IntelligentEnterprise Business Intelligence Weblog

Is Gartner's Quadrant the Problem, Or Is It How It's Used?

By Cindi Howson — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 13:33:41 -0500

Bashing Gartner's Magic Quadrants seems to be a popular industry pastime, but in truth, I kind of like the quadrants. My biggest gripe is in how the quadrants are used, not necessarily the quadrants themselves.

There are several positionings I could find fault with in the latest BI platforms Magic Quadrant (MQ). That both Microsoft's and Oracle's "ability to execute" is higher than IBM Cognos' and SAP BusinessObjects' would be two; I say that in terms of their BI-specific offerings, not their overall ability to execute. Vendors are very much at the mercy of the Magic Quadrants, when in reality, positioning in the MQ says little about how well a particular company or product will meet a customer's needs. And therein lies the problem.

Clarabridge Asks, Are You Customer Experienced?

By Seth Grimes — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 10:08:00 -0500

Add "customer" to Jimi Hendrix' song title and you have a question central to last week's Clarabridge Customer Connections (C3) conference, Are You Customer Experienced?

Clarabridge is a leading text-analytics vendor, delivering voice of the customer and related business solutions. The C3 conference's Orlando-Disney venue lent itself to a bit of Goofy-ness, and CEO Sid Banerjee indeed riffed off the magical journey theme in his post-conference write-up. Forrester analyst Bruce Temkin, who titled his conference summation It's Time For Text Analytics, used a different magical kingdom, that of the Wizard of Oz, to illustrate a customer-experience voyage of discovery in his conference keynote, although a panel he later moderated wasn't immune to an intrusion of Disneyicity.

Quick Thoughts on Sybase/Aleri

By Curt Monash — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 15:44:05 -0500

Sybase announced an asset purchase that amounts to a takeover of CEP (Complex Event Processing) vendor Aleri. Perhaps not coincidentally, Sybase already had technology under the hood from Aleri predecessor/acquiree Coral8, for financial services uses (notwithstanding that between Aleri Classic and Coral8, Aleri Classic was the one of the two more focused on financial services). Quick reactions include:

Visualize Balance, Visualize Change

By Seth Grimes — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 14:04:41 -0500

The best BI visualizations bring out essential information that might otherwise remain hidden in data. A Washington Post visualization of President Obama's proposed $3.8 trillion budget for fiscal year 2011 does just that. The Post's viz tells a complete story: Budgets include both expenditures and revenues and this viz counter-balances the two. Contrast with other budget views, such as one that appeared in the February 1 New York Times, that focus solely on spending, telling only half the story, albeit with a much deeper level of detail. There's much to be learned from the Times example as well, in particular about visualizing change.

Semantic Search Footnotes: Concepts, Ontologies & Real Time

By Seth Grimes — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 12:59:22 -0500

I want to respond to a few comments/suggestions I received about my recent Intelligent Enterprise story, Breakthrough Analysis: Two + Nine Types of Semantic Search -- it also ran in InformationWeek -- regarding semantic-search definitions and examples.

My article gained hundreds of page views and a couple of dozen tweets, but there was only one suggestion of a semantic-search approach I'd missed, "real-time search with some sort of filtering," that from Jim Hendler, who is certainly an authority on semantics, more on which later. I'll start, however, by elaborating on points raised by NLP/semantics researcher Tom O'Hara in an e-mail message.

Semantic Search Footnotes: Concepts, Ontologies & Real Time

By Seth Grimes — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 12:59:22 -0500

MicroStrategy Says It's Time for Mobile BI

By Cindi Howson — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 12:39:35 -0500

There was record attendance at MicroStrategy's annual conference in Las Vegas this week, with more than 1,500 customers and partners attending. While a conference in Las Vegas may have the perception of extravagance, in reality, the hotel and flight were the cheapest I can recall.

As is this vendor's tradition, the general session kicked off with a rock impersonator, this year, Gwen Stefani. The performance wasn't particularly memorable, in contrast to last year's Tina Turner ("we're simply the best�") or to the both daring and amusing Kinks' Lola in 2008 ("BI bake off�"). (Truly, if there were a YouTube clip of this rendition, I know BI teams around the world would be playing it at their selection kick offs.)

