Self knowledge is the start of all wisdom

Writing by Jorgen on Monday, 29 of October , 2007 at 11:08 pm

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Category: BI Thoughts

Diablogue: a thousand different answers…

Writing by Jorgen on Monday, 29 of October , 2007 at 7:37 pm

Ask anyone in this industry for his or hers definition of Business Intelligence and you get a thousand different answers. Is that a bad thing? Not necessarily, but it does imply that we still have not agreed upon some of the basics. It is an interesting paradox that although we are apparently not 100% sure about what Business Intelligence is we do have an opinion on how it should be or where it is going.  Over the last couple of years a common understanding of Business Intelligence has been created holding some universal truths firm in its grasp. Frank Buytendijk and I came up with a Top 10 of those universal (so called) ‘truths’. (Frank is Vice President of EPM Strategy for Oracle’s Business Intelligence and Performance Management Global Business Unit. You can find his blog at: http://blogs.oracle.com/frankbuytendijk/). We decided - just for fun – to turn the BI world as we know it around and see what comes up if we take the opposite view. Here is our Top 10:

  1. We need one version of the truth.
  2. BI projects require a business driven approach.
  3. BI development should be done incrementally.
  4. BI projects needs high level sponsorship.
  5. BI = decision making process.
  6. BI is going to be real time (BI 2.0).
  7. Information democracy: BI for everyone.
  8. BI cannot be outsourced.
  9. Merging : BI, CI, EI, EPM, CPM, BIM…
  10. BI is the answer to everything. 

I will start with the bottom five (saving the top 5 for a future blog). Frank will react to this on his own blog. This way we hope to create a dialogue or diablogue (dialogue + blog). Please feel free to join the discussion and share your opinions with us and all other readers.    10. BI is the answer to everything. No, almost every answer creates a new question. Data is often limited, not captured or of low quality. Therefore one can say that BI is NOT the answer to everything. In the best case scenario it is helpful.   9. Merging: BI, CI, EI, EPM, CPM, BIM. There are so many acronyms and abbreviations that I am not even sure that we can agree on all the two- or three letter words at the beginning. And even if we agree that BI stands for Business Intelligence - I doubt that we can agree on a common definition - let alone talk about merging. To my opinion it is not a merger but a different manifestation where the core or main point may differ per area (focus on strategy, or client, or process…). In each case: it should be information centric.  8. BI cannot be outsourced. A lot of BI professionals tell me that BI cannot be outsourced because of its specific nature (mutual development with end users, incremental approach, and so on). One of our clients has already outsourced its BI environment as long as 8 years ago. The proof of the eating is in the pudding.  7. Information democracy: BI for everyone. Information is critical for almost each person, process or technology. We in the western world produce more data than products. But in order to transform the data into information, knowledge and action you need to add your personal experience, time and effort to the mix. Some people will and will benefit from this. Some people will not and can live without it. BI is not for everyone but at least for the smart people.  6. BI is going to be real time (BI 2.0). If you view BI as strategic there is no need for real time data. But if you view BI as more operational than it will come in handy. In my view BI supports better decisions by making a strategy, process or objective - accountable, adjustable or adaptive. For accountability you do not need real time, for the other two you do. Therefore my answer would be: it depends.  5.BI = decision making process. Ouch, tough one. As mentioned previously I think that BI supports better decisions. It is up to the end user if they make use of it. They can make a decision that is in full conflict with the number crunching. Therefore BI is not the same as the decision making process it is just a supporting tool. I look forward to reactions from Frank and all the other readers.

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Category: BI Thoughts, BI Tools, Business Intelligence consulting, Business Intelligence datawarehousing, Business Intelligence solution, Business Intelligence strategy, Business Intelligence system, Business Intelligence tools

