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 17

August 24, 2009

August 21: Of course, nobody knows the fate of healthcare reform. But any overhaul to the system would be great news for the IT industry in general and the BI sector in particular, according to Forrester Research principal analyst Boris Evelson. He begins this InformationWeek piece with a look at what is wrong with modern IT and describes the role BI can play in the solution.

August 20: It’s an unfortunate reality that print newspapers are stressed to the point of breaking and need all the help they can get. This press release is interesting in showing how BI can help even this old and staid industry improve its prospects. The claim is that Alterian’s integrated marketing platform – which includes targeted segment analytics – has helped the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel increase its direct mail subscriber acquisition rate by 36 percent and cut expenses by 41 compared to last year.

August 19: SearchCIO-Midmarket.com offers an exhaustive and well done look at the current state of BI deployments. The story focuses on the Montana State Fund, TiVo and the Grafton School, a healthcare non-profit. The bottom line seems to be that much progress is being made, but that much remains to be done. Says writer Christine Cignoli: “[Companies’] road to nirvana — stores of clean, rich, integrated data accessed easily by those who need it — is a journey that’s barely begun.”

April 17: Larry Zagata of MiPro Consulting uses this post to discuss the best way approach to business intelligence requirements gathering. The key, he says, is to take a deep look at the business processes involved and identify key questions raised by those processes. Zagata illustrates with an example in the packaged goods/retail sector.

–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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Quick Takes for the Week of August 3

August 10, 2009

August 7: This Informatica post, written by Joe McKendrick, discusses the thorny issue of when it is right to deploy a BI platform. The bottom line is that a lot of work must be done before actually installing a product. McKendrick lists a number of good questions that should predate a deployment. They include whether there are plans for enterprise/master data; who will be able to access the BI system; how the information will be used; whether the proposed system is as easy to use as Excel and if users will be able to build their own reports.

August 6: ClickZ’s Neil Mason looks at the types of folks that are needed top build out a Web analytics team. The mere fact that he is writing such a post as the economy struggles to right itself is a good sign. Mason suggests that at least two sorts of folks are necessary: Those who can create a system that produces reliable data and those who are likely to have good insights. He concludes that it is unlikely that one person can excel at both jobs.

August 5: datadoodle has an interesting post mortem on the folding of LucidEra in late June. The post is based on an interview with Ken Rudin, who was the CMO when the company folded. The bottom line is pretty simple: SMBs — LucidEra’s target market — weren’t adept enough to interpret data or use tools in anything beyond the most rudimentary manner. They therefore saw little value in the relationship. Dealing with enterprises, who generally have someone on staff with specialized knowledge, is a far cry from short-staffed SMBs. In the case of LucidEra, this lack of expertise on the part of their customers proved fatal.

August 4: Mike Urbonas, the Director of Product Marketing for iStrategy Solutions, posts about grit, the intangible that determines whether somebody perseveres and achieves his or her goals or folds their tent at the first sign of trouble. Urbonas says that somebody with grit is more likely to create and work indomitably toward a long term goal. The connection with BI is clear: Grit is an element of how business tools and platforms are used, Urbonas says. The companies that use these tools to achieve long term goals – not just to perform stop gaps such as “hitting the numbers,” as Urbonas puts it – are exhibiting grit.

August 3: The Journal of Commerce provides a platform to Bill Loftis, the principal in Chainalytics transportation practice. He uses it to discuss business intelligence and its potential benefits for transportation management. Loftis suggests that “business intelligence” is a better term than “metrics” for the act of using data modeling to improve transport efficiency. The problem in doing so in this sector is that there are multiple variables, which makes the creation of practical models difficult. The last section of the piece describes one promising model, which was developed by a colleague.

–Carl Weinschenk

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