Sentiment Analysis, Enterprise Content, and Social Media, Year 2010

By Seth Grimes — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 08:24:36 -0500

Sentiment analysis is one of my favorite topics: one of the most challenging and one of the most interesting uses of text technologies. News and social media, e-mail, surveys -- the gamut of text sources -- are full of subjective information: opinion, attitudes, emotion, and mood, with a wide variety of current and possible business uses. Application areas include customer satisfaction and support, marketing, financial markets, media and publishing, and politics and policy: essentially any computing application sourced from human communications.

Sentiment analysis represents a huge opportunity and it presents technical and solution challenges. That's why I've created a new conference, the Sentiment Analysis Symposium, slated for April 13 in New York.

Hear BI Survey Results, Plus Donald Farmer

By Doug Henschen — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 18:07:23 -0500

I'll present the results of the latest Intelligent Enterprise business intelligence survey and Donald Farmer of Microsoft will surely talk about the new PowerPivot add-ins for in-memory analysis in Excel. That should be enough to attract more than a few registrants to this week's "BI Agenda for 2010" webinar. But there's more...

Predicting BI Highlights for 2010

By Cindi Howson — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 17:03:02 -0500

Did you catch the Packers vs. Cardinals game? Well, I was at a swim meet, so I didn't quite watch it, but I got real-time texts from my husband and son (as well as updates from fellow Green Bay fans, also dressed appropriately in green at the meet).

The seeming assuredness of the Packer's loss at the beginning, followed by their incredible comeback, and the volatile overtime, made me think of the competitiveness of the BI landscape and the difficulty in predicting what 2010 will really bring.

I hope I'm better at predicting BI events than football outcomes. Here are my thoughts on where the excitement and let downs will be.

Distorted Netflix Rental Data, Online at NYTimes.com

By Seth Grimes — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 11:24:49 -0500

I'd like to like the New York Times's on-line visualization, A Peek Into Netflix Queues. I'm a big fan of the paper and its infographics -- witness my True BI for the Masses -- but in the end, the Netflix visualization strikes me as glitzy rather than informative, a misleading graphical tarting up of incomplete data.

Score one for Netflix' publicists: The Times imprimatur validates the data, relative 2009 popularity of movies for rent by ZIP code, yet the data is incomplete and therefore not what is claimed. The result is a pretty but false picture. It does NOT present correct relative Netflix rental popularity for 2009 as claimed. Do check out the visualization, which does offer nice interactive features, and I will explain where Netflix and the Times went wrong.

Bad Decisions Are Contagious

By Neil Raden — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 00:16:54 -0500

Part of the problem with writing a book is that you become associated with a simplified version of your concept. In "Smart (Enough) Systems," James Taylor and I never claimed that computers were capable of running businesses in an unassisted way, or even that many of the decisions made in an organization can be automated. Our premise was that only those decisions that are high volume and low-risk (on an individual basis) are likely to be improved through decision services. Otherwise, decisions are best left to people. Sort of.

Davenport On Analytics Buzz and Bravado

By Doug Henschen — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 15:35:21 -0500

A few days before Christmas I recieved an advance copy of Tom Davenport's new book, Analytics at Work: Smarter Decisions, Better Results". I managed to score this interview with the author and college professor over the holidays, but I thought I'd add a bit of interesting context in this post.

I was keen to interview Davenport in part because his name has been popping up on Intelligent Enterprise of late. As Cindi Howson recounted in this blog post, for example, it was Davenport who questioned John Schwarz (former Business Objects CEO and now member of the SAP Executive Board) about strategy when he was using the term "analytics" quite liberally at last month's SAP Influencer Summit in Boston.