Wein, weib und gesang

Writing by Jorgen on Thursday, 18 of October , 2007 at 11:53 am

“Who loves not wine, women and song; remains a fool whole life long”. This is an old German expression which means having fun. I wrote about “weib” yesterday (Cybersex and Business Intelligence). So today I will focus on the “weib und gesang”.  Regular readers of my blog know that I am very enthusiastic about the upcoming trend in decision making to rely more on statistical analysis. The umbrella term for this is called analytics. Recent books about this topic are: Competing on analytics by Thomas Davenport and Super Crunchers by Ian Ayres (www.supercrunchers.com). You are no longer a nerd if you think that regression is cool again. For the non mathematical persons: Regression is a statistical procedure that takes raw data and estimates how various causal factors influence a single variable of interest. Ayres describes in Super Crunchers how analyzing massive databases can provide greater insights in human behavior. One of his case studies involves the work of Oren Ashenfelter. Oren can assess the quality of Bordeaux wines based upon regression (basic variables are: rainfall & temperature). There is much skepticism about his work among wine connoisseurs. Robert Parker – probably one of the world most influential wine writers - said: “it is really a Neanderthal way of looking at wine”. However it turns about that Ashenfelter predictions are much more reliable than the old fashioned way. The week from 5-12 October was democracy week. Over forty broadcasting companies worldwide paid attention to this on radio and TV. Here in the Netherlands we had a mock competition for a new national anthem. The current one which is called The Williams song – or Wilhelmus – is considered to be the oldest one in the world. You can hear the competing songs on this website: http://www.wijzijndebaas.nl/page/liederen. As a follow up to this program there was a segment on a company called Platinum Blue. They have come up with a tool that is called Music X-Ray. This is a complex computer program that breaks songs down into 30 or so component parts’ including rhythm, melody, harmony, beat, cadence, timbre, pitch and gives each a number. All hit songs fit the same pattern. If your song matches the pattern this increases the change of success dramatically. They claim that human decision making (does it sound like a hit, can we promote it like a hit) delivers a 10% success rate. However if you add a third factor – statistical analysis – this score goes up to 75%. You can see their presentation on youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8lUewWlLgLo. Just the same as with the wine there is a lot of criticism. The X-factor judge Louis Walsh said: “The only technology I would use to pick a hit is my ears. I would not listen to a computer,” The pattern is the same in both cases. The traditional or old fashioned way of doing business is challenged by a new approach based upon statistical analysis leading to much skepticism. In my view this discussion is too much binary digit, true or false (I wanted to say black-and-white but I am still a technology consultant). In both of the above mentioned cases it is just a tool or technique - a guide to making the final decision, which always comes down to a human being. It is not about replacing the human decision making process with statistical analysis. But on the other hand there is enough evidence to support the fact that adding analytics to the decision making process leads to increased results. This can be done by creating a dialogue between Business Intelligence tools and their users, instead of a one-sided approach of data delivery only, leaving the decision making process to the end user. This going back and forth between user and tool can lead to something that I call intuitive intelligence: leading to insight without (much) thinking.

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Category: Analytics, BI Thoughts, Business Intelligence consulting, Business Intelligence solution

(Cyber)Sex and Business Intelligence

Writing by Jorgen on Tuesday, 16 of October , 2007 at 2:07 pm

At first sex with robots might be considered geeky, “but once you have a story like ‘I had sex with a robot and it was great!’ appear some place like Cosmo magazine, I’d expect many people to jump on the bandwagon,” said David Levy, a researcher at the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands. He recently completed his Ph.D. work on the subject op human-robot relationships called: “Intimate relationship with artificial partners”. Don’t worry, this blog is still on Business Intelligence, but I have your attention now. There’s a trend of robots becoming more human-like in appearance and coming more in contact with humans,” Levy said. But it is not so much the ‘mechanics’ of human-robot sex that he is interested in. As software becomes more advanced the relationship between humans and robots becomes more personal.  In my own words, it is not so much about lust but about attraction. He is talking about symbiotic relationships where two unlike organisms live together for mutual advantage. In this relationship something like a dialogue starts to happen. Until now most of this dialogue is one-sided (like a guy talking to his car like she is his girlfriend – Not much of dialogue other than in his mind). However the advances in software programming allow us to make this dialogue more bilaterally (just Google: “ELIZA” + “psychotherapist” and you will see what I mean).  Business Intelligence has also been a one sided relationship. We have used technology to help end users by supplying them with the right information. We gave them cubes and reports and good luck with it. But the real intelligence does not start until the end user adds his personal skills to the mix. Slicing, dicing and drilling his way towards a decision. But what if BI exists in a bilateral way? What if it can offer the decision instead of only just the information? What if through a dialogue between the OLAP cube and the Marketing Manager the correct campaign decisions can be made? This means programming a framework based on the task and responsibilities of the end user. With use of business rules, correlation, regression techniques and all kind of other statistical analysis’s you can create a dialogue with suggestions and propositions.   It will no longer be man versus machine, but man with machine. To me this sounds like a match made in heaven.  

