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 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, 9 of January , 2008 at 1:38 pm
Detailed insight into crucial data and events is a necessity for organizations that want to navigate a constantly changing, information-rich environment. Intelligent organizations are 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. Traditionally BI enables business decisions through information access, by delivering the right information, at the right time, in the right way. However nowadays BI does much more than then decision making. It also monitors and supports, among other things, crucial business processes and is much more then ever embedded into daily business. Therefore it can be said that BI is crucial for the strategic, tactical but also the operational needs of an organization. Many companies have service level agreements (SLA) between (mostly internal) parties to formalize the process of data delivery or extraction from data sources and/or the publication of information to business stakeholders. With a traditional focus on decision making or decision support only those SLA have been created with just that scope in mind. This has resulted into a situation where a problem with data delivery or information publication had to be resolved within for example a timeframe of 24 hours or even more. In other words, due to it’s reactive or even reflective nature, the repair of the BI problems have not been the highest priority for many organizations. This makes sense if you compare this to critical business applications such as cash registers or ATM for banking. They support the crucial daily operation and should get top priority. But with the changing nature of BI, becoming more operational and supporting real time business processes, it is time to redraw the SLA and giving (almost) top priority to BI systems as well.
Category: Business Intelligence consulting, Business Intelligence datawarehousing, Business Intelligence solution, Business Intelligence strategy, Business Intelligence system
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 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 Monday, 12 of November , 2007 at 7:09 pm
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?
Category: BI Tools, BI vendor consolidation, Business Intelligence datawarehousing, Business Intelligence software, Business Intelligence solution, Business Intelligence system, Business Intelligence tools, Cognos, IBM
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 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
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.
Category: Analytics, BI Thoughts, Business Intelligence consulting, Business Intelligence solution
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.
Category: BI Thoughts, Business Intelligence solution, Business Intelligence strategy, Business Intelligence system, Business Intelligence tools
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.
Category: BI Thoughts, Business Intelligence consulting, Business Intelligence solution, Business Intelligence strategy, Business Intelligence system, Business Intelligence tools
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.
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
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.
Category: BI Thoughts, BI Tools, Business Intelligence datawarehousing, Business Intelligence solution, Business Intelligence strategy, Business Intelligence system, Business Intelligence tools
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
Category: BI Thoughts, Business Intelligence consulting, Business Intelligence solution, Business Intelligence strategy, Business Intelligence system
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?
Category: BI Thoughts, Business Intelligence solution, Business Intelligence strategy
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.
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 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 spec
