Quick Takes Week of June 29

July 6, 2009

July 3: Last week, Timo Elliott, who runs the BI Questions Blog, offered a post last week in which he laid out the reporting requirements of the stimulus package and made the point that it essentially mandates the use of business intelligence tools. Elliott details some of the ramifications of this. He says that major vendors—he mentions SAP and IBM—have rolled out products and details some of what is available.

July 2: ZDNet blogger Sam Diaz notes that MicroStrategy is making its reports and dashboards available on the Amazon Kindle DX reader. Diaz is skeptical about the device as a business tool. The post raises a broader and interesting question: Just how useful will non-traditional mobile devices, such as MIDs and netbooks, be for business intelligence?

July 1: Zach Gemignani at Juice Analytics suggests that the next generation of business intelligence can be categorized into a small number of fresh approaches: analysts tools; dashboards; open-source and free; targeted solutions; advanced visualizations and, in Gemignani’s words, “other stuff.” The piece offers multiple screen shots and descriptions of who Gemignani thinks are the key vendors in each of the categories.

June 30: silicon.com asks a question that probably has been answered in the affirmative by anyone visiting this site, but is far from settled in many other quarters: Is BI a key investment during a recession? The Naked CIO, a columnist for the site, suggests that the answer is no if the BI platform is used solely as a financial reporting system. The value becomes greater, he suggests, if a comprehensive strategy using data of good quality is implemented. Silicon.com blogger Peter Cochrane suggests that such platforms are key: “I can’t imagine running any business without good intelligence tools - they are essential to business and always a good investment,” he says.

June 29: Jorgen Heizenberg, the principal technology officer for BI at Capgemini Netherlands, offers a short but intriguing post at his blog on the differences between what he terms “operational systems” such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) and “informational systems” such as business intelligence. Perhaps, he suggests, BI would be more successful if it became more operational in nature.

–Carl Weinschenk

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Quick Takes Week of June 22

June 26, 2009

June 26: Larry Zagata at MiPro Consulting offers a commentary at the company’s Unfiltered blog on the deeper use of business intelligence. All too often, he says, BI projects are established in response to requests from end users in order to solve a specific problem or to smooth a given process. The far more prudent approach is to embed BI within business processes. In that way, a perpetual feedback loop is created in which the task the BI intelligence is performing is continually refined. This ensures that the information that is gathered is usable on an ongoing basis.

June 25: This is a nice column by Microsoft regional sales manager Rob Busch in BizTimes.com, which serves Milwaukee and southeastern Wisconsin. Busch points to four activities – “software plus service,” unified communications, virtualization and business intelligence – as tools that can help companies survive the bad economy. He provides a good overview of BI’s benefits. It’s nice to see the category’s value being positioned in simple and clear ways in general business publications.

June 24: The case for Web analytics tools is persuasively made by Cindy Waxer at CNNMoney. The first half of the story is a mini case study of IndustryWizard, an online corporate network that used Lyris HQ Web Analytics to re-imagine its email newsletter. The company was able to almost double clickthrough rates and increase the time spent on the site from 4:31 to 9:17. Waxer also discusses Google Analytics, Piwik and Omniture.

June 23: Here are how some sites handled the news late last week that LucidEra had shut down: Seeking Alpha suggested that the shutdown, while unfortunately, is a natural part of the evolution of the BI/analytic software-as-a-service segment. CNET’s Dave Rosenberg confirmed the news and offered an analysis by Birst CEO Brad Peters. Jessica Tsai at destinationCRM posted analysis from ThinkStrategies’ Managing Director Jeff Kaplan. We spoke to Lucidera Co-Founder and CMO Scott Rubin last month and to Kaplan in April.

June 22: This ITWorld piece by Derek Slater adds an interesting