Intelligent Enterprise

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"

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Making Sense of Gartner's '09 BI Magic Quadrant

Posted by Doug Henschen
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
2:17 PM


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:


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MicroStrategy in Perspective

Posted by Neil Raden
Monday, January 19, 2009
11:12 AM


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).

I have a different perspective from Mark and Cindi, one that is borne of a history with MicroStrategy that goes back fifteen years. My review, with that perspective in mind, is this:

Continue reading "MicroStrategy in Perspective"

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Does Being 'the Best' in BI Matter?

Posted by Cindi Howson
Friday, January 16, 2009
9:31 AM


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.


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MicroStrategy 9 Brings Simplicity and Sophistication to BI

Posted by Mark Smith
Thursday, January 15, 2009
10:17 AM


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.

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Microsoft's Big BI Ads... and About Those Editors' Choice Awards

Posted by Cindi Howson
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
11:44 AM


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.


I applaud any efforts that raise the awareness of BI, particularly in this tough economy when making better decisions – based on facts – and operating efficiently is a matter of survival for many.

Continue reading "Microsoft's Big BI Ads... and About Those Editors' Choice Awards"

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SAP 'Fully Integrates' Business Objects

Posted by Doug Henschen
Thursday, January 8, 2009
10:47 AM


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."

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Who Loves the Incumbent Vendor?

Posted by Alan Pelz-Sharpe
Friday, December 26, 2008
10:00 AM


One of my favorite little phrases is "double edged sword," and I found a perfect application for it recently: the discussion of "incumbent vendors" — those whose product(s) you're already using.

Imagine you have been using a particular vendor's technology for the past five or ten years. It could be EMC|Documentum or Open Text or any one of the 197 other products CMS Watch evaluates. I'll just call them Vendor X. But now it's time for an upgrade, or even a replacement of that technology. It did what it was supposed to do at the time, but now technology has moved on and it's time for a refresh. So you're kicking off a major project and starting up the RFP and shortlisting process.


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Will IBM Add Analytics to its Toolbelt?

Posted by Doug Henschen
Thursday, December 18, 2008
12:30 PM


The gist of Ambuj Goyal's message in this Q&A interview is that predictive and statistical modeling — key offerings for the likes of SAS and SPSS — are overrated. IBM has what Goyal describes as better, cheaper alternatives in a mix of techniques developed for industry- and domain-specific challenges. Okay, I'm fine with challenging conventional wisdom and seeking the simplest possible solutions, but I also believe there's good reason SAS, SPSS, and a few other analytics specialists have grown large and stable businesses. What's more, I won't be surprised if and when IBM acquires one of these analytics vendors.

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The True End User Experience for BI

Posted by Mark Madsen
Monday, December 15, 2008
1:59 PM


This video will help you understand the essence of the end-user experience for business intelligence, and the message is delivered in ten seconds. Keep it in mind as you deploy BI more broadly.

Continue reading "The True End User Experience for BI"

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Why BI Vendors Won't Drive Mobile BI

Posted by Doug Henschen
Thursday, December 11, 2008
8:31 AM


Author David Hatch of Aberdeen Group didn't underscore this point in this week's feature on "Best-in-Class Secrets to Mobile BI Success," but it's pretty clear that the Mobile offerings from the major business intelligence vendors won't end up driving anywhere near the lion's share of mobile BI adoption. The evidence, as well as common sense, tells us that mobile applications with embedded intelligence will be the locus of most mobile BI.

That's not to say that the likes of Business Objects Mobile, Cognos Go!Mobile, Information Builders Mobile Favorites and Microstrategy Mobile won't see demand. It's just that there are only so many situations in which dashboards, scorecards and reports built on the parent platforms need to be mobilized. In our own poll, posted on our home page, the readers of Intelligent Enterprise didn't exactly place mobile BI as a high priority when asked, Which best describes your status/attitude toward mobile (smart phone) delivery of business intelligence?:


Continue reading "Why BI Vendors Won't Drive Mobile BI"

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On Thanksgiving, Freedom for Some, Fear for Foreigners

Posted by Cindi Howson
Wednesday, November 26, 2008
3:25 PM


I hope you will excuse a departure from my BI-focused blogs to a more personal one, but on this Thanksgiving eve, I find myself thinking more about freedom and how fragile it is right now. If you are one of the many foreign-born BI product managers, software developers, or BI specialists I have met over the years, then you will want to read this story.

