I was writing about the difference between operational systems like ERP and informational systems like BI. One of the most obvious differences is that ERP systems support operational or business processes. The information that is captured is very explicit. It is almost binary. Data latency is minimal.BI systems are often supporting decision making processes on a more strategic level. There is no yes or no. Often it is about maybe or what if. The information is much more implicit. Data latency is often a problem. Looking at all this made me think.BI has always been more tactical or strategic. But it has also never been the big success that we BI people claim it can have. Is the reason that we have been looking in the wrong direction. Maybe Operational BI has much more value? What do you think?

Oracle has something new. It is called EPM TV.  See: http://www.epmtv.eu/Home. It is all about Enterprise Performance Management. Somebody on twitter said: “Cool, Frank Buytendijk now has his own TV channel”.It made me think. If Frank has his own TV channel, I want to have my own movie. So therefore I proudly present to you: BI the Movie. Now on any computer near you.Just follow this link: http://www.xtranormal.com/watch?e=20090628071326228

Do you remember the 1995 movie Seven where Detectives Mills and Somerset jointly investigate a series of ritualistic murders inspired by the seven deadly sins? I vividly remember a library scene where Morgan Freeman goes through a set of books related to the seven deadly sins, like Dante’s Inferno (or hell). The seven deadly sins were: lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy and pride. Today I suddenly wondered, are there seven deadly sins for Business Intelligence? And if so, what are they? Inertia:The potential of BI is unbelievable. It allows companies to make smarter and faster decisions and simply outperform the competition. Lack of relevant information may even lead to a loss of market share, drop in profit or even bankruptcy.  There are numerous examples to support this claim. This is why BI is always in the top 5 of any CIO or CFO. However there are still companies that do not have an (official) BI initiative in their organization or lack focus on the information function. In today’s economy something that one simply cannot afford. So the first and most deadly sin must be something which has to do with the lack of relevant information or slow time to information. The use of BI must be stimulated at all times and no barriers should prevent the adaption of BI within any company. Costly:BI is often considered to be expensive. We all heard people say things like: “Why does it take 3 months to build a few simple reports”. In some cases these people are right. If BI is not organized in an efficient way it will lead to higher costs. For example if there are many local initiatives or an IT organization that does not understand business needs. For me, the second deadly sin has to do with the fixation on costs instead of thinking about return on intelligence. BI can have a hard dollar (or euro) return but the business case can also be qualitative or based on vision or innovation. Off course, we must always look for smart and cost effective solution. Lowering the TCO can be done, for example by standardization of tools and processes. Another possibility is outsourcing. However that can lead to new challenges. This brings us to deadly sin number three.  Complexity:BI is no rocket science but it is also not a trifle undertaking. BI has both a technological as well as a business component. This makes it neither business nor IT. This creates a possibility of increased complexity in the development of BI solutions but also in the final product itself. The result may be a BI environment that is not used. It is important to keep the BI solutions simple. By taking small and simple steps and making sure that business and IT keep aligned. We must also be aware that there are different types of users and that they use BI differently. Manager need dashboards and aggregated numbers while financial experts need detailed number in spreadsheet like form.  Technology:The fourth deadly sin is that BI is often also the number one deadly sin. In my experience it is one of the main reasons why so many BI projects fail. It has to do with the tendency to focus on tools and techniques. BI delivery is often within IT where the understanding of the business can be absent. Realization of the technical solution, like a data warehouse, is the objective instead of fixing the business need (where the data warehouse is just part of the solution). Let’s remember that IT is just an enabler for doing better business (intelligence). So why are 9 out of 10 BI blogs only about technology? Ignorance:Let’s say that we have found a company that believes in BI, focuses on ROI and with a not all too complex solution in mind. Even better they also focus on business results and not technology. Sounds like all ingredients for a successful BI solution are in place. So they start this great project to improve their call center effectiveness or increased sales force performance. And in the back of the room there is this little geek from IT that always talks about the importance of data quality and Master Data Management. Don’t you wish they would have listened to that guy then in stead off afterwards when their reports have the wrong numbers? Or when they spend days or even weeks discussing about a difference in definitions? The fifth deadly sin is that the most important fundaments of BI are often ignored as they are not sexy enough. MDM and DQ are essential for acceptance of BI.  Deviation:Sometimes a BI initiative just starts. Not because there is a business need. Not because somebody has a vision. Only because the company needs to have a BI system. There is no time spend on thinking which business problem is helped or solved with this solution. All other people have BI so we want it too. The sixth deadly sin is to build something without knowing where to use if for or having no sense of direction. Organizations should never develop a BI environment before they have a clear BI strategy. Halting:The seventh and final sin is that after a BI project is finished or a 1^st increment is delivered no follow up is given and BI is not integrated in daily business. The real business value in BI will only emerge if you keep on investing in your BI environment and adapt for changing circumstances. Something like a BICC should solve this. I am not sure if these above mentioned seven deadly sins are in fact the only ones or in the right order. But I do think they contain elements that hinder the proper use of the BI function within many companies today. I would really appreciate your feedback on this. Perhaps you have some deadly sins to add to this list. Please do not hesitate to react.

