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Why BI is in a Funk
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Gut Versus Analytics: What's the Real Story?
A recent article in CIO by Thomas Wailgum entitled "To Hell With Business Intelligence: 40 Percent of Execs Trust Gut" caught my attention. There were also a couple dozen comments that are worth reading as well as a blog by Marcus Borba. This was driven by some recent (separate) research by Accenture and Forrester to examine how business managers are using analytics as opposed to intuition or gut feel. I think they left out one category, though. James Taylor and I wrote that many decisions are simply avoided or hidden because people really don't know what to rely on, but that's a different topic. Let's get back to the subject of the article. It is no coincidence that there are so many phrases that depict thinking guts. There is gut reaction, gut feeling, gut instinct and, related but even more evocative, butterflies in the stomach. As it turns out, there are good reasons for these terms because your gut actually can think, in its own fashion. In "Lights Out: Sleep, Sugar and Survival," T.S. Wiley, Pocket Books, 2000 (full disclosure: T.S. Wiley is my wife), the author writes: Continue reading "Gut Versus Analytics: What's the Real Story?"  Comments
I wrote recently that BI is in a "funk." Let me now offer a few ideas as to why that is so. 1. At its heart, BI is an application development technology, and making money from innovating in development is hard. To quote myself: Products are obsolete before they [are] mature. Products commonly do only part of what is necessary. Generally, a new tool will be developed to help with a new need... But these tools will often be weak at what came before... By the time the shiny new tools mature to do a good job at the older requirements, some other... shift comes along, with yet newer and shinier tools to handle the latest twists. Continue reading "Why BI is in a Funk" Comments Vendor Stability Matters Too
Technology is important, and so is vendor stability. You want solutions that perform, and you need to be confident that providers will be there for support and upgrades. When I see evidence that companies I follow are facing serious business complications, do I relate what I see, possibly adding to the difficulties faced by companies I'd like to see succeed, or do keep my views to myself? This isn't an abstract dilemma. I have two software vendors in mind. Here are their stories, a cautionary tale, names withheld as an ethical compromise. Continue reading "Vendor Stability Matters Too" Comments Gartner on Emergency IT Cost Cutting
I had a heads up this morning via Shane Schick's Twitter stream that Gartner was holding a webinar on emergency cost cutting in IT, featuring Kurt Potter, and 20 minutes later I was there. Gartner's been talking with a lot of their customers about the impact of the recession, and although most are not in completely dire straits, they are seeing some who are having to deploy emergency measures, and there are lessons to be learned from the squeezing being done. There are factors in any organization that make it difficult to cut costs: Continue reading "Gartner on Emergency IT Cost Cutting" Comments Startup Supports Lucene Open-Source Search
For the most recent edition of the Search and Information Access Report, I had the opportunity to help expand our coverage of Apache Lucene. The decision to increase our coverage of Lucene was a no-brainer, because (as anyone covering the search and information access space knows) Lucene's traction in the enterprise world is accelerating by the day. Over the past year, in particular, interest in Lucene (and related projects – Solr in particular), has picked up noticeably, in part because of recent significant performance enhancements and stability improvements, but also because IT specialists are increasingly desperate to get their search problems solved on a limited budget. Continue reading "Startup Supports Lucene Open-Source Search " Comments Put Cloud Computing in its Place
While many advocate cloud computing, others are weighing the fit within the modern enterprise. I posted my initial thinking about cloud computing, and others are doing the same, including this recent article in Computer World by Bernard Golden, who lists five key areas of concern for enterprises considering cloud computing: Current enterprise apps can't be migrated conveniently All good points, but here's some further analysis: Continue reading "Put Cloud Computing in its Place" Comments Mobile BI Emerges on the Apple iPhone