Continue reading "On Thanksgiving, Freedom for Some, Fear for Foreigners"

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Information Builders Resolves Excel Hell

Posted by Mark Smith
Thursday, November 20, 2008
10:50 AM


For more than thirty years, Information Builders, led by its founder and CEO, Gerry Cohen, has been focused on solving the tough challenges in accessibility and integration of data for business. Over the last decade I have personally witnessed the company's evolution to provide robust tools for IT and business. Last month Information Builders released its latest product, called WebFocus InfoAssist, which brings a range of BI capabilities for business and IT for easily accessing, analyzing and publishing data across the enterprise.

If you read my blog on the latest from Microsoft at its BI conference in October, where it accurately describe the dilemma of "Excel Hell" created from the misuse of Microsoft's spreadsheet tool for storing and analyzing data across business. Unfortunately, Microsoft's prescribed antidote, called Project Gemini, won't be available until at least 2010 or beyond. The challenge with Microsoft's announcement is not just the promise of the release in the future, but the estimated requirements for the version of Microsoft Office, Microsoft SQL Server and operating systems. Why wait years to evaluate a product when there are solutions today?


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ChoicePoint Blends BPM, BAM and BI

Posted by Sandy Kemsley
Thursday, November 13, 2008
7:32 PM


I attended a session at Software AG's recent Innovation World 2008 conference in which Cory Kirspel, VP of identity risk management at ChoicePoint (a LexisNexis company), described how the company has created an external-facing solution using business process management (BPM), business activity monitoring (BAM) and an enterprise service bus (ESB). ChoicePoint screens and authenticates people for employment screening, insurance services and other identity-related purposes, plus does court document retrieval. There's a fine line to walk here: companies need to protect the privacy of individuals while minimizing identify fraud.

Even though the company only really does two things — credential and investigate people and businesses — it had 43+ separate applications on 12 platforms with various technologies in order to do it. Not only did that make it hard to do what they needed internally, customers were also wanting to integrate ChoicePoint's systems directly into their own with an implementation time of only three to four months, and provide visibility into the processes.


Continue reading "ChoicePoint Blends BPM, BAM and BI"

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Cool BI from TDWI in New Orleans

Posted by Cindi Howson
Wednesday, November 12, 2008
11:57 AM


TDWI hosted its first conference in New Orleans, post Hurricane Katrina, last week. I admit, I was both worried and curious about the location, still reading regularly about how certain parts of the city have never recovered. And yet, after walking along Bourbon Street, with its diversity, old French buildings, and intricate beads galore, I can see why people are passionate about rebuilding and why TDWI picked it as a conference location.

Back to BI, I taught a new course at the event, the theme of which is highlighted in this week's Intelligent Enterprise In-Depth feature article, "Cool BI: Rating the Innovations." Those who know me know that I am anything but cool. Conservative, yes. Serious, yes. Cool, no. So I was catching some flack about the course title from colleagues, and well, my very cool kids. Trying to get into the spirit of things, I kicked the course off donning a cool '70s dress with Cold Play blasting in the background (guess who picked that music!).


Continue reading "Cool BI from TDWI in New Orleans"

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Process Intelligence, CEP and Operational BI

Posted by Neil Raden
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
7:49 AM


In case you haven't heard it yet, here comes a new product category: Process Intelligence. But what does it mean? All of these terms overlap: Operational BI, Pervasive BI, Operational Intelligence, Process Intelligence, BAM, CEP (Complex Event Processing), Decision Management, Decision Services. Arguments over definitions tend to be vigorous for two reasons. First, the taxonomy of product classes tends to be pretty leaky and second, the stakes are so low.

