It is close to Sinterklaas in the Netherlands. Sinterklaas was a saint that gave away his money. We celebrate this every year by giving presents to our children. Sinterklaas was stolen by the Americans (sorry guys) and Coca-Cola turned him into the commercial Santa Claus. What does Sinterklaas has to do with Business Intelligence? BI is everywhere. If you are aware of it or not. There is an enormous amount of data. Either from your own transaction systems or from others in your network. Both structured and unstructured (just consider the internet). However I see a lot of customers not using this information for BI. Either they do not know how to use it, or have not thought about it yet. But there is also a group that doesn’t see the value of it. The ROI, or Return-On-Intelligence as I call it. At the same time we have consumers that act more unpredictable. They are better informed (again the internet) and react faster. Retaillers often don’t want to spend too much money on information systems. As long as sales are up they are happy. Why bother with extra costs. Therefore their focus is on ‘buy in store’ instead of management information. But if sales are up by 10% and the market revenue by 20% there is more money to be made. And now I have their attention. Benchmarking is a great way of making this insightful. The downside to bench marking is that it often only shows the average. And it easy to understand that nobody or nothing is the average. Therefore you need to slice and dice the information, to make a real comparison of store size, location, prices, models against a benchmark of the same granualarity. Your competition will probably not give you that information. So you need a trusted third party that collects point of sale information. Some of the major retail labels do this and some don’t. Who do you think performs better? The ones that keep the information to themselves or the ones that share? Happy Sinterklaas!

It has taken much more time than expected – but finally IBM has announced that they are buying Cognos for 58 USD per share – making this a five billion dollar transaction. IBM and Cognos have had a strategic alliance dating back to early 2006. However it looked like IBM was slow in reacting to takeovers such as Business Objects by SAP. So slow indeed, that new names came to the surface: Microsoft and Informatica. But now it is final: IBM it stays. Therefore it is safe to say that this is not a big surprise. But is this a logical step by IBM? They themselves state that this fits perfectly with their information on demand strategy - opening up information to business users. IBM traditionally had a focus on hardware and data integration – the techy stuff of datawarehousing – lacking business interaction tools like Cognos. Therefore this acquisition of front end technology for business users - Business Intelligence and Corporate Performance Management - is very compatible with the hard- and software they already had. It has made their BI portfolio more complete without a doubt. So am I 100% enthusiastic? No, is the answer. The main reason for this is that the whole “Information on demand strategy” implies having data in the first place. Where other vendors like Oracle, Microsoft or SAP have transactional platforms or CRM solutions creating transactional data – IBM starts at the point of data integration – missing the essential first step of business applications. This way they can not get their claws into the much valued business processes. They will position themselves as being independent of any database, platform or application, which off course is true from an IT point of view. However, they will very often not be a first ‘automatic’ choice (like BO will be for SAP users) for business user, meaning that they have to put a lot of energy into marketing and sales. In summary: IBM & Cognos offer a powerful, complete and compatible Business Intelligence solution which will make the IT department very happy but will the business people give a hoot?

I get most of my creative ideas when I have the time to contemplate. Often this happens under the shower or in the gym. I always thought the main reason for this was that since I had nowhere to go physically my mind could wander instead. I turns out that I am right, but only partially.  Recent studies show that the emotional state of people highly influence the way they process information. If you feel happy you are more receptive for outside stimuli. You start to see the beauty in things. Also there is an increase in creativity when you are in a good mood. The other way around, depressed people tend to focus on themselves and their problems. So now you know: I like taking showers.  Design can make a product more attractive. Attractive things create positive energy and state of mind. When asked to choose between products that basically do the same - have the same performance, price and so on – people tend to choose the attractive one. The Apple I phone is probably one of the best examples. So if attractive things work better (or at least create the feeling that they do) and stimulate creativity why is it that a lot of Business Intelligence solutions still look like spreadsheets, matrices or boring lists? I always encourage my colleagues to make their solutions super fancy sexy. Meaning that it should not only hold the correct data but at the same time it has to look good too. By presenting the information in a creative, nice looking way you increase the acceptance and usage of the product.  For Business Intelligence solutions the presentation and visualization are just as important as the content. Do you agree?