One definition of Business Intelligence is the collection and structuring of corporate data in order to gain information for further control and management of a process, target or strategy. The return on intelligence (ROI) is achieved by doing better business. BI is therefore often part of a project or sometimes even a project in its own right.  Many corporation start a project by putting together a business case. All possible costs and benefits are taken into calculation. Only the projects with a sound or positive business case get the green light. But the economic downfall has changed all this. Not only are we starting with less projects, even those that have a positive business case to begin with, many project have been cancelled, delayed or re-scoped. In order to make reasoned decisions an answer must be given to questions such as: How will this project contribute to our business objectives, are we doing the right projects, are there better ways of using our resources, is the business case still valid? Portfolio management gives corporations the change to have a clear understanding of the contribution of an existing or potential initiative. This way a corporation can make sure that it only invests in projects that add value. The corporation is doing the right things.  But just as important is Portfolio management information. Monitoring the current portfolio enables corporations to get an early warning on possible risks but also the possibility for action taking if the value of certain projects decrease or even get negative. The corporation is doing things right. 

I see to many companies limiting their selves by building one single business case only at the start of the project. This way they will not get the maximal return on their investments.

These corporations might be doing the right things, but they are not doing things right.

I have a love-hate relationship with technology and more specific gadgets. For years I kept using a paper notebook for writing down my appointments. If people showed up with their flashy looking pda’s I asked them if theirs could this and dropped my notebook on the floor. Off course this proves nothing about the general usability of pda’s but I had a good laugh anyway. It is a stange kind of anamosity between me and technology. Because in my professional life I cannot wait until all kind of cool gadgets are introduced in BI tools. The newest craze in town seems to be twitter. Even our Dutch secretary of foreign affairs is into twitter. But there are many others out there that share his enthusiasm. And in all honestly I ask you, why? What is the point of twittering about walking home, reading e-mails or hanging around in bars? What do I care. It is way too much information for me without any relvancy. It reminds me of sitting next to a person in a crowded streetcar (or tram as we call them in Amsterdam) listening in on a phone call often involving a break up or the greatest party ever (that is seem to have missed sadly). A couple of weeks I wrote a blog about data quality. I argued that often too much time, effort and money is spent on trying to get the data quality 100% perfect. I compared it to a jigsaw puzzle. If you can see the big picture there is nothing wrong with a couple of pieces missing or of the wrong color or shape. Apparently this opinion caused ‘quite a stir’ within the data quality twitter community (sic!). I never imagined that there could be something like a DQTC. What do those people do all day long? “I have found a interesting data integrity issue in datafile xyz”, one twitterer writes. “Wow, tell me more about this fascinating discovery”, another responds. Off course, I am making fun of this but mainly to make a point. Most of the time twitter has no added value. It may be fun (which I do not understand) but nothing more than that. However sharing observations about a certain field of expertise including comments, solutions or explanations can have great benefits. If one regional sales manager makes sense of certain trends in the latest figures and shares this using twitter with the other salesmanagers, suddenly something of value can appear. Instead of meaningless babble the twitter helps people improve the quality of their work or even their performance. Perhaps there is a point to be made about introducing twitter in your company. I wonder in which twitter community this blog ends up? Keep me informed! 