The reason it is important to get some clarity on the definitions is that the wider BI industry (and I don't know what to call it) is driven by marketing, not by function or requirements. Software vendors invent things, acquire or get acquired by other vendors and give names to the combined capabilities they possess. Then it's packaged and sold to companies.


Continue reading "Process Intelligence, CEP and Operational BI"

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Put BPMN and BPEL in Perspective

Posted by Bruce Silver
Wednesday, November 5, 2008
10:06 AM


Anyone interested in the history of business process management (BPM) technology (brief as it is) should not miss Ismael Ghalimi's recounting of it, "Why All This Matters." As a seminal figure in that history, Ghalimi's discussion of the relationship between BPMN and BPEL, the two important standards in BPM, is especially notable. Neither standard is perfect. But while BPMN has succeeded in the BPMS world in spite of its shortcomings, BPEL's shortcomings have largely confined it to the SOA/integration space, where "business-empowerment" does not have especially high priority. And in spite of the fact that BPEL was originally conceived by IBM and Microsoft as an Intalio/BPML-killer — Ismael does not say that directly, but I will — his post insists that BPEL remains central to BPM's (and Intalio's) larger mission.

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Salesforce Elevates Cloud Computing Force

Posted by Mark Smith
Tuesday, November 4, 2008
8:54 AM


The "No Software" company, salesforce.com opened its annual Dreamforce conference yesterday with the usual loud sounds and video to introduce CEO and chairman, Marc Benioff. With more than 9,000 attendees from 40 countries in the standing-room-only keynote, Benioff said the company is doubling down on making its customers successful. The company's strategy is to put business information into their cloud computing environment and manage all your customer information, share all of your business information, and build multi-tenant applications.

On a personal note, I was pleased to hear salesforce.com highlight that it does significant work to help the community and non-profit organizations by donating more than 90,000 workforce hours and $13 million in grants to community service with some 5,000 non-profit organizations. This donation should be applauded as companies should give back to the community, especially as they continue to grow and succeed.

Saleforce.com is moving beyond the 2007 launch of the cloud computing technology platform Force.com and just competing against other IT technology platforms like IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP, as referenced in my blog "Can salesforce.com make the dream reality." Salesforce has gone beyond the traditional enterprise software market and is venturing into a new realm of applications and platforms for developers to bring cloud computing closer to a reality in your enterprise.


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Taylor and Raden Define Decision Management

Posted by Sandy Kemsley
Thursday, October 30, 2008
3:42 PM


Opening the second day of the Business Rules Forum, James Taylor and Neil Raden gave a keynote about competing on decisions. First up was James, who started with a definition of what a decision is (and isn't), speaking particularly about operation decisions that we often see in the context of automated business processes. He made a good point that your customers react to your business decisions as if they were deliberate and personal to them, when often they're not; James' premise is that you should be making these deliberate and personal, providing the level of micro-targeting that's appropriate to your business (without getting too creepy about it), but that there's a mismatch between what customers want and what most organizations provide.

Decisions have to be built into processes and systems that manage your business, so although business may drive change, IT gets to manage it. James used the term "orthogonal" when talking about the crossover between process and rules; I used this same expression in a discussion with him yesterday in discussing how processes and decisions should not be dependent upon each other: if a decision and a process are interdependent, then you're likely dealing with a process decision that should be embedded within the process, rather than a business decision.


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In an Economic Maelstrom, How Bad is Your Performance Management?

Posted by Mark Smith
Wednesday, October 29, 2008
4:43 PM


It's obvious to everyone that we are in turbulent times as economic challenges rattle the globe. As I have been reading in The Wall Street Journal and The Financial Times, it's clear that the finger pointing and rescue packages for large businesses will continue for some time. The question is whether the post-mortem analysis and diagnosis of the causes and symptoms will focus on the right area and help minimize future failures. Will the determination be that management processes failed and information was not put in place to provide the right level of notice to prevent the recent financial services industry meltdown?

