Quick Takes for the Week of July 20, 2009

July 24, 2009

July 24: Zulfikar Sidi, the Manager of Global Business Analytics Consulting at SAS, offers a long and rewarding article about analytics at Dashboard Insights. In order, Sidi tackles defining the business problem with which analytics deals, assessing and securing data, choosing human and software tools and implementation. Clearly, moving toward a more analytical approach to business is a tall task, but – as Sidi says in the article summary– companies that incorporate it “into their DNA” will benefit in the long run.

July 23: Rajat Sharma, the CEO of Onward Systems, writes at Bank Systems & Technology on the potential of BI to help the banking industry. A bank, he says, relies on cash flow and customer retention to be profitable and to increase revenue. In other words, it deals with the same basics as other businesses, though there clearly are some important differences in this heavily regulated industry. Sharma doesn’t go into that too deeply, but does offer a bit of a primer on how BI can help these institutions.

July 22: NewsFactor does a good job of explaining why BI has done so well while other software categorie have struggled. The bottom line is that BI is flexible: It can help save money when it is trained on internal operations and increase revenue when used positioned to ferret out trends in customer behavior patterns. The piece is worth sending to non-technology executives who will make strategic and tactical buying decisions.

July 21: Oyku Isik is a Ph.D. candidate in the Information Technologies & Decision Sciences College of Business at the University of North Texas in Denton. Her dissertation, she writes, aims to “provide a better understanding of BI success by proposing a framework that examines the impact of BI capabilities on BI success, in the presence of different decision environments.” Isik is seeking participation in the project through a Web-based survey that he says takes 10 to 15 minutes to complete.

July 20: There is nothing radically new in this brief IT Pro piece focusing on comments by Stephen Read, the director of SME for SAP’s UK operation. But is is important to not that the company, like the rest of the industry, is making a significant move to attract the SMB segment. The story says that Read reports “huge” demand for BI among this segment. The piece doesn’t go into much detail, but the emergence of SaaS-based BI and the general acceptance of the bottom line rationale for BI are among the drivers of BI in among smaller companies.

–Carl Weinschenk

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Quick Takes for the Week of July 13

July 20, 2009

July 17: The Aberdeen Group has released a study entitled The 2009 State of the Market: Mid-Year Insights Report. The study found that BI will have a high impact on organizations during the next two to five years. The study confirmed previously firm research that found that companies are interested in embedding BI within ERP, CRM and other enterprise applications. The study identifies drivers for the growth of BI.

July 16: Richard Herschel, the Chair of the Department of Decision & System Sciences at St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia, uses his column at The BeyeNETWORK to explore the impact of the Kindle DX on business intelligence. It’s a long and interesting column. Many of the points and assumptions can extend into devices such as mobile Internet devices (MIDs) and netbooks. The bottom line is that the advent of WiMax and, soon, LTE and devices with big screens challenges a lot of assumptions about where and how corporate data is introduced into, and used by, a BI platform.

July 15: This entertaining post by CNET’s Matt Assay is about BI – sort of. It also has a big takeaway for folks in the business. Assay describes the next generation of information and applications in very personal terms. He describes biking, exercise and diet apps that he uses to stay in shape. The point is that the data that will be collected and acted upon going forward is going to be extraordinarily granular and the applications very highly customized. This, of course, is as true in the business sector as it is with consumer apps. Vendors and end users not willing to deal with this landscape will be asking for trouble.

July 14: It’s a nice thought that BI can help in the fight against cancer. This piece focuses on Britain’s National Health Service’s use of The Cancer Commissioning Toolkit (CCT) to provide “an online, national view of responses and actions to cancer.” BI can fight cancer, the CIO writer says, by benchmarking incidence of the decease, mortality rates and myriad other relevant issues. The bulk of the story, which was written by an oncologist, focuses on the many uses of the CCT platform.

July 13: Michael Franklin, a professor of computer science at UC Berkeley and the founder and CTO of Truviso, comments at GigaOm on a topic with which a lot of folks are grappling: The huge increases in the amount of data and organization must keep on top of. Franklin sees the same basic problem in two areas. The explosion of data makes it increasingly difficult to keep search functions current. At a more fundamental level, the increases are a challenge for data analytics and large-scale data management systems, he writes.

–Carl Weinschenk

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