IntelligentEnterprise Performance Management Weblog

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.

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.

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.

Recovery.gov Double Fault: Broken Data Feeds

By Seth Grimes — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 13:36:14 -0500

The relaunched recovery.gov government-transparency site no longer supports automated data feeds. These feeds had allowed users of the 1.0 site to perform their own valued-added analyses, "the whole point of accountability and transparency," according one site user, an executive with a large, government systems integrator. According to that user, who asked not to be named, referring to the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board (RATB) and lead contractor Smartronix, "from a software architecture standpoint, they seem to have missed a key principle here: backward compatibility."

RATB spokesperson Edward Pound confirmed that the relaunched site no longer offers the feeds. Pound did not know if notice had been provided to users, on-site or through another mechanism, of the discontinuation of the data-feed interface. He stressed that the Recovery Board is working hard to meet emerging user needs and improve site capabilities in furtherance of its non-political mission of promoting open government.

Questions and Answers about USAspending.gov

By Seth Grimes — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 15:22:34 -0500

My blog article on USAspending.gov's design flaws has attracted record page views according to IE editor Doug Henschen, boosted by coverage on Slashdot, Government Computer News, and other outlets. Posted comments reveal many misconceptions about the site. I'll distill the more interesting ones, with some of my own, into a series of questions. Noting that "[g]overnment should be collaborative," I'll attempt answers myself.

Serious Design Failure at USAspending.gov

By Seth Grimes — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 13:04:34 -0500

The U.S. federal government's USAspending.gov Web site is a travesty, almost a parody of a government-transparency site. The site looks fine, but it significantly fails U.S. government accessibility requirements and its use of graphics has only gotten worse -- far worse -- since I wrote about execution issues a month ago. Further, it's old-school, a mockery of Gov 2.0 principles of interactivity and responsiveness and community.

Who's Buying What in BI?

By Doug Henschen — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 15:47:06 -0500

What are firms in your industry buying? What are firms of your size buying? What are IT types using and and what are business types using? When it comes to business intelligence software, you'll find answers to all these questions in Nigel Pendse's "The BI Survey 8."

As I explain in this article, there are more than 350 charts and 490 pages in "The BI Survey 8." As one of a handful of media sponsors to the survey, Intelligent Enterprise is entitled to share just a peek at the report. To give you some sense of where the more than 2,600 respondents stand on the best-known BI product out there, I obtained approval to share these four charts:

BI from the SAP Customer Viewpoint

By Cindi Howson — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 08:26:43 -0500

I'm just back from the SAP Netweaver BI & Portals conference in Florida last week, digesting what's new, what's old, what's coming.

The SAP Insider conference is different from many of the BI conferences in that a media company, rather than the vendor, runs the event. I had last attended an SAP Insider conference shortly after the Business Objects acquisition was announced. Then and now, I noticed a stark contrast between the former Business Objects' conferences and these SAP Insider ones. I would have liked more enthusiasm and certainly less emphasis on legacy products.

From 'BI' to 'Business Analytics,' It's All Fluff

By Neil Raden — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 23:11:44 -0500

A lot of bloggers are writing about SAS' newly launched marketing campaign called "business analytics," which positions business intelligence as a subservient tool. I was there in Washington, D.C., last week at the SAS Global Executive Forum when Jim Davis gave his much-talked-about, business-intelligence-is-dead, business-analytics-is-the-future presentation. "I don't believe (business intelligence is) where the future is; the future is in business analytics," he said. I thought at the time that it was a little silly.

'Fewer Measures, Better Results' and Other Advice for the Times

By Doug Henschen — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 12:08:44 -0500

If your enterprise is focusing on more than, say, a dozen key performance measures, you are probably not seeing the forest for the trees. This is just one bit of advice delivered in one of nearly a score of articles we've published on the theme of adjusting your plans and approaches to combat the downturn. Next week we'll roll the best of that advice into a one-hour Webinar entitled "Resetting Information and BI Priorities for a Challenging Economy."

The case for KPI/Dashboard restraint is well illustrated by Shari Rogalski, Executive Director, Accenture Information Management Services. Rogalski shares a story about a large retailer that was reporting literally hundreds of "key metrics" to run the business. When the company decided to focus strictly on customer satisfaction and profitability, they ended up with just 15 key metrics.

