Writing by Jorgen on Thursday, 4 of September , 2008 at 9:47 am
In school I participated in a Poem contest. Although I didn’t win I found writing poetry to be fun. But as with many fun things you forget how important they are and after time you do not practice them at all. Instead we find other not so funny things more important, like work. Well, I found a great new way to combine both work and poetry on TedC blog: http://datadoodle.com/2008/07/28/bi-haiku-from-the-uk/ TedC started with combining the ancient Japanese form of poetry called Haiku with Business Intelligence. A haiku poem (ideally) consists of 3 line of 5, 7 and 5 syllables. I can’t wait to see your contributions. Here is one example (which does not 100% follows the rules of a Haiku – but rules are there to be broken – right?). Extract from your systems.
Leave overnight to churn.
Predict the future
Category: BI Thoughts
Writing by Jorgen on Friday, 8 of August , 2008 at 1:37 pm
Just imagine that your local hardware store gives you a hammer for each and every project you want to undertake. Paint the house? Here have a hammer. Fix the light? Here have a hammer. Build a shed? Here have a hammer. Actually, that last one made sense. In order to select the right tool you need to know a couple of basic things. One of the most important questions would be: where do you want to use it for? The same thing off course applies for BI tools. Giving a standard reporting tool to all user across the organization does not make sense. Some people might need a dashboard and other statistical data mining tools. Therefore the same question must be asked: where do you want to use it for? But who to ask this question? Do you know your Business Intelligence (BI) End-users? Are you wondering why your BI-applications are barely used? Do you think technology is enough? Do you want to want to get maximum benefit from your BI investments? During the next six months a scientific research project is conducted by a graduate student of Utrecht University to get an answer to these questions. The main goal of this research is to obtain insight into the factors influencing the fit between BI Solutions and BI End-users. Derived from the research goal(s), the following main question is formulated: “What are the major factors influencing the fit between end-users and Business Intelligence Solutions?” Results will be posted regulary at
www.intelligent-business.nl. Are you interested in helping him with his project? To validate the research project several semi-structured interviews will be conducted with BI-Practitioners (in English or Dutch). Please do not hesitate to contact him directly. Send an e-mail to Rick Tijsen or leave a comment in this post.
Category: BI Thoughts, BI Tools, Business Intelligence tools
Writing by Jorgen on Tuesday, 6 of May , 2008 at 10:42 am
RT: There is a slowdown in the BI market (I think). The reason for this is that most organizations have some kind of BI solution in place. The next challenge will be information management. The problem is that we need a business case for this. IT is at a deadend if they cannot translate their house keeping in some kind of revenue versus costs calculation. JH: I don’t know if there will be a slow down. BI is a slowly evolving system that needs constant attention and a incremental updates. RT: Organization need a BI house keeper. JH: New BI initiatives will probably slow down in the medium & large segment. Mainstream IT is on its way to be a commodity (like furniture). But BI is still such a specific type of IT with a lot of business involvement that it will remain a hot topic. Perhaps in a different shape than cubes and reports. RT: Best in class companies can focus on tooling and information but all others have a data problem. JH: competing on data is tge nr1 challenge. RT: We need a new subject at school! JH: Out with the CIO – long live the Chief Data Officer RT: Information Logistics RT: (CDO, see Yahoo) JH: Are they doing this? Smart of them to listen to the guru 
JH: However if they are taken over by MS they are not as smart as I expected. RT: lol, nice fight with NewsCorp, AOL, Yahoo, MS, Google … JH: Have to go – talk to you later RT: CU.
Category: BI Thoughts, Business Intelligence strategy
Writing by Jorgen on Tuesday, 6 of May , 2008 at 10:29 am
There is much talk about the impact of the (feared) recession on Business Intelligence. Most analysts are expecting a slowdown in customer spending and vendor revenues. I see their point and I am somewhat inclined to agree but there is another side to this. There is an expression that goes something like: you have to repair the roof when it’s not raining. In other words IT spending is obviously up during financial upturns. BI tends to benefit from this as well. But as the economic weather gets rough there is even more need for information. As the budget is cut back people are looking at smart things to save costs, recognize trends early, and identify the most valuable customers and so on. This is exactly what BI enables you to do. So my expectations are that an economic downturn will hit the general IT market much harder than it will impact BI.