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Category: BI Thoughts, Business Intelligence solution, Business Intelligence strategy, Business Intelligence system, Business Intelligence tools

Guys who do strategy don’t drive trucks

Writing by Jorgen on Tuesday, 16 of October , 2007 at 11:24 am

Kaplan & Me [Click to open]

Yesterday was the launch of Microsoft Performance Point Server in the Netherlands. Keynote speaker was Robert Kaplan (Business Balanced Score Card, Strategy Maps). In the afternoon we did a workshop with Kaplan and some of our clients. This gave me the opportunity to ask him some BI questions.

The first question was what role BI can play for the BSC? He answered that BI is very important. Not only for the reporting framework but especially when it comes down to analytics. (See also: http://www.randomhouse.com/bantamdell/supercrunchers/ and http://www.amazon.com/Competing-Analytics-New-Science-Winning/dp/1422103323). According to Kaplan analytics are crucial during the review of the strategy. Domain experts can crunch the numbers to come up with new and perhaps more effective measures to drive performance. In his opinion all organizations should have an analytics group.

I also asked him what he thinks about two trends in BI: real time (or 2.0) and performance networks or ecosystem BI  (sharing your information with your stakeholders).  Kaplan mentioned that real time BI often is only considered for operational dashboards. However if these operational dashboards are alligned with the strategy they can also be your early warning system for more strategic decisions.

He also strongly believes in sharing information to improve performance, but he underlined that a feedback loop is crucial for this. This must start within your own company, allowing your own employees to react (for example by e-mail) if they find deviations. He gave an example of a large petrol company. Their strategy was to improve the convenience for the customer. The truck drivers, delivering gas to the stations, were very sceptical: “guys who do strategy don’t drive trucks”. But after a while they started calling the head office informing them about rude personel, unclean rest rooms and so on. Sharing the strategy was enough to start a change even before an improvement program was set up.

In summary:

1. Analytics are crucial for reviewing strategy (regression is cool again).

2. Real time BI can be an early warning system for strategic decision making.

3. Information sharing implies a feedback loop.

4. Communicating about strategy is almost as important as excuting the strategy.

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Category: BI Thoughts, Business Intelligence consulting, Business Intelligence solution, Business Intelligence strategy, Business Intelligence system, Business Intelligence tools

Poll: who will buy Cognos

Writing by Jorgen on Friday, 12 of October , 2007 at 11:16 am

[Click on image to enlarge]

With great thanks to my collegue Ron Torrico, the outcome of a small internal poll. No big suprises here (IBM), although the number #2 Microsoft ? Time will tell.

My prediction? Although IBM and Microsoft are most likely a strategic partnership with Informatica sounds great. It plays the independence card and also completes the Cognos BI platform which lacks a robust ETL tool.

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Category: BI Thoughts, BI Tools, BI vendor consolidation, Business Intelligence consulting, Business Intelligence software, Business Intelligence system, Business Intelligence tools, Business Objects, Cognos, IBM, Informatica, Microsoft, Oracle, Outlooksoft, SAP, SAS

Politics of data

Writing by Jorgen on Wednesday, 10 of October , 2007 at 4:05 pm

This is a very funny movie on the politics of data

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cN6gj3cTiJs

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Category: BI Thoughts, Business Intelligence strategy