Let's be honest. Organizations have not managed their businesses using systems to understand current performance and risk in a common, enterprisewide fashion. Without such an approach, the appropriate changes to business plans to minimize impacts on shareholders and the workforce can't be implemented. Frankly, the current environment shines the light on the lack of performance management and business intelligence. My take is that the lack of management processes, with analytics and information coordinated from across the business, has led to our current quandary. Business management in the financial services industry has failed the world by not heeding the need for enterprisewide decision-support systems for managing performance and risk.


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From Here to Agility: Ron Ross on Rules

Posted by Sandy Kemsley
Wednesday, October 29, 2008
9:25 AM


The good news is that it's a lovely sunny, breezy and cool day: perfect fall weather for Toronto. The bad news is that I'm in Orlando, and was hoping to wear shorts more than sweaters this week. However, I'm here to attend — and speak at — the Business Rules Forum, not sit by the pool.

Ron Ross, executive editor of BRCommunity.com, kicked off this week's Business Rules Forum with a keynote called From Here to Agility; agility, of course, is one of the key reasons that you consider implementing business rules, whether in the context of BPM or other applications. It's pretty well attended — probably 200 people here at the opening keynote, and likely a lot of vendors off setting up their booths for later today.

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8 Things You Should Tell Your CEO

Posted by Sandy Kemsley
Thursday, October 23, 2008
2:11 PM


When Pegasystems invited me to attend this week's PegaWorld conference outside of Washington, D.C., I took a quick glance at the agenda and thought that it said that George Clooney would be speaking. I immediately accepted. On second look, I noticed that it was actually George Colony, founder and CEO of Forrester Research.

The somewhat-less-famous George talked about business technology (BT) in the format of eight things that he would tell your CEO over coffee:


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Be My Guest at BPM New York

Posted by Bruce Silver
Thursday, October 16, 2008
9:24 AM


I will be chairing an all-new BPMS Track at BPMInstitute.org’s upcoming BPM Conference in New York City at The Roosevelt Hotel (November 5-6). This track analyzes the latest generation of BPM Suites, and features an extended panel on November 5 in which leading vendors show how their offerings address key topics such as business-IT alignment, agility and time to value, end user experience, and optimizing business performance. We did this in San Francisco and it worked very well. The discussion was lively and open, and I learned things about each product that I didn’t know before.

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My Takeaway on Teradata's Keynotes

Posted by Mark Madsen
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
11:44 AM


I'm at the Teradata Partners conference this week. I consider it to be the best event in the BI market if you want to see a diversity of company presentations, particularly on more advanced topics. You won't find the same number and quality of end-user presentations at any other event. The official kickoff went through some interesting and entertaining moments and closed with a terrific keynote from Dan Ariely, author of Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions. Here's my quick takes on each of the talks:

Continue reading "My Takeaway on Teradata's Keynotes"

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Tech Investment Advice for Tough Times

Posted by Tony Byrne
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
9:46 AM


As bailouts become a global phenomenon, it's time to review what this all means for you, the technology buyer.

I think there are two main issues here:

1. The immediate liquidity crisis and any lingering effects that may lead to longer-term financial sclerosis
2. An enduring recession — which previously left much of the enterprise and web software space unscathed — getting deepened and extended


Continue reading "Tech Investment Advice for Tough Times"

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Is Microsoft Thinking Bigger or Catching Up?

Posted by Mark Smith
Thursday, October 9, 2008
10:14 AM


At its second annual BI conference, Microsoft offered a glimpse into what the future holds for its products. Stephen Elop, a Microsoft senior executive relatively new to business intelligence who is president of the Microsoft Business Division, introduced the theme of the conference, "Think Bigger about BI." Judging from the presentation and conversations I had, Microsoft believes it is leading the democratization of business intelligence around the world through its release of Microsoft SQL Server 2008 and future development projects that were officially unveiled. But is Microsoft thinking bigger or just catching up?