Category: BI Thoughts, Business Intelligence consulting, Business Intelligence strategy
Writing by Jorgen on Monday, 7 of April , 2008 at 9:10 am
Currently I am working for the BI competence center of Albert Heijn (supermarkets) in Zaandam (Netherlands). Last week this AH BICC won the Dutch Business Intelligence Award. Please read the full article (Dutch) on http://www.computable.nl/topic_artikel.jsp?rubriek=1277145&id=2456110
Category: BI Thoughts
Writing by Jorgen on Tuesday, 11 of March , 2008 at 9:51 pm
I was asked by an IT magazine in the Netherlands to come up with a couple of practical tips on BI service delivery. In my opinion the most important element in service delivery is creating a optimal mix of all crucial elements. My submitted three practical tips cover design, build and implementation. However it is just a start. Please join me to create a top 10 in BI service delivery. [1] When designing a Business Intelligence environment always consider target groups and type of usage.Target groups: Some users such as managers often have the need for a high level dashboards with little detail. However other users like analysts need lot of detail and powerful analysis tools. Every target group needs their own environment in form, function and frequency (of data refresh). Usage: There should be a mix of fast (ad hoc) and structural (more long term) BI solutions and products for the end user of a BI environment. [2] Excellent BI specialists are a scarce resource but are crucial for the success of the BI environment. Do not cut back on quality. Make sure you have a proper mix of ‘hardcore’ geeks as well as business architects or BI visionaries. In order to make the costs controllable consider outsourcing parts of your BI environment. A good starting point would be technical realization (build) and application maintenance. [3] Don’t stop when it’s finished. After the technical realization of the BI environment the real work just starts. A critical success factor for this is the BI Competence Center. This center should mix IT and business components to ensure the optimal use of BI within the organization. It should be the BICC that pro actively supports the users in their daily work. In this phase it is no longer about high level sponsorship but more about working floor thought leadership.
Category: BI Thoughts, Business Intelligence consulting, Business Intelligence datawarehousing, Business Intelligence solution, Business Intelligence strategy, Business Intelligence system, Business Intelligence tools
Writing by Jorgen on Friday, 7 of March , 2008 at 1:20 pm
What is the most annoying thing that can happen when you want to buy a carton of milk? That the milk is out of stock! As a customer this is very frustrating. As a consumer of a certain product of service you want to get what you need. The same applies for BI. Whether it is a report, cube or specific tool specialist. But who is the BI customer? This depends on the supplier perspective. In ‘our world’ there are two types of suppliers of BI products and services: Systems Integrators and the BI department within organizations. The SI supplies BI knowledge and capabilities to the BI department. That is their customer. The BI department supplies reports, cubes and so on to different departments within their organization. An example: A SI delivers a reporting consultant to the BI competence Center within a large supermarket organization. This BICC delivers reports to the replenishment organization within the supermarkets. The performance of the BI consultant will be done by the BICC. For example using a assessment report. The performance of the BICC will be evaluated with the replenishment organization. They will probably use a Service Level Agreement for this or the yearly Customer Satisfaction Survey. In both cases the accountability is a direct relationship between supplier and customer. However the true performance can only be measured by the customer of the customer. Or maybe even their customer. What do I mean with this? For example, from the perspective of the SI the customer is not the BICC but the replenishment organization. If they are happy with the reports the BI consultant did his job satisfactory. And from the supermarket perspective the customer are the clients in the local supermarkets. If they can find their carton of milk the replenishment department did their work as they should. In conclusion, you could argue that the current system for evaluating BI performance is incomplete or even incorrect. By limiting the evaluation to the performance between the direct relationship between supplier and customer an incomplete picture is drawn. Therefore both SI as well as organizations with a BI department should find a different way of measuring performance going down the complete value chain of BI. What do you think? Should we evaluate the BI performance with the availability of the carton of milk?