Eleven BI/Analytics Topics for 2010

By Seth Grimes — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 14:22:09 -0500

This time of year, we pundit types like to post our summations of the past year's developments, our Best Of lists recapping our own work, and our industry predictions for next year, for 2010. Not me, not this year. I will, however, post on the year ahead... for me, on BI and analytics topics that I plan (or at least hope) to cover in the next few months.

Coming Soon from SAP BusinessObjects

By Cindi Howson — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 08:40:39 -0500

I'm blaming the delay in this blog post on the snow (well, it was really a presentation, two reports, a survey, and the extra shoveling, but snow alone sounds more in the holiday spirit!).

I recently attended the SAP Influencer Summit in Boston. At this annual event, 275 thought leaders gather to hear about SAP's strategy and vision around BI and more. The tricky thing about events like this is that some attendees want broad, high-level insight, and others, like me (and readers like you) want much more detail.

Google and the Meaning of Half Open

By Seth Grimes — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 08:59:25 -0500

Google is half open: the conclusion I draw after reading product management SVP Jonathan Rosenberg's long, rambling essay, "The Meaning of Open," a seeming apologia pro vita sua posted December 21 to the Official Google Blog. Rosenberg and Google get it -- open source software creates value for everyone and give-back is essential; open information creates choice and engenders trust among individuals who engage in the Internet ecosystem -- but for all the pride and confidence and even wisdom conveyed in the essay --

Closed systems are well-defined and profitable, but only for those who control them. Open systems are chaotic and profitable, but only for those who understand them well and move faster than everyone else. Closed systems grow quickly while open systems evolve more slowly, so placing your bets on open requires the optimism, will, and means to think long term. Fortunately, at Google we have all three of these.

-- the repeated assertions of Google's openness only reinforce that Google's core, its strategic direction -- Rosenberg's own product management brief -- is closed rather than community-driven. In the end, for Google, (updating a Vulgate translation of a phrase of Isaiah's, adding tech-marketing talk), "my secret [sauce] is my own."

Intelligent Enterprise Top Blog Posts of 2009

By Doug Henschen — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 11:37:30 -0500

News coverage gives you one version of the truth, but there's nothing like the instant expert analysis blogs can bring to breaking stories. Here are the top-15 posts of the year from the Intelligent Enterprise blogosphere:

1. Serious Design Failure at USAspending.gov It was hailed as ushering in a new era of open government, but Seth Grimes uncovered plenty of data-analysis and data-visualization flaws at USAspending.gov.

2. Microsoft's Big Change on Performance Management (and BI) Cindi Howson was among the first to report on Microsoft's move to dump PerformancePoint Server and move most -- but not all -- of its functionality into the Enterprise Edition of SharePoint.

BI or Analytics? "'T ain't what you do..."

By Seth Grimes — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 16:02:49 -0500

There was yet another "What's the definition of analytics?" exchange on-line today among some of my industry analyst friends. These debates are typically prompted by a software vendor's claim to be "beyond BI" or the like, as if analytics don't (in my opinion) fall within the scope of business intelligence. Vendor claims of this type are about differentiating on nomenclature rather than on substance, rather than on value delivered to the customer.

My response: "'T ain't what you do, it's the way that you do it." Let's talk value, not feature lists.

Mainstream BI: Are We There Yet?

By Cindi Howson — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 21:40:47 -0500

BI Scorecard has just published the 2009 Successful BI Survey results. You can see a free preview here (click on "2009 Successful BI Survey Highlights" - registration required). Unfortunately, usage and success rates haven't improved since 2007 when we first ran the survey as part of research for my book.

Turn Content Challenges Into Opportunities

By Doug Henschen — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 11:57:50 -0500

There are plenty of parallels between business intelligence (BI) and enterprise content management (ECM). For starters, the leading vendors in both markets (in terms of software revenue) were snatched up by the technology giants, yet plenty of best-of-breed players, upstarts and open source alternatives remain. But there is one key difference that has kept BI in the limelight while content management has often languished on IT to-do lists.