BI consolidation: from transaction to interaction

Writing by Jorgen on Wednesday, 10 of October , 2007 at 2:54 pm

In order to adapt to faster changing circumstances, organizations are more and more in need of a (near) real time supply of information within the decision making process. This means gathering transactional data from inside the organizations processes (often structured data) or on the outside edge (often unstructured data).  The true business value of business intelligence (BI) can be found in the ability to efficiently gather useful information from a diversity of both internal as well as external information sources and by sharing or interacting the intelligence with the ecosystems partners and customers to improve mutual performance.  This information centric approach is also reflected in the BI or Corporate Performance Management (CPM) suite of various vendors: integrating both organizations processes such as planning, consolidation and forecasting and search / knowledge management solutions. This makes sense as the most productive fields within the BI/CPM market are at this point in time: financial consolidation, BI platform, budgeting, planning and forecasting. This makes BI/CPM suite vendors a tasty bite. BI/CPM vendors often have similar products build upon the same type of technology. Therefore there are little distinguishing characteristics between the various vendors. It is therefore more than likely that technology is not the driving force behind the recent storm of BI/CPM consolidation. Keeping or gaining market share is their main goal. From a technology standpoint there is a case to be made that the innovation will come from small companies focusing on niches, such as: strategy & implementation tools, meta- and master data, advanced visualization, text mining, search or business activity monitoring. These will be likely candidates for a content driven acquisition. A strong trend in the BI/CPM market is the integration between hard- and software. The main push for this is the focus on real time transactional data for the decision making process. This will result in a merge between (transactional) platforms/databases and (interactive) BI/CPM solutions. A dominant position for platform/database vendors such as SAP, Oracle, IBM and Microsoft is to be expected.  These BI/CPM platform vendors will end up with a large number of duplicate tools. They will have at least two or more tools fit for the same solution. They must choose if they want a technical integration (complex, time consuming) or to thin out or rationalize their stack (kill your own darlings). Over time this heated BI/CPM consolidation will result in new product stacks, making recent tool selections obsolete and future ones a challenge.  Recent BI/CPM acquisitions Some of the most striking BI/CPM acquisitions so far have been:

  • SAP acquiring Pilot Software, Outlooksoft and Business Objects;
  • Oracle acquiring Peopleosoft, Siebel and Hyperion;
  • Microsoft acquiring Proclarity (and the release of their Performance Point Sever);
  • SAS announced a strategic partnership with Teradata (just separated from NCR);
  • Cognos acquiring Adaytum, Frango, Celequest, Applix.

SAP acquires Business Objects SAP has announced that it intends to acquire Business Objects in friendly takeover. They will pay 4.8 billion Euros for this deal. Business Objects will operate as a stand alone business but part of the SAP group. SAP is an established ERP vendor and market leader in Enterprise or business applications. They have a strong transactional platform which includes BI (Netweaver) and CPM (Outlooksoft) capability. SAP has had limited success with their own BI solutions. The main reasons for this are their weak front end capabilities and problems with unlocking data from non SAP sources.  Business Objects is a pure BI player with very strong reporting, analytics and CPM capabilities with many industry models available, focusing on the mid market. They have been the market leader in Business Intelligence. Business Objects has entered the CPM arena late in the game, some say maybe too late. They have made up for this by buying SRC, ALG and Cartesis, allowing them better access to the finance and CFO office. However as they are still busy with the XI integration this must be quite an extra burden. With SAP being strong in enterprise applications but falling behind in BI, this acquisition of the Business Objects makes up for this. Not only can Business Objects help them with their front end solutions or metadata, they can also give them the much wanted business user access and mid market expansion. Business Objects can also help with Non SAP data integration.  Does that mean that everything is like hand and glove between them? Some analysts question the robustness of the Business Objects ETL tool, especially in complex SAP environments. But the main challenge will be the integration of the all the (previously) acquired companies and their solutions. Having more than one solution for planning, reporting, consolidation, analysis or score carding will also create much confusion with their clients on which will survive the cut.  In summary, this acquisition allows SAP to have the transactional platform and the interactive Business Intelligence (Business Objects) and Corporate Performance Management (Outlooksoft) solutions. However they will face a large product overlap in the CPM area: planning, budgeting, financial consolidation. Having said this, technology probably has never been the main driver for this acquisition. This can purely be considered as a strategic reaction against the Oracle / Siebel /Hyperion merger.

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Category: BI Thoughts, BI Tools, BI vendor consolidation, Business Intelligence consulting, Business Intelligence datawarehousing, Business Intelligence software, Business Intelligence solution, Business Intelligence strategy, Business Intelligence system, Business Intelligence tools, Business Objects, Cognos, IBM, Informatica, Microsoft, Oracle, Outlooksoft, SAP, SAS

What do Range hoods and BI have in common?

Writing by Jorgen on Monday, 8 of October , 2007 at 2:59 pm

Yesterday morning I was in the gym doing my weekly workout. There is little more boring than standing on s stationary machine, working up a sweat, and basicly not going anywhere. Therefore I try to make this task a little more attractive by watching TV (my cross trainer comes with a build in TV screen). I was watching a show called “How it’s made” on the Discovery Channel. This specific episode showed the production of artifical logs (for your fireplace), snowmachines and range hoods. Range hoods are those things you will find in a kitchen above the cooker or stove. The basic three functions of a range hood are: contain the smelly air, filter it and ventilate it somewhere else.