Category: BI Thoughts, Business Intelligence solution
Writing by Jorgen on Friday, 15 of February , 2008 at 12:18 pm
My fellow blogger Frank Buytendijk and myself have been writing together about the 10 BI truths. Now Frank has started an new episode with Top 5 list. Read his hilarious blog here: http://blogs.oracle.com/frankbuytendijk I have tried to come up with some top list myself. Business Intelligence improvements I love to see:
- Intelligent tools that offer solutions and/or decisions instead of information only;
- Effective visual communication of data adapting in form or functionality based upon the data provided and decision to make;
- Program or project managers that understand that BI is a first priority instead of something we also have to do sometimes;
- Make BI at C-Level (Chief Data Officer) mandatory or at least have BI thought leaders.
Business Intelligence product names that I don’t want to see anymore:
- Everything with numbers (BI 2.0, Product 7.1)
- Everything with technical names like Server or SQL (it’s BUSINESS intelligence not IT intelligence!)
Technology breakthroughs:
- All the stuff that Frank mentions especially the soundtrack system;
- Spam filters that understand that I do not need penis enlargements (!) but might be interested in cheap airline tickets;
- One card to replace all the cards that our now in my wallet (loyalty cards, payment cards, credit cards, access cards…..)
Category: BI Thoughts
Writing by Jorgen on Friday, 25 of January , 2008 at 1:25 pm
The beginning of the year is always a period to look back but even more important to look forward. On the radio I hear a lot of commercials from different training institutes urging people to add their specific course, study or lecture to their 2008 curriculum. I expect that employees are now running towards their management requesting training in new features of tool XYZ and so on. Business Intelligence (BI) is a field of study that has been dominated by a strong technical driven focus. Business Intelligence supports better decisions, by making a strategy, objective or process – accountable, adjustable or adaptive. Shapiro has developed a knowledge management pyramid with three layers: data, information and knowledge. Unlocking data and transforming this into information will lead to more knowledge and insight. Professor Weggeman defines knowledge as: Information * Experience and Attitude (K=I * EVA). He states that hard facts, information or explicit knowledge can only lead to benefits when combined with implicit or tacit knowledge. Only when something is done with the information, such as sharing, comparing or merging with something else will lead to performance improvement. Choo adds another element to the mix. On top of explicit and tacit knowledge he adds cultural knowledge. Those are the beliefs and values that exist within an organization. Therefore it is safe to conclude that when it concerns performance improvement or strategy alignment the real barriers are: communication, culture and change management. BI from a technical point of view is just an enabler. So why is our community still so much focused on technology. Why is it that instead of subscribing to for example a course in business spirituality we choose the “database administration 2.1” or “Advanced SQL 3.2”?
Perhaps you can find some inspiration in these lyrics: http://www.oldielyrics.com/lyrics/supertramp/school.html
Category: BI Thoughts, Business Intelligence datawarehousing, Business Intelligence strategy
Writing by Jorgen on Wednesday, 16 of January , 2008 at 8:56 am
Times they are changing. Last year has been tumultuous for BI at best. We have seen the BI market consolidate into a few remaining mega vendors. But there was also room for niche players especially the ones focusing on speed, visualization or collaboration. So what will 2008 bring? To quote from Star Wars: “Impossible to see the future is”. But let’s give a try anyway. There are five mega trends that I foresee. Some have been around for quite some time and some are new. The first one is called: (1) Increase: Business Intelligence must be able to cope with considerable increase in both data (size) and speed (real time). The second one is (2) Integration: Business Intelligence will continue to integrate with operational processes but will also be more aligned with strategy. The integration of (un)structured data will increase. Finally, Business Intelligence will integrate with other business applications or ERP systems. Third, and my personal favorite, is (3) Insight: Business Intelligence will continue to become more intuitive (less end user involvement) showing an increase in advanced visualizations but also more analytic (more end user involvement).The fourth is (4) Interactive: Business Intelligence will be more reciprocal by nature; creating a dialogue between system and end users as well as sharing information and collaborating within performance networks. Finally, number five will be (5) Industrialization: Business Intelligence development will be characterized by a more industrialized approach using standard development frameworks opening up the possibility