I'm drawing parallels between BI and ECM because today we're launching the Intelligent Enterprise ECM TechCenter, a mini-site aimed at helping you to treat documents, e-mail messages, forms and collaborative content like valuable assets. Enterprises have done a fairly good job of treating data as assets, thanks to information-rich, well-maintained data warehouses. But those seeking to make the most of content have not had as much success in building comprehensive ECM repositories. If you want some insight as to why ECM deployments fail or fail to get off the ground, download the In-Depth Report "10 Gotchas that Derail ECM Initiatives" and you'll find a detailed explanation of each of the following mistakes:

The Myth of 360 Degree Views

By Seth Grimes — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 12:34:10 -0500

We've all encountered the promise of 360-degree customer views, marketing-speak that asserts that BI solution X, Customer Relationship management (CRM) solution Y, or Sales Force Automation (SFA) solution Z considers customer information from all angles with the implication that (everyone else's) non-360-degree solutions are inferior. Yet I've never seen the "360-degree" claim fulfilled. Some element is always missing. I can't think of a single solution that considers all pertinent customer information --

Information from every customer touch point
Past behaviors, current interactions, and likely future actions
Information from sources that have only recently come on-line, and
Larger market views that contextualize information about individuals

-- that is, not one or two, but all of these. Here's my own take on 360-degree views and how they can finally becoming reality.

Text Data Quality: Mistakes and More

By Seth Grimes — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 08:00:00 -0500

I wrote recently on Text Data Quality, looking at issues that arise in working with textual information that affect analytical accuracy. I wrote, "The basic text data quality issue is that humans make mistakes, and the challenge is that people's natural-language mistakes defy easy, automated detection." The topic of mistakes -- and the related topic of the non-erroneous vagaries of human language -- bears further exploration.

This current follow-on was prompted by a tweet of Manya Mayes's, "Text mining/social media analysis-there are at least 4 ways to misspell a word, and in some cases (company/brand names) upwards of FIFTEEN!" Indeed, in an article On Text Data Quality Manya posted to SAS's "The Text Frontier" blog -- Manya is chief text mining strategist at SAS -- she provides examples that recap "The Ten Transgressions of Text" per a presentation she gave at last June's Text Analytics Summit.

SAP Gets Microsoft Nod on Performance Management

By Cindi Howson — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 14:49:28 -0500

I hadn't even had my first cup of coffee yesterday when this press release caught my attention.

SAP announced that Microsoft supports SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation (BPC, formerly known as OutlookSoft) as a preferred solution and are identifying joint marketing initiatives.

Text Mining: The Intersection of Content & BI

By Doug Henschen — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 16:46:56 -0500

I was in NYC at TechWeb's Interop event today and I just happened to run into Harvey Spencer, an old friend from my days as editor-in-chief of Transform Magazine. Until it was folded into Intelligent Enterprise way back in late 2004, Transform focused on enterprise content management (ECM) and business process management (BPM) challenges. Harvey was a contributing editor from the publication's start as Imaging Magazine, and he taught me everything he could about document capture when I joined the staff in 1998.

It was a nice coincidence seeing Harvey given that Intelligent Enterprise is about to launch a Tech Center (mini site) focused on ECM. I was keenly interested in hearing his take on how the world of content management is colliding with the world of business intelligence.

True BI for the Masses

By Seth Grimes — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 07:00:00 -0500

BI for the Masses is overused marketing-speak meant to suggest that Vendor X's break-out Product Y is going to enable/deliver business intelligence beyond the 15%-20% of knowledge workers who currently do BI. (I got that estimate from a chat with industry veteran Dave Wells, who says the figure becomes 40% if you include Excel.) Well, I have my own notion of BI for the Masses, and it is NOT:

Some slick, supposedly easier-to-use dashboard
Reports routed to mobile devices.
Excel, no matter how many new capabilities Microsoft and third parties stuff in there.

BI for the Masses is accessible, to-the-point BI delivered via everyday channels. Analytical functionality is stripped down to essentials that suit the user, data, and medium. IT is at arm�s length. It's BI where the user -- the consumer -- may not even know he or she is doing BI. And it's illustrated by a couple of recent New York Times data visualizations that I'll describe for you now.