At first I thought of ETL (Extract the data, Transform it and Load it in the datawarehouse) and how to use this analogy in a presentation. But things got even more interesting. Because this TV programm shows how things are being made - the creation process of the range hood was shown in detail. You could see that the engineer had a screen in front of him showing all the important steps. With this electronic manual the company made sure that all steps were done in the right order. The engineer had to sign off on each step. Also the distribution of all materials (like a skirt, motor or fan) was monitored. Not only did this improve the quality of work - at the same time the management was provided with valuable information on product use (ideal for stock control!) - and the performance of their engineer (for planning & control).

Kimball talks about the 38 subsystems of ETL. He indicates that ETL is often complex and labor intensive.  Labor intensivity drives a strong case for industrialization. Making the process more standard could decrease costs and would enable system integrators to rightshore this solution. The complexity could be tackled by having the BI engineer use some kind of electronic manual for all the important steps in creating an ETL environment. 

Therefore: an industrialized approach to ETL makes sure that both the process and the products are of high quality and low cost.

PS: Yes, this doesn’t have to be limited to the backend, but can also be applied to reporting & analysis.

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Category: BI Thoughts, BI Tools, Business Intelligence datawarehousing, Business Intelligence solution, Business Intelligence strategy, Business Intelligence system, Business Intelligence tools

Is Business Intelligence a dirty word?

Writing by Jorgen on Monday, 8 of October , 2007 at 11:02 am

Today a collegue of mine told me that a lot of clients think of business intelligence as a dirty word. He says that there is a shared perception among end users that business intelligence is synonymous with expensive (takes for ever, costs a lot of money).  Therefore he is not longer calling it BI but “information supply” instead. I think he has a point. Is this something that BI professionals are aware of? Or have we been working so hard in making BI a mature (Business not IT) discipline that we forgot our clients on the way over? 

There was a time that we did not name it BI or Data warehousing. Instead we were just talking about reports or lists. Little by little we added more tooling and techniques. Than we introduced magic words like: corporate performance management or pervasive business intelligence. But basicly it is still about getting information from data. There is nothing intelligent about that. It is just a (technical) trick.

The real intelligence (or magic) happens when end users start to interact with the information we provide for them. When they use it for decision making or advanced analysis or process improvement and so on. So we manage the information which they again use for the management of their business.

Business Intelligence is dead. Long live BUSINESS INFORMATION MANAGEMENT

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Category: BI Thoughts, Business Intelligence consulting, Business Intelligence solution, Business Intelligence strategy, Business Intelligence system

SAP buys Business Objects: The final round?

Writing by Jorgen on Monday, 8 of October , 2007 at 10:29 am

Yesterday SAP announced that they have agreed on a friendly take over with Business Objects. As they have already acquired Outlooksoft they can now work on integrating these seperate environments to create a complete DWH/BI/CPM platform. That means that SAS (privately owned), Teradata (just seperated from NCR) and Cognos are the last 3 men standing. So when will IBM annouce that they have bought Cognos? Or wil Microsoft swoop them away first? Fun times!See also my previous blogs: BOBJ for sale & kiss of death (vendor consolidation)

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Category: BI Tools, BI vendor consolidation, Business Intelligence consulting, Business Intelligence software, Business Intelligence system, Business Intelligence tools, Business Objects, SAP

Great one liner

Writing by Jorgen on Wednesday, 3 of October , 2007 at 8:23 pm

Yesterday I visited the BI Kring (Dutch BI community) event.

I heard somebody say the following:

If we have so much information, why do we treat it as being scarce?

I loved what she said, but I am still thinking about the implications.

Any thoughts?

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Category: BI Thoughts, Business Intelligence solution, Business Intelligence strategy

Mission Control Center

Writing by Jorgen on Wednesday, 3 of October , 2007 at 8:17 pm

In the Volkskrant (a Dutch newspaper) I read two interesting articles The first one was titled: “Radiologist in India monitors Ethiopian baby”. The second one: “Drilling for oil in Iraq using a webcam”. If you take one step back and analyze these two articles you will find a very simple underlying model they have in common.

In both articles you have an expert (the radiologist or the oil driller) monitoring a remote process (baby development or oil drilling) and if needed taking action.

The main reasons for this remote monitoring are the lack of know-how, expertise or information in the vicinity of the process itself.

The main benefits of this remote monitoring and action taking were cost reduction and less time between the actual event and the appropriate measure.

