used to bring information to the forefront (i.e. ETL) and focus on the ways customers use the results, I can consolidate this down to:

reports (including prompted, charts and KPI reports)
OLAP/cubes

I would even strongly challenge that OLAP is simply a navigable report (the answers are fixed and finite). So on the visualization side, the vendors and tools are essentially reporting tools with more features than say, 10 years ago.

In fact, looking at it that way, the acquisitions of BO, Hyperion and Cognos make sense. The acquirers (IBM, Oracle, SAP) simply needed a suite of reporting tools for their ERP applications. Because why would Oracle want their customers using IBM Cognos or SAP BO as the reporting tool on top of Oracle Financials?

Now let's be honest about the backend, ETL. This is data warehousing and DW has had a troubled history of failures. I would guess there are recent failures too. The question to customers is how much are you willing to spend to provide a finite set of inflexible answers based on today's business?

Plus the costs to maintain a data warehouse can be tremendous. In my opinion, a DW loses value a few months after go-live. I remember doing cost/benefit analysis for a government client to determine the value of paying $1m annually to maintain their DW/BI.

There was value in the information but not enough to warrant the cost. Although it was a System Integrators dream project. They didn't want to finish until every system was in the DW. The customer had a feeling of diminishing returns but waited years to do anything about it.

So is there a better way of integrating information? Well there are many techniques that are becoming mainstream, none of which would consider DW/ETL competition. These new technologies share information in real-time or near real-time (no nightly loads or checking the error log in the morning for failed batches).

And where's the new thinking for such things as integrating with information outside of the organization. Integrating and sharing information with partners. I hope BI can become more like Google. New websites are created daily and it only takes a few days before that information can be searched. And probably mostly done through automation. How long does it take for new data and reports to be provided in your BI/DW?

Participate in the first BI sharing network!

2008-05-21T19:32:00.000-07:00

Want to share your ideas about business intelligence and innovation? Want to learn from real people?

Well you can with BI for Business People's own instant Q&A network. It's as simple as asking your question and someone in the network will share their ideas, advice, tips, experience, and more.

I guess you could say we're in beta because we would like people to participate in the Q&A network. Answering questions is all about sharing your experience, being interested in business intelligence & innovation, and getting some recognition (...and also learning more while talking to others).

Asking questions is all about finding the "Got Questions" box at the top right of this site. (if you're question isn't answered, have a little patience and come back soon when more people are participating in the network. Or why not participate yourself!)

This all started during conversations with Fabien Degaugue, Founder and CEO of Muchobene.

10 Questions with Simon Tucker and Ron Dimon

2008-05-15T17:51:00.000-07:00

Before the Strategy Maps, metric stop lights, and planning/forecasting models, organizations focus on setting their strategy. Of course the meaning of strategy means something different for every organization (Mintzberg's 5P's of Strategy).

However having a formal process is key. Even more important is executing on the strategy. While talking with Simon Tucker (CEO) and Ron Dimon (COO) of Business Foundation, they share how they work directly with senior executives using a tangible, interactive methodology to help management execute on their strategy.

And these guys have experience to share previously holding senior level mgmt positions at CSG, Adaytum, Hyperion and Deloitte. So I want to share their insights because I believe they are onto something that can help many organizations.

Question 1: Hi Simon and Ron. Why do you feel organizations need the Business Foundation methodology?

Answer: Hi Tom, thanks for taking the time to talk with us. Many organizations, in our experience, have a major disconnect between their strategic objectives and what they actually measure, monitor, and plan for. They need a way to see what the true drivers of value are, spread-out across the entire enterprise. They’re tired of all the information silos they’ve built and use us to help them create and validate a roadmap to bring together the people, processes and technologies that will deliver improved performance.

Question 2: How does your previous experience at Deloitte and Hyperion support executive teams when discussing strategy?

Answer: Our company has experience dealing with C-level executives across almost every industry: from Retail, Manufacturing, and High-Tech through Non-Profits, Higher Ed, and Government. And it’s very interesting – even though strategies are certainly tied to industries, we’ve found identical problems across all industries, including things like lack of visibility into areas of the business that matter, a lack of understanding how pulling a lever in one area of the business affects outcomes in another area, and one of the big ones, not having a common business language which hinders making repeatable, fact-based decisions.

Question 3: Do organization need help bridging the gap between business and IT, seriously?

Answer: We hear it all the time! IT uses us to drive-out requirements from business functions (Marketing, Sales, Operations, HR, and so on) since we’re able to have the strategy & business conversation, and the business functions use us to help IT understand their problems and the impact those problems have on performance and results. There is much debate these days about the alignment gap between IT and the business; there are dozens of books that try to address this gap (“I.T. Wars” by Scott, “The IT Value Stack” by McCormack, and “Geek Gap” by Pfleging to name just a few). A lot of people talk about it, we actually have a proven methodology to bridge the gap.

We become IT’s “True North” – the long-term solution vision into which they are implementing short term initiatives, and each of our recommendations is validated and justified by the sponsoring business unit, so the entire business has a common solution vision (not one for IT and one Marketing and one for HR and so on).

Question 4: Would you agree, executing on strategy should include processes AND technology?

Answer: Definitely. In fact, when we connect strategy to execution, we focus on the intersection of people (and their role in the organization), process, technology, and data. We also add another dimension of strategic ‘enablers’ to the conversation. This includes the concepts of depth (how far down into the details do you need visibility), horizontal alignment (among the business functions), accountability, and compliance.

Question 5: Without giving away your corporate IP, how do you have conversations on strategy with senior executives? Any special tools?

Answer: That's what makes us unique. In two hours, with no PowerPoint, no laptops or projectors, we have a very rigorous interaction with one or two executives at a time (sometimes we can make three work). The interaction is a business conversation that takes what's already in the executive’s head, his or her unique perspective on the business and what drives value, and puts it all onto one sheet of paper. The 'special tool' is the sheet of paper. We start with our Periodic Table of Business™ database (with over 1,500 KPIs, metrics, measures, and processes – organized by industry and business function) which generates a baseline picture of the business as a matrix: functions and layers. We then tailor the sheet to fit the individual client before we get into the first meeting. So the executive sees their company laid out in a way that makes documenting what’s in their head very simple. And it invariably leads to new insights for the executive. We even had one CEO tell us "it was like being on the psychiatrist’s couch for 2-hours!"

Question 6: Can you help explain why there are so many acronyms for performance management (i.e. BPM, EPM, CPM, xPM)?

Answer: Lee Geishecker of AMR Research coined the term "Corporate Performance Management" in 2001 when she was with Gartner. It was the confluence of business planning with reporting, business intelligence, balanced scorecards and other areas. Hyperion, right after the Arbor acquisition, adopted this concept by bringing together their analytic applications (planning and financial consolidation) with their OLAP engine (Essbase) and later Business Intelligence (from the Brio acquisition). They chose the term "Business Performance Management" to extend the concept out of head-office ("corporate") and into the lines of business. It's a bit unfortunate that there was confusion between that BPM and the existing Business Process Management acronym. Cognos was hot on Hyperion’s heels and kept Gartner's CPM acronym. From there evolved Deloitte's IPM (Integrated Performance Management) and others. Today Oracle and SAP have decided on Enterprise Performance Management to extend the scope even further. To avoid the confusion, we’ve been calling it xPM, the "x" can be any letter you want – the acronym isn’t as important as the value proposition of end-to-end management of performance and getting from strategy to sustainable, predictable execution.

Question 7: Would you say "what-if" modeling is part of Business Intelligence or do you see "what-if" analysis done differently in organizations?

Answer: Business Intelligence has traditionally meant operational and financial monitoring and analysis. xPM (or EPM, BPM, CPM if you like) includes the "what if" modeling component and blends it with BI. So now what matters is that you can model an infinite number of scenarios (what happens to cross-sell and cash flow if I divest this business? What happens to customer acquisition rate if I invest more in sales training?). We see some organizations limited in their what-if modeling and analysis by their systems – some use their ERP for this and get stopped very quickly. This is where xPM on top of ERP makes sense.

But even more importantly, are they modeling and analyzing the right things in the first place? Companies should be modeling and analyzing the key drivers of the business that can deliver the most material margin, revenue, cash flow, market share, or whatever their strategic imperatives dictate.

Question 8: I've seen many organizations with planning cycles that execute on the plan but don't take the time to reforecast. I think you would call this the opposite of "The Learning Organization"?

Answer: Close. It goes beyond re-forecasting. We think organizational learning happens when you not only go back and re-forecast (and/or use a rolling forecast), but you also capture the underlying drivers that caused the shortfall or exceeding of the target. Then make sure those drivers are plugged into your models along with the assumptions and constraints for each driver. Making your models smarter and connecting them to your plans and forecasts gives you better predictability (forecast accuracy, for example) in the business.

Question 9: Would you recommend your methodology for high growth industries and organizations that constantly go through change for competitive adjustments?

Answer: Yes, certainly. The companies that get the most value from our method are those that want to make sure they're measuring, monitoring and planning for things that can have the most impact in their business. They want to leverage their investments in IT, ERP, and performance management systems. They want a way to prioritize initiatives that are in line with their strategy. It's always about the right balance. For high-growth industries, it’s about the balance between expanding scope, geographies, and markets without sacrificing quality, margin, and cash flow. For companies that need to be agile enough to respond to competitive pressures, it's about the balance between innovation (pricing, product, and business model innovation) and standardization (in processes, systems, and brand).

We also recommend our method for organizations that are facing increased pressure from the recent economic downturn. You may not be immune to changes in the economy, but you can strive to outperform your competitors. So are you modeling price and price mix? Are you forecasting average selling price? Are you performing profitability analysis by customer and product? And of all your IT initiatives, which should have the highest priority?

Question 10: Excellent talking with you both Simon and Ron. Do you have any additional links or information about Business Foundation you want to share?

Answer: Thanks for taking an interest in our company, Tom. Readers can find out about us at Business Foundation and can read about our take on xPM, strategy to execution, IT/business alignment, and other topics on our blog (http://businessfoundation.typepad.com/).

Really Simple Integration

2008-04-23T10:10:00.000-07:00

Companies are challenged these days. So are individuals. The vast amount of information available and being created every minute is growing so fast how can one leverage that into something meaningful?

Along comes aggregation. It's seen for blog/news feeds, like AllTop, for the thousands of "top bloggers".

But what about organizations and integrating their information needs? Along comes SnapLogic with an open source RESTful architecture integration app. I spoke with Chris Marino, CEO, and John Bennett, Director of Marketing. They explained how they empower organizations through self-service... to "loosely couple a federation of systems" for enterprise mashups of data.

Here's a partial quote from their press release today:

"Really Simple Integration is a new approach to data integration" that "enables enterprises to quickly and easily make core IT data from data warehouses, Master Data Management data marts, SaaS apps, SOA Web Services and other sources."

Be sure to check them out if you're attending O'Reilly's Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco this week. In Web 2.0/open source fashion, they have started a publicly available collection of free components, including a screencast showing a mashup of LinkedIn and SalesForce.com.

So where does this put Business Intelligence and more specifically ETL tools and the static nature of data warehouses. I think this is another step towards the end of the ETL era as we know it. Products like SnapLogic provide transformation functionality but have access to more than internal data sources. Ever heard of an ETL tool able to scrap data off a public website to merge with your sales data?

Business Intelligence has been typically limited to using an organization's internal databases, such as finance, CRM, marketing, and sales. But we're in the age of the Internet now (actually we've been here for quite some time) and to be competitive you need access to the vast amounts of information from external sources of information, such as SaaS applications and information websites.

The small to mid-sized market is where SnapLogic is positioned today. Tiny companies can leverage the open source community, while IT staff of mid-sized companies would deploy SnapLogic for efficiencies. So once the data warehouse is built, users/departments will start asking for the data in different ways. (The static issue with a DW). Or merrying DW data with data not in the DW (and they shouldn't wait 18 months for additional DW implementation to address this need). IT departments can shine by having an easy-to-use tool like SnapLogic.

Sometimes there is no time to wait for the perfect enterprise dimensional model to be designed. Organizations are organic and need to stay competitive and ever changing to keep ahead. Access to information is key.

10 Questions for Miriam Tuerk

2008-04-08T13:06:00.000-07:00

It has been said by many, including Gartner and Forrester, that the next big innovation for BI & DW will most likely come from the data warehouse side. Sure Visualization is a hot topic lately but the "pain points" for many clients are on the back-end.

After speaking with Miriam for a few minutes, she mentioned their tool produces results from "three billion rows of data and resolved queries in seconds". So she caught my attention. And when Miriam Tuerk, CEO of Infobright, mentions a client roster of the likes of the Royal Bank of Canada, Xerox, and TradeDoubler, you know they are onto something.

Our conversation continued as we discussed Infobright's innovative solution, which I'm sharing with you.

Question 1: Hi Miriam, let’s start with your statement “Research shows that the volume of the world's data approximately doubles every three years... 92% of new information is stored on hard-disks." Do you think Infobright can help organizations analyze data faster in a more flexible way?

Answer: We have proved it at our customer sites. Our customers have wrestled with the problem of how to extract valuable information from the huge volume of data they collect. They know, as we do, that being able to quickly access key information about their business or their customers can be the difference between business success and business failure. That is why recent studies confirm that Business Intelligence is the #1 investment area for CIO’s today. Infobright designed an analytic data warehouse solution from the ground up specifically designed to provide fast answers to ad hoc, complex analytic queries without burdening IT with lengthy, resource-intensive projects.

Question 2: Okay, let's get right to the heart of Infobright's business. Why do I need your DW solution when I know I can already build dimensional models, cubes, reports, etc?

Answer: Three reasons – time, money, and the unknown. Given enough time and money, IT can develop a system perfectly designed to answer any question quickly – as long as they know the question. In today’s changing business world, however, business people don’t know in advance all of the questions they will need answers to in the future. They want the answers today, but most systems require a lot of manual work on the part of IT and database administrators to set up and maintain environments each time the business users want to perform new and different analytics on their business. Today, providing fast access to massive amounts of data requires a lot of IT resources and time. Infobright’s solution eliminates all of that work by IT, and doesn’t require buying lots of servers and storage as other products do. Instead, we developed a simple but very powerful solution that provides business users access to all of the data they need to get fast answers to unpredictable questions.

Question 3: How did you and Infobright get started? Was it a grass-roots entrepreneurial effort?

Answer: Infobright was born out of pioneering work done by a group of internationally recognized mathematicians in the emerging science of Rough Set Mathematics. They realized that they could use information about the data itself to quickly provide answers to complex queries, rather than require IT to do extensive work up front or rely on brute force from massive amounts of hardware. Seeing the benefits of this approach, RBC Capital and Flybridge Capital Partners (formerly IDG Ventures) funded the company and brought in an experienced management team to turn raw technology into industry-leading products and services. Over the past year we have expanded the capabilities of our software while growing our customer base and establishing Infobright as an emerging player in the market. For example, Infobright is the first analytic data warehouse provider to be named a MySQL Certified Storage Engine Partner. The combination of Infobright’s solution and MySQL provides organizations an analytic data warehouse that delivers unprecedented scalability, performance and ease-of-use.

Question 4: Where do you envision the DW market going, especially with recent consolidation of BI vendors?

Answer: In the “old” days – the 1990s, which is really not so long ago – smaller volumes of data, smaller and less diverse sets of users, fewer subject areas and simpler queries, allowed vendors to recommend one data warehouse solution to meet all of the business needs of the users. Just like hardware, where once we only had only the mainframe, the market is evolving and maturing such that there is no longer a “one-stop shopping” solution to meet the BI needs of businesses today. There are really two different types of workload in a data warehouse:

One requirement is where you have a lot of users running the same query over and over. An example would be if you had a customer data warehouse being used to support a call center for a cell phone company. Every time a customer calls in, the customer profile is pulled from the data warehouse. This is a repetitive OLTP-like query and for this a highly designed and engineered system, optimized and tuned for the specific and repetitive queries are the best solution.

A second requirement for data warehousing is analytics. Here, marketing, finance, sales, compliance, risk management, operations groups in companies are performing ad hoc, changing and unknown queries such as:

“How did our 2007 Christmas sales campaign perform as compared to our 2006 campaign? Was the customer retention higher – did more of those customers buy the value-add services?” or

“Let’s do a trend analysis understanding why there are more mortgage defaults in this area than previously – lets run a trend analysis of the last 12 months versus the last five years. Can we identify any indicators that would allow us to re-estimate/extrapolate what the defaults will be thru the end of 2008?”

These parts of the business use the data warehouse to design marketing and sales campaigns, to understand what the risk, compliance and security issues may be – and use that to operate and manage the business. Today, IT needs to assign resources and do manual work in support of all of these queries. And every day the business has new or different queries, IT must do more work. Business users need to have a “Google-like” experience for this type of data warehouse workload. They need to be able to just run the query against the data warehouse without manual intervention of IT.

This is the really big, hidden story in BI, that the growing analytic requirement is causing IT to drown under the workload it requires. They need a way to make things simpler and really change how things are run. Some technology companies are delivering value by consolidating platforms and creating integrated solutions. We have chosen to focus on the analytic use case and deliver the only product in the market that effectively solves that problem.

Question 5: What are the benefits of Brighthouse for an organization or manager looking for information?

Answer: Brighthouse delivers fast response to ad hoc, complex analytical queries across a large volume of data. It does so without requiring IT to spend time and effort to create new schemas, create indices or partition data. It is also lowers total cost of ownership through industry-leading compression that significantly reduces the amount of storage needed to support all this data. Business users get the answers they need quickly, and IT can meet high service levels with minimal effort or cost.

Question 6: You mentioned the phrase, "use the intelligence of the data." Can you share what you mean by that?

Answer: When data is loaded into the Brighthouse system, it is tightly compressed and stored in “data packs.” The Knowledge Grid automatically creates a highly compact set of metadata, which stores information about the relationship between packs and statistical information about the contents.

When a query is initiated, Brighthouse searches the grid to intelligently decide which data packs, if any, are required to resolve the query. The Knowledge Grid is created on-the-fly, dramatically increasing data load times, and eliminating the need for specialized data partitioning and indexing.

Question 7: So, what about competitors, like BI appliances, database vendors, and such? Are you taking data warehousing one step further?

Answer: The fact that there have been new entrants into the market in recent years is a clear indication that current technologies do not meet the needs of the business today. They are also an indication of high demand across a very broad spectrum of new requirements. Traditional solutions are very expensive, take a lot of time to build, and in fact, are not well suited to support the analytic queries of the business. That is why IT struggles to keep up with the demand of the business users. Many of the newer products on the market are very good at what they are designed to do – provide very fast query performance to predictable queries – but are not designed for ad hoc, unpredictable complex queries. What’s more, they all require substantial work on the part of database administrators and IT to implement and maintain.

Infobright’s solution is markedly different – it is incredibly simple to implement and maintain. Rather than extract-transform-load data, our solution is Load and Go. No new schemas, no index creation, no data partitioning. Brighthouse is simple, powerful and extremely cost effective – the best solution if you need fast answers to evolving business questions.

Question 8: How can your Brighthouse product fit within an existing BI/DW solution? Or is it better to use your product at the beginning of designing a new BI system?

Answer: When we built our product strategy, this was a very important question for us. Organizations have invested millions into their existing data warehouses and BI infrastructure. Offering a solution that leverages those investments and works within that environment was key to us and is a big part of our go-forward product road map. Brighthouse is very well suited to be added to an existing data warehouse environment. Because of our “just load it and go” capability, you can re-use all of the data modeling, ETL, and BI reports that you have already built. Many of our customers have large data warehouses already, but they aren’t able to support business users requests for ad hoc queries due to its performance impact on other users or high cost. In that case, they’ll implement Brighthouse as a complementary warehouse to provide the services their business users need.

In other cases, Brighthouse is implemented as the sole data warehouse for the company.

Question 9: During our call, you mention several amazing results seen by clients. Care to share some of those with readers?

Answer: I’d be glad to. A good example is the use of our technology in support of online advertising. Companies that advertise online want to track how well marketing campaigns are attracting their target audiences as well as detailed ROI of these campaigns. The marketing analytics providers depend on being able to rapidly run complex, ad hoc queries against huge amounts of click stream data and provide this to their customers.

Using Brighthouse, one digital marketer found that it could load 3.2 billion rows of data at an average rate of more than 300,000 rows per second! Brighthouse also compressed all-important fact tables at a ratio of 40:1 – meaning that 40 GB of raw data resulted in only 1 GB of storage, leading to huge savings in storage costs as well as improved performance.

Another user—a company that manages major online customer loyalty and incentive programs—found that Brighthouse returned query results 15 times faster than an existing solution. Brighthouse also surpassed this solution’s ability to compress data, reducing the footprint of fact tables some 35 to 43:1.

Question 10: Excellent talking with you Miriam. Do you have any additional links or information about Infobright you want to share?

Answer: For your readers who are looking for more information about what is new in data warehousing, we have an excellent white paper on our web site written by Claudia Imhoff, a well known expert in the field. Those people interested in finding out more about Brighthouse can also find additional information on our web site at http://www.infobright.com/, or contact us at any time via email at info@infobright.com.

Taming information from the Internet with one website

2008-03-28T12:55:00.000-07:00

The mass amount of information one can spend hours reading, watching, and being entertained is limitless for any individual. Some would consider much of the information found on the Internet as noise.

Many have tried finding ways of reducing that noise for you.

Leading the charge, Guy Kawasaki is taming the volumes of information one website at a time. His latest introduction is Alltop. A website for those who just want information at their finger tips without figuring out the multitude of RSS readers, adding RSS feeds, XML, and bombarded by email updates from bloggers (which you may have received from me because of this post).

Alltop's, "all the top stories", is an execution in simplicity. Sure not all websites are on there (including this one sadly). And sure you cannot customize the list. That's because this is a list of the "top sites" on the web. It's your dashboard into the best of the blogosphere.

Guy walks you through a day in the life of using AllTop.

"Making the simple complicated is commonplace;
making the complicated simple,
awesomely simple, that's creativity."
- Charles Mingus

Relating this to Business Intelligence... when you're designing, building, or requesting changes to your Business Intelligence system, you may want to keep in mind the power of simplicity and how effective it can be. Does the business need all variations of revenue reports when a dashboard may suffice? Maybe the path from corporate Strategy Map to performance metrics could be made crystal clear for managers.

The power is not in the volumes of functionality provided by toolsets but in the clear, concise presentation of the information.

You've got questions, they have answers instantly

2008-03-12T19:38:00.000-07:00

Instantly may not be much of an exaggeration. One of my questions was answered in 16 seconds. You can ask anything. And they most likely will have an answer! Their motto:

"No one knows everything. Everyone knows something."

The Muchobene Instant Answers site allows any question to be asked. Muchobene then places you in contact with an appropriate person who can answer it within seconds. I must say, what a great concept! I may finally be able to win at Trivial Pursuit.

Here are screen shots from the conversation I had. And the great part is, you're conversing with someone (who-knows-where) with answers you need.

Initial screen waiting for that special someone to respond to my query.

My question about 'green' technology was responded to in 26 seconds.

Some pleasant conversation via instant messaging as he or she sends me more information.

And finally closing remarks, while I rank the response I received as "Right On!", five stars.

The possibilities are endless in my mind. Imagine customer support from your bank starting a conversation with you in seconds. Never being put on hold. No automated attendants.

Simply an instant connection to people who can answer your question. Thanks Guy Kawasaki for making this happen.

Open source gets VC funding

2008-02-28T10:28:00.001-08:00

$12M in a round of Series C funding by Benchmark Capital who has backed other open source companies like Red Hat, Zimbra, and MySQL. This makes a total of $26M of VC funding given to this US-based BI open source company.

Yes, the Pentaho group picks up another round of funding according to this Performance Guys post. The article suggests that open source is one of three disruptive technologies with Software as a Service and pre-loaded appliances being the others.

The question still remains. Can Pentaho, and really open source BI in general, compete with other on-premise vendors, such as Cognos, Business Objects, Microsoft, and Hyperion? According to the article, Pentaho reports "brisk" uptake. My take is they still need to continue converting the 3 million downloads into open source licenses (i.e. sales).

Pentaho has built a location intelligence dashboard mashup with Google Maps. And is working with Greenplum's Bizgres-based data warehousing appliance platform. So they are getting out there and integrating their products for a variety of revenue streams.

But what differentiates them enough from Cognos, BO, Microsoft, and Hyperion?

I guess the licensing costs could be significantly less. The flip side to low upfront costs is the backend support and how that support is perceived. Is there enough of a developer community to support customer implementations? Are there enough help desk and knowledge areas to give IT departments support when questions and issues arise?

Perhaps the open source BI play is in the small to mid-sized company range for now. I'm all for Pentaho and other open source BI companies as they bring competitiveness to the industry. And as they take on more market share, the proprietary vendors will be forced to adjust and improve. And that ultimately provides more choice and flexibility for customers.

Microsoft leader in execution

2008-02-27T16:51:00.000-08:00

I'm sure you've heard the Gartner quadrants are out again. The BI vendors are graded and ranked according to Gartner criteria. And as you can expect, vendors want to be high and to the right.

This year Microsoft is a leader in platform BI and ahead of the pack for "ability to execute" on the BI vision. This means Microsoft has the competitiveness, success from it's BI products, investment in BI, and can execute on it's pricing model.

Tidbit: Did you know Microsoft spends $6B (with a 'B') company-wide on research and development annually?

And it's pricing model... which I have to say is aligned with the BI industry's goal: deliver BI for the masses. No longer will an organization have to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars on licenses -- this is a cost prior to building anything for end users! Microsoft's model flips the traditionally expensive licensing model upside down.

Plus Gartner thinks Microsoft's PerformancePoint Server is coming to a desktop near you. Aimed at the mid-market and above with a CPM focus, Microsoft's BI stack integrates well with it's integration engine (BizTalk), Office products, and portal software (Sharepoint). What else could most organizations need?

And if you're interested, here are the Top 10 benefits of PerformancePoint Server from Microsoft's marketing department.

Okay, there are a few short comings but which vendor doesn't have them. One being a not so competitive data mining story. I view this as a small portion of most organizations, so I shall not dwell. The second is how they intend to deliver their BI products to customers -- through a partner community.

Yes, Microsoft isn't interested in implementing their own software, unlike Cognos and Oracle. They want to educate and train partners to do this. Today the downside is the limited choice of BI Systems Implementation partners.

The huge upside is when more partners come on board, watch out. These partners will have the collective brain-power to Outsmart, Outwit, and Outlast (yes I watch the Survivor series on TV) any in-house services group from the likes of Cognos, Oracle, etc.

So I like the Microsoft model and their products and expect to see them competing along side the other leaders that are high and to the right.

The "Platinum Rule"

2008-02-22T10:24:00.000-08:00

From my Who's Better: Business or IT debate, I received feedback, some strongly opinionated, from people with examples of CIO's as successful sponsors/leaders of BI initiatives. I have several examples myself.

And Frank Buytendijk's rebuttal (kudos on taking the high road, Frank) shares his Platinum Rule ("those with the knowledge and experience, make the rules") and thoughts on organizational maturity. I can appreciate his statement that "the only project approach more disastrous than the IT-driven project, is the business-driven project."

While this debate on the success of IT or business driven projects is healthy, I feel we're missing something. As most leadership books will say, a good, strong leader is important but the people on the team are the ones who make it happen. Regardless how well a leader can motivate, the results are capped by the capabilities, skills, and experience of the individuals and the team as a whole.

As Jim Collins (writer of Good to Great) says, "Do you have the right people on the bus (the wrong people off the bus) and the right people in the right seats?"

This is the job of a leader... or at least it should be.

The job of the team, especially when talking about BI, is to reach for that higher rung and be the best at what you do -- architects, developers, business analysts, power users, report writers, quality assurance specialists, testers, project managers, and the list goes on.

While I think good leaders are required (great ones are hard to find), it is up to the individuals on the team to make their BI project a success. Have water-cooler conversations, share ideas, and learn from the best (and each other). Push for a team culture where you can bring your ideas to the group -- uncriticized. Freely research ways to improve your BI system -- remember the goal is information to the masses.

Okay back to the question of "who's better, an IT or business driven project"? After leaders sort out the bus and seat question, who's going to deliver BI success for your organization? I firmly believe it's not just the technically-minded people but all the people who know what is needed for your organization... from those with knowledge of the content required by the management team through to those with experience of core software functionality.

I would say without the emphasis on the team delivering BI for your organization won't reach it's full potential. Then "success" becomes only a thought dreamt up at the beginning of the initiative along with the Project Charter.

The SEC side-steps BI

2008-02-15T15:00:00.000-08:00

Could the SEC be side-stepping business intelligence forcing companies to report financial data in an XML standard? Or could this turn into the investor's version of "financial intelligence"?

The SEC launched an XBRL-based online tool that allows investors to extract, compare and analyze executive compensation for large U.S. companies. This tool is so important to the SEC that they are pressing to mandate it as a requirement for all companies to post their financials for investors to view.

Investors can do analysis and reporting on companies to determine investment worthiness. And the best part, no Data Warehouse required.

Business Need: Ensure financial accuracy - In recent years, regulatory reporting requirements prescribed by new legislation, such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act in the United States, have raised the importance of reporting accuracy and transparency.

Companies are forced to produce a public BI system, of sorts, hosted by the SEC.

Microsoft: As we know, MS Office Word and Excel have long been used to help compile, report, and consume financial information. Together, XBRL and Microsoft Office hide the complexities and shoot for wide-scale adoption in the financial community. Microsoft has a considerable lead in the market as financial people are very familiar with Excel.

With SEC's XBRL, contextual information is stored, while the language and accounting standards are irrelevant.

What is it? Extensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) is a worldwide industry standard for the publishing, exchange, and analysis of financial reports and data based on the XML language. The XBRL technical standard is being developed by XBRL International, a not-for-profit consortium with 200+ members worldwide.

So where does this leave you if you're managing BI and your CFO needs to produce these XBRL financial filings? Most likely the financial department will want to export directly from their financial system. In my mind, this would break BI's one shared truth concept for an organization. Or does it?

This boils down to what BI is today and what BI can do for an organization in the future. Today, SEC filings may not be your BI system's mandate. In the future, BI needs to expand it's definition. Should it always include ETL and a data warehouse? Or should BI focus on delivering content throughout the organization and to external partners or customers? I think the later.

BI has potential but is rot with problems -- failed projects, high costs, low returns. Some organizations have made BI very successful. The US Veterans Affairs is one of the largest Microsoft Analysis Services deployments in the world with a profound cost savings of over a billion dollars! Now that is successful BI!

So you may want to consider how XBRL should be apart of your BI system using an overall mandate of providing content to the masses. As for XBRL, couldn't they at least come up with a friendlier acronym!?

Where is your ego?

2008-02-01T11:48:00.000-08:00

An excellent speaker via webinar shared with us what our greatest asset is and I felt compelled to share it with you.

The webinar was about taking advantage of your ego and team ego to build great teams. Many would pause and say it takes a big ego first -- before being successful. Or you get a big ego after achieving success.

But there is a difference between big ego and big ambition!

I must say, I learned more about myself and how our team could work better together in one hour -- I can imagine what 2 days with them would do. Did you know, 99% of us don't have inflated egos all the time but in those moments when we do, we become:

Defensive

Comparative

Seek acceptance

Showcase our brilliance

To help keep our ego's in check, Dave Marcum and Steve Smith wrote a book called Egonomics where "it's not a book about big egos, but how ego affects the performance of everyone, in everything we do—good or bad—in ways we hardly notice, but have an immense impact."

Ever had a career review and asked for feedback?

Sure, we all have. It can be hard not to become defensive during this process. We say we want feedback but receiving it from some people is so hard.

On EgonomicsLive blog, they reveal the 2 major reasons why we become defensive in this situation. We want to keep: 1) the image we want others to have of us, and 2) the image we need to have of ourselves.

However Egonomics is also about the betterment of the team.

Have you been on a team and wondered how to move from a 'good' to a 'great' performing team? Team Egonomics has short case studies and a guide you can use to discuss the Egonomics techniques directly with your team.

When you want more (and you should), Marcum Smith's personal site has loads of research and compiled results so people can understand the affects of bad ego in the workplace and at home.

Now bringing this ego stuff to BI... Is your BI team highly effective with the right people on the bus and in the right seats? Ask yourself, can you have open water-cooler conversations between business and IT stakeholders all with humble egos? Answer honestly.

You may ask whether this humble approach to ego can survive in a capitalistic "dog eat dog" world?

From Marcum and Steve's extensive research "humility is the only real way to become great". Humility was also used in the book "Good to Great" by Jim Collins. Both found a strong, direct link to leaders who made their companies great performers while having a humble ego.

In the BI world, we constanstly read about the problems between business and IT sponsored projects and the challenges BI projects have. What is it worth to you and your team to have a highly effective team? Could managing your ego make BI successful throughout the organization? Can you afford not to try?

As Marcum says, "Ego works for or against us in each team meeting, boardroom debate, client conversation and interview we have. When we manage ego effectively, it can push us from the mail room to the corner office, from mediocrity to excellence, from bitter discouragement to fierce determination."

Learn to manage your healthy ego.

Strategy & Leadership in January 2008

2008-01-27T12:16:00.000-08:00

I came across Erin McCune's post on Leadership is Critical to Project Success on the Forte Financial blog. She references an earlier post of mine on Business vs IT (appreciated) but I would have to say she adds a more important educational component.

Thanks, Erin, for sending out that January 2008 Harvard Business Review is dedicated to Leadership & Strategy. Some of the HBR topics below could be interesting... guess I'll find out when I start reading on the weekend.

The New Leader's Guide to Diagnosing the Business

How Star Women Build Portable Skills

The Existential Necessity of Midlife Change

The Experience Trap

The Founder's Dilemma

And just before I left Erin's blog, I saw her latest post on XBRL tools making reporting easier. The tool she references "maps data stored in separate systems and proprietary formats into XBRL so that it is easy to share for reporting and analysis". Excellent idea for using an open standard.

The tool by Enterprise Engineering, Inc, is an XBRL-based analytical tool that makes it possible to compare a company’s income statement, balance sheet and other financial reports to peers and industries.

However, hard to find BI vendor tools that use the XBRL standard in a non-proprietary way.

Reality Check: search is lacking

2008-01-21T21:21:00.000-08:00

Reading Frank Buytendijk's post on search conjured up memories of the hours I've spent on Google (I admit I haven't used others, even Yahoo or LiveSearch) trying to find information or a birthday present. Sure when I know exactly what I want, it's easy... I only receive a million links to trudge through.

But when I don't know precisely or I'd like to have options to my original thought, I spend hours trying different keywords to give me those options. The same is for any keyword search in Forrester, eBay, Amazon, etc.

For example, when I was interested in buying a video camera for capturing ad hoc interviews at conventions or a spontaneous family moment (not a complicated or expensive camera), you can imagine the results I received -- 52 million. The first couple pages are riddled with product pricing and accessories -- no trusted, non-marketing information -- definitely no options!

This relates to BI too. When I search for corporate information in a BI system, such as, "sales performance 2007", I don't necessarily want every report and KPI with the word "sales", "performance", or "2007" found in the name and description. That would assume I know the name of the report or KPI from a list of thousands -- I have more important things to remember.

The search engine optimization strategies don't work for me, the average consumer. Seth Godin thinks Internet SEO's are problematic for marketers too. So today's keyword search is not working for either the consumer or the marketer.

Here's what I'd like to see from a search engine (if you know of one, BI or other, please let me know):

Search shouldn't be a yes/no answer. When I ask for 'video camera', the search engine should also come back with options, such as, accessories and comparisons from trusted, non-marketing information. Not just 52 million results with those words or nothing.

Search should ask me for clarification. When talking with people, we ask clarifying questions, like "did you mean camcorders, professional cameras, or picture cameras with video?" It's the help me, help you situation.

Search should provide flexible results. From Frank's post, "If you search for a second-hand Jaguar in black, with not more than 100,000 kilometers, perhaps the dark blue one with 101,000 km is fine too."

I want search to be intuitive, easy like Google, but have some "intelligence". Access to information is great but now there is too much available to us in an inefficient manner.

Now to BI. Business Intelligence provides insight into your organization but at what cost is accessing the content. Ask yourself how easy is it for the average person in your organization to gain insight through your BI system (without knowing exactly what the name is). How easy is it for management to find information in your BI system? Do you need a dedicated power user who is the only one that knows what is available?

Think how easy BI would be adopted within your organization if access to the information was as easy as using Google.

Who's better, business or IT

2008-01-04T10:41:00.000-08:00

I recently consulted on a large government project where the project sponsor was the CIO. There were only two people above him before you step into the land of 'professional' politicians. This CIO was savvy, smart, and needed to build buy-in from multiple stakeholders (Chiefs of Police... a difficult breed comfortable with conflict) to make this $100M project a success. You may ask how one could not be successful with that kind of cash on the table... but it happens... a lot.

I can think of failed project examples. Specifically I'm thinking of 3 projects in the last 6 years done by large consulting firms (ie. the IBMs, EDS', Accenture's of the world), where failure cost tens of millions of dollars with little or no results. Much of this was your taxpayer money hard at work by the way.

So what makes an unsuccessful project?

Some potential culprits are: technology issues, budget constraints, timeline constraints, user adoption and leadership can contribute to failure. However, leadership stands out the most for me. A leader or project sponsor can make or break the project. They give direction, remove political roadblocks, manage the money... and significant issues escalate to them for final decision.

They have lots to answer for. However let's divide sponsors/leaders into two groups: IT and business. IT sponsors may be the CIO or IT department head. Business sponsors may be CEO, CFO, or VP of a line of business. BUT...

Who makes a better project sponsor and hence best to run a BI project?

(I'm pro-business for this open debate expecting you bloggers and readers out there to provide sharp contrasts and opinionated rebuttles... and support, of course. [Bell ding to begin the round.])

Let's begin with the fact that organizations typically don't have the CIO at the decision-making table - sad but true (oops, I'm pro-business). Okay don't you think this can hinder success if the IT sponsor does not have the backing of the CxO's office? You betcha. Because, let's remember, it's the business who holds the purse strings. And the golden rule is - those with the money, make the rules.

But even without making the rules, business knows what they want and need from BI - simply gather the user & information requirements and ensure IT makes the technology happen. The misconception that IT makes is "if we build it, they will come" -- the value would be so obvious users would clamor to use the BI system. Not true without the business showing IT what they want.

So is it obvious that business sponsors should lead BI projects, especially since BI is for the business? And where do CIO's think they can do a better job? (By the way, the police project I mention above is in progress, so I'll let you know how it goes for the CIO.)

Enterprise-wide data warehousing, duh

2007-12-13T10:30:00.000-08:00

From recent talks with organizations on preferred techniques when building their BI/DW visions, I heard a rainbow of responses. I'm sure there are many schools of thought so I spoke with a friend Dave Hewlett, an architect and BI practitioner for years.

"...In my opinion, anything under the category of “data warehouse” absolutely has to be planned enterprise wide. It really doesn’t matter if you are implementing Kimball or Inmon to be honest. The less you plan the more you have to refactor/rebuild as you develop and grow the warehouse. As it gets bigger the refactoring cycles get larger and larger requiring more and more “rebuild from scratch”. It basically turns your warehouse into an upside down pyramid of growing effort. Quick wins up front result in massive complexity down the road."

This means organizations designing their first data mart or silo from one source system or focusing on a single Line Of Business (LOB) are going to cause themselves additional re-work and budget increases while growing their enterprise BI/DW -- not to mention difficulties keeping up with a changing business.

I equate Dave's analogy to building a house. First an architect does up the plans based on your needs, wants, desires. Then a builder plans out the execution and schedules resources. All this before anything is built. You don't design and build one room in the house, then move to the next room to design & build.

That would be one funky house, if it could even be finished!

So why do organizations design one source system or data mart, instead of a big-picture view? Man, what are they thinking...? Well here is what some are thinking:

It's easier for me to ask for and receive a smaller initial budget. I can ask for more next year when I've proven our team can deliver.
My risks of making a mistake are reduced. I don't want to promote enterprise BI to management when I cannot be sure we will be successful.
I want the vendor to prove themselves first. I've heard of failed BI projects before with license and consulting fees going through the roof.
The consulting firm suggested starting small, then building it out.

These are responses from a few leaders I've spoken with - legitimate, definitely. In my mind, this thinking is similar to building software.

We all have been affected by this vis a vis monthly software upgrades. A software company builds a basic software product and gets it out the door in a rush. Then hopefully with feedback from customers, they continue to release newer versions, each one inching the product closer to the overall product vision.

Incremental building causing redesign as they go. Customers suffer the pain of not having a final product. In BI, some call this stovepipes. Others would say poor design.

So what works best for BI/DW?

Up-front design, best practices for enterprise-wide BI.
Or incremental design, budget-easing, risk-adverse data marts towards enterprise BI.

You may want to say, "Tom, we could use Master Data Management (MDM) as a way to tie together (conform) our data marts." I'm sure MDM could help in some circumstances but this does feel like a band-aid approach (unless you designed with MDM in mind from the beginning).

I think you need to design & build based on the business need.

If (or should I say when) your business needs to improve performance, are you concentrating on the entire business or a Line Of Business? If you want silos or reports or cubes or KPIs for one Line of Business, you are only focusing on operational improvements for that one LOB.

You're not looking at how that LOB performance supports the organizational strategy and goals. Which, if that is all you need to do, then you're off to the races. Then go deliver!

But... if you feel this is only the beginning and other LOB's would want something similar... the management team may want performance from their perspective... you may share common dimensions across the organization...

...then I would say you should be looking enterprise-wide design.

Acquisitions bad for customers

2007-11-30T16:17:00.000-08:00

In the short term at least. Acquisitions can kill R&D funding and unfocus company direction during the internal integration process. Then there is all the time and effort spent on a new company message announcing the "new" product and service offerings - marketing, architectures, training.

Thank you Fayu for sending in this IT Week article about acquisitions in BI will stem innovation.

As well, it could be that during the Oracle, SAP, and IBM acquisition/integration efforts, it may create a vacuum while these big three BI vendors (geez I guess they are now) focus on internal integration. This downtime vacuum may open up a space in the market for the entrepreneurially minded. I hope it does!

Sure business for the acquired (BO, Cognos, Hyperion) will continue to sell licenses. However I agree with the article that behind the scenes people are going to be pulled into committees, working groups and potentially let go, okay, re-shuffled.

This all equates to not pushing the envelope nor being laser-focused on customer needs and the competition. Unfortunate for them... Opportunity for others!

Who's Next

2007-11-16T16:46:00.000-08:00

Who's next in acquisition fever?

Yes, there is already debate on who's to be acquired next. I guess it could be the natural progression of things but more likely the herd mentality is cropping up. I know, I know, BI is hot right now.

But like speculators on the stock exchange who drive prices up, make their money by selling at the top, and watch the prices fall on those unaware investors... aka us normal folk who are just trying to make a buck...

I've noticed attention being focused on the remaining tier 1 independent BI vendors - but I don't want to jump on the propaganda band-wagon for companies that didn't really standout before. Not meant as an insult but there are excellent reasons why Cognos, Business Objects, and Hyperion were acquired first (I would also include Microsoft with these best of breed companies).

Then I read the typical "watch for the up & comers" called tier 2 vendors. I believe both these tier 1 & 2 vendors should all be considered either "up & comers" or "been-there-and-done-that'ers".

The question is, if we sober up from our high on acquisitions, down deep in places we don't mention in polite company, "do you really feel the need for the industry to continue consolidating?"

I think not! Any acquisition now would come across as a follower in a sea of leaders. I may exclude acquiring SAS from that list, although there are post-acquisition, merger problems with a privately owned company such as SAS.

Alas where people, investors, acquisition-hungry companies should focus their attention on are innovative, thinking-out-of-the-box companies, technologies or people that will shift BI away from lengthy, costly implementations; allowing BI to permeate throughout a company delivering on the "BI Promise"!

Otherwise BI will be downgraded to simply a component or attachment to an ERP initiative, perceived as the second-cousin, something we will do later after the "must-haves" are complete. You know, similar to what operational reporting is today. There are winners to this downgrade... IBM, SAP, and Oracle's of the world win by having a complete solution to offer, where customers can go shopping in one place for everything they need.

Another word for this... WALMART!

And how do you compete with Walmart? Carefully, not head-on and not on price. Luckily IBM, SAP, and Oracle are not selling cheap commodities - their prices are high. In stark contrast, Microsoft's licensing model is built for growth... huge growth.

So where does this leave us as customers, consultants, and practitioners? With options.

As competitors consider how you will be competitive within this consolidated BI world.

As customers consider how you will win with either the Walmart's or the up & comers.

And a final up-lifting note on market change for up & comers. A market that is squeezed into a corner has high magnitude potential for paradigm shifts and innovative ideas to alter the status quo... sometimes in a significant way!

Here's a TED video of Larry Lessig telling 3 great stories of change.

Final acquisition - IBM

2007-11-13T10:54:00.000-08:00

The story has hit the airwaves. One of the more obvious acquisitions in recent months completes the trend that has taken place in the Business Intelligence industry for several months/years now.

What this means for the industry specifically is too hard to tell at the moment. So as a CIO or business manager will you jump for joy or go running for the door.

IBM acquired the Canadian-made Cognos yesterday for $5 billion. This Wallstreet Journal article states Cognos is No. 3 in the BI industry following SAS (No. 2) and BO (No. 1). The IBM price is slightly less than SAP's BO ($6.78B) and more than Oracle's Hyperion ($3B).

Some may say IBM's hand was forced with the industry consolidation by competitors Oracle and SAP. However I think the IBM-Cognos deal was in the works for some time.

Cognos and IBM have 'played' together on large government projects. IBM tested Cognos tools in their performance lab. IBM and Cognos have done joint whitepapers. IBM consulting services has people focused on Cognos. I think the writing was on the wall -- just when and how much.

Plus you don't make a $5B decision in cash over a couple months because of pressure from your competition. At least I couldn't (my cheques don't have the space to write that many zeroes).

Overall:

IBM is known for going after the "big and scary projects that no one can do" -- in IBM's words. Cognos is known for selling to large companies and governments. Probably a match made in heaven.

But let's take a step back for a moment. We know the acquisitions of BI companies will change the landscape of the industry. BI could simply slide into being another component of ERP vendors. Or BI may continue to stand on it's own as a business improvement driver by gauging performance.

The big picture question is, "with independent BI companies gone, where will BI go?"

Just like most acquisitions, the ecosystem of toolset vendors, consultants, customers, and 3rd party vendors can change dramatically. How? I would like to think our drive to improve BI for the betterment of organizations and people is the underlying goal. But that may get in the way of profits, selling licenses, and implementing large BI projects because they can.

Don't let them tell you "nothing will change; it is status quo" -- it will change.

Don't let them tell you "more benefits exist by being acquired" -- there can be huge drawbacks.

Don't let them charge more because "IBM, Oracle or SAP specialists are doing your BI" -- the business problem and expertise have not changed.

Don't let them tell you "this is the only way to do BI" -- get a second opinion from someone independant.

And welcome to the confusing jungle of seriously large companies where BI is just one line item on their financial plan.

BI in just 24 hours

2007-10-18T22:44:00.000-07:00

What I've always liked about the Salesforce.com offering was the ease in which a person or company could start using CRM software - "pure" SaaS. You could use CRM without even talking to a salesperson or IT person -- sign up, load your contact data and start using CRM.

Can BI be done in the same way? From my experience in multiple industries with SMEs to large government departments, the business of analysis and gauging performance really isn't... well, that different. Ironically though, people usually feel their business is unique until you open their eyes to the similarities.

So where is an equivalent "pure" SaaS offering for BI?

Aaron Burnett recently shared with me how SeaTab picked up $9M in second round funding muchly based on their innovative approach to BI and PivotLink Now -- their "pure" SaaS suite of BI tools.

Their innovative approach brings the "full power of Pivotlink BI to customers in 24 hours". They are hoping the price point is disruptive to the marketplace. And they impress with their proprietary technology querying billions of rows in less than 5 seconds.

Even if you're only slightly intrigued you may want to check out their online, live demo (use the Test Drive link). I like that you can test drive the tools with actual information. No flashy sales videos. Real hands on test drive. I'll leave the review and impression of their tools in your hands.

The BI industry is changing in many ways with cookie cutter "pure" SaaS BI and significant acquisitions to make this a changing landscape -- far from the old Decision Support System days.

This begs a question in my mind. Where is the next big innovative, paradim shifting, Web 2.0, BI 2.0, multi-billion dollar valuation going to come from within BI?

Transform your carbon emissions

2007-10-17T21:05:00.000-07:00

I was in an airport recently listening to this guy ranting about how air travel, and hence capitalism, was so bad for the environment. Did he know he was in an international terminal drinking a Starbucks coffee? I was tempted to point out the obvious and ask why he was flying. But there is just no reasoning with people like that.

Then this week Al Gore was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts towards planetary climate change.

Then yesterday, Laura Wang, Editor and Chief Architect of Business Object's Insight collaboration community, spoke with me about their Carbon Offset Challenge and user conference on this week.

Three times in a short period couldn't be a coincidence.

My point is, have you ever been to a conference and flown or drove hundreds of miles along with hundreds and thousands of others? Sure. However you probably haven't thought of carbon emissions produced from everyone traveling -- me either.

Laura was at Insight's Orlando conference yesterday where Business Objects paid to offset attendee carbon dioxide emissions from traveling. They did this by purchasing Green Tags from Bonneville Environmental Foundation using a formula:

Number of miles flown multiplied by 1.36 = Number of lbs. of CO2 emitted
1400 lbs of CO2 emitted = One Green Tag

Then you take the total number of attendees and mode of travel. Total miles traveled by all attendees is 3,802,796 miles. Business Objects ended up paying for 3,991 Green Tags. This is equivalent to planting acres of trees nearly the size of Central Park in NYC. Well done!

To put the travel by all attendees to this conference into perspective:

Total attendee travel is equivalent to one person traveling around the earth 152 times.
Even more striking, the distance from the earth to the moon is 238,712 miles, so attendee travel is equivalent to 8 roundtrips to the moon and back.

We all like our conferences and those corporations (or people), which are environmentally conscious -- or want to make a statement -- can reduce their guilt and support a global problem by purchasing Green Tags. Alternatively, you could take Insight's collaboration community up on their future challenges and contribute your personal time.

Analysis of your competitors

2007-10-10T07:59:00.000-07:00

Being able to monitor the performance of your business is vital. But what is more important is tracking your competitors and how the market is responding to them. You're looking for gaps in their offering, weaknesses and strengths. Anything to give you an edge.

In this day of Web 2.0, collaborative, social-networking, comment-generation, community-controlled content, do you know how your company is fairing in the market? Do you know your website popularity? It would be great knowing whether you are driving more traffic than your competitors, wouldn't it?

Whether you're a vendor trying to build an online community (like BO's Insight) or you want to know the site visited by the most people for BI information (aside from this blog, of course), doing this analysis is challenging especially when you don't know where to start.

Look no further.

Rich McIver sent me this post about "25 Tools to Compile an In-Depth Dossier on a Competitors' Site". This is the most comprehensive list (with descriptions for the less technically savvy people like myself) of analytical websites giving you intelligence on:

Who owns a domain name
Analyzing website traffic
Hosting information
Marketing and advertizing spending
Trademarks and filings
Public relations
Finacials
Browser compatibility, accessiblity and website security

To test drive this oracle of information, I did a simple website traffic analysis of Business Objects, Cognos, and Hyperion (see the picture at the top of this post) using http://www.compete.com/. I'll leave the analysis to yourself.

BO takeover made public @ 20% premium

2007-10-09T07:25:00.000-07:00

The agreed to takeover of Business Objects at a 20% premium or $6.8B by SAP is now public knowledge. The news articles read as per expected; synergies between their companies will benefit customers. Click on the diagram showing how SAP and BO complement each other.

The question is How will they benefit customers?

It has been an acquisition frenzy lately. SAP purchased OutlookSoft (performance mgmt), Pilot Software (analytics), and now Business Objects (suite of tools). Plus BO recently purchased Cartesis (performance mgmt).

And with all this growth, BO has been spending years integrating the original BO package and Crystal engines. Cartesis hasn't been fully integrated prior to this acquisition so the challenge will be how to sensibly pull together four different products into a clear product offering from SAP.

Then take the overlap with SAP's own Business Warehouse product. From my experience BW had difficulties being received by customers -- the takeovers/acquisitions definitely give SAP a strong BI offering for their business process solutions. They should simply replace their Business Warehouse tools completely with tools that work.

Will SAP embed their acquired analytics into their transactional applications?

Perhaps the question is When. You can expect SAP to provide an integrated SAP/BI solution where the new analytics will be embedded within the business process tools. Which is another challenge. Will SAP embed their new BI tools and still offer a separate BI suite of tools? BO, as with the others, are vendor neutral - meaning the tools can sit on a variety of vendor databases.

And with BO's revenues of $1.25B last year, disupting that source of income just to have BI embedded within SAP so you can sell a packaged solution, would be suicide. Unless the management team thinks the world revolves around business process and is unable to see the vendor-neutral potential of BI.

The merging portfolio's of two multi-billion-dollar companies give this takeover huge complications in vision and direction. I'm sure existing Business Objects customers will be watching closely.

Now that leaves Cognos to be purchased by EMC, HP or IBM. Any friendly bets on who takes Cognos to new heights?

Beating them at "their" game

2007-09-28T19:34:00.000-07:00

Hearing someone talk about one of the big BI vendors usually doesn't grab my attention. Except when I hear Cognos being coined the "Elder Statesman of the Canadian software sector"! I was a little shocked that Cognos was considered in those ranks so I listened. Here are a few tid bits:

Meaning: Elder Statesman is any influential person (company) whose advice is highly respected.

Rob Ashe: "almost all of our sales are from outside of Canada."

Acquisition: Cognos has the "intention" to acquire Applix for $339 Mln. The deal has been compared to the Hyperion acquisition by Oracle, in part, because of Applix's financial focus.

Rumour: Business Objects is on the block to be acquired. Oracle passed them up, so now who else is looking for BO?

Looking Over their Shoulder: Cognos. Trying to grow fast enough organically and through acquisitions to hold off the wolfs.

How?: Through license sales, services, and maintenance fees. This year Cognos earned 12% growth on license fees, with revenues of $252 Mln and $87 Mln in license sales.

Cognos is established and was conceived in 1979 where they started with their PowerHouse product; then produced reporting and analytical products, and now flog a full suite of web-based BI tools.

Oddly they recently partnered with Informatica where the deal has Cognos reselling Informatica products. I can only conclude that Cognos is admitting their ETL tool is substandard - why else would you resell a competitor's product? (Great for Informatica who doesn't really have a home.)

In my opinion and all that being said about elder statesman status, Cognos still has high-end license fees and products with a plethora of functionality (does anyone use half the buttons in PowerPlay cubes? Really. Honestly.)

I'm still looking for BI tools with ease of use for business users who don't have to be techies at heart. However today, is anyone beating Cognos at "their" game?

On-demand BI fits Casual Male

2007-09-10T21:46:00.000-07:00

Here's a story about a retailer making the cultural and mindset shift from using mainframes to looking outside their walls for Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) BI to handle their planning and reporting needs. Not only is that a serious shift for any organization and IT department, the retailer, Casual Male, "needed a better way to plan inventory" and "understand customer buying behaviour". And they did what most companies do and "looked at traditional BI software but balked at the price."

Where have we heard this before.

As I'm reading the article from Search Data Management and preparing to rant about the high price for license fees and on-going maintenance contracts (another 10% - 15% annually), I made it to the bottom of the article.

What I found interesting was a mention of the big BI vendors seeing the benefits of SaaS BI. Initially I thought SaaS BI was more of a competitor, however Cognos and BO have acquired smaller SaaS BI companies Celequest, NSite, and Applix. While SAS built in five on-demand BI modules last year.

So what does this do to the traditional software licensing vendors business model, you may ask? Won't offering a pay for service solution cut into their high margin license sales?

And the answer looks like yes... on the surface. So why are they doing it? In my mind, because they are expanding their business to include small to mid-sized customers. The traditional licensing costs are out of reach for these customers (Casual Male sited the same concern over price). By having a BI solution that is now affordable, the big BI vendors now have another revenue stream offering SaaS BI as the service. By having two-tiers for BI solutions, they can reach a more complete range of customers from large to small.

If this is their strategy, they will need to keep the two-tiers separate in the minds of customers. When customers perceive cost and functionality overlapping on both tiers, confusion will build in the minds of customers. They will wonder, "What is the difference between your two products?"

That would be not be a great market strategy.

So you then push the tiers even further apart. Now does that mean increase license fees and provide additional functionality for traditional software? What about reducing the functionality for those low-end customers who cannot afford the expensive tools?

The various ways the big BI vendors may approach this will be interesting. Expect more direct competition between Cognos and BO. And expect an offering to come from the other major players.

And I almost forgot. Those traditional software vendors getting into SaaS BI will need to dive into the hosting business, which brings with it a different business model and mindset for sales and infrastructure. Software-as-a-Service was touted as the traditional software killer back in the day. Now the traditional software pure-plays are becoming hybrids.

The role of business vs IT

2007-09-04T21:21:00.000-07:00

Business Intelligence crosses both the business and IT boundaries -- unfortunately for some it is seen strictly as an IT initiative. Frank Buytendijk's post makes an excellent point: "you are not delivering 20 reports", you are helping "business users make really good decisions".

Check out Frank's blog site (he is the VP of Corporate Strategy at Hyperion/Oracle), *new* since Oracle's acquisition of Hyperion.

He goes on to say how the business has bargained (actually leveraged) themselves to the point of 'no responsibility' for initiatives that involve IT support. IT writes the business case for a system to improve the business. IT is responsible for project deadlines and budgets. And who has to live with the results?

The Business.

So wouldn't you want more influence, control, and input into something you have to live with for years, maybe a decade? When I want a vehicle to drive, I don't ask the mechanic to find one for me. Although I'm sure the car would be great under the hood. Because maybe I want my unique style, colour, prestige, the right growl to the engine. Aesthetics. Generally not a mechanic's forte.

So why rely on IT to be responsible for your system's initiative.

Saying that, IT brings much to the table. Such as, people who know what is technically possible, IT project managers, and support staff to keep the lights on once it is built. What they don't bring to the table, which you can, is this:

Business knowledge and how the business really works.
What information is important to you.
How you want to measure your business.
How a system should improve your processes.
How a system impacts the bottom line.
Senior business executive sponsorship.

IT initiatives that only have IT support and little business buy-in is doomed for failure. Maybe not the day the system is released; but months down the line when the business realizes the system doesn't meet their needs.

Cannot justify BI purchase?

2007-08-20T22:26:00.000-07:00

Frank Dravis' post on SaaS, how it fits shares the typical and not so typical reasons for why you may want to consider SaaS BI for your company.

Typical:

Startup-costs are less
Focus on outsourcing non-critical applications
Lack of internal technical resources
Lack of technical expertise

Not so typical:

Reduced risk of deploying in-house
Less data volumes
Fills short term gaps with IT plan (business must go on)

Search not found - BI videos lacking

2007-08-20T08:30:00.000-07:00

Videos and the Internet... what an excellent way to get your name and company out there for all to see. Express your brand awareness. Gauge the market response of your new idea. Or simply be entertaining and go viral.

So I searched for entertaining BI videos on the usual sites. What I found lacking was entertaining, viral, innovative BI videos. Well, not exactly true. I did find this one, which lead me to the Swats site. More on this below... back to my rant.

Is BI really that boring?

Where are those creative-minded, marketing-inspired, forward-thinking, viral-focused people who can show how impressive BI can be? Are we not more than the sum of our software parts? More than moving data from point A to point B and performance reporting?

There are impressive examples out there about business improvement or increasing employee effectiveness, to name two. Where are the videos to energize us about these accomplishments.

In an attempt to inspire you, review Technorati's everything in the known universe about BI videos, albeit all from YouTube from what I can see.

Any videos, company ads, marketing campaigns, slogans, even jingles you care to share? Post a comment or send me an email.

-----

Okay back to this Swats site, which is a bit corny but actually has videos. Their manifesto is to improve the IT experience for business users. They are trying to buck the negative IT stigma by following 7 initiatives:

Align IT with business processes,

Accelerate innovation,

Facilitate decision making,

Increase flexibility,

Manage knowledge captial,

Favor exchanges, and

Guarantee trust.

They could be onto something. I'll let you make your own opinion on whether they will be successful (or even if they were entertaining).

10 Questions with Steven Schneider

2007-08-10T10:13:00.001-07:00

I work in an industry where the potential to provide value to a customer is great; and equally great is the potential for new innovations in technology and business models. Steven Schneider is doing both - innovating within the BI industry and providing value to customers. He does this as President of OnDemandIQ Inc by using their unique SaaS BI approach and unlocking the data companies have in a valuable way.

Sending your data to an external company to be properly hosted and delivered securely back to your employees is just one benefit. Steven shares 10 more excellent reasons to utilize SaaS BI for your organization.

Question: What really differentiates OnDemandIQ from other SaaS BI companies?
Answer: First, ease of use. Second, we provide a low cost of entry.

The primary users of our system are business users that have very basic needs – reports with real-time data, a dashboard that tracks the 4-5 metrics they care about, and some drill down/analysis capabilities. While we have more sophisticated capabilities and configurations, these can all be hidden by the administrator so as not to overwhelm the end user. There is one client we are working with for example that was able to setup their data feed, add their users, create 4-5 frequently accessed reports and a full graphical dashboard for their management team in just a few days. Before, they had an analyst that was manually creating these types of reports every time they were needed.

Our application also has a low cost of entry – with per-user pricing and base subscriptions starting at just a few hundred dollars a month. This allows organizations to start small before making substantial investments.

Question: How do you help clients use BI to become more competitive themselves?
Answer: In a general sense it is all about unlocking the information contained in the data they already have. Now that is a pretty general claim – but what is different about our approach is that we focus on getting the information to the person on the front line that can change their behavior or take action. All too often BI implementations give analysts the capabilities to really dig into the data, but something becomes lost on the way to the person that does something with it.

Question: It is a well known challenge/goal to have BI proliferated throughout an organization. How are you being successful in this area?
Answer: In my experience these types of initiatives often fail because they try to do too much – envisioning that all of their business end-users want all of the complex slicing and dicing capabilities. What we’ve found is that in many cases, the end-users want to look at very specific metrics and/or slices of information, and they don’t want to hunt around to try and find it.

We’ve had a lot of success with sales organizations in giving each user a pre-configured dashboard that reflects the metrics they care about – the ones they are paid on, and a set of 4-5 reports that they need to do their job. Everything is pre-set and configured for them so they can get in, get the information they need, and get out.

Question: What do you see as the biggest hurdle for SaaS BI or even simply the BI industry?
Answer: A major hurdle for BI SaaS vendors is that BI is in some way or another, inherently custom. It only really works when integrated with the data, typically from multiple sources, that a company generates. Many of the traditional BI software vendors really just sell toolkits that I.T. departments and/or consultants use to construct a solution. SaaS vendors are really just now trying to find the right mix of static software vs. consulting customizations.

For the BI space as a whole, the threat from existing players is really cannibalization. The small-mid market has been, for the most part, ignored by major players because the licensing price point necessary to serve this market is too low and would threaten the business from their existing customers. With gaining popularity of SaaS catering to this market at a reasonable price point, there will be a growing threat from smaller companies, in particular SaaS.

Question: What made you start on this business endeavor?
Answer: We started as a consulting company to the life sciences industry – and what we saw was that sales representatives were overwhelmed with data from different systems, covering different time periods, etc. We saw a real opportunity to distill data from multiple places into actionable information that sales representatives could actually use.

Question: What are three significant benefits SaaS BI and hence onDemandIQ provides customers over traditional BI?
Answer:
- Easy to Use & Setup
- Low entry point with limited risk
- Few I.T. requirements

Question: Are companies concerned about hosting their data outside the firewall? How do you address concerns in this area?
Answer: This is usually less of an issue than you would expect. Many of the companies that come to us are already distributing information to business users in various geographies, so the data is already out there in excel spreadsheets on laptops, personal databases and on emails. Having the data hosted in a security facility with proper authentication, access logging, and encryption is a step in the right direction.

Question: You mention wanting to meet "80% out of the box". Care to explain?
Answer: We provide many of the high-value BI capabilities that small-mid sized companies desire – such as ad-hoc reporting, dashboards, and simple analytics out of the box. We have a generic, flexible data model for data such as sales transactions, accounts, and activities that can model many different types of data sets and provide a whole host of custom metrics. Most of our clients are sales organizations, retail, or manufacturing.

While taking this more generic approach allows us to offer a more cost-effective and easy to setup solution to a wide range of customers, it does mean that we might not be a fit for clients with very specific and unique needs.

Question: Where do you see onDemandIQ going into the future with the SaaS model?
Answer: I think for us, and for the industry as a whole, you will see a blending of the lines between what is software and what is service. In most cases the ‘Problem’ that BI is solving is a lack of access to information and that requires two parts – access and analysis. While we address the first part of the problem, we only partially solve the analysis piece by providing tools that people can use. There is still a missing piece that requires a human element for more sophisticated analysis.

For example, for clients in the Life Sciences vertical we have taken on the role of an outsourced analyst function, providing services in the areas of forecasting, compensation, and more advanced analytics. It is all about solving the problem, and the mechanics really don’t matter.

Question: Excellent talking with you Steven. Do you have any additional links or information about onDemandIQ you want to share?
Answer: Sure – I’d suggest the following links:

Article: Hosted BI: New Options for Small-Medium Businesses

OnDemandIQ: http://www.ondemandiq.com/

2007 leader for BI

2007-07-31T20:59:00.000-07:00

This year the Gartner's BI Excellence award goes to a Police Department. BI for geospatial analysis of crime trends, visualization, and statistical analysis.

And the Brain Food Blogger on Intelligent Weblog makes a good point about considering other quadrants aside from the BI Platform quadrant, including Corporate Performance Management and integration.

I don't want to keep you in suspense any longer (if the picture didn't give it away already). The Gartner 2007 BI Platforms magic quadrant courtesy of Business Objects. One look at the quadrant and you'll understand why BO is being generous.

Wake up call for Air Canada

2007-07-31T20:34:00.000-07:00

How many times do you need to hear something before it sinks in and you take action. When people ask for it - respond. Air Canada did, partially. As a decentralized organization using Excel spreadsheets for reporting, you can imagine how effective they were back in 2002. However their initial challenge wasn't building a BI centre of excellence, envisioning a one shared truth, or a well-thought-out technical architecture.

It was making BI easy and useful for the novice user (rather than just the power-users).

Briony Smith wrote an article in IT World Canada about Air Canada using IBI WebFocus because of the cheaper price point, high usability, and visualization tools.

But this is not about tools. Less than 20% of people in an organization use BI. Why could that be. Take away the bad implementations, insufficient toolset functionality, and untrained developers & project mgrs. What you're left with is approach and understanding the business problem.

Briony's article speaks of business intelligence competency centres as a way to bring together IT and business people to "break down the walls". Air Canada resisted this centralized approach (and I think missing out on improved collaboration and communication).

So many times have I seen projects boil down to technology, architecture and design. Important yes. Technologist focused yes. Incomplete picture yes.

The C-level execs are taking back control of IT decisions. You can see this with more and more IT professionals being left out of the decision-making loop. This makes delivering successful BI projects a challenge, no? Creating a competency centre (i.e. committee) in and of itself doesn't make a success.

IT professionals are left out of decisions because the needs of the business are not being met from IT projects. Having IT at a decision-making meeting is perceived as having little value. Knowing architecture, dimensions and toolsets is not big value to the final decision.

So here are 3.5 ways to add value and get invited back into that meeting:

Be more than just technologists.

Provide value by meeting business people's needs.

Solve their business problems with an easy to use result.

Make decisions based on what's best for the organization and employees.

As a side note, Westjet (Air Canada's main competitor for readers outside of Canada) has a large BI centre and also moved away from a plethora of Excel spreadsheets. The approach Westjet took was taking the BI technologists around to watch employees interact with customers and do their jobs with Excel. Hands-on requirements gathering.

10 Questions with Aaron Burnett

2007-07-10T22:06:00.000-07:00

Software as a Service (SaaS) is a serious strategy and business model for software leaders like Sales Force.com and Sharp Analytics. Saas for business intelligence is expanding and breaking traditional assumptions about the industry.

SaaS means.... You don't need hardware. No need to install software. Much better ROI and less up front costs.

Now take this one step further by removing the intensive effort of building a traditional ETL layer – the layer that moves and translates information from your systems to a data warehouse.

Now what if you could accomplish SaaS for BI without that ETL layer?

When I came across Seatab Software, I was skeptical. However, their unique, innovative approach may dramatically change the way business intelligence is delivered for organizations and employees.

I spoke with Aaron Burnett, VP of Marketing for SeaTab, one morning about what they are doing that is breaking our traditional thinking about BI.

Question: Good morning Aaron. Let’s start with what makes you and SeaTab passionate about BI? Tell us how SeaTab got its start.
Answer: From its founding in 1998, SeaTab Software has been dedicated to provided SaaS business intelligence solutions. The company’s founder (Ching Wan) spent years leading deployments of massive data warehouses and complex BI solutions as a Data Warehouse Practice Lead for Cambridge Technology Partners. Through his experience, it became clear to Ching that then-available data warehouse and BI solutions were failing many of the customers who needed them. Too often, customers spent millions of dollars and months or even years of work, only to find that the inflexibility of the solution they deployed precluded the analysis they needed, relegated BI to the hands of a few “power users” and wedded them to large internal support costs or expensive and ongoing professional services fees.

Ching’s realization that, “there is a better way” marked the genesis of SeaTab and our SaaS business intelligence solutions. Our mission, then and today, is around providing every end user who needs it with the full power of business intelligence and enabling these users to create the custom/personalized BI environment that best suits their needs – all without requiring extensive IT support. We’re also dedicated to providing solutions that can be rapidly deployed (we deploy in 30 days on average) and preserve ongoing operational flexibility (additional data sources, changes in underlying business operations, etc). Again, the focus here is to provide these capabilities without requiring extensive IT support or outside professional services.

The more than 12,000 companies using our solutions gives some indication of our success at delivering on our mission.

Question: You mentioned SeaTab is being a "quiet success.” What did you mean by this?
Answer: One of the amazing things about SeaTab is that, until October of 2006, the company had no formal marketing function. Our customers are consistently passionate about the value our BI solutions have provided and created a great, informal network of SeaTab “evangelists.” As a result, new customers came to us almost exclusively through word-of-mouth.

In the last year, SeaTab has experienced significant growth, with staff expanding from eight to 25 employees and sales increasing more than four-fold so far. In addition, we obviously now have a formal marketing function!

Question: Word of mouth can be quite effective marketing. So what is behind the dramatic difference with SeaTab’s approach, no ETL or dimensional models?
Answer: In the main, dimensional models were created to overcome the inability of relational databases to support analytical queries. We knew from the start that a powerful SaaS BI solution couldn’t be built on a relational database. And by not relying on a relational database, we also don’t have to create and rely on dimensional models (cubes). As I know you understand, this has opened tremendous avenues of both operational and analytical freedom—for our customers and for us.

In a similar fashion, formal ETL tools and processes are required to support the physical data structures inherent in the relational database/dimensional model world. Again, we don’t employ physical data structures. We use logical modeling instead. Therefore, no physical data structures and no formal ETL. That’s not to say that we don’t have to model the data at all, we do. But we do it only once (when we first deploy) and we work with data in its original, “denormalized” structure.

By the way, we also deliver query response times that are typically much faster than those delivered by conventional BI solutions. That’s also helped our word-of-mouth marketing!

Question: I have found that BI isn't always pervasive throughout an organization. The information and tools are used by a small percentage of employees. You're trying to change this?
Answer: SeaTab’s technology puts the full power of BI in the hands of every user. This means every user has the ability to create custom reports, scorecards, KPI’s, dashboards and even custom calculations without requiring IT involvement. Part of the reason we can do this gets back to the data modeling approach I described in answer to your previous question. Because we store all customer data in a single, unified table and don’t have to build subject area cubes or adhere to dimensional models, we can easily provide end-users with the kind of analytical freedom such end-user access and control necessitates.

Some of this also has to do with ease of use. Our user interface is intuitive and requires very little training. In fact, training typically requires fewer than 30 minutes, and in many instances is accomplished virtually via WebEx or a recorded training session.

We’re typically deployed both broadly and deeply within our customer organizations. For example, Car Toys, a leading specialty retailer of mobile electronics and wireless services has more than 1,200 users ranging from the CFO and CEO (who stays logged in all day) to hundreds of seasonal retail employees who use PivotLink OnDemand as an integral part of the company’s ordering and provisioning processes.

Question: Let’s talk about companies who have benefited from your approach and PivotLink OnDemand. Car Toys CIO, Tom Lockwood, said, "[SeaTab was] the best and most important IT investment Car Toys ever made." Care to explain Tom’s quote?
Answer: Sure. Our deployment with Car Toys is a great example of the kind of operational flexibility I referred to earlier.

In addition to 50 company-owned retail locations, Car Toys operates more than 350 kiosks selling wireless services within major retail locations in the U.S. Maintaining onsite inventory levels for all of these locations is a monumental task. To address this need, we integrated PivotLink OnDemand with Car Toys’ ERP system. Now PivotLink OnDemand continuously monitors sales activity and inventory levels, automatically triggering orders to replenish inventory at any of the company’s 400 retail locations.

Lockwood (Car Toys’ CIO) says the following, “Without this system, it would take an army to calculate and manage our inventory orders. Now we're automatically generating thousands of purchase orders every week instead of undertaking this monumental task manually."

Question: Talking about ROI, CIO’s and companies building BI systems want to know the TCO and ROI. Can the PivotLink tool show decent Total Cost of Ownership and Return on Investment numbers?
Answer: Actually, our TCO and ROI numbers are pretty stunning. I’ll give you two examples, the first from an ROI-driven study of one of our customers that IDC conducted and the second from facts another of our customers has provided to a number of interested reporters.

EXAMPLE #1: SeaTab provides enterprise-wide business intelligence for Zones, Inc., $600 million/year, publicly traded, multi-channel retailer of more than 150,000 name-brand information technology products. More than 400 of Zones’ 650 total employees use PivotLink OnDemand on a daily basis – from CEO to customer care representative. More than the three-plus years since our deployment, these employees collectively have created more than 4,700 custom reports. And yet, Zones estimates their total internal support cost for PivotLink OnDemand at $25K (20 percent of one IT staff member’s time). In addition, IDC documented a payback period of just 42 days on their purchase of PivotLink OnDemand and found a 50 percent increase in sales productivity.

EXAMPLE #2: REI is a billion dollar retailer as the leading provider of quality outdoor gear. We provide REI with business intelligence solutions including merchandising, inventory management and sales. REI’s own internal assessment of the ROI PivotLink OnDemand brings includes:
- 9 percent increase in topline sales
- 1.6 percent increase in profit
- 2 percent increase of in-stock performance

Question: With your approach and your tool, PivotLink, can you really keep up with the on-going changes within a business and the volumes of information an organization captures?
Answer: Absolutely. Ongoing operational flexibility and an ability to rapidly integrate and accommodate changes in business operations are strengths in our solution. Because we don’t have to build physical data structures (data cubes), we also don’t have to tear down those structures when business operations change or when new data sources need to be integrated. Such events are trivial for us.

Question: Now for a competitor question. If you had to pick the top 2 items of what sets you apart from the competition, what would those be?
Answer: I would have to say,
1. End-user access and control.
2. Powerful BI performance at an unexpectedly low price. We provide price performance economics that no one in the marketplace can match.

Question: And now for the future vision of SeaTab. Where do you see yourselves going in the market, and what is your biggest hurdle?
Answer: We see ourselves as being the dominant SaaS player for the mid-market. Our biggest hurdle is overcoming the preconceived notions of how difficult and expensive BI implementations are.

Question: It was excellent to talk with you Aaron and hearing about your innovative approach to BI. To wrap this up, you mentioned you would have articles and stories for our readers. Can you send me links about SeaTab you want to share?
Answer: Thank you as well Tom. It was also good to meet with you.

SeaTab Web site:
http://www.seatab.com/

IDC Report:
Link to an IDC report that outlines how multi-channel retailer Zones, Inc. (http://www.zones.com/site/home/index.html), achieved a 50 percent increase in sales productivity and ROI of 1,065 percent by implementing SeaTab Software's PivotLink SaaS (Software as a Service) Business Intelligence solution.http://www.seatab.com/dnn/Default.aspx?tabid=140

News Articles:
Multi-channel Merchant:
Resource Guide: Business Intelligence Solutions
http://multichannelmerchant.com/crosschannel/metrics/resource_guide_business/index.html
CRM Buyer:
Web Services on Steroids
http://www.crmbuyer.com/story/56304.html

STORES Magazine:
Smooth Sailing; Anchor Blue unlocks its database with help from SeaTab Software
http://www.stores.org/archives/2007/2/edit13.asp

Featured on ebizQ!

2007-05-29T16:21:00.000-07:00

The blogosphere is expanding and the BI-related content is improving. BI blogs are growing past strictly vendor marketing and traditional data warehousing techniques. I guess the industry is realizing that business users really don't care whether it's Kimball versus Inmon or OLAP versus MOLAP.

There is an increased focus towards consumers and users of BI -- the business side of business intelligence -- solving business problems and improving efficiencies.

Case in point, ebizQ.net with over 100,000 members and a 37,000-subscriber newsletter has initiated a website called BI in Action. They sponsor Featured Bloggers, most recently yours truly (see the Blog Buzz section), and podcast roundtables.

They have setup a BI Virtual Conference (June 20-21) with keynotes from Gartner (Driving Business Performance) and Forrester (Current State of BI Market).

90 Partners with MS

2007-05-26T17:15:00.000-07:00

When you partner with a company, it should be a win-win for both sides. In the dotcom era, many organizations made partnerships. Though both parties wanted 2 + 2 to equal 5, they ended up with 3 instead. When you partner, you want improved cash flow, increased revenues and lowered costs.

Michael Matrick, CEO of 90 Degree Software, talks about their Microsoft partnership. On the surface, the obvious objective is to offer new BI products and reach out to more customers.

Download here the conversation Michael has with Microsoft's Director of Product Marketing, Francois Ajenstat.

However, reading this Q&A, you'll come away with two additional points:

Improved training and end-user adoption as a way to lower the costs for organizations,
Envisioning BI to all employees by lowering the cost of BI licenses.

As Francois says, "we've dramatically changed the economics of BI so that it is within reach of the end-users and within the reach of organizations, large or small."

One of the significant influences I see Microsoft having on the BI landscape is by changing the way vendors offer licensing. The traditional cost of $1500 per user is seen as a major roadblock by organizations.

Cognos, BO, Hyperion, MicroStrategy, (and others) take note.

One may think Microsoft is making BI a commodity by selling their tools relatively cheaply. Before you rush to judgement, it's true Microsoft may be using this to gain market share; however, real benefits will be seen by organizations and not just in reduced costs but in the ability to deliver BI to more employees.

And isn't that a top tier goal for BI. BI needs to get out of its niche market of analysts and technology-saavy managers. Because information should be available to everyone.

MS BI conference update

2007-05-14T10:08:00.000-07:00

Day 3 of the Microsoft BI conference. This inaugural BI conference provided superb keynote speeches from Jeff Raikes, Michael Treacy, Ted Kummert, Dr. Robert Kaplan, and with CEO Steve Ballmer wrapping up Day 3.

With hands-on labs, client war stories, and demonstrations, we were kept busy. The various types of tracks focused attendess on technical, business, client ROI, and partner. And the after hours parties were entertaining showing off Seattle's best.

However to summarize 3 days into one post, here are my top 3.5 take-away messages from the conference:

1. The Microsoft message was obvious; they are here to compete.

They have the tools to match or beat other vendors (ie. Business Objects, Cognos, MicroStrategy, etc). And they have an unmatched Total Cost of Ownership. The pack leaders don't have to look far to feel the Microsoft Juggernaut on their backs.

Sure the conference itself could have been better in a few areas but in typical Microsoft fashion: next time will be much better and the time after that will be really impressive.

Their BI play is much the same. They are about a year away from "really impressive" however today's Microsoft BI tools made me take serious notice. ProClarity provides analysis in easy-to-visualize formats (huge improvements for presenting information compared with typical vendor "cube" views). Business Scorecard Manager and PerformancePoint are clean and concise tools for dashboards, scorecards, and KPI analysis.

2. But the sum of the parts is less than the parts combined as a whole.

(I'm trying not to use 'synergy' here because it is over-used)

Now you can take the BI tools and seamlessly wrap them with SharePoint for your enterprise-wide, information sharing, collaboration tool. The best part about SharePoint is it's ability to fit outside of BI using document mgmt, search, and collaboration features. This is one major advantage Microsoft has over almost every competitor.

If you don't see it, Microsoft is amassing a total package that hits almost every point in your business.

3. Who's going to support the vendors with similar tools to Microsoft?

There were several, and I mean many, vendors that built products very, very similar to Microsoft's existing offering. Many started prior to the ProClarity acquisition when there were gaps in the BI offering. Now it begs the question,

How many analysis tools and report graphing tools that "integrate seamlessly with SQL Server" can the market support?

I'm sure many of their business plans used to say, "Microsoft to buy us out at year 3". Many of those are changing to say, "If Microsoft is a competitor and has no need to buy us out, can we compete?"

3.5 Seriously considering Microsoft BI?

It is not only the SQL Server product anymore. A full suite tools with a price point that allows you to spend more money on customizations. This makes business people (the end users) very happy indeed.

Have you ever heard from other BI vendors the pitch that licensing costs and implementation costs are about 50/50. That is, 50% of your BI implementation is spent on licenses. That doesn't leave much room for building BI to fit your business needs.

"BO no longer a BI company"

2007-05-02T13:45:00.000-07:00

This is a quote from CEO John Schwarz himself in this webcast.

Business Objects is rebranding itself. You mean they do more than Crystal reports? Okay, maybe that was a cheap shot but it is about time BO did something significant about their image. John's quote refers to BO no longer being a BI toolset company but a company that helps other companies gain insight into their information.

It is subtle but significant.

Their product offerings have expanded to include mobile/Blackberry, Xcelcius and On-Demand BI connectors. As well the Cartesis acquision for performance management and financial consolidation.

The downside is this.

This may be a reaction by management to the recent Oracle-Hyperion deal (that doesn't mean this isn't the right step for BO). Then consider the time/effort to consolidate acquired products and companies. In fact, Cartesis acquired several firms in 2005 and is probably still trying to integrate their acquired tools. Then BO just got through integrating their Crystal and BO to the new XI platform. And now BO will have to integrate Cartesis with XI.

That is a lot of change. But definitely a leap forwards and a shot over the bow of the competition. Makes you wonder who has the next big thing.

Sybase late to the party

2007-04-28T10:19:00.000-07:00

Pretty much every vendor has a tool to move information into a data warehouse - an ETL (extract, transform, load) tool. More recently with Oracle and Sunopsis, they have a competing offering with E-L-T tools. And some vendors offer ETLT, like Microsoft's SSIS.

So isn't Sybase late to this party by announcing they are adding to their suite an ETL tool? Unfortunately it does look similar to Oracle's approach of an embedded ETL tool within their database. I'm sure there are technical differences and I'm sure some would say the Sybase IQ ETL tool is separate from and can be used independantly from their Sybase ASE database.

But what's the point?!?

The question if I were a company or IT department looking for ETL is, "if I don't have the Sybase database, why would I look at Sybase ETL tools?" Oracle has a similar problem. I have never heard of Oracle's ETL tools (or any Oracle BI tools) being used with anything but Oracle databases.

It's one of the major drawbacks of having an integrated database with BI/DW tools. Yes, there are advantages to being tightly coupled but aren't they just technical. Are there "true" advantages for companies having an all Oracle or Sybase or Microsoft shop?

Their mantra: the synergy of our single vendor offering is in the overall value, where the value is more than the sum of the pieces (one plus one is three).

But what about doing a 'mix and match' by taking the best tools from the best vendors? Our society wants choice, your company should also have choice. Choosing the tools that meet your company's critieria, such as price, functionality, and ease of use, would reduce your risks of relying on one vendor.
The moral: Purchase tools based on your specific meaningful criteria and don't be caught up with the 'we have that tool as well' sales game.

At least having a choice will ensure you get what you asked for. And you never know, that may be from one vendor afterall.

Best BI Workplaces in Canada

2007-04-23T09:19:00.000-07:00

More than 20,000 employees from companies across Canada participated in the 2007 “Best Workplaces in Canada” survey. The list of Best Workplaces in Canada 2007 was published in the April 23rd's issue of Canadian Business.

I went through the list searching for any BI-related companies and found these:

19th Microsoft Canada
28th Online Business Systems
37th Deloitte and Touche

Not a great showing for BI vendors, except for Microsoft BI where their Canadian BI group is gaining momentum with mid to large installations. I'm sure they are looking forward to their PerformancePoint 2007 release.

Online Business Systems has a BI and integration consulting practice throughout Canada and US. And Deloitte and Touche also has BI practitioners but probably wants to focus more on business transformation, strategy and business cases around BI and DW.

Typically companies that have the "right" culture, like Canada's 50 best, attract the best and brightest people. Who wants to spend time working for a "bad boss" or a company with a culture of holding back their people?

What I'm getting at is the companies that can hire the "best people" will probably give you the best products and services in the end. If you're interested in doing BI, then I would start with these best.

It would be great to see more BI companies on that list but these 3 are a beginning.

BI Success Checklist

2007-04-11T20:39:00.000-07:00

Excellent post by Timo Elliott about the five fatal flaws of BI. I would use these for any and every BI project. Are you starting BI internally and what to be successful? Use Timo's list as your guide.

Because I work on different projects for various organizations, having a checklist like Timo's would help me focus my efforts in the direction of success each and every time.

Finally a MS BI conference

2007-04-06T14:36:00.000-07:00

Microsoft's first ever BI conference is in Seattle from May 9 - 11. I'm going so I can get an in-depth understanding of the ways Microsoft is being innovative for BI. Specifically whether PerformancePoint 2007 will compete with the industry's entrenched competitors. I'm also going to see what companies are attending as exhibitors and sponsors, as this should show who's fully on board with the Microsoft play.

The conference is expecting 2500 people but if you're there, I hope we can catch up. Drop me an email if you're going.

The first SaaS BI company acquired

2007-03-20T16:52:00.000-07:00

Thank you Stan Pugsley for passing on news of a new BI acquisition. Sharp Analytics, the forward thinking SaaS BI company, was acquired by iCrossing, a digital marketing agency. Seems my 10 Q&A with Chuck Sharp was timely (the acquisition was unknown to me at the time).

So why would a marketing agency acquire a subscription-based BI company?

Sure. There is the marketing alignment between the two companies. The synergy between sharing the same clients. But for a marketing agency to get into ETL, data integration, statistical analysis, and cleansing of data seems to be a detour from it's core competency.

What were they thinking.

iCrossing provides pay-per-click, search optimization, and landing page services that improve the success of a company's marketing campaign. Target specific demographics. Media placement. And once a campaign is run, the result produces boat loads of data.

But it's only data.

How well did the campaign perform? What demographics bought what products? Did the campaign make money? There are no actionable insights. Where's the BI? Actually Sharp Analytics offers this analysis. Search keyword analysis. Track search rankings. Click fraud reports. Paid search analysis.

Marketing BI.

Now iCrossing with Sharp Analytics can offer a full range of services to their clients.

I guess that was their thinking.

The end of BI

2007-03-19T16:08:00.000-07:00

The end, at least as we know it, touts Information Week. Thanks Janaki Gopalan for these articles.

Oracle's purchase of Hyperion leaves just two big BI vendors, Business Objects and Cognos. Many think they will be acquired but are they good acquisitions?

Here's what their CEOs have to say, Business Objects, Cognos CEOs Speak Out On Hyperion Acquisition.

Oracle's deal to buy Hyperion Solutions is changing the market landscape for customers, vendors and partners. To further explain, Information Week writes, It's The End Of The Business Intelligence World As We Know It.

So what does all this mean? The market is consolidating. Okay. The big players are serioulsy interested in BI. Excellent. And will this increase value to the business and give timely information to employees and mgmt?

Oh that.

Yes, while the vendors & acquirers are calculating the best combination of stock options & cash, who's delivering for customers? The IDC chart above puts the top 3 analysis vendors as Business Objects, Cognos, and Microsoft. But in the same article said SAS has the largest revenues of $1.9B. While Hyperion seems to focus on financial departments.

The question for those thinking about BI or those already using BI is this,

"What vendor has the toolset functionality, capability to improve their product line, and the implementation partners to give me the ROI, on-going business value and monthly performance answers our company deserves?"

Unfortunately for customers, consolidation means less choice, especially if major companies continue to acquire the major BI players. On the bright side, there will be more room for new entrants into the vendor market -- you know, those that offer innovative ways to bring BI to business people.

10 Questions for Michael Matrick

2007-03-15T10:27:00.000-07:00

When you bring together former senior leaders from some of the leading BI vendors, you'll probably find them creating innovative, Web 2.0 products with a fresh new approach to a common problem. When customers need, almost demand, that they gain immediate value from their existing BI system, 90 Degree Software has a unique collaborative approach for building reports and dashboards that I haven't seen in any other product.

When I was given a demonstration of what their tools could do, I had to share this with you. So I spoke with Michael Matrick, co-founder and President, about what they are doing over at 90 Degree Software up in Vancouver, BC Canada (which is the host city of the next Winter Olympics 2010).

Question: So what made you think the industry needed another reporting product?
Answer: The industry was in need of change. We believed that reporting products have had little innovation in the past number of years. It seems that the vendors are more interested in selling servers and BI platforms versus focusing on the actual users. Reporting is the most critical element of a BI solution. If the users can’t adapt to the reporting solution, the solution will end up failing. I will add that it was our customers and partners who we’ve worked with over the past decade that helped us to realize that change was mandatory, someone needed to step up and introduce innovation.

Question: You and others left some of the biggest BI vendors to be entrepreneurs competing in the same field. Where did you come from and what's your edge?
Answer: I think we all feel fortunate having had the opportunity to work for such large BI organizations (Crystal - BOBJ, Cognos and Microsoft) and gain the experience we did. Collectively as a company, we have over 100 years of BI experience. This includes - product development, sales & marketing and executive leadership. It was this experience that’s given us the opportunity to bring to market a much better way of reporting. I myself started my career with the early Crystal and ended it with Microsoft. In between there was a stint in where I ran a BI services company, focused on developing BI solutions. Lots of good times!

Question: What does your product solve for customers?
Answer: Simply put - We developed Radius⁹⁰ for people who create reports. Creators and users of reports are driven to use tools that are either too complex or too simple in nature (meaning not enough). In between there is a large opportunity to bring to market a reporting solution that works to benefit both users, using a single, clean and consistent interface. Radius⁹⁰, I’m happy to note is doing just this. We have brought to market the first Officetm based reporting solution.

Question: Typical BI software puts report builders in the IT department. What is different with Radius⁹⁰? Who can, or should, be using Radius⁹⁰?
Answer: Yes…and this is the problem. Radius⁹⁰ provides a consistent designer that looks and feels just like Office. We all spend our days creating documents, spreadsheets or PowerPoint’s…why do we need to learn a new user interface to create a report. Creating a report should maintain the same work flows and behave just as any other Office product. People who create or consume reports are Office users. With this, organizations can lower their costs by reducing training costs and time to create reports.

Question: When you mentioned that management uses Radius⁹⁰ like "lego blocks", what did you mean by that?
Answer: Ahh…yes. Radius⁹⁰ has a very unique feature called “Radius⁹⁰ Library.” Radius⁹⁰ provides users with this ability to decompose their reports or reports of others so that these report components (fragments) can then be used to construct new reports. This feature is a real blockbuster, as it enables people to assemble reporting using existing content (data connections, queries, parameters, charts, tables, matrices, etc…). to some they may say – so…think about it. Do you like recreating the same report more than once, just to tweak it or customize it for someone…I would guess the answer would be no. This is where we can realize that too much time is spent copying reports only to recreate the same report a different way. Now think about it – doing it that way means…managing 2, 3, 4, 5, 100 different reports. What happens when a change needs to occur? Using the library, users can reuse report content and leverage our semantic engine to offer version controls and centralized management. This means, IT can own the data and take the risk out of the equation for their users. Business or power users can simply leverage these existing report components and feel confident knowing that the data is accurate. For those who understand “RAD” (rapid application development) this will make a lot of sense.

Question: So a management team could collaborate to come up with their monthly management reports?
Answer: Yes. The library is a key collaborative feature of Radius⁹⁰. Management can search their library or the library of others and pull together a business view/perspective without ever having to know anything about SQL or anything of that nature. They know they want a sales pipeline chart by sales person. This fragment of information already exists so why not repurpose this information. Users like managers or others always think of what they want then try to build it. Usually they hand the request off, only to be disappointed by the results as it didn’t meet their requirement. Interpretation is usually what breaks down during this process.

Question: For those technology-minded, what sets Radius⁹⁰ apart from all the other proprietary products?
Answer: It’s a Rapid Application Development environment for building reports. Radius⁹⁰ provides a rich semantic layer that allows for report content to be tagged and reused, making report creation faster. I don’t know any technically minded report designers who don’t love this feature. Radius⁹⁰ also provides an extensibility model that allows developers to build report templates / theme’s, which we call report “add-ins.” This allows developers to integrate their LOB application right into the report designer. Not a runtime version of a report viewer. We are talking about a fully functioning reporting solution, leveraging your application logic giving the users the ability to customize or personalize reports.

Question: Microsoft's published RDL (Report Definition Language) is good for customers, why?
Answer: I believe so. The days of managed report formats or vendor controlled binaries are over. We’ve seemed to make such changes in all other software manors – for example, XML – why not with report formats? Users are looking for more open standard approaches to data storage, specifically file formats. Microsoft RDL provides an open report format that empowers organizations like us to roll out feature rich solutions without having to manage the format. Microsoft makes this format available as part of their SQL Server offering meaning customers get a scalable BI reporting platform that they can make available to enterprise customers. We feel fortunate to have the relationships with Microsoft that we do, allowing us to participate in early adopter panels, forums allowing us to prepare for any changes.

Question: What does the future have in store for 90 Degree Software?
Answer: To become the new report designer of choice for all report developers, users and consumers. It’s bold but definitely possible.

Question: Where can others find out about 90 Degree Software?
Answer: You can find more information from our website 90 Degree Software. As well, we had a booth at Convergence 2007 – San Diego – we were the hit of the show. We’ll be at the Microsoft BI conference in May and the WW Partner Conference in July, please come check us out!

3.5 reasons why Hyperion is great

2007-03-08T02:35:00.000-08:00

The recent news about Hyperion lead me to ask,

What makes them so good?

Oracle saw something in the company and its people but is there anything there for business people looking for a BI vendor? From your organizations perspective, are they any good? Not having worked with them, I have no direct experience but you can tell much from a company that shares information and how they share it.

Frank Buytendijk, VP of Corporate Strategy, and Richard Cox from Hyperion kindly sent me what I think are 3.5 reasons why Hyperion is a great company.

Reason 1
Expert Insights from Leaders
At this link, Hyperion executives and other thought leaders offer their insights about best practices, BPM strategy and the industry as a whole. You will find a new series of Expert Insights, called the CIO Dilemmas, providing an interesting perspective on using dilemma-based thinking to fuel new approaches to problems.

Reason 2
Educational Partnerships
At this link, they’re working on bringing BPM to the classroom. At Educational Partnerships you can see new developments and partnerships that Hyperion has with business schools worldwide.

Reason 3
Frank Buytendijk’s Blog
This blog from Frank, Hyperion’s VP of Corporate Strategy and well known player in BI and performance management circles from his previous role as a Gartner analyst, covers a spectrum of topics in BI, BPM, CPM and data warehousing. Frank’s also known to throw a few light-hearted posts in there from time to time about anything from Star Trek’s Kobayashi Maru to how BI could help him in his weight loss efforts.

Reason 3.5
Where Hyperion is taking BI
This great little piece of interactive media is entertaining and informative for anyone. The best viral media I've seen from a BI company to date.

BO denied; Hyperion now Oracle

2007-03-06T12:20:00.000-08:00

In a previous post, it was rumoured that Oracle would purchase Business Objects to improve it's BI offering through M&A.

That intel was inaccurate.

Hyperion was the object of Oracle's desires as The Data Doghouse explains. And with hindsight, I see how Oracle/Hyperion makes more sense. Acquiring Hyperion gives Oracle deeper customer relationships with financial departments where they can expand their ERP. And Hyperion will sit Oracle next to SAP clients (supposedly because many SAP clients use Hyperion for their BI) for further the competition between SAP and Oracle.

The Data Doghouse shares 5 Q&As about Oracle, Hyperion, and the competition with SAP.

This acquisition will almost for sure heat up the M&A fever for other BI vendors. Although I'm not sure it will be Business Objects or Cognos. The question I keep asking myself is, "What do they have to offer a large ERP vendor?" There are some big ERP players that want to enhance their BI offerings but what BI vendor has the track record for large, complex businesses with large volumes of data?

To further substantiate the fever of M&A, the Wall Street Journal published an article "Update: Oracle Buy Could Spur New M&A In Business Intel Mkt".

Explain why BI 2.0

2007-02-27T23:49:00.000-08:00

What I know about BI 2.0 is this -- decision-centric business intelligence or as the IDC's recent trends report outlines (I would like to have the actual report to share with you, I really would but $4500 is more than I'm willing to spend), BI 2.0 is for customers interested in providing their employees with advanced decision support that solves specific business problems.

That's not really descriptive enough, so my BI 2.0 would:

track business events
make decisions in close to real-time
use SOA and Web 2.0 technologies

Then IDC goes on with a new term business analytics; "software for tracking, storing, analyzing, modeling, and delivering data in support of automating decision-making and reporting processes."

IDC says business analytics, I'm assuming the software, is the cornerstone for the newly emerging BI 2.0 concept -- giving us decision-centric BI. Sounds like this will give business people the automated support they need from their BI system!

But don't get juiced up just yet. These waters are muddy. Here are other statements muddying the market around BI 2.0:

BI 2.0 sounds similar to Enterprise Decision Mgmt: the automation and improvement of operational business decisions.
"It is also interesting to note that BI 2.0 is complementary and supportive of many of the requirements of BPM 2.0." - Craig Schiff's BPM article
"Operational analytics is a key component of the next wave of business performance management, as described in Craig Schiff's recent article Performance Management 2.0.

Could we confuse the market anymore? Luckily there are differences between market trends that last (maybe that's BI 2.0, for sure it is Web 2.0) and the fads that are shortterm that no one remembers (probably anything else ending in "2.0").

Integrated performance management

2007-02-24T13:36:00.000-08:00

Integrating the various components of your corporate performance management initiative is going to be challenging. But sometimes the best organizational improvements you make are the most difficult. Increase the effectiveness by going beyond just measuring past performance for the sake of measurement -- integrate individual compensation, recognition and rewards into the overall process.

This CPM blog explains it nicely. And thanks to Frank Buytendijk, Hyperion's VP of Corporate Strategy, for his performance management blog.

So why link people to the high level performance measures?

One word -- effective-motivated-employees!

Having key performance indicators is a start but typically are abstract to the point where the employee doesn't understand where their contribution to the company fits into the performance strategy. The hard part is taking the process from a strategic level to an operational level and clearly linking individual performance to the overall corporate goals.

But once there, you will realize the benefits of your hard work!

Here's a YouTube clip about combat readiness for an underperforming navel vessel. And how the captain used communication to improve productivity.

Now go and integrate individual performance to the overall corporate strategy so employees understand why they are spending most of their day at work!

10 Questions for Chuck Sharp

2007-02-20T17:30:00.000-08:00

Chuck Sharp is co-founder and CEO for Sharp Analytics, a company with a unique Business Intelligence offering. I came across this company when looking for innovative, entrepreneurial leaders within the BI industry (all you can eat bi).

The way Chuck sees BI is different than most; he is forward thinking and creating a path that could be the beginning of the next big wave of innovation for BI. So I talked with him to find out what this was all about.

Question: Tell us why you started Sharp Analytics? Where did this business come from?
Answer: I come from a marketing background. Christian Faulconer, the other co-founder, comes from an IT and datawarehouse background. As co-workers in another organization, we discussed the difficulty in bridging the natural gap between IT and business users, especially in the areas of marketing and customer relationship management. Those discussions led us to create our own company.

Question: When you were a marketer, who were some of the more interesting companies or projects you worked with?
Answer: I actually consider myself a marketer first and a technologist second. Our success to date at Sharp Analytics has been that we are domain experts in marketing and we understand what data and data sources are needed to create a valuable BI solution for marketers.

When I worked for Hallmark I was asked to create the database marketing strategy for their online customers. During that time I learned how great data insight can create meaningful marketing programs. We found out that we had just a few thousand customers driving over 30 percent of our business. We decided to send them a customized holiday card that was hand signed by ever member of our department. This personal touch created great word of mouth advertising for Hallmark.com and increased more customer loyalty.

Question: You obviously saw a need in the market for something different. So where do you see the BI industry going?
Answer: Business Intelligence needs to break down the walls between organizations within a company, and the walls between a company and its suppliers, distributors and customers. SaaS can leverage the power of web services and SOA to bring together those parties.

Question: What makes Sharp Analytics innovative and different from the typical arrangement of BI vendors with consultants?
Answer: Traditional BI vendors and their consultants offer a solution that:
1. requires significant licensing, human resources, and training costs to maintain
2. is often stagnant, solving problems that existed at one point in time.
As a result, unless there is extremely strong commitment on the side of the customer, the solution is either hard to support or hard to commit to in the first place.

We allow customers to focus on their core business areas, while letting us deliver, support, and evolve a BI solution without any of the previously mentioned drawbacks. Because we have all of the tools and staff already in place, we can deliver that solution in a matter of weeks rather than months.

Another differentiator is that we provide ongoing analysis and custom reporting for our customers as part of the deal. Each customer has a dedicated analyst to support the evolving business needs.
Question: “Start with the end in mind.” When we spoke what did you mean by that?
Answer: The first step in any BI project is to identify the business objectives and key performance metrics. Tools and technology should be out of the picture at that point. Once we understand those objectives and metrics, we can pick the right tools and reports to meet those needs.

Question: Rob Ashe, Cognos CEO, says “only 20% of users actually access data through BI”. Is Sharp Analytics another BI company that only delivers to analyst-types that make up 20% of a company?
Answer: One of my team members just wrote a blog entry on this exact topic:
http://blog.sharpanalytics.com/?p=16. It is a constant challenge to make BI relevant to the other 80%. The key is to improve the ROI for a user – meaning the return on the investment of clicking on a link, typing a username and password, and navigating to a report. We are experimenting with push technology, as well as continually developing new content.

Question: If you were to take sides, do you see yourselves as translators for the business or do you support internal IT departments?
Answer: Our goal is to deliver for the business. Answer their key questions; respond within 24-hours to their questions. Of course, IT departments are our partner in delivering that solution since our solution depends on a dependable source of data from the customer. We find that most IT departments are anxious to build nice reports, but when you talk to them about the resource-intensive effort of integrating and cleansing data from multiple sources, they are happy to have our assistance.

Question: What kind of benefits are clients gaining from using the SaaS model and specifically the way Sharp Analytics offers SaaS?
Answer: BI requires a specialized set of employee skills and an expensive set of tools. Many companies aren’t ready to make that commitment in a serious way, and are unhappy with the results when they try to do it on the cheap. The SaaS model allows us to become very good at BI, hire great people and give them an endless supply of interesting projects.

Question: Do you see the SaaS model growing within the Business Intelligence industry?
Answer: There will probably always be some companies that are uncomfortable with dealing with external service providers. These may be the same companies that also decline to contract out their custodial or telecom services. But SaaS is going to appeal to an increasing portion of the market. And we are not just talking about the small and mid-size companies. Fortune 500 corporations often become so large that the IT and business organizations act as different companies, opening up a gap that we can help to fill.

Question: If someone wanted to know more about Sharp Analytics, where should they go?
Answer: www.SharpAnalytics.com and blog.SharpAnalytics.com

An additional way people can learn about what we do is to look at some of our online demos at our website. These will really show you how we make complex data easy to understand for non technical business users.

BI fights criminals with GIS

2007-02-15T13:47:00.000-08:00

Sometimes generic reporting and analysis tools don't cut it. Sometimes you need more than Excel or a report or a cube.

You need Google Maps on steroids.

For some industries, people live and breath in a geospatial world where analysis of geographic layers is done. And now visually seeing the analysis & trends of a geospatial map can be done using your GIS tool.

Integeo developed a geospatial business intelligence tool, Map Intelligence, to integrate with GIS tools and BI tools.

The article shows how Police services analyzing various criminal codes (ie. murders, break & enters) is done graphically. Is there a correlation between drunk and disorderly behaviour and liquor stores? Where are the serious troublespots then overlay the city districts to determine where best to allocate police officers?

It seems geospatial business intelligence is another frontier yet to be broached by BI vendors.

Oracle eyes Business Objects

2007-02-01T10:13:00.000-08:00

More consolidation for the BI market is a foot.

Oracle's eyes are looking to takeover Business Objects. And there is also mention of IBM wanting to purchase Cognos.

If only I had a BI software company... Could be the right time to sell.

Instant Messaging gets into BI

2007-01-30T11:34:00.000-08:00

Just as I was looking for examples of Web 2.0 innovation in the BI space and having a hard time finding leaders (or even companies attempting to be leaders), along comes this post from Sales Technology - BI gets collaborative. They hit the nail on the head.

"The BI industry has offered little to directly address the collaboration environment."

The companies looking at integrating Web 2.0 and Instant Messaging are onto something. I can conceptually see how Instant Messaging (IM), which is typically used for social chatting between friends and co-workers, can foster new ideas for collaboration within a business environment and strictly for business reasons.

Could this replace printing financial reports that managers discuss over a conference call? What about holding performance meetings with a location-dispersed management team? It seems to me there is huge potential here -- not only from improving the efficiencies of a business but also financial savings.

So where are the leaders and what are they waiting for?

The downside to all this new technology will be keeping BI simple and easy-to-use so BI breaks the "used by only 20% of an organization" barrier. The last thing the industry needs is another era of complicated tools that only a few people can use.

First BI mashup with Google Maps

2007-01-25T11:12:00.000-08:00

Okay, being the first out of the gate with a new technology doesn't mean you will be the long term winner. But in this case, they could be. A mashup between BI and Google by using the open source, collaborative model gave Pentaho the edge they needed.

That collaborative model may also keep them the front-runners in the future. Instead of using only in-house IT people or consultants to build new products, the Open Source model uses hundreds and thousands of people outside of company walls, many of which are in the new Web 2.0 world, to design and build the next generation of software.

In this case, Pentaho mashed Google Maps with their graphical dashboards to display location-based metrics tied to geographic maps. And Google featured this as an innovative example in Google Code.

Here's an example,
"The combination of Pentaho’s charts and other graphically expressed metrics with visual geographic information can help companies rapidly identify regions associated with certain customer behaviors or spending patterns, (...) zero in on location-based business opportunities, and gain other insights that are difficult to see in a traditional report or spreadsheet."

So chalk this up as a win for the Open Source, collaborative model (and Pentaho, of course).

I'd like to continue with this topic of conversation and ask, "Have you come across other mashups that move BI closer to a Web 2.0 world?" Or know of new innovative features (or would like to suggest ideas for BI) that push the BI envelope to be more mobile, easy-to-use, or ways that would make BI utilized by more people within the organization? Let's hear from you.

Are BI appliances falling short?

2007-01-15T10:37:00.000-08:00

The one truth that I know is that BI/DW appliances are here and penetrating the BI market. IBM, Teradata, Netezza, and DATAllegro are well known vendors.

But are they a viable solution for you?

Questions that come immediately to mind are: Will appliances be cheaper to implement? Do they have an overall lower cost because they combine hardware and software? Are they cheaper to support? Will I require specialized people to support an appliance?

[Quick description of BI appliances from a non-technology perspective: BI appliances are a combination of hardware and software that are packaged together to provide high-performing, streamlined BI solutions. BI appliances are relatively new to the market but promise a high price-to-performance ratio.]

To build a typical BI system, today you would have to find a hardware vendor, a BI software vendor, and a separate consulting partner (or internal resources) to implement your BI solution -- then you would tune for performance. This can be a complicated process but are using appliances any better?

Here is a link to DATAllegro's CIO Whitepaper Series where I read Bloor Research's Truth about DW appliances white paper by Philip Howard (head's up: he is a bit techy in his explanations). Thank you Fayu for passing this on to me.

In the past, I have questioned whether appliances are ready for prime time. Or are they best for a market niche. To help answer these questions, Philip's white paper suggests the following common myths (concerns) of appliances:

Unfortunately, appliances are proprietary
Only good for data marts, not Enterprise Data Warehouses
It's easier to build your own appliance
Support is split between the appliance and hardware vendors

Philip does give alternative perspectives to these concerns but I didn't walk away evangelistic about appliances. I think this whitepaper was meant to address 'typical' objections vendors try to overcome. So I may just need to hear from those working directly with BI appliances to understand all the great benefits.

Anyone with direct experience willing to comment?

But unless you know something I don't and you don't know whether you need an appliance, then you probably don't.

Biggle me this

2007-01-09T15:50:00.000-08:00

Gartner has created a new word for us. They do this once in a while.

Biggle -- The intersection of BI and Google.

They call it the concept of easy-to-use BI where data warehouse software is sophisticated enough to relate similar concepts and products. I like the concept but is Biggle (the word) really innovative? As far as trend-setting, Gartner doesn't always hit the mark.

So let me take a stab at this. Google's search engine is being used by various BI vendors to give business people easier access to their information. And BI vendors, such as Cognos & SAS, have redesigned their web portals so people can use the familiar Google search bar. Is this telling BI vendors to focus on what they are great at, which is BI and not Web 2.0 applications?

(A quick aside) Business Week writes about BI uncovering $13M in improper Medicaid claims in New York. They say it could have been $3.8 Billion!

And the same article also talks about Biggle:

"For instance, if a business-unit leader searches for first quarter financial results, she might also get reports on the 10 largest customers by profit and revenues."

This post was a bit of a hodgepodge but the underlying message is this:

BI needs to be simplier so business people can accept and use it in a meaningful way.

Building planes in the sky

2007-01-06T08:53:00.000-08:00

So you have built a mature Business Intelligence offering that has supported your business for years. Everything is running relatively smoothly. Users are getting accurate information in a timely manner. You feel confident that you can reap the benefits of your hard work.

Or can you.

There is more to be done (there always is) but how do you accomplish this while your production system is being used by all those users?

Well here's how planes are built while in flight.

There is usually more that can/should be done. Whether it involves upgrading the software to the latest Web 2.0, content sharing, self sufficient reporting products. Or supplementing your implementation with executive reporting, financial planning models, or following up with users for their latest analytical needs.

But the question is how do you make this happen when you have a production system running. You want to keep the lights on for those using it. No downtime - 24x7x365. Maybe it would help by hearing from the different roles in a project (mostly in jest).

Project Managers: Determine the risks of upgrading, find the critical path, and add a contingency to the estimates. We can do this if we add more resources to the project plan.

Technologists: Use more hardware/software for multiple environments and after doing Agile development just switch all users to the new system. Simple.

Users: Um, we like what we have. What is this upgrade going to give us again?

Toyota presumed imperfect

2007-01-02T16:28:00.000-08:00

For some, a New Year's resolution is all about planning and personal improvement. I decided against making a resolution after reading about Toyota's obsession with improvement. So maybe instead of signing up for that book diet or gym membership, you may want to take a page from Toyota -- Fast Company.

They don't set goals in the sense of striving to reach a plateau. The company is thriving, while the big three are suffering. Their culture is rooted in being self-critical with "a pervasive lack of complacency with whatever was accomplished yesterday."

Matthew E. May is the author of Elegant Solution: Toyota’s Formula for Mastering Innovation and you can download a copy of Matthew E. May's manifesto on ChangeThis.

Will this approach to incremental improvement help your organization or BI engagement? I'm sure there are new innovative ways to impress management and customers. The goal shouldn't be to cross a finish line in one, unchanging step.

In fact, for Toyota, there is no finish line. Could each of your products or services be looked at with an eye to "how can we make this better today for us and our customers."

So how will you break the mold and continuously improve.

Doghouse best in class

2006-11-29T10:18:00.000-08:00

Not everyone needs best-in-class software. So why not purchase the best? Just because a vendor sits in the upper right quadrant doesn't make it the best choice for you. You may need to consider your budget, your culture of organic open source IT, or maybe you want to focus on your core competencies which isn't BI development.

Even the Fortune 1000 should look outside the typical "short-list" of BI vendors. And then there are the small to mid-sized businesses with typically limited IT resources.

Thank you Fayu for this post from The Data Doghouse giving options beyond the best-in-class vendors. Here's my shortened list of options.

BI with SaaS - cost effective, minimum internal IT resources required, All you can eat BI.

Open Source BI - cost effective, typical BI technical architecture, requires internal IT support, Open source validated.

BI appliances - simple solution from customers perspective, BI in a box that sits at your site.

Microsoft Excel - least expensive, inherent problems with taking this approach but works for some.

To help with others doing their research on these vendor categories, if you know of companies that fall within these categories, send them my way or post your own comment. I know I could learn something from these new offerings too.

Executive reporting? free ebook (for now)

2006-10-20T13:20:00.000-07:00

Executive reporting is changing. Or rather the way executives are doing organization-wide reporting is. Consuming information is at an all time high. Executives want to act before they have to react to the market, competition, and other conditions.

This Executive Reporting ebook I'm publishing is not about selling you on one service or another. Nor does it recommend a product or tool. Instead it is about giving you tried ideas that worked for management groups in government and private firms. In a condensed, easily consumable form.

Download pdf here.

I'm sure this ebook is incomplete. But that's why I left the option open for future issues. I hope this encourages you to think and pay attention to what other organizations are doing. And it's free. And it is small enough to email to colleagues or post on your own site.

Thanks for reading.

Marketing matters

2006-10-20T11:20:00.000-07:00

Many vendors don't get it. How many vendor demonstrations have you sat through and all you came away with was how their products are great. The best features. Better than the competition. I bet they are in the top right corner of the Gartner quadrants too.

It shouldn't be about how their product functions. Unless the "how" is what you want to know. Sometimes techies and vendor sales people focus on the technology when marketing to business people. Check out John Dodds post ("Geek Marketing"). Following even one or two of his top ten will help with not speaking geek. "Translate the creations of the uncommunicative (techies) into the needs of the untechnical (biz people)".

After all it should be about how the product can work for you or your business.

An Engineer, economist, and a marketer walk into a room

2006-10-10T09:27:00.000-07:00

Eirik has a excellent riff on "When will a new technology break through?"

His "most important thing" is very important for BI users (I mean executives, analysts, managers, and frontline staff). Design, good design, will help with users accepting and using BI and business performance measurement and pretty much anything you want used by people.

Creative BI: people want it

2006-10-06T23:38:00.000-07:00

Ever have the feeling that some people are reacting to BI with a "oh, it's that again" attitude. Ever heard a user say, "I get what I need, then I get out quick." Not in your department, you say?

BI could be getting stale for people. BI can be known as a difficult tool that provides more information than is really needed. And is delivered to far too few. Perhaps in some cases but there are ways to change that.

Impress users with the "wow" factor. But how?

Design and innovation. Chas Martin is finding that creative, innovative designers are increasingly more relevant within companies. With BI, it's about the user interaction portion. Use something other than the generic out-of-the-box functionality. Boring.

Find out what the winners of the TDWI Best Practices awards have done to impress. They raised their standards and the results benefited users.

BI can be more than pushing mounds of data to users. The experience can be about seeing the information you want quickly and easily. People don't have the luxury of spare time. By helping them get to the point in less time, they may use it more often next time.

Microsoft could cost you more

2006-09-29T11:06:00.000-07:00

Good news for some; for the rest, it could take focus and money away from projects and improvements for performance measurement and BI systems.

The IDC study (paid by Microsoft) concluded that Microsoft's new Vista operating system (in the European Union) will require billions of dollars and more IT employees to focus on the upgrade. Some will argue the benefits of the new software outweigh the costs. Really?

Silicon Valley Sleuth shares their comments and here's the IDC study.

First some numbers. For every Euro that is spent on Windows Vista, companies on average will spend another 14 Euro on downstream economic activity (hardware, services and third party software applications). This is not going to be a simple upgrade of Windows. CIOs and IT budgets will feel the financial hit.

And that's a staggering proportion. If everytime a client came to me and asked for the latest and greatest and I told her "it will cost you 14 times the software costs to complete", I wouldn't have her as a client! But if I had a monopoly like Microsoft, then I guess she couldn't turn to anyone else.

Now the benefits. According to IDC, one of the positive impacts for the economy is the 50% increase in IT jobs needed for Vista-related work. More jobs are welcomed but realistically that will mean less IT people and budget focused on content and systems to support business people.

Some may argue that Vista benefits business people, but I haven't come across an executive yet that asked for the latest Windows patch.

For those who have some influence over IT spending, be informed (warned?) that business people may be the ones losing out with Microsoft's new Vista upgrade.

BI detects fraud

2006-09-20T11:54:00.000-07:00

Some of us are willing to pay anything to have chiropractors fix our necks and backs. Then there are those who scam insurance companies with false claims of injury. I'm assuming this is a big business if you want to be on that side of the law. Fighting back are insurance companies using BI to track down fraudulent claims and unethical chiropractors.

This is what BI should be doing. Focusing on how to right a wrong. Learning how to help people in society. Protecting a business from economic downturns. Increasing market share of a business. What contribution is your information providing you, your organization, or society?

Executive reports on your Blackberry

2006-09-19T10:51:00.000-07:00

When you need to check the performance (or under-performance) of a business unit, geographic region, or sales numbers for a department, it is difficult to do this on the road. Shawn writes that Cognos can now do this for your Blackberry.

Being less tied to your computer or laptop for information will keep you mobile (especially for those who spend a great deal of time traveling or going to meetings 8 hours a day). You want the "right" information pushed to you on a regular basis without involving a bunch of people or asking IT.

Information you want; when you need it.

The key will be giving executives information that works on the 3 inch Blackberry-type screens. The days of the "one-page-wonder" where all your information is on one report will be history. But replaced with simple, clear, concise, to-the-point, and actionable information.

People will become accustom to charts and data that relate to key performance information. When people are accountable and gauged on a small number of key performance measures, people tend to focus.

There is a downside to being too focused though. More about that later.

Where is your pipe dream

2006-09-19T10:45:00.001-07:00

Lyndsay Wise writes how "business performance management (BPM) is the next generation of business intelligence". Not so sure this is true when Hyperion is already adding Google search to their BPM and BI toolsets.

The next wave for BI, which includes BPM, will probably focus on two objectives:

1) Simplify BI so non-tech people can actually use it. Google search is a start.

2) Once it is easier to use, BI will quickly be pushed out to more people within an organization.

BI and BPM can be a huge benefit to a business. At this point, only 20% of people gain this benefit.

Imagine your business using a pipe with two open ends. At one end, information enters the pipe. Invoices, customer support, case management... data goes in. The pipe makes the magic happen and information should come out the other end. (The pipe is a metaphor for BI technology, in case it wasn't clear.)

You want the information coming out to be at a good flow and the pipe at the correct width. I suspect most have the tap on too high. Or not enough flow. The point being that every organization has different needs. And people within a company also have different needs.

Do a quick check. Are your executives receiving the same flow of information as people on the front line? Different information and tools for different folks.

Getting started

2006-09-08T16:05:00.000-07:00

Prospect: "We loved your pitch from yesterday for a BI solution and we want to start today."
Consultant: "Sorry but we don't have anyone available at this time. But we could start in 45 days."

Vendor: "If you liked our proposal, then we are ready to discuss moving forward today."
Client: "Your proposal is what we want and everyone here agrees with it. But we want to revisit the design."

Employee: "The client says they are ready to start so I'll need Bob to uncover details for a proposed plan."
Boss: "I don't think you need Bob yet. Wait until the project starts and we have a contract."
[the plan submitted was rejected due to inaccuracies.]

Sometimes getting started is the hardest thing to do even when all the writing is on the wall. Actual conversations (luckily not all mine) about the status quo and taking that next step.

Unique

2006-09-08T15:26:00.000-07:00

There are 44,200,000 Google matches for "Information Management". "Business Intelligence" beats that with 55,600,000, while "Data Warehouse" is far behind with 12,600,000. "Performance Management" is in the middle with 21,600,000 matches.

Are you using these words to describe you or your company? You may not be so unique as you think you are, I'm guessing.

Compare that with Google matches for vendors. Business Objects at 9,100,000. Cognos at 4,630,000. Down to Microstrategy at 1,660,000 and Pentaho with 240,000.

Does more content suggest a better product? More matches suggest more installations? Being the loudest doesn't mean the best.

Choosing from the top 10

2006-08-31T09:55:00.000-07:00

With 90+ performance management vendors out there having a list of the top 10 is invaluable. Craig Schiff's criteria identifies good companies with good offerings. For you making a choice for that "one right" product will be challenging to say the least.

There are two ways to find that one great product that your organization will thank you for finding (or not).

1) Ask someone who says they are an expert in the field. They should guide you through a process of elimination. They should interpret what your organization needs and keep you on the right path.

2) Dive in yourself. A high learning curve but you'll know the product offerings intimately. Be warned. Not all marketing material reflects the "truth" about the products or companies.

Either way the process is the same. Determine the criteria that are important to you. Price. Functionality. Vendor support. Do your research. Which will lead to more research. See a few vendor demonstrations and watch the salesperson courting ritual.

Making a choice is easy when you have hindsight. If you don't have it, use someone else's.

Ownership over governance

2006-08-11T10:32:00.000-07:00

Knightsbridge released their Top 10 trends in BI. The Whitepaper is brief but they point out that the business is best suited to own and manage the organization's data. Afterall the business supplies the information and consumes the information; taking ownership over how the information is governed for BI only makes sense.

Knightsbridge's "6 key dimensions" for a governance program sound a bit technology and data quality focused. I may supplement them with The Gatekeeper approach and the business committment to taking ownership, especially of meta-data and proliferation of reports.

The ability to bring together multiple business units under Enterprise-level BI will require strong leadership. The business needs to assign leaders who have the authority and influence to navigate the political landscape.

When building a governance model, as Aloys points out, you want to start off with a 70%-right governance model, require committment from stakeholders, and paint a good looking end-state to help stakeholders through change.

Jim Wirth writes a more in-depth post about the top 5 Knightbridge trends.

Aussi rules for BI

2006-08-09T10:00:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Alex Cook for this Austrailian Building Commission website that makes analysis of their performance measures available to the public. You can understand their business just from the intuitive nature of the website.

6 reasons why this is a great site for promoting successful BI:

Users are the public so the drill down analysis needs to be dead simple.
Defintions for each measure are explained clearly and concisely (and short).
Seamless integration between the web user interface and BI tools.
The analysis and reports are displayed using Web presentation best practices (BI vendors could learn here for their own Portal product offerings).
Performance is relative; they compare to 16 headline measures.
You don't know what BI tool is being used or even that you are using a BI tool.

All-you-can-eat BI

2006-08-03T10:20:00.000-07:00

All you need is a web browser. No infrastructure. No BI resources or specialists. Then you pay monthly for your transformed BI. How do you have BI without any resources or infrastructure? Doing this would definitely lower the barriers of entry for more SME's to get into BI.

Sharp Analytics offers to do just that - outsource your BI saving you from having BI infrastructure and BI specialists. They started as a niche BI company for marketing data. Now they are providing affordable, web-based, external BI for marketing, financial, utilities and retail.

Their "data as a service" approach lowers the financial burden and removes the need for technical skillsets when operating a BI system. Prepare for this model of BI to take hold and be used by more organizations. The reduced capital spending on initial infrastructure and toolset licenses may be a key driver for many.

Put the V in your project

2006-08-01T10:10:00.000-07:00

When there are a several choices of project managing lifecycles to choose from, which one suites you best.

Waterfall approach. Iterative cycles or spiral model. CMMI. Or the German V-Model.

The V-Model is an interesting concept from Germany. The left tail represents specifications; the right tail as the testing stream related to the specifications defined on the left. The V bottom represents the development stream.

Many projects fall short in the testing cycles. Either not enough or not enough of the right kind. The V-Model shows that testing needs to occur at all levels from the developers code to the business requirements.

Informatica mashup

2006-07-27T14:45:00.000-07:00

Morgan posts about the deal made between Informatica and Salesforce.com -- bringing DW and SaaS together, or as Morgan says, "data as a service". Users access Informatica tools in a services setting to migrate, synchronize and profile CRM data.

The Internet is disrupting a traditional BI toolset race. Google is in the news lately with Cognos and Google Maps doing BI-specific mashups. Soon more companies will realize that this can be a serious avenue for revenue growth. Let the entrepreneurial thinking kick into high gear.

For those, like me, who are new to "web mashups".

0 to 1 Terabyte in 60 seconds

2006-07-27T09:13:00.000-07:00

This isn't your grandparents' harvest-gold kitchen appliance. They say it will give you "two orders of magnitude better price-performance" for analyzing large volumes of data. This is hardware with open source software that, when tightly integrated together, improves the performance when querying hundreds of terabytes of data.

Clarise makes the point that enterprises are not investing in new infrastructure and technology. So did Sun and Greenplum waste time & money on a product no one can buy?

Companies have growing volumes of data and the need for timely access to their information. I think we'll see more specialized appliances for the BI industry.

BI affects so few

2006-07-21T10:06:00.000-07:00

Putting BI in the hands of more users is our goal. Rob Ashe says only 20% of users access data through BI.

Now people are in search of better BI by integrating enterprise search capabilities with BI products.

Imagine typing in "Cases On Time" and getting results showing all the reports and OLAP cubes that match, the KPIs that are related to cases, and any user documentation on definitions and methodology.

You no longer need to remember where to look for information; you just need to know what you're looking for.