http://www.biplatform.nl/Nieuws/Detail/Heizenberg-ging-Van-der-Lans-voorOn the sixth of april the BI Platform in the Netherlands announced that Rick van der Lans was the first Dutch blogger with his own channel on the b-eye network. However it had escaped their attention that I have been hosting a channel on the dutch b-eyenetwork for some time also. http://www.beyenetwork.nl/blogs/heizenberg/  Therefore I seemed to be the first.  Karien Verhagen responded that she had co-authored with Claudia Imhoff even before that. So it now seems that Karien was first at the top. Congratulations!

“But it wasn’t because I didn’t know enough. I just knew too much”. Gnarls Barkley – Crazy

The market is volatile. Your customers are volatile. Maybe if you look in the mirror you will see a volatile person. But volatility is something we – in general - tend to dislike. Therefore we strive to regain control. Control of our finances, of our customer even of our future. Management Information seems to help us with this. But the way we use management information or business intelligence is not always up to par. Most of the time we use historical data or performance to make decisions. But many answers, smart moves, right decisions are hidden in the near future. That’s why we want to be proactive. Beat the other guys. Advanced Analytics seems to work. It combines techniques like datamining and statistics with business knowledge to create predictive models. But even in advanced analytics we seems to focus too much on using our own data. Some argue that the most valuable information is not found inside your company but outside. If this is true I don’t know. What I do know is that external data can help you improve your performance. But how do you regain control of external – often unstructured – data. And even better. How can you make this process repeatable? The most obvious three problems that arise are: [1] too much data, [2] data too late and [3] poor data quality.

The problem with having too much data is that you need to come to a selection. The data in the world keeps growing and growing in mind boggling amounts. But the majority of this increase is not relevant. Pictures on flickr are great but aren’t much help when figuring out your supply chain strategy for 2010. But it is not so much the amount of data that is the problem. It is the structure. If you find a way to effectively structure any increase can be handled without too much effort. Therefore I would suggest to start structuring your data for relevance.

Another problem is that the relevant structured data is often received too late. After the fact has already happened. This means that no proactive behavior but reactive behavior. So how can we improve on that? One solution could be to set up early warning signs. Maybe there are some early indicators that can warn us about things to come. For more information on this I would like to suggest the work of Ben Gilad (http://knol.google.com/k/ben-gilad/competitive-intelligence/1o41pnd9hgmyg/2#). Please make sure you know what early warning systems are crucial for your organization.

Finally, good old data quality. In our pursuit for perfect data we tend to forget the reason why? Do we really need perfect flawless data ? If we have one piece of the puzzle that is wrong it might causes a problem. But if we have 1000 pieces of the puzzle – some right some wrong – we have enough information to make our decisions. So forget about data quality and start focusing on relationships between the data elements that make for the big picture.

If business intelligence can improve by adding external data, why is it that a lot of companies keep looking inward for their management information? One explanation could be that compliance is often the reason why they have a BI environment anyway. For some reason they have to report their performance to stakeholders. This mandatory reporting is often focus on (financial) internal data. Or  somebody started with improving a process by making it measurable with the use of BI. Or even more simplw. It is easier to start with your own system, company or IT department.

In conclusion I would like to argue that we need to structure and combine internal and external data in order to really gain any competitive value.

On a Dutch website

( http://www.computable.nl/artikel/ict_topics/business_intelligence/2844877/1277145/bi-betaalt-zich-bijna-nooit-terug.html#2853949)

there has been some discussion about the return on investement for BI. I reacted (in Dutch). Follow the link for the reaction from myself and others.

