5 Ways to Save Organizations Millions

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.

13% achieve BI objectives

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

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.

Why the auto industry sells lemons

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]

Everything as a Service

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.

BI in the year 2020

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.

1. 90% of BI will be delivered on mobile devices.
   
2. Much larger volumes of data, beyond terabytes, will need to be handled changing the hardware and software paradigm.
   
3. Information will be managed by business professionals and not technology professionals.
   
4. 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.
   
5. 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.
   
6. Better adoption of BI will happen when BI is integrated within productivity suites, like Office. BI will be an extension of business productivity.
   
7. 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.
   
8. 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.
9. SaaS BI's success will be based on two serious roadblocks: Data Quality and Data Security.
10. 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]

Introducing Business Intelligence Soapbox

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

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.

BI has it all wrong?

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.

Participate in the first BI sharing network!

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.

Really Simple Integration

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

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:

1. 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.


2. 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

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

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.

Where is your ego?

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.

Reality Check: search is lacking

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 Next

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.

BI in just 24 hours

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

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.

Search not found - BI videos lacking

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:

1. Align IT with business processes,


2. Accelerate innovation,


3. Facilitate decision making,


4. Increase flexibility,


5. Manage knowledge captial,


6. Favor exchanges, and


7. 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).