Microsoft SQL Server 2008, previously known as project Katmai, offers a number of new capabilities to support data warehousing and analytics for BI that expand its value as an enterprise data platform and its support of nonrelational data sources, as well as what Microsoft calls "pervasive insight" but is really the reporting and analysis of data that can be published. Microsoft has added new data adapters for Oracle, SAP BW and Teradata systems to enable users to gain better access to data and mechanisms for data compression and governors for resources and queries. A new Report Builder helps simplify developing, deploying and maintaining reports and delivering data into Microsoft Word and Excel.

Continue reading "Is Microsoft Thinking Bigger or Catching Up? "

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Support Tops Priorities for Czech BI Market

Posted by Cindi Howson
Wednesday, October 8, 2008
9:13 AM


While many of my peers headed to Seattle for Microsoft's BI conference this week, I headed in the opposite direction to Prague, Czech Republic, to speak at IDC's annual BI road show.

I had never been here before, and I confess I had a degree of trepidation. While Prague today is a top business and tourist destination, the fall of communism was only 20 years ago. In fact, I was living nearby in Switzerland during that profound time so the memory is not too distant as my Czech friends then wondered if it was really safe to return. Some people I spoke with lament the modernization of the country, whereas others said the changes have been too slow, particularly outside of Prague. But back to BI.

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Is Business Activity Monitoring a BI Application?

Posted by Seth Grimes
Monday, September 29, 2008
12:33 PM


A question I posed to a LinkedIn group — Is Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) a BI Application? — sparked interesting discussion. I noted and asked, "BAM involves dashboards and analyses for business processes, and BI isn't typically very processy. If not BI, who 'owns' BAM?" There have been 9 responses to date, including two from Howard Dresner, who has done as much as anyone to shape current-day BI. The responses speak to growing interest in operational BI, and they hint at the impact that complex event processing (CEP) will have on enterprise analytics.

BAM displays operational performance indicators in numerical and graphical form, often backed by rules-based alerting capabilities. BAM monitors execution of business processes and is part of operational-performance management solutions. It can be incorporated in line-of-business and operational interfaces, for instance for contact-center management, and in automated control systems. As the speed-of-business accelerates, BAM is more important than ever.

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Rethink Web Analytics For the '2.0' World

Posted by Doug Henschen
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
4:12 PM


"If your Web site sucks, it's your own fault." That's the tough love Avinash Kaushik shared today here at O'Reilly's Web 2.0 Conference in New York in a presentation entiled "Web Analytics 2.0: Rethinking Decision Making in a '2.0' World." Kaushik offered a bunch of great advice on how to better measure site performance and he also listed a handful of free tools. "So there can be no more excuses" like not having enough data, not having the right data or not having enough money for Web analytics, he concluded.

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Dashboards, Decisions and Wall Street

Posted by Doug Henschen
Tuesday, September 16, 2008
2:12 PM


Today I'm at the Gartner Event Processing Summit in Stamford, Conn., and much of the buzz here is about what's going down on Wall Street. That's no surprise given that about 70 percent of the attendees here are from financial institutions. There have been plenty of jokes about not being able to buy paper clips, let alone enterprise technology. That said, I did see at least some tire kicking in the exhibit hall, and among the 15 vendors exhibiting at this smallish, 150-attendee hotel event, almost every one of them seemed to be showing off a dashboard-style interface.

As Gartner analyst Roy Schulte's observes in this week's in-depth Q&A interview, dashboards showing current (or at least near-real-time) business metrics have never been hotter. We're seeing these types of interfaces from BI vendors, BAM vendors and complex-event-processing (CEP) vendors alike. It's a healthy sign of a meeting of the minds between business and IT.