 Two important announcements came from Microsoft recently. One was that Microsoft is firing people. A move that was inevitable after analysts said that Microsoft had to lay off at least 10% op their workforce to remain healthy. Another one was an update of their BI product roadmap. Performance Point Server scorecard, dashboard, and analytical capabilities will be consolidated into Sharepoint Server Enterprise. This means that they will not continue with their Performance Point Planning solution. In their words: after PPS Service Pack 3 (expected mid calendar year 2009) no further investments will be made in planning and stand alone versions of PPS.  Are these two facts related? Maybe not but it helps them on their way to this tough 10% target. Is this update of their BI products roadmap unexpected? In my opinion it is not. There are several reasons for this. PPS Planning has never been very successful and I have seen a limited number of implementations. When competing with other planning products (Hyperion(Oracle), Outlooksoft(SAP) or Cognos Plannings(IBM)) they often lost the battle. One could also argue that they are their own biggest competitor with MS Excel as the number 1 planning tool in the world or BI tool for that matter. Also this product does not fit their BI for the masses strategy. Planning has always been the domain of a limited number of (financial) people. But this is not only a defensive move. Integrating PPS with Sharepoint also allows for a ‘marriage’ between structured and unstructured data which is promoted by many BI experts of late.  It will be interesting to see if other BI vendors are going to reposition their planning capabilities.