I was disappointed to find Apple missing from the IE Editors' Choice list. There's a "perfect storm" brewing that just might elevate the iPhone as the tool of choice for corporate types, not just for e-mail but for BI on the go. Apple has, of course, long been the consumer's delight and the corporation's despair. Apple leads digital convergence in our personal lives – the iPod, iPhone and Mac work together like no other set of these technologies and are beautiful to boot (pun unintended) – but is still a rarity on the corporate landscape. This is partly because for years, Apple has maneuvered itself out of corporate reach (price uncompetitiveness being no small a factor) and partly because Microsoft Windows and Windows applications are so firmly entrenched on the corporate desktop. But it looks like things might be about to change, with a groundswell led by the acclaimed iPhone. Continue reading "Mobile BI Emerges on the Apple iPhone" Comments Microsoft's Big Change on Performance Management (and BI)
What's the quickest way to grow your market share in an economic down turn? Change your licensing policy! That's exactly what Microsoft has done with its dashboard and scorecard capabilities that were initially part of PerformancePoint Server. Continue reading "Microsoft's Big Change on Performance Management (and BI)" Comments Autonomy Acquires Interwoven: A First Take
Today Autonomy announced it intends to buy Interwoven. Continue reading "Autonomy Acquires Interwoven: A First Take" Comments The First 100 Days: Set the Tone, Get Results
In keeping with other recently installed change agents, Elise Olding of Gartner offers this Webinar on your first 100 days as a business process (BP) director. As she points out, you have 100 days to make some key first impressions and get things rolling, and although you may not necessarily deliver very much in that time, it sets the tone for the ongoing BPM efforts. She breaks this down into what you should be doing and delivering in each of the first three months: Continue reading "The First 100 Days: Set the Tone, Get Results" Comments Don't Let Gartner's Data Warehouse Magic Quadrant Confuse You
Gartner's latest Magic Quadrant for data warehouse DBMSs was published last last year. Thankfully, vendors don't seem to be taking it as seriously as usual, so I didn't immediately hear about. (I finally noticed it in a Greenplum pay-per-click ad.) Links to Gartner MQs tend to come and go, but as of now here are two working links to the 2008 Gartner Data Warehouse Database Management System MQ. My posts on the 2007 and 2006 MQs have also been updated with working links. Highlights of this year's data warehouse DBMS Magic Quadrant include: Continue reading "Don't Let Gartner's Data Warehouse Magic Quadrant Confuse You" Comments Making Sense of Gartner's '09 BI Magic Quadrant
I'm a bit perplexed by the 2009 Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence Platforms, released last week and made accessible to all by SAS, which purchased the rights to post it online. SAS, of course, is in the prized upper-right quadrant along with IBM (Cognos), SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, Information Builders and Microstrategy. I was surprised by the disappearance of the name "Business Objects" from the Quadrant (even within parentheses, as used for "(Cognos)"), and I was even more mystified by the second-tier placement of SAP (which now stands for the combined SAP-Business Objects portfolio). Also curious was the hit Microsoft took on its "Ability to Execute" while its "Completeness of Vision" stayed put. Let's take on these open questions one by one: Continue reading "Making Sense of Gartner's '09 BI Magic Quadrant" Comments So What's so Great (or Even New) About Cloud Computing?
This seems to be the question coming from those who are looking at cloud computing and the value it can bring to the enterprise. Those who are deep into cloud computing already – typically vendors and consultants – are actually having trouble answering that question, and for good reason. Truth be told, cloud computing is a movie you may have seen years ago called "time sharing," which gave us the ability to share computing resources among many different users. In those days, many companies actually shared a single computer sitting in some data center. Moreover, that computer was able to allocate and manage resources for each user and each application, and the user could request more computing time, or less, adjusting their use of the time-sharing service. It's how I started my career, and most people in their 40s or older remember those days well. Continue reading "So What's so Great (or Even New) About Cloud Computing?" Comments MicroStrategy in Perspective
Cindi Howson and Mark Smith already weighed in with their impressions about MicroStrategy World and the impending release of MicroStrategy 9. Mark made a fairly complete overview of the product and proceedings and Cindi placed the offering in more or less competitive context, so I won't repeat either of those points of view (though I will take issue with Cindi on one thing – some of the other BI vendors may have been able to access multiple data sources in a single report, but not nearly as intelligently, efficiently or with more coherency than MicroStrategy version 9. These other approaches are ugly kludges in comparison). Continue reading "MicroStrategy in Perspective" Comments Does Being 'the Best' in BI Matter?