Now apply this to the Business Intelligence domain.

The expert (Business Intelligence professional or knowledge worker) monitors the key business processes (for example: supply chain, time to market or product delivery), runs analysis’s and  if needed takes action by intervening in the process or contacting the process owner.

If I close my eyes I can see a mission control center – like the bridge in Star Trek – where the whole company and its surroundings is being monitored for better performance.

Make it so.

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Category: BI Thoughts, Business Intelligence consulting, Business Intelligence datawarehousing, Business Intelligence solution, Business Intelligence strategy, Business Intelligence system, Business Intelligence tools

Business Objects for sale! The fight continues.

Writing by Jorgen on Wednesday, 3 of October , 2007 at 8:17 pm

PARIS (Reuters) - Business Objects (BOBJ.PA: Quote, Profile, Research) (BOBJ.O: Quote, Profile, Research), a French-American business intelligence software maker, is looking for a buyer and has appointed Goldman Sachs to find an investor, Le Figaro newspaper said.
At current market prices, Business Object is valued at 2.9 billion euros ($4.03 billion).

The consolidation of BI tools is entering a new round. Will be this the one where the final knock out will be given? An article in the French paper le Figaro mentions that Business Objects (BOBJ) has hired Goldman to sell the company! This is sure to reignite the acquisition speculation again.

Until recently BOBJ official position was that they were not for sale. On the contrary they were on the acquisition path themselves and their ambition was to remain an independent BI software firm.

Although this is the official stand point rumor has it that they have been contemplating this move for quite a while. Unable to make the much needed growth as an independent software - fighting their opponent Cognos - they need a large platform vendor to make the difference.

Which of the usual suspects would be in the market for BOBJ?

1) Oracle does not seem like a logical choice. With all their recent acquisitions their BI portfolio seems to be complete enough. Also Fusion will have to be their main focus for now.

2) The SAP BI solution (SAPBW) has never won any prices. It was considered to be not very user friendly and limited in its possibilities. I had many clients inquiring on alternatives. They could use a good BI environment maybe more than any of the competition. With they recent acquisition of Outlooksoft they have the possibility to finally go for a complete BI/CPM platform: leveraging the power of the underlying SAP data.

3) Another good possibility are they guys and girls from HP. They have bought Knight bridge - a BI consulting firm - and have a comprehensive data warehouse solution/infrastructure. However they are still missing a BI tool or environment to go with this. This might be a great possibility to really enter the arena.

4) IBM always comes up in these kind of list - but somehow they never seem to bite. But they have they same starting point as HP with strong data warehouse infrastructure and consulting in place. But an American - French marriage often leads to many problems (although in real life I have a good friend who has fought the odds). I keep hearing rumors about Cognos and IBM. If HP decides to buy BOBJ then IBM must follow. Start calling your stoke broker.

Although there are more candidates out there - such as Microsoft (don’t think so), Cognos (that would be so funny but impossible), Teradata (a possibility after the split from NCR) or even the real outsiders as Google Aps (hmmm, have to think about that one) - my guess it will be one of the above.

Do you agree or have I missed something or someone? Please react and share your opinions.

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Category: BI Tools, BI vendor consolidation, Business Objects, SAP

Microsoft BI 2.0

Writing by Jorgen on Wednesday, 3 of October , 2007 at 8:15 pm

Last week Microsoft came in the news with two seemingly separate events. The Dutch government has decided to make more use of open source software. There are several reasons for this: lower costs, more innovative employees and so on. But the most dominant driver for this was limiting the position of power of Microsoft.

Also the European community won their fight with Microsoft, forcing them to give other companies more information on the ins and outs of Ms Windows. Giving these so called API’s to other companies allows them to better integrate their products with Ms Windows. In the extreme this can be considered as a first step towards making Microsoft more open(source).

The support for open source software among some IT professionals is powerful. For example there is a high correlation between pony tailed network administrators and (Linux) penguin T-shirts.

As many of you know Microsoft has been entering the BI arena with products like performance point server. Many argue that Ms Excel already is the dominant BI tool anyway. It has been common practice among IT professionals to bash Microsoft and for BI professionals to bad-talk Excel. But on the other side, the business people (especially those grayish people from finance) cannot live without their spreadsheets. So if IT doesn’t want it but the Business needs it – are we at a deadlock?