The economic slowdown will continue to dominate the BI market this year.  As BI is still often executed within IT (and not business) it will be affected by the lowering of IT budgets which will result in a decrease of information supply. At the same time the business demand for information will increase as uncertainty grows. Solutions offering cost cutting will be the number 1 objective for both business and IT. We will see the following 9 trends in Business Intelligence this year. [1] Rationalization: Customers will move from best of breed solutions towards BI platform from all major vendors (Oracle, SAP, IBM and Microsoft) and /or a rationalization of their BI products. A reduction of the number of BI tools make sense both from a financial as well as a organizational point of view. There will a danger of the so called vendor lock in – which is hard to prevent anyway.   As money is tight more major acquisitions from BI vendors are not to be expected. Small companies with niche technology such as search or visualization can be bought instead of own innovation or development. A further integration of acquired technology in the (BI) infrastructure, applications or processes will be the first objective of these companies. Any remaining budget will be spend on marketing and sales activities.[2]  Mastering & Governing Core Data: Due to the economic slowdown more and more companies feel the need to create a single view of all enterprise data. Many customers move from a classical business unit structure towards a more multi dimensional steering model where profit and loss is calculated on region, customer or even process.  There will be an increased need for Master Data Management using the technology provided by all major vendors and a revival of OLAP (Multi Dimensional) is to be expected.[3] Architecture The Other Way: There will be an increasing demand for faster answers and decisions as well as more need to connect and share information with other stakeholders.  These new requirements will set new standards for BI architecture as it moves away from traditional batch orientated architectures.  An increase is expected of different architectures such as Data warehouse appliances & Cloud computing.  Also Open Standards and Service Orientation will be the next model of choice for many customers.  Finally, cost cutting hardware (Green – less energy consuming) can be expected.[4] Operational Excellence: With the slowdown of the economy comes a reduction of budget and a growing demand for cost cutting. This will raise the need for cheaper delivery of new information products and  a more cost effective ways for the maintenance of existing BI environment. IT departments will focus on Operational Excellence which implies faster and cheaper ways to deliver the same type of solutions as before. Innovation will not originate from the IT department as their focus will certainly be on lower cost of delivery and maintenance. Development of new functionality will therefore make use of proven methodology from SI, industry templates and/or outsourcing. For the maintenance of the current BI infrastructure we will see an increased interest in outsourcing like constructions based on a SAAS like model.[5] Customer Centric: In troubled times companies can take any of two basic choices. They can either reduce their services to cut costs or expand their services to attract new or more profitable customers. Companies will therefore try to focus on finding the most profitable customers among their current population. They will also need to know which customer are of less importance so they can decrease their activities to keep them. Finally they will have to find new ways to extract new customer by providing new products, better propositions or better services. Therefore an increased need for Customer Intelligence or analytics is to be expected.[6] Using The Data: Reporting (what has happened?) such as the monthly report is fast becoming a commodity (classical BI) where no competitive edge is realized. Monitoring (right time BI) of operational processes as they happen on the other hand will increase to ensure enterprise agility. Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) and Rules Based Decision Engines will begin to find their way as a result of this. Also we will see that Analysis will revive (OLAP). Much of the (classical) BI infrastructure is already in place. With increased business need for information this is the time to use this. Most added value will be in Analytics combining data mining, statistics and business knowledge to analyze current and historical performance to predict the future. We will see many investment here.[7] Overcoming Differences: In these times no organization can afford to be caught in internal or external disputes. Therefore all classical differences are to be overcome. The first and most obvious one is the cost versus benefit discussion. As the return on intelligence is more and more disputed we will see an increased need for business cases. The second one is the gap between the IT department and the business departments. This will lead to an increased need for alignment such as an BI Competence Center for strategic-, user-, data- & process support.  The technical development and maintenance of BI will be done by IT with Operational Excellence as their main driver. The functional development and innovation of BI will be done by the business with Management Excellence as their modus operandi.The third and final one is Finance (controlling)  vs the rest. Finance will control the budget and be in the driver seat for all cost cutting programs. They will take the lead in the majority of all BI solutions.The CFO will be the sparring partner for new BI initiatives and the CIO will be the sparring partner for the maintenance of the current solutions.[8] Organizational Transformation: If you do what you always did, you get what you always got. In these times organizations cannot afford to sit back and see what happens. They have to be smarter, faster, cheaper, better … than their competitors. As a result of that there will be an increasing need for information and organization transformation. This will impact Business Intelligence as right time data transformations are required to quickly access information and make decisions. Therefore we will see an increased interest in solutions providing right or real time information and solutions. Decisions can not only be made on tacit knowledge (numbers and facts). We will see that the decision making process will involve other relevant information (often unstructured) to provide a context. We will see an integration of Business Intelligence and Enterprise Content Management with semantic web or google like solutions. Finally business (and especially finance) will demand fast and easy access to all data and self service architectures will me the model of choice.[9] Need For Cooperation: During difficult times there will be an increase need for people to connect and share. In this economic downfall we can expect the same from knowledge workers connecting with other stakeholders and sharing information with them. We also see that cooperation can work as a strong stimuli for stimulating business innovation. Enablers for cooperation are architectures that allow for open markets of information and self service solutions of (internal) customers. These solutions will be based on services and free flow of information. Data governance and security are obvious spin offs of this trend. Summary: The economic slowdown will dominate the BI market leading to a decrease in information supply (IT) and an increase in information demand (Business) with cost cutting as the #1 objective. We will see customers standardizing on 1 vendor and a rationalization of the BI products. MDM will help create the much needed single view of the enterprise. The increased demand for faster answers and decisions and a need to connect and share will impact BI architecture as we know it, giving rise to datawarehouse appliances and service orientation. IT will look for more cost effective ways for delivery and maintenance of BI solutions while the business will focus on finding and keeping (profitable) customers. There will be more need for faster answers (real time) and more value from data (Analytics). Classical differences have to be overcome as we see an increased need for business cases, IT & Business alignment and a leading role for Finance. Self service and contextual data will be demanded by business to cope with the new tasks at hand. Finally the storm will be challenged by connecting with stakeholders and to share information and to stimulate innovation.

What makes Business Intelligence successful? Why is one project turning out great and the other one a complete failure? I wish I had the answer to this but I don’t. What I do know – see my previous blogs – is that BI has to be super fancy sexy. This means that any BI solution should look great which greatly increases the changes of success. The last time I blogged on this topic I had 5000% more traffic on my blog (google term: BI SEXY). So to all my new readers please react to below mentioned best practices and see if you share this. Please react and become a BI GURU yourself. Design phase

• Think about targetgroups (different users have different needs)
• Think about usage (adhoc and structured )

 Build phase

• Go for quality instead of quantity
• Mix your team (functional and technical)

 Implementation phase

• Don’t stop after build.
• Support BI by forming a competence center
• Find high level support (thougtleadership, inspiration much more than sponsorship)