Just over 1,000 MicroStrategy customers convened here in Las Vegas this week for its annual user conference. Given how travel budgets have been slashed in recent months, I was surprised to see that attendance is only slightly lower than last year's. No doubt high attendance was driven in part by interest in the company's introduction of MicroStrategy 9. The general session kicked off with a Tina Turner look alike singing "we're simply the best." VP of Products Mark Larow described MicroStrategy 9 as the biggest release since version 7, perhaps the biggest release ever, packing in more than 8,000 enhancements. The most noteworthy are multi-source ROLAP and in-memory. Continue reading "Does Being 'the Best' in BI Matter?" Comments The Real Data Liberation Initiative
The Data Liberation Initiative is a worthy project that aims to provide academic researchers with affordable and equitable access to Canadian current governmental statistics and other data. I had a chance to meet with three DLI team members back in 2003, and I'm glad to see that the initiative, approved by the Canadian government as a pilot in 1996, has grown into a robust effort with subprojects that benefit the spectrum of public data users. DLI and similar undertakings such as the US government's Fedstats, the Open Data Foundation, and IBM's Many Eyes are what real data liberation is all about. Continue reading "The Real Data Liberation Initiative" Comments MicroStrategy 9 Brings Simplicity and Sophistication to BI
I attended MicroStrategy's 12th annual user conference in Las Vegas this week where the company unveiled version 9, the next major step for its BI platform. This release brings more than 8,000 enhancements and upgrades along with new products through advancements to the platform and suite of tools to support broad enterprise deployments as well as departmental and workgroup deployments no matter what size of business you operate. MicroStrategy is well known to support the most complex enterprise requirements, having some of the largest BI deployments in terms of data volumes and numbers of user. Now in this release they have simplified the implementation and integration of BI in many methods that will expand the realm of what is possible with BI. Most importantly it will make it simpler to deploy sophisticated and easy-to-use BI. I hope to see how MicroStrategy will also make lower-cost entry points for smaller teams of business and IT groups. But by addressing the need for business users and analysts to easily design and deploy BI on a robust platform, this release brings enterprise class capabilities with in-memory and multi-source ROLAP for accessing data and processing it efficiently to support any type of deployment. Continue reading "MicroStrategy 9 Brings Simplicity and Sophistication to BI" Comments Pollyanna and the Technology Market
The technology sector has been nothing but doom and gloom recently, but a recent report by the Aite Group shines a bit more light on to what is a fairly complex market situation. The report focuses on spending in the capital markets, and considering the spectacular turmoil in that sector over the past year, its a particularly interesting one to read. The skinny on the report is that IT spending will fall by on average 5 percent in 2009. A figure that is fall less severe than one might have expected, yet the logic behind the modesty of this prediction is pretty sound. Firstly, just because legendary firms disappear and people are laid off, does not mean that information stops being processed. In fact in many cases, mergers and corporate downsizing create more information and more processing, though this is, of course, counterbalanced to some degree by a tail off in new applications and activity. But the initial information volumes remain fairly constant – and by their nature grow incrementally regardless. Continue reading "Pollyanna and the Technology Market" Comments Microsoft's Big BI Ads... and About Those Editors' Choice Awards
I know business intelligence is becoming mainstream when my husband asks me about it in the midst of a Giants' football game (note, we are in NJ, but my son has converted me to a Packer's fan, so our real misery was last week. Go figure). It seems Microsoft has launched a new advertising campaign where business intelligence gets top billing. You and your business users will be seeing the ads in print and TV. That's great for business people who need to be the driving force behind BI. It's also great news for IT people who needs the business to care about BI.
Continue reading "Microsoft's Big BI Ads... and About Those Editors' Choice Awards" Comments Not All Apps Are Fit for the Cloud
Cloud computing is on fire with "new technology" and "new approaches" that are really not much different than things we've been doing for the past 30 years. While the shift is not that drastic, the excitement and movement in this new space is crazy-fast as businesses attempt to reduce the costs and risks of computing by leveraging shared and public resources. However, in moving to cloud computing, it's also clear that not all information systems are good candidates to run in the clouds. Indeed, those charged with reducing costs and moving to a cloud computing platform are well advised to spend some time understanding their own systems before pushing them outside of the firewall, to sometimes disastrous results. Here are a few things to consider: Continue reading "Not All Apps Are Fit for the Cloud" Comments Happy Post-Vacation Procrastination!