If this first step of forcing Microsoft to open up its secrets to other players continues - perhaps in the future IT and Business can work together in making Microsoft BI (2.0) a truly collaborative business intelligence experience.

Bookkeeper and BI professional – both wearing a “I LOVE BILL” T-shirt – working together on improving Microsoft BI. Shall we live to see this?

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Category: BI Thoughts, BI Tools, Business Intelligence datawarehousing, Business Intelligence software, Business Intelligence tools, Microsoft

I am a believer

Writing by Jorgen on Wednesday, 3 of October , 2007 at 8:15 pm

Day 1 in Mumbai. What an overwhelming city this is. After ‘surviving’ Mumbai rush hour I will never complain anymore when stuck in traffic (ok, maybe a little). But this is probably the only city in the world where you don’t get RSI from clicking your mouse but from honking your horn (if you have been here you know what I mean). After driving through the slums – overpopulated with people so poor they cannot afford to buy shoes - back in my hotel room I found two chocolate cupcakes with fresh whipped cream! So does this mean that we should consider the Indian IT solutions to be at the bottom of the value chain as well? Or at best be of mixed quality? Is India only a country for low cost IT resources – or is there more than meets the eye?

I have spent the day talking with people that know how to do business. And their knowledge of Business Intelligence (BI) far exceeds the ‘simple’ data warehousing and reporting capabilities. Ok, it’s confession time. I also thought of India as a quick fix for our resource problems. Let’s just dump our specs over the wall and let the Indians build it. But guess what? They have strong knowledge of consulting – in for example supply chain or customer value – and of BI integration, and development and even outsourcing and maintenance. Some customers have said to me: “India is a great concept but that does not work for BI. Also all our documentation is in Dutch. This will not work”. But can you believe that today I met some Indians who actually spoke some Dutch! They had worked on a project where originally all requirements were in Dutch but were translated (in India) into English. After they were checked again in the Netherlands they started building the solution in Dutch using an English/Dutch glossary as reference. By working together with the end customer in the Netherlands they quickly picked up some of the lingo. So I have seen the proof here. A lot of successful BI projects (91% of the customers valued it as good, very good or excellent). And although I have to admit that BI is not standard and will probably be different for each customer or even subject area, I am pretty sure these guys can solve anything thrown at them (or already have).

So here are my questions for you:
• How mature can a BI solution or project from India be?
• What are the limitations? What are the opportunities?
• Is it limited to offshore development based on onshore requirements? Or can they do more?
• Where will it end?

Please let me know what you think of this.

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Category: BI Thoughts, Business Intelligence consulting, Business Intelligence datawarehousing, Business Intelligence software, Business Intelligence solution, Business Intelligence strategy, Business Intelligence system, Business Intelligence tools

Cognos to acquire Applix

Writing by Jorgen on Wednesday, 3 of October , 2007 at 8:13 pm

I hate to say I told you so - but I am going to do it anyway! I wrote in my blog about vendor consolidation that the innovation would come from small companies and that the larger (BI) vendors would acquire them. Well yesterday Cognos annouced they acquired Applix - a 200 person company specialized in performance Analytics.

See what cognos writes about this on their own website:

Cognos to Acquire Applix
Cognos has announced the execution of a definitive agreement to acquire Applix, Inc., a publicly held company based in Westborough, Massachusetts and an industry leader in analytics. With this acquisition, Cognos expects to further extend its position as a leading independent provider of financial performance management.

Applix will complement Cognos flagship products—Cognos 8 Planning, Cognos 8 Controller, and Cognos 8 Business Intelligence —specifically in the area of financial performance management. Applix performance analytics will give customers new capabilities to analyze and optimize financial performance. This will include improved control and leverage of large, complex financial performance data; strong finance self-service capabilities for “what-if” business modeling and scenario management; new solution areas including profitability analysis; and innovative technology, including a patented, 64-bit, in-memory multidimensional OLAP server

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Category: BI Tools, BI vendor consolidation, Business Intelligence consulting, Business Intelligence datawarehousing, Business Intelligence software, Business Intelligence system, Business Intelligence tools, Cognos

BI vendor consolidation - The kiss of death?