to outsource. Increase will be mostly characterized by the need for real time information (partly due to the fact that BI becomes more operational). This will be supported by tools like Netezza and Teradata. They can also support the growing process of data retrieval from vast amounts of data. Integration of unstructured data (text, search, documents, agents) for example in a document warehouse (using tags) sitting next to the data warehouse will be the wave of the future. I expect Google or Attunity to take the lead here but the original BI vendors (Cognos, BusinessObjects) have also been investing in this. Although the market is more or less divided among a few remaining vendors it is still possible that we will see some more integration. This will be partly triggered by the fact that BI will be used on all levels: strategic, tactical and operational. This means BI tooling must support strategy development as well as pervasive BI (it’s everywhere). The renewed interest in open source Business Intelligence (Pentaho, Jaspersoft) is a clear counter reaction against the market domination due to vendor consolidation. Creating Insight today will be the one mega trend where I expect the most innovation to come from. It is a hot topic and fun to watch evolve. Here you will find things like intuitive intelligence (Strategy companion) or decision engines supporting your daily work (Fair Isaac). Also advanced visualization will help the end user get more grip (fractal edge) on things. Triggered by the success of “competing on analytics” or “super crunchers” we will see an rise in the use of analytics, strongly combining informatics, statistics and business knowledge. Perhaps here lies the opportunity for the long awaited promise of data mining? A clear and much appraised trend is the sharing of information with other people either inside or outside your own company to create mutual benefit. But it is more than just sharing the information it is also about sharing the reasoning behind it. How have we come to this conclusion and do you agree? It is asking feedback or contributions to your problem solving by your stake holders. All the characteristics of the web 2.0 can also apply here. This can also be done by using a trusted third party to solve your BI wishes by providing BI as a service. As BI is getting more mature by the minute I expect that we will see a standardization of best practices resulting in an industrialized approach in (standard) BI development. BI factories, often based in typical outsourcing countries, can provide high quality, low cost ready-to-use BI solutions. Some people say that after all the consolidating this will be a boring year for Business Intelligence. But if I look at these five mega trends I can’t wait. Happy new Year.
Category: Analytics, 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
Writing by Jorgen on Wednesday, 19 of December , 2007 at 4:17 pm
Almost all human beings, except for the blind or visually challenged, are by nature visually orientated. Our eyes constantly monitor our surroundings searching for things that are out of the ordinary. This real time interface between eyes and the visual cortex of the brain has helped the human race survive by quickly recognizing danger. The great thing about this is that we are also able to filter out all the noise. For example, if you want to mail a letter and during the trip from your home to the mailbox you see every little detail, you probably never get there. So we ignore the stuff that we already know or looks the same all of the time. Only the things that look different get our attention. At the present time this ability to quickly spot dangerous animals or other threats is most often used for other purposes: shopping! Store owners, website builders, they all try to grab our attention using visual stimuli. Recently I was at the new Starbucks coffee shop at Schiphol airport in the Netherlands. My eyes quickly spotted a new Ready To-Go coffee tumbler. It was different from the normal ones because it had some kind of holiday season appearance. Being a collector of Starbuck Coffee Tumbler (I know this is a bit geeky…) I bought it on the spot. For Business Intelligence it is not so much different. As we are confronted with an enormity of data we try to find ways to interpret it. We try to find the information or even knowledge in this overload of data. Therefore we use Business Intelligence. But this information is presented to us in more or less the same manner, shape or form. Therefore we are quickly bored with it. Knowing this and the fact that our eyes and brains have this great ability to recognize patterns and trends we need effective visual communication of data that changes its shape or form to grab our attention when needed and allows us to quickly asses if the information presented holds some kind of pattern of interest. We need visual business intelligence that makes use of our intuitive skills. Just take a look at the work of Stephen Few (http://www.perceptualedge.com/) one of the evangelists of visual Business Intelligence or tools like Gapminder (http://www.gapminder.org/) to see what I mean.
