Two important announcements came from Microsoft recently. One was that Microsoft is firing people. A move that was inevitable after analysts said that Microsoft had to lay off at least 10% op their workforce to remain healthy. Another one was an update of their BI product roadmap. Performance Point Server scorecard, dashboard, and analytical capabilities will be consolidated into Sharepoint Server Enterprise. This means that they will not continue with their Performance Point Planning solution. In their words: after PPS Service Pack 3 (expected mid calendar year 2009) no further investments will be made in planning and stand alone versions of PPS.  Are these two facts related? Maybe not but it helps them on their way to this tough 10% target. Is this update of their BI products roadmap unexpected? In my opinion it is not. There are several reasons for this. PPS Planning has never been very successful and I have seen a limited number of implementations. When competing with other planning products (Hyperion(Oracle), Outlooksoft(SAP) or Cognos Plannings(IBM)) they often lost the battle. One could also argue that they are their own biggest competitor with MS Excel as the number 1 planning tool in the world or BI tool for that matter. Also this product does not fit their BI for the masses strategy. Planning has always been the domain of a limited number of (financial) people. But this is not only a defensive move. Integrating PPS with Sharepoint also allows for a ‘marriage’ between structured and unstructured data which is promoted by many BI experts of late.  It will be interesting to see if other BI vendors are going to reposition their planning capabilities.

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.

Everybody deals with data all day long, from the board room down to the order entry department. Most of the time we do this without even thinking about the quality of the data. But when we do think about Data Quality (DQ) it often already has become an issue. Therefore our approach towards DQ is often negative (Garbage In, Garbage out). And also our approach is often technical (Field X in Interface Y is alphanumeric with 9 positions instead of numeric 8). So what happens? The IT department hurries towards the business owner with their negative technical problem often followed with an even more technical solution. Nine out of ten times this involves a tool from some vendor that promises a magic data laundry machine that cleans your dirty data. Let me tell you, there are not many business users that become enthusiastic after a negative technical speech. A more smart approach would be to make a simple business case. Bad DQ costs money, therefore good DQ makes money (or at least saves you some). That should be simple enough for any business user to understand.  As BI becomes more operational (do I dare to say real time) the chance that the data is polluted (or not yet cleaned in the ETL process) increases. Another trend is the combination of structured and unstructured data. Combination means coupling of two or more entities, also know as data integration. This is again an area where the DQ is crucial. In order to deal with DQ under these circumstances there are two options. Option 1: increase the performance by adding more of everything (CPU, memory, tuning IO and so on). Option 2: increase the performance by doing things smarter. This means creating some kind of solution that involves metadata or business rules. Also using a profiler tool to filter out the usual suspects is a smart way to go. Whatever you do, try to take a proactive approach instead of solving it after the ‘laundry is already dirty’. What can be the result of bad DQ? It can lead toward making the wrong decision (when based on incorrect data), it can cost money from an operational point of view (double mailings) or even lead to damage to the corporate image. It is safe to conclude that DQ is important for everyone. But by making it every ones responsibility it at the same time becomes no ones responsibility. There is always someone else that owns the problem, needs to fund the solution and so on. An at the end of the day still nothing happens to solve the DQ issues, leading to wrong decisions and more waste of money.  Let me explain what I mean using a real example. Department A has a customer database where customer A is known as Mr. A. Department B also has a customer database where customer A is know as Mr. B. During the data integration process Mr.A. and Mr.B. are seen as two different persons while in fact they are not. Should department A fix this? Why should they as this registration in their database of Mr.A. suits the purpose. The same applies for department B. Should the IT department fix it during data integration? If so, do they choose Mr.A. or Mr.B. in their Master Data approach? And by the way, who is going to fund this? It is not a problem for IT so they are not going to open their wallet. It is not a problem for department A or department B so they are not going to fund it. We have talked about the data delivery and the data integration, now enter the data subscriber. Department C uses the central data warehouse for their management decisions, corporate mailings and so on. They have problem with this whole Mr.A. and Mr.B. stuff but do not consider it their fault. So why should they pay for fixing this? This is what I mean. The whole DQ (and metadata issue for that matter) problem keeps being pushed from one desk to another and no one is going to solve it.  The central questions are: 1. Who owns the problem? 2. Who is going to solve it? 3. Who is going to pay for it? All the IT department can do is to identify the problem and facilitate the solution.  I would love to hear what you think about this. Please let me know and write your comments. Perhaps together we can find a suitable solution. In the meantime we keep our fingers crossed and hope for the magic laundry machine.

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.

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.   

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.  

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.

[Click on image to enlarge]

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.