Quick Takes for the Week of July 27, 2009

July 31, 2009

July 31: Preaveen Kodur eloquently makes the case for business intelligence in this post – which serves as a good introduction to his blog. The key paragraph restates a theme that BI folks already take as an article of faith: That executives relying only on antiquated methods, including their “gut feel” about a particular issue, are selling themselves and their organizations short. Instead, use of data analytics and business intelligence enable them to unlock hidden patterns and value in the mountain of data they collect. Certainly, there is nothing shocking here – but the message is adroitly delivered, and in a form that may well resonate with non IT decision makers.

July 30: ComputerWeekly.com, a UK site, has an interesting article on the future of BI. It begins by quoting Gartner’s take on the three stages of BI: organizing/cleansing/collecting, delivering in a consistent and appropriate form and use of data to make good decisions. The last phase is the trickiest, the writer says. He then looks at industry consolidation and what the remaining players are doing to tackle this challenge.

July 29: Forrester has released a report entitled Mighty Mashups: Do-It-Yourself Business Intelligence for the New Economy. The report suggests that the way to lighten the load on BI staffs and get end users what they need quickly is a self-service environment. Mashup-style functionality that enables end users to fulfill their own BI needs “relieves developers from having to respond to an incessant stream of user requests for low-level changes to reports, dashboards, and cubes,” the report says.

July 28: DM News points to the growing importance of social media in the mix of sources from which companies gain information about their customers and prospects. The key is to find a way to “be where their customers are talking,” according to Jim Schwab, Techrigy’s VP of business development. It’s not easy, but can be very rewarding. The prize for effectively mining social networking sites and services is a great deal of real time information about how people feel about the company.

July 27: Jeff Nolan at Venture Chronicles writes a long and informative post on the relative position of SAP, IBM and Oracle. He clearly feels that SAP, via the Business Objects acquisition, is best positioned. He delves into the plans that new SAP executive board member John Schwartz brings to the company from Business Objects. Nolan provides a lot of context, but the core of the plan is to make deeper analytics more widely available and to move more fully into unstructured data.

–Carl Weinschenk

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