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.

At home I always tell my children that everything is Business Intelligence. Last week my daughter gave me her favorite bear and told me it could already say: “Everything is” and after spending one day with ‘grandfather’ she was sure that the bear could learn to say BI as well. Today at the Seattle BI Conference I found out that I was right. Everything is about BI. Or as they say at Microsoft this year: Think Bigger About BI. They explained to us that BI is going to be part of everything, meaning: (1) Embedding information everywhere, (2) Include unstructured data and (3) Actionable BI is part of our daily work. Even playing Halo 3 on the Xbox is considered to be BI because of all the real time statistics. The overall theme this year would definitely be PERVASIVE. I started out with the BS bingo during the Keynote and Pervasive won hands down. MSoft is serious in their business focus. They expect BI can improve the productivity of information workers. They call it the democratization of BI by putting it in the hands of everyone. Following the recent evolution of the BI industry the market has changed from many pure players into a consolidated few large vendors (IBM, Microsoft, Oracle & SAP) with many different solutions. Does that mean that everything has changed? From where I am looking this just means that the brand name changes but the solutions (for now) remain the same. MSoft boasts an Integrated end-to-end solution that other parties miss and as an extra Unique Selling Point the all too familiar technology of Excel. As I explained before I question this last argument. Many clients perceive Microsoft Excel as the head of the beast (not necessarily the beast). Therefore they go to great lengths to avoid Excel as they fear this will be considered as old style spreadsheet BI. But to be honest Msoft has made some major steps with MOSS 2007, PPS 2008 and SQL Server 2008. They have made it easy to have an integrated (portal or thin client) environment to communicate, analyze, research both structured as well as unstructured data. With their constant focus on end user (Joe Report) or customer focus they understand that technology is just the enabler here. They have built a platform with enterprise data (low cost of tco), beyond rational (including other types of data), dynamic development (richer solutions) and pervasive (BS Bingo!) insight enabling business users to get answers fast. But at the other hand I hear a lot of million rows of this, terabytes, services etcetera. I guess it is difficult to shake of the technical stuff. Especially in a room where people actually  applaud for 20 million rows in Excel! Two exciting projects were announced today. The first one is a project codenamed Madison. It will release in the first half of 2010 and concerns the integration of the recently acquired Datallegro. Using Massive Parallel Processing capabilities on top of reference hardware platform they will be able to scale SQL server to hundreds of TB and still get great performance. Something to look forward to as the amount of data seems to increase more and more over time. The other important announcement was on Project GEMINI. Part of the SQL server Kilimanjaro release also in H1 2010 it empowers end users to work with self service analysis, self service reporting and sharing and collaboration management. Basically it allows end users access to a component based library where the data warehouse data can be joined in Excell with all kinds of external data using what looks like a pivot table. Underlying is a star schema which allows for slicing and dicing. By creating your own reports, integrating it seamless without effort with other external data and publishing it on a portal environment (with collaboration features) actually sounds like something I look forward to seeing in action.  I would say that they had a pretty good start of the conference and I look forward to seeing and hearing more of their long term vision on putting the user behind the wheel.