Earlier this week I was driving home from work listening to the radio. It was around 6 P.M. so I was waiting for the six o’clock news while absently listening to the commercials in the background. One of the commercials caught my ear. The narrator asked us the listeners the following question: How is the performance of your network?  What would your first reaction be to such a question? I bet you were thinking about some kind of telecommunications service product with circuits and packets. Is this where we separate the geeks from the rest? The first thing I think about when I hear network is People. Or better even stakeholders (mind you that is much broader term than shareholders).  So this question about network performance made me wonder.  How can my stakeholders help me improve my performance?  The answer of course would be by sharing relevant information. This raises a bunch of other questions, such as:How would they know what is relevant to me?How can I even know what is relevant to me?Why would they share information in the first place (what’s in it for them)? If you look at the traditional knowledge pyramid – data, information, knowledge, action – one of the answers could be just to share data and let the recipient transform this further. Let them filter for relevance. This would allow for a SOA like architecture where data is provided in the form of messages and the BI solution just ‘mashes this up’. The benefit would be that the senders would expect the same in return. This is a relatively straightforward business model that has been around since EDI. At the same time we see a major trend which I labeled “increase”. We see an increase in (volume of) data, an increase in the speed we want to consume this data (even real time) and an increase in the impact of business decisions. We want smart and relevant decisions now! Not after we have loaded the data in our datawarehouses or datamarts. Not after we viewed it using reports or cubes. Not after we have come to some decision based on our implicit knowledge. This would allow for a architecture where no longer the data is provided but where decision is provided. The relevancy is determined by smart algorithms,  business rules or some other smart solution. Obviously this is more difficult but it would help me improve my performance. But what would be the benefit for the sender? Probably they will charge me money for adding analysis and actions on top of this data. So what do you think? Are we going towards a business model where information brokers are collecting data, making analyses and supplying decisions and actions to their clients (in fact take BI outside your company) or do we stick to the traditional model (where BI resides inside your company)?

I was watching this video and it made me wonder. Is BI about supplying the data or coming up with the right answers?

 Just watch this and decide for yourself where the wrong is. Is it in the data or in the decision that is based on the data? http://www.funnyordie.com/videos/f7fdce5e16/youre-fired-from-jstancari

If the answer is: “in the decision” do we really want BI tools that have more decisions support features or should we stick to tacit knowledge only. 

Here is a video I found of an enthusiastic BI consultant helping people remember the Business Intelligence Mash up.

(By the way check out the excellent book bij andy Mulholland called Mashup Corporations).

http://5×5m.com/lp/285/jp.html

Yet do much less, so much less, Someone says,(I know his name, no matter)–so much less!Well, less is more… Robert Browning (1812–1889)   The expression less is more is based on the notion that simplicity is to be preferred over complexity. By keeping things simple it is possible to focus on the core message or the essence. This opposed to a situation where a subject is overloaded with extra elements that have no or little added value. In other words: simplicity leads to clarity which leads to better understanding or use. KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) is also often associated with less is more. KISS is often used as a directive during a design phase to focus on the absence of unnecessary elements. Philips, one of the largest electronic firms in the world, uses the following pay-off in all their commercials: “Sense & Simplicity”. They too have understood that in order “to make things better” the focus should be on delivering products that do exactly what they need to do (a vacuum cleaner is for vacuuming) and that it must be very easy to understand and use the working of these products. Vilfredo Pareto, an Italian economist, has given name to a principle that is called Pareto’s 80/20 rule. This rule is often used to focus on 20% of a population because it holds 80% of the associated volume. For example: 20% of your customers are responsible for 80% of your revenue. Therefore you can focus on those 20% (instead off 100%). This way you can save a lot of money in sales & marketing costs. The same can be applied to management information. By focusing on the most important performance indicators (KEY performance indicators) you will cover 80% of your business. The rules of simplicity can also be applied to reports, graphs, and dashboards. Because a tool vendor gives us so much functionality it doesn’t mean we actually have to use it all at once. I have seen bright multi colored, 3 dimensional pie charts that would look great in a bakery but are absolutely worthless if it comes to decision making. If we apply the rules of simplicity to Business Intelligence it could be argued that a report is only finished when there is nothing more that can be deleted or omitted from it. Simplicity is often associated with boring or superficial. This is not true. Just look at the work of Ludwig van der Rohe (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludwig_Mies_van_der_Rohe). He is a famous architect and one of the founding fathers of a movement called Bauhaus. Although he focused on simplicity his work has given us some pretty amazing buildings. If often tell business intelligence consultants that their work should not only be accurate (the numbers have to be correct) but that the result must also look good as well (Content is king and GUI is Queen). I call this SFS or Super Fancy Sexy. If the report, graph or dashboard looks great chances are that they will be used more as well. This leads us to an interesting apparent contradiction. How can we make BI solutions simple and look SFS at the same time? Stephen Few has been thinking about that for some time now. Check out his work on http://www.perceptualedge.com/. He shows us the importance of visual business intelligence and the role simplicity plays. It has made me thinking about adding another S(imple) to SFS. 