Gartner Tips on Cutting Software Costs

By Sandy Kemsley — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 10:59:22 -0500

Gartner's had a good webinar series lately, including one last month with Alexa Bona on software licensing and pricing (link to "roll your own webinar" download of slides in PDF and audio in mp3 separately), as part of its series on IT and the economy. As enterprises look to tighten their belts, software licenses are one place to do that, both on-premise and software-as-a-service, but you need to have flexible terms and conditions in your software contract in order to be able to negotiate a reduction in fees, particularly if there are high switching costs to move to another platform.

For on-premise enterprise software, keep in mind that you don't own the software, you just have a license to use it. There's no secondary market for enterprise software: you can't sell off your Oracle or SAP licenses if you don't need them anymore. Even worse, in many cases, maintenance is from a single source: the original vendor. It's not that easy to walk away from enterprise software, however, even if you do find a suitable replacement, you've probably spent three to seven times the cost of the licenses on non-reusable external services (customization, training, ongoing services, maintenance), plus the time spent by internal resources and the commitment to build mindshare within the company to support the product. In many cases, changing vendors is not an option and, unfortunately, the vendors know that.

Slicing Up The BI Market

By Seth Grimes — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 11:30:07 -0500

Analyst Lyndsay Wise recently published a useful BI demand-side analysis, Redefining the Mid-Market and Its Business Intelligence Requirements. Her thesis is that "small and mid-sized organizations seem to get the short end of the stick when it comes to their software needs" based on IT infrastructure she sees as needed to support BI and related technology. Yet I wonder if segmenting BI-user enterprises by gross revenue is the best way to look at the BI demand-side market. Let's consider other, more refined approaches.

How Sweet is SAP Business Suite 7?

By Mark Smith — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 09:08:19 -0500

Just in time for Valentine's Day and your C-Suite of CEO, CFO, COO and CIO budget review, SAP has announced SAP Business Suite 7, which is the latest version of the company's on-premise enterprise-level application suite. This application suite, which encompasses CRM, ERP, PLM, SCM and Supplier Relationship Management, is now brought out in a uniform product release that include everything from a newer version of their SAP NetWeaver application and integration platform and user interface capabilities in their applications that can support their vertical industries and demands of line of business. Now SAP has worked for many years to bring this major version to market but of course the economic environment and difficult time by companies using SAP has complicated the usual opportunity for organizations to upgrade. There are many business technology priorities for 2009 that have to be reconciled with the examination of SAP Business Suite 7 as a purchase this year and next. At the same time SAP is also trying to advance separately new solutions for priorities in business like enterprise performance management and for finance, risk management, and governance, risk and compliance with BI and information management that are also key priorities for many organizations using SAP today.

Microsoft's Big Change on Performance Management (and BI)

By Cindi Howson — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 12:20:43 -0500

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.

PerformancePoint was released with much fanfare in 2007 as having integrated planning (the big innovation), scorecarding (an enhanced version), and dashboarding (acquired from ProClarity). It turns out many customers only wanted the latter two components, which are more BI related. So now Microsoft is making it easier for customers to get these by including them in the SharePoint Enterprise license. Effective today, SharePoint enterprise customers can download PerformancePoint for free. Conversely, customers who bought PerformancePoint with software assurance can download SharePoint for free. What's more, Microsoft added the following:

The First 100 Days: Set the Tone, Get Results

By Sandy Kemsley — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 09:45:43 -0500

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:

Making Sense of Gartner's '09 BI Magic Quadrant

By Doug Henschen — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 14:17:54 -0500

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:

MicroStrategy in Perspective

By Neil Raden — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 11:12:42 -0500

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:

Does Being 'the Best' in BI Matter?

By Cindi Howson — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 09:31:30 -0500

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.

MicroStrategy 9 Brings Simplicity and Sophistication to BI

By Mark Smith — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 10:17:26 -0500

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.

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

By Cindi Howson — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 11:44:22 -0500

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.

SAP 'Fully Integrates' Business Objects

By Doug Henschen — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 10:47:19 -0500

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."

Who Loves the Incumbent Vendor?

By Alan Pelz-Sharpe — Fri, 26 Dec 2008 10:00:37 -0500

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.

Will IBM Add Analytics to its Toolbelt?

By Doug Henschen — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 12:30:16 -0500

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.

The True End User Experience for BI

By Mark Madsen — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 13:59:09 -0500

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.

Why BI Vendors Won't Drive Mobile BI

By Doug Henschen — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 08:31:09 -0500

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?: