Sybase late to the party

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

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

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

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

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

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

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).

1. 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.


2. 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!


3. 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.


4. 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.


5. 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.


6. 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.


7. 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.


8. 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.


9. 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.


10. 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

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

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

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

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

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.

1. 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.


2. 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.


3. 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.


4. 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.

5. 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.


6. 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.


7. 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.


8. 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.


9. 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.


10. 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

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

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

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

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?

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:

1. Unfortunately, appliances are proprietary
2. Only good for data marts, not Enterprise Data Warehouses
3. It's easier to build your own appliance
4. 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

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

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

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.