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Wherefore Analytics on Wall Street? An Homage to Hy Minsky

Posted by Neil Raden
Monday, September 15, 2008
5:29 PM


When it comes to analytics, Wall Street is clearly the leader. The best of the best head there after school to grab six-figure starting salaries. Some even see seven figures, based on their performance. They are the rara avises, the crθme-de-la-crθme, and whenever we speak about "Competing on Analytics," it goes without saying that Wall Street analytics represent the exemplar of what is possible for an analytic culture.

So why is Wall Street melting down?


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Gartner Sums Up SaaS-Based BPM Options

Posted by Sandy Kemsley
Friday, September 12, 2008
9:58 AM


Is software as a service a viable option for process improvement projects? Michele Cantera covered some of the same material here at this week's Gartner BPM Summit in Washington DC, as the SaaS and BPM session in February, but there was some new information as well. For example, based on 2007 estimates, she segmented the BPM SaaS adopters into four categories:

• Pragmatists, forming 49% of the market, are replacing departmental on-premise applications but don't have an enterprise-wide scope.
• Beginners, 40% of the market, are replacing low-end software tools with simple utility applications. These are often small or medium businesses who don't want to grow an IT department.
• Masters, 10% of the market, are weaving SaaS applications into their enterprise-wide application portfolio.
• Visionaries, a mere 1%, are actively replacing on-premise applications with SaaS wherever possible.


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What's at the Top of Your BI Wish List?

Posted by Doug Henschen
Tuesday, September 9, 2008
8:55 AM


"Better, easier, lower-cost" and "more flexible." These were the adjectives respondents to a recent InformationWeek / IntelligentEnterprise survey used most often when asked "what's at the top of your business intelligence wish list?" The survey was conducted this summer and is behind this week's in-depth feature "Special Report: BI Gets Smart," as well as a full report with the complete survey results. The words "better, lower-cost," and "more flexible" applied to a range of wishes, but here are the top "must haves":

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Social Software Supports BPM: Let Us Count the Ways

Posted by Sandy Kemsley
Friday, September 5, 2008
10:09 AM


I've been excited about attending this weeks' BPM 2008: Milan conference for months since it's focused on the research that's happening in the field of BPM, rather than the usual vendor and analyst conference that I attend. As a prelude to the conference, there was a full-day workshops on various BPM topics, and I attended a session on BPM and Social Software.

The workshop was chaired by Selmin Nurcan of the University of Paris and Rainer Schmidt of Aalen University, and will consist of discussion of the various research papers contributed by the attendees — in fact, I seem to be one of the few people in the (small) audience who has not contributed a paper.

Before we got into the individual papers, Rainer Schmidt gave an overview of the issues in BPM and social software. I gave a presentation two years ago at the BPMG conference in London on BPM and Web 2.0 (the terms Enterprise 2.0 and social software were just starting to be used back then) that covers some of the same subject matter.


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TDWI Roundup: BI Bake Off on the Beach?

Posted by Cindi Howson
Wednesday, August 27, 2008
8:56 AM


Back from sunny San Diego, place of TDWI's annual world conference.

I kicked off my week with a birds-of-a-feather networking event. The most popular table? The business-IT partnership, which also happens to be one of the top barriers/enablers to BI success (according to research from my book). The different perspectives — and just how polar opposites they could be — bordered on amusing.

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BI and Performance Management Evolve at SAP-Business Objects

Posted by Mark Smith
Tuesday, August 19, 2008
8:35 AM


Business Objects an SAP company brought forward the integrated strategy for where they plan to advance their organization and products into the future at last week's 2008 Influencer Summit. The core emphasis was on the product strategy and the success of the portfolio of products across enterprise performance management (EPM), governance, risk and compliance (GRC) and business intelligence (BI) and information management. This is a blend of products from Business Objects and SAP, along with companies they have acquired over the last couple of years. Business Objects has focused on how they can advance their products to address the broad set of user demographics and interactive requirements of them across organizations using Web 2.0 Internet technology.

Continue reading "BI and Performance Management Evolve at SAP-Business Objects"

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