Check out: http://wordle.net/.

The website Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.

I used Wordle with the text I wrote about the Microsoft BI Conference in Seattle. Isn’t she a beauty?

As happens so often during 3day conferences the second day seems to be less dynamic than the first.  The third can swing both ways. I have seen conferences go out like a candle but I have also seen some interesting fireworks at the end. This morning I did a videocast with Joey Fitts and Bruno Aziza. They both work for Microsoft and have writen an excellent book (now available) called: Drive Business Performance. Enabling a culture of intelligent execution (http://www.amazon.com/Drive-Business-Performance-Intelligent-Leadership/dp/0470259558). Thomas Davenport (Competing on analytics) called this book a clear road mpa for navigating performance management. The books shows how performance management can delivere competitive advantagge, how to diagnoze your organization’’s performance management capabilities and what specific skills and assests your organization needs to mange performance more effectively. It is a practical book with lots of case studies and a self test. I highly recommend it to you. During the interview we discussed what I like to call the 5 i’s of Intelligence: Increase, Integration, Insight, Interactively and Industrialization. The interview will be on the Microsoft Conference website later and on this blog as well. At the end we came to the conclusion that 5 years ago we would have been talking about performance in terms of megabytes, I/O, tables, queries and now we talked about decisions, actions, people and change. BI has come a long way the last couple of years. After that I checked out the session of David OÇonnel from Nucleus Research on the ROI of Performance Mangement. In his session he highlighted how to assess ROI, why metrics matter, where to focus and how to actualy build a business case. The problem with a ROI for BI or PM is obviously the indirect of intangible benefits of better decisions. He concluded the session with a graph (see picture) that shows that indirects benefits have the lowest believability and GROWTH is on the bottom right side. That is scary because growth is one of the most important factors why companies still exist. BI and PM business case therefore must be sold much more on vision than on hard dollar ROI.

The afternoon session of Joey and Bruno on their book was good as expected. They had a panel with clients that were featured in their book. Always a pleasure to learn and recognize other BI people problems. The final session was a disapointment. The speaker - I will not mention his name for obvious reasons - took a hour to explain to us that BI is not about systems and technologies but about end user experienced. Duh! He even thought this was a very prevocative statement. So just as expected the seminar candle slowly dimmed and …. THE END. PS: Overall again a good conference - maybe a little less dynamic than the first - but with some pretty good announcements and speakers. And last but not least: wihout any rain! Can you believe that in Seattle. I guess the gods are with Microsoft.

Today we started with the keynote from Ben Klein. Some people might remember him as the teacher from Ferris Buelers Day off (Great movie btw). His speech was funny but very American. His basic theme was that the American Youth is getting more stupid by the hour. The focus is on material things, money i.s.o. taking care of eachother. This was folowed by a plantinum sponsor panel discussion with guys from accenture, Dell, HP, Hitachi and profit base. First take aways are. BI in the next 10 years is going to be more about social networking, instant information, even more data, integration, visibility of data, 90% on 3 or 4 platforms, role driven and less adhoc. There will be a gap between BI solutions and its users due to cultural differences, skills and so on. Perhaps this will create a new role of the information architect (iso the data architect) with more focus on business than on SQL. Understanding then underlying model is key for enduser buy in. There will be an ERP world (with focus on capturing the information) and an IRP world (with focus on delivering the information). Right now they are going into commercials so it is time for a cup of coffee.