Category: Analytics, BI Thoughts, BI Tools, Business Intelligence software, Business Intelligence solution, Business Intelligence strategy, Business Intelligence system, Business Intelligence tools
Writing by Jorgen on Thursday, 13 of December , 2007 at 3:24 pm
Detailed insight into crucial data and events is a necessity for organizations that want to navigate a constantly changing, information-rich environment. Organizations that know how to connect the use of data to their strategic objectives are more intelligent: they become ‘Intelligent enterprises’, constantly reading, analyzing and reacting to information inside and far outside the companies’ boundaries. Information thus becomes a corporate asset, which infuses itself into all strategic and operational parts of the business. As a result it’s only natural that more and more organizations want to start a Business Intelligence initiative. However BI initiatives cost money. This is often an inhibiting factor for many companies. At the one hand they need BI to face the business challenges of today’s market but at the other hand they need some kind of justification before they can start. This justification can take two shapes or forms. The first and most well known is the business case. Basically this is a quantitative analysis of all expected costs versus the expected yield or profit resulting into a return-on-investment. The business case involves calculations on lower costs, more effective processes or less manpower. Those are all very tangible and well defined attributes. Business cases are often made by business departments in order to obtain a budget. The other is less known - probably far more difficult - but with a higher yield. It involves a non quantitative analysis based on vision. Driven by thought leadership an ideal or goal is formed. Unlike the business case there are no tangible attributes. The advantages or benefits can be things like qualitative better decisions or accessing unknown data sources. Often these initiatives are considered to be vague or soft. There is a promise of profit not a proof of profit or like I call it: return-on-intelligence. This vision based justification is often made on an organizational level in stead of departmental. In my opinion, in this day and age a company can not allow it self to remain without business intelligence and survive the increased competition. A BI environment is a necessity just as much as a LAN or transactional business applications. Therefore they need BI initiatives even without a cold business case. I encourage all companies to take this vision based approach. Not only will it lead to more commitment from your employees, it will also support the execution of your strategy. And in the long run – there is proof enough for that – it will also pay back on its investment.
Category: BI Thoughts, Business Intelligence consulting, Business Intelligence solution, Business Intelligence strategy
Writing by Jorgen on Thursday, 6 of December , 2007 at 12:47 pm
This is the second part of my posts about the ‘universal truths in business intelligence’. Check out what Frank Buytendijk thinks at: http://blogs.oracle.com/frankbuytendijk/2007/12/04#a95 4. BI projects need high level sponsorship. The reason for this is that we want to introduce Business Intelligence in the organization. It is all about creating awareness and enthusiasm. So do we really need a high level sponsor or manager for this? Perhaps in a very rigid hierarchic organization you do. But we Dutch do not deal well with a top down approach. The real innovation comes from the work floor, we think. I think organization can benefit much more from a highly committed thought leader. 3. BI development should be done incrementally. What would be the opposite of that? Probably some kind of big bang approach where all the functionality can be delivered in one single release. That sounds nice but often this is not possible for BI. To start with I find that when users start to interact with the new BI system they come up with new insights followed by change requests. A successful incremental approach focuses on the identification and prioritization of the most beneficial increments or slices. This should be based on the priority of the objective (is this a key process, is it in line with our strategy?). Other qualifying criteria can be availability and quality of the data. Each slice should be a complete solution. BI projects – just as in real life – should have a first things first approach. Delivering incrementally – keeping the long term view in mind – allows for faster speed to value. So I agree with this truth. 2. BI projects require a business driven approach. Any BI project or program should have business value. Creating a business intelligence environment without a goal is a mission impossible. We do not need data warehouse projects. We need project that can create more sales or reduce churn. A data warehouse or business intelligence project can support this goal. However I do not think that it is should necessarily be the business user who initiates such a project. IT can play an important role in taking the lead by showing what is possible. Especially by creating a prototype. See also my other post on IT push or pull (http://www.biguru-online.com/2007/12/04/active-push-or-passive-pull-role-for-it/). 1. BI needs one version of the truth? Has anyone of you ever played bullshit bingo? It was one of the sources of inspiration for this post. You take 10 of the most used words and cross them out during a meeting when used. Single version would be on the top of that list. I hope that from this day forward no one will ever use this expression again. This was born out of fear for multiple version in spreadsheets across organization. And frankly, I cannot stand the expression anymore. Also I totally disagree with it. Understanding is always determined by its context! And all communication should differ for each target group. Creating a single version – let alone the office politics involved in that – is an utopia. Instead let us focus on a single version of the facts (data quality, lineage and so on). To me the focus should be on the definitions or meta data. As long as the definition is clear you can have different version per context. So are there any ‘truths’ that we missed in our top 10? We would appreciate your suggestions. Also if you disagree with what I said (or agree for that matter) please post a comment. Remember this blog is all about the possibility to be an online BI guru yourself. It is a platform for an open discussion about BI – not just a floorshow for my thoughts.