It's the end of the first post-holiday work week, and if you are like me, you are struggling to get back into the swing of things. I can't quite get my mind around what to tackle first – an article, update the Oracle review, tinker with IBI's InfoAssist, work on two webinars, or write this blog. If only I had some online holiday shopping to distract me! The first week after the holidays reminds me of what USA Today writer Craig Wilson calls post vacation procrastination. With the winter skies bleak and gray, and NJ calling for yet another snow storm, it seems there's not much to look forward to (or so much to do I'm already overwhelmed). Continue reading "Happy Post-Vacation Procrastination!" Comments SAP 'Fully Integrates' Business Objects
Earlier this week, I joined a few colleagues at InformationWeek to take part in an exclusive interview with SAP's Bill McDermott, President and CEO of Global Field Operations and an Executive Board Member. The two-hour discussion was broad ranging, but I honed in on the state of Business Objects and demand for performance management and process management. McDermott called the Bobj acquisition "one of the greatest moves that SAP ever made," and he also detailed a few ways in which the business intelligence vendor is being more closely integrated into SAP. Never one to sound downbeat, McDermott said the acquisition has "turned out so well" because "Business Objects is platform agnostic, so when you're operating in a heterogeneous environment and you want to unify a management team on a common platform approach, you have to be able to extract data from any source. You have to be able to process that data very quickly and you have to be able to pop that data up to each role in the value chain based on the attributes that they care about. Before Business Objects, we couldn't talk to CEOs, CFOs and other executives about that as intelligently as we can today." Continue reading "SAP 'Fully Integrates' Business Objects" Comments Satyam's Stunning Offshore Fiasco
In news that is still unfolding, the founder and chairman of Satyam Computer Services, India's fourth largest offshore services vendor, has made a stunning admission of massive financial fraud. Are you impacted? If so, how do you react? First, the event, in case it's news to you: Satyam co-founder and chairman Ramalinga Raju has just admitted to cooking the books... for years. In his words... "What started as a marginal gap between actual operating profit and the one reflected in the books of accounts continued to grow over the years. It has attained unmanageable proportions as the size of company operations grew. It was like riding a tiger, not knowing how to get off without being eaten." Continue reading "Satyam's Stunning Offshore Fiasco" Comments Public Data from Amazon Changes Game
It was bound to happen sooner or later; Amazon is now in the live data business with the recent launch of Public Data Sets on AWS (Amazon Web Services). In short: "Public Data Sets on AWS provides a centralized repository of public data sets that can be seamlessly integrated into AWS cloud-based applications. AWS is hosting the public data sets at no charge for the community, and like all AWS services, users pay only for the compute and storage they use for their own applications. An initial list of data sets is already available, and more will be added soon." Continue reading "Public Data from Amazon Changes Game" Comments Complex Event Processing as a Marketing Device
I thought I'd share a CEP-Interest list message on Complex Event Processing (CEP) as a marketing device with Intelligent Enterprise readers. Posted by a long-time member of the event-processing community, Hans Gilde, it's an objective, refreshing market positioning/messaging analysis. I don't completely agree with Hans of course, but I do think his views are insightful. They echo points I wrote about back in 2007, and some are points I puzzled out in writing a sponsored CEP-BI white paper for Coral8. With Hans's permission, the rest of the words in this article are his: For software vendors, CEP is a marketing device and nothing else. Notice that no two people will agree on what CEP is, but everyone claims to be more CEP than the next guy. It's like asking to define "cool." The only two consistent attributes across all "CEP" products are (1) they are in some way used for soft real-time processing and (2) they are general purpose, rather than coming pre-customized for a very specific purpose. So the question of the CEP marketplace has two parts: The marketplace for the brand (really a "brand attribute" or whatever) that is the acronym CEP and the marketplace for products with the above two attributes. Continue reading "Complex Event Processing as a Marketing Device" Comments HP Says It's 'All in' On BI and Neoview
In case you missed the front-page story in the New York Times business section last week, HP wants the world to know that it's serious about business intelligence and that it's standing behind Neoview as a cornerstone of its future in that business. The Times spun it as a story about HP CEO Mark Hurd taking on his old employer, NCR-Teradata, along with the other leaders of data warehousing, but that's old news to those in the BI and data warehousing industry. The new news is that HP has reorganized the formerly separate Neoview product organization and the business intelligence services group that had its roots in the acquired Knightsbridge consulting business. HP Business Intelligence Solutions is the newly unified, worldwide business dedicated to BI and data warehousing, and to underscore its importance to the company, HP has put executive Kristina Robinson, a Teradata veteran, in charge. Her bio is impressive: Continue reading "HP Says It's 'All in' On BI and Neoview" Comments New Year Meanderings...
Searching for BI. MDM is for real. Multi-flavored data warehouses. It's why we love Google. As the title suggests, these are truly meanderings... Searching for BI Sitting in on a Cognos event recently, the speaker, a Cognos global marketing manager, asked the attendants how many people used the Go! Search feature (which lets users search up, down and across BI content and other corporate information). Nobody seemed to raise their hand — which had the presenter scratching his head: "Maybe we need to look into the pricing," he quipped... Continue reading "New Year Meanderings..." Comments
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