Quick Takes for the Week of August 24

August 31, 2009

August 28: It’s nice to read about technology being used for nice things, so this KM World story on the use of Oco analytics by Cradles to Crayons – an organization that provides toys, clothes and other things to children in need – is a good read. The software is being used to gain visibility into the organization’s operations in Boston and Philadelphia.

August 26: This Channel Insider article by Ericka Chickowski offers valuable insight into how the channel – the folks that sell, distribute and provide service – look at BI. The writer defines nine ways in which platforms can be promoted. The bottom line is that the steps – such as setting up cross-functional teams to facilitate deployment and losing dependence on spreadsheets – add up to a win/win: The customer benefits by realizing the benefits of BI and the channel wins simply by selling and serving more software and hardware.

August 24: One theme of this CRM News story is that the recession is the best time to make an investment in business intelligence, and enough companies are recognizing that to enable the product family to buck the trend bad economy. One of the next big tasks, according to the story, is to find a way to bring unstructured data – which may account for 80 percent of the data with which companies deal – into the BI fold.

–Carl Weinschenk

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Quick Takes for the Week of August 10

August 17, 2009

<i>April 14:</i> Oyku Isik, a Ph.D. candidate in Information Technologies & Decision Sciences at the College of Business University of North Texas, is seeking survey participants in connection with her dissertation. Participants will have access to findings. The purpose of the dissertation is to provide a better understanding of BI success by proposing a framework that examines the impact of BI capabilities on success in different decision environments. BI capabilities are defined in this case as critical functionalities of BI that help an organization improve its performance. The decision environment is defined as a composition of the decision types and the way the required information is accessed and processed to aid in decision making, by the decision maker. The Web-based survey, which takes about 10 to 15 minutes to complete, will be open until August 24th.

August 13: IDC has a new report that says that retail demand intelligence is the “most pressing technological investment issue currently facing retailers.” The report says that retailers are using RDI in conjuction with retail planning systems, supply chain applications and customer selling systems. The report, according to the release, details the vendors serving this market.

August 12: CNET’s Dave Rosenberg discusses the joint cloud venture of Jaspersoft, Talend, RightScale and Vertica. The piece features an interview with Jaspersoft CEO Brian Gentile, who says that a cloud-based approach eliminates the difficulties of hard-to-use and cumbersome enterprise software. Actually, he puts it all a bit less delicately: “The dirty secret about enterprise software is: it sucks.”

August 11: Scott Wanless, the Principal Management Consultant for Fujitsu Consulting’s Business Intelligence Practice, writes at the BeyeNETWORK about the changes to healthcare and its impact on BI. He says that more emphasis is being put on reducing hospital readmission within the first 30 days of discharge. The idea is that if people need to be quickly readmitted, the original care probably was poor. Reducing readmissions improves healthcare and saves money. BI has a dual role in monitoring efforts to reduce readmissions: The first is analysis of the readmission rates themselves and the second is helping to assess their cause.

August 10: There were some interesting results to a survey conducted in Australia by QlikTech and reseller Inside Info. Respondents to the survey, which was performed at the first QlikView Australian user conference, suggest that BI is seen by SMBs as a revenue generator as opposed to a way to save money. The release says that 74 percent said that their aim for the remainder of this year and for 2010 is to use BI to create operational visibility and generate business opportunities. Though the survey was conducted down under, the results are suggestive for other markets, including North America.

–Carl Weinschenk

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