Wordle

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

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

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

Analysis of your competitors

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

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

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

Look no further.

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

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

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

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).

2007 leader for BI

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

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

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

Featured on ebizQ!

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

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

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

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

"BO no longer a BI company"

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

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

It is subtle but significant.

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

The downside is this.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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").

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.
    

Marketing matters

Many vendors don't get it. How many vendor demonstrations have you sat through and all you came away with was how their products are great. The best features. Better than the competition. I bet they are in the top right corner of the Gartner quadrants too.

It shouldn't be about how their product functions. Unless the "how" is what you want to know. Sometimes techies and vendor sales people focus on the technology when marketing to business people. Check out John Dodds post ("Geek Marketing"). Following even one or two of his top ten will help with not speaking geek. "Translate the creations of the uncommunicative (techies) into the needs of the untechnical (biz people)".

After all it should be about how the product can work for you or your business.

An Engineer, economist, and a marketer walk into a room

Eirik has a excellent riff on "When will a new technology break through?"

His "most important thing" is very important for BI users (I mean executives, analysts, managers, and frontline staff). Design, good design, will help with users accepting and using BI and business performance measurement and pretty much anything you want used by people.

BI affects so few

Putting BI in the hands of more users is our goal. Rob Ashe says only 20% of users access data through BI.

Now people are in search of better BI by integrating enterprise search capabilities with BI products.

Imagine typing in "Cases On Time" and getting results showing all the reports and OLAP cubes that match, the KPIs that are related to cases, and any user documentation on definitions and methodology.

You no longer need to remember where to look for information; you just need to know what you're looking for.

The idea of the Long-Tail

"Our culture and economy is increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of mainstream products." -- Long Tail 101

1. Make everything available.
2. Help me find it.
Chris Anderson, The Long Tail

The ideas in Chris' new book will be talked about for years. His fresh perspective helps you understand the success stories of companies such as, Amazon, Google, Lego, RealNetworks, Netflix, and iTunes.

"As the costs of production and distribution fall, especially online, there is now less need to lump products and consumers into one-size-fits-all containers. In an era without the constraints of physical shelf space and other bottlenecks of distribution, narrowly-targeted goods and services can be as economically attractive as mainstream fare."

One. BI vendors may benefit from the Long Tail thinking. Focusing on the market of lots of items that sell a few units can be as profitable as a market of a few items that sell a lot of units. Today the aim is generic products with each installation using the same rainbow of product offerings. Assumes all customers have the same needs.

Two. BI can "make everything (ie. data) available" to the users. Bi does this well. But do we do a good job with the "help me find it"? Users can be lost in a sea of information BI makes available to them. A double-edged sword.

Apply various design approaches to increase user's usability of BI. Portal design. Free text search. Simplified look and feel. Personalized information.

Double dip marketing

You probably disapprove people taking a double dip with their chip in the party dip. But a similar technique is used by Microsoft and other software vendors. And Cognos is following suit. The marketing ploy generates a ton of money and word of mouth for the vendor. But are customers gaining any advantage with better quality products and services?

Certification programs and training classes. When software vendors promote training benchmarks to consulting and technology companies, who wins? And who's the real client?

Vendors like Microsoft, and now Cognos, double dip. Customers buy software (one dip). Consultants buy training (2nd dip). Consultants want to be reimbursed for this sunken cost. Customers buy consultants. Cognos gains marketing & word of mouth paid for by customers, employees and consultants (3rd dip?).

Granted vendors don't start there. They work hard to become successful to the point where people want their products (and are trained in their products). Shouldn't they reap the rewards of creating that base of customer/consultant demand? Just feed the pyramid and let others grow their business. Sounds like they have been reading Seth Godin's flipping the funnel ebook.

But customers benefit from higher skilled people, right? Sure, a skill benchmark is set. But set by the vendor - not exactly an independant assessment. And letters after your name look great on the resume (MSCE, PMP, MBA). But these certified people cost more to find, hire, and keep. And then certification alone doesn't reflect experience and quality of work.

The biggest vendors & products cost a premium. Highly skilled & certified people also come at a premium.

Pick the products that meet your specific business and technical needs. Think open source. Think young, eager BI companies nipping at the heals of the largest. Big doesn't always mean the best.


Quote bloggers live by, "Sorry this was so long. I didn't have time to make it shorter." -- Jefferson.

What people are saying about BI

When talking with people who "do" BI, I listen to what they think BI is. I hear: Analysis. MIS. OLAP. Reporting warehouse. Some people have just said, "we do Oracle BI", thinking the vendor/tools are what makes BI. And my favorite, "BI is BI" (assuming everyone knows what it means?).

So I used the Internet as a research tool and I can understand why there is confusion. Websites seem to have different definitions. MIS and BI are frequently used interchangeably but Wikipedia defines MIS differently than BI. Oracle's definition is tools focused, as expected. DM Review gives a decent business focused one. Which one do you grab onto?

It is true that the BI industry is getting more complex but the message being delivered is too. When talking with potential clients (internal or external) offer a consistent story that is authentic, entertaining, and enlightening. And offer it to the right audience.

If you're technically minded, deliver a clear message on the technology, its use, and limitations. Toolset/vendor specialists would do well with presenting an open minded view to gain an audience's trust. Delivering to the business may involve telling the advantages of performing better business decisions.

The message you deliver and to whom you deliver it are important.

Look for a different approach

Seth Godin has a way of clearly showing the way through change. When starting a new BI initiative or building on your existing BI offering, improvements on the status quo can be helpful, but looking for what makes your project different will engage people. From the business sponsors to the IT group.

Excitement for BI can be seen in most organizations. Momentum to move a project forward is usually lacking. Or how to create and maintain that momentum is.

Find ways to move the next step closer to the vision. There is an unending list of issues that seem to need to be resolved before proceeding. Don't resolve them. Re-juggle tasks. Re-prioritize. Use a mini-project for the team to gain confidence and answer questions.

What ever it takes.

What visible results can be done this week? Can we mock up screens or create databases? Can we build relationships to lower any political roadblocks?

Here's a true story about a company wanting BI. It has been months, if not a year, since a couple internal people began educating and pushing for BI. The value to the company was very apparent. Time savings. Accuracy of information. Tons of data but no way of analyzing (or even accessing it!).

The next step was to involve someone from IT. But then IT raised so many issues and concerns that many felt it was not feasible. In my experience, IT usually raises many issues because they are the ones that need to live with doing the heavy lifting. But they are all, yes all, solvable.

They are now stuck waiting for IT to research and resolve the technical issues. Stalled, spending time & money without producing visible results. Many do it this way.

Or you could think "different" and present something each week that engages the business-side. BI is for the business after all. Write a business case or value proposition. No technical infrastructure? Use free or trial version software and create something relevant on your computer. Show your boss. Your boss' boss.

There's always a way to move forward.