Category: BI Thoughts, Business Intelligence consulting, Business Intelligence datawarehousing, Business Intelligence solution, Business Intelligence strategy
Writing by Jorgen on Tuesday, 4 of December , 2007 at 2:33 pm
Alles is BI [Click to open pdf]
Everything is BI, but what is BI and what is happening in the BI world with all the vendor consilidation?
In this pdf file you can find an article (I was interviewed for this) published in channelworld about the subject.
ARTICLE IS IN DUTCH
Category: BI Thoughts, BI Tools, BI vendor consolidation, Business Intelligence datawarehousing, Business Intelligence software, Business Intelligence system, Business Intelligence tools, Business Objects, Cognos, IBM, Informatica, Microsoft, Oracle, Outlooksoft, SAP, SAS
Writing by Jorgen on Tuesday, 4 of December , 2007 at 12:04 pm
Yesterday we had a workshop with Andre van der Waal. He is a leading CPM specialist in the Netherlands and writes a lot about high performing organizations. We had a discussion about the active or passive role for IT. I argued that although Business Intelligence projects need a business driven approach there is nothing wrong with a small push from the IT department to get thing started. A marketeer should be good at marketing, a call center manager at managing calls and so on. I find that often they do not have the capability, time or interest to find out what IT possibilities there are. Therefore IT should take a proactive approach by showing the possibilities. Prototyping for example would be a nice start. If have seen 9 out of 10 IT departments working on creating a role or function for the alignment of IT and business (“We IT people need to have more business knowledge”). If have never seen a business department creating such a role (“We business people need to know more about IT”). This also leads to the conclusion that there should be a person responsible for IT at the corporate level (CIO). This person should align People, Process and Technology, not by focusing on the T(echnology) but on the I(nformation). It is time to put the I back in IT. An information centric approach on the C level allows for better alignment between business and IT resulting in a more possibilities and one should hope, better performance. Especially when the business scores low on their IT maturity the IT department can take an active approach, by showing the possibilities by use of prototyping or agile development. Also IT should create an open, easy accessible system environment for stimulating innovation with a minimum of restrictions. Statements like “SAP only” are a sure way to kill any IT innovation from the business
Category: BI Thoughts, Business Intelligence consulting, Business Intelligence datawarehousing, Business Intelligence solution, Business Intelligence strategy, Business Intelligence system
Writing by Jorgen on Thursday, 22 of November , 2007 at 5:30 pm
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!
Category: BI Thoughts, Business Intelligence strategy, Business Intelligence system
Writing by Jorgen on Wednesday, 7 of November , 2007 at 9:21 am
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?
Category: Analytics, BI Thoughts, BI Tools, Business Intelligence consulting, Business Intelligence datawarehousing, Business Intelligence software, Business Intelligence solution, Business Intelligence tools
Writing by Jorgen on Monday, 29 of October , 2007 at 11:08 pm
Category: BI Thoughts
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:
- We need one version of the truth.
- BI projects require a business driven approach.
- BI development should be done incrementally.
- BI projects needs high level sponsorship.
- BI = decision making process.
- BI is going to be real time (BI 2.0).
- Information democracy: BI for everyone.
- BI cannot be outsourced.
- Merging : BI, CI, EI, EPM, CPM, BIM…
- 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.
Category: BI Thoughts, BI Tools, Business Intelligence consulting, Business Intelligence datawarehousing, Business Intelligence solution, Business Intelligence strategy, Business Intelligence system, Business Intelligence tools