Writing by Jorgen on Wednesday, 3 of October , 2007 at 10:20 am

For as long as I can remember, the market for Business Intelligence tools has been more or less stable. Sure, sometimes a new player entered or another disappeared. But on the whole, the market was dominated by a couple of vendors. The most exiting news came from new versions, upgrades or a technological breakthroughs. To put it bluntly: you could choose either Cognos or BusinessObjects or if you were running SAP you could go with BW. Than things slowly started changing. Instead of Business Intelligence we suddenly found ourselves talking about things like Corporate Performance Management, financial consolidation, budgeting, planning, dashboards and scorecards. And we embraced the tools that came with it. Our work was no longer limited to reporting and analysis. We were proud that after so many years finally the strategic value of Business Intelligence was recognized. Thus changing the playing field completely. The focus in BI was shifting from a technical toward a business solution.

The BI and platform vendors quickly recognized this also and have been embracing these tools as well. They bought up companies that had tools specializing in this specific area and integrated them – as best as they could – in their own product portfolio. SAP for example acquired Outlooksoft (Consolidation) and Pilot Software (Strategy Management). Oracle acquired Hyperion (after they bought Peoplesoft and Siebel) – the market leader in planning, budgeting and financial consolidation. Microsoft acquired ProClarity (Analytics) and made a firm entry to the BI/CPM marketplace when they launched their Performance Point Server. Cognos – a pure BI player – acquired Adaytum and Frango and created a complete CPM solution. Finally BusinessObjects- still busy with integrating Crystal – bought Cartesis (consolidation) to complete their CPM offering that they already started building on when they acquired SRC and ALG Software. However is this buying up – this consolidation – not the kiss of death? Where is this going to end? Why this focus on applications rather than information?

Business Intelligence has come a long way. It is now closer tied with the business processes as ever before making the basic data (quality) that comes from this also more and more important. BI still can be an aggregated report of last month sales on a highly accumulated level but it can also be operational dashboards monitoring key business processes on a real time level supporting split second decisions. This makes a strong case for the platform vendors. They have the applications to support the business processes, capture the data and report on them. An integration of software and hardware therefore seems to be unavoidable. Cognos is one of the fist BI pure players to understand this. Their launch of Cognos Now! – which integrates a hardware server and dashboard for realtime monitoring – is proof of that. They might well be the first BI platform vendor.

But basically all BI/CPM vendors have more or less the same products and use the same technology. Even the corporate take over strategies are being copied resulting into a concentration of BI vendors. The real innovation still has to come from small companies that specialize in a niche of business intelligence such as: strategy implementation, meta- and masterdata, advanced visualization, text mining, search and business activity monitoring. These small companies will probably at some point in time be bought by one of the large BI vendors. After all, Cognos Now! was Celquest before. The real challenge for the large BI vendors will than be the technical integration of all these tools. It is easy to make a Ms Powerpoint presentation of where this new application fits in your product portfolio – but making it work with these other tools is a far more difficult thing to do.

Finally, will we end up with one or two BI vendors with a standard set of Business Intelligence tools? No, I don’t think so. The BI tool set will always be dynamic. Remember? After DDS (Decision Support Sytems) and EIS (Executive Information Systems) came Enterprise Reporting and OLAP (Analytics). Than came the consolidation, planning, dashboard and scorecarding tools. Nowadays, the streaming servers and realtime monitoring tools are being wheeled into the business. There will always be something new. The platform vendors will take a dominant position in the BI market but there will always be room for vendors with a focus on BI only. It is almost like the Olympics. Sometimes you need the decathlete to jump, run and throw the javelin and sometimes you just need a 100 meter specialist.

But I am not sure that the real innovation will come from these companies, though they may well acquire the innovators to embed them into their enterprise solutions. Like a thousand points of light, there are individuals and small companies out there already thinking in a really innovative manner about what Business Intelligence could be given new capabilities and technologies.

Who are they? I can’t wait to find out! Let me know what you have seen or are thinking, and that also means the big players too.

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Category: BI Thoughts, BI Tools, BI vendor consolidation, Business Intelligence consulting, Business Intelligence datawarehousing, Business Intelligence software, Business Intelligence solution, Business Intelligence system, Business Intelligence tools, Business Objects, Cognos, IBM, Informatica, Microsoft, Oracle, Outlooksoft, SAP, SAS

Author

Jorgen Heizenberg is Principal Technology Officer for the Business Intelligence domain at Capgemini Netherlands. The views expressed in this blog accurately reflect his personal views about any or all of the subjects and is not part of the official Capgemini company view. PLEASE REACT TO HIS OPINIONS AND BECOME AN ONLINE BI GURU