Check out all the stuff that Johan van der Kooij writes about the conference on his blog at http://biconsultant.blogspot.com/ But beware this is in Dutch. Good stuff.

The business value of business intelligence was the stream I concentrated on today. Gartner, Forrester and AMR research all had a presentation about trends and technologies in BI. Bill Hostman from Gartner kicked it off with a plea to move beyond the query and reporting and take a more holistic approach at what he call the BI continuum. He described the challenges many organizations face with connecting organization efficiency, business process optimization and empowering business users. He went into more detail as he described three trends and 7 technologies ending with 2 advices. The trends are: (1) strategy driven BI (align business process with strategy), (2) Analyst driven BI (such as business analytics and data mining) and (3) process driven BI (embedding BI at the place of work). The associated technologies were: (1) BI &Search nick named BIGLE (after BI and Google get it?) where he expects a traffic jam or accident between structured and unstructured, (2) Interactive data visualization, (3) text & speech analytics, (4) In Memory analytics (Project GEMINI), (5) Model factory (pre packaged of the shelf analytical applications or components tied to the business applications). The implication of that would be that a shared meta data layer or all BI environments (such as datamarts, warehouse, business application, models, in memory environment) is crucial in order to avoid the risk of silo solutions. This would be a layer of love, (6) Decision optimization (moving from intuition to information) where latency can be reduced between the actual event and the business response by using decision rules and (7) BI as a service. His advice is to create a BI portfolio approach to figure out how to put it all together and to have a BI Competency Center (BICC) with business skills, analytical skills and IT skills where the focus should shift from technology to competency. Next up was Forrester in the person of Boris Evelson. He took a more practical approach. BI, he says, is not going to be affected by the financial crisis as much because Information is THE differentiator during increased competition. Also BI is much needed to make sense of the massive amounts of data that has to be turned into information. He further explained that BI project have difficulty with: (1) accessing the right data, (2) complexity of learning and navigating in a BI environment, (3) too much dependency on IT for new reports or enhancements, (4) inflexibility and slow reaction times within the BI applications and unclear ROI. One of the things he said that really got me thinking was that the basic components of BI are not so much changing as well as the way we do BI. Next Generation BI, as he call it, will be: automated, pervasive, unified and has no borders. It is more easy NOT to know what to look for than exactly knowing what to look for and that is what we have been doing with BI so far. It should be all about making decisions more simple, allowing actions to be taken and performance to be approved. He closed with  a list of (already known) best practices. Little pop quiz. Next to me set a guy. He was moving in too close for comfort, had not one but 5 questions, dominated the conversation and did not listen to the answers and was basically impossible to understand. Have you guessed his profession? He was a technical architect. No suprises there. The last speaker of the Business Value track was John Hagerty from AMR.  He showed us recent research where he concluded that due to all the vendor consolidation and interest in analytics  many customers will focus on getting ready for the next BI level. They are looking more into tools and infrastructure than new functional improvements. After explaining the difference between CPM (finance), EPM (CPM + Operations) and Pervasive (BS!) PM (EPM + Value network) he explained the AMR maturity model that consists of 4 quadrants: reacting, anticipating, collaboration and orchestrating. Low maturity is often on technology and inside out thinking while high maturity implies culture shift and outside in thinking. His conclusions, and I found this to be very interesting, are more or less the same as the results I got when I did my CPM Index white paper a couple of years ago. Most people are in maturity level 2 (out of 4) and most have the ambition not to go further than level 3. It is disappointing that nothing seems to have changed after these years. With this conclusions we went to the partner reception to score some drinks and perhaps a few nice gadgets. With the ‘We” I mean the 3.000 people that are at the conference from 60 countries. Actually there are close to 40 people here from the Netherlands. We come in fourth just behind US (obviously), Sweden en Denmark(?).  Probably a mix up as many Americans still think that Copenhagen is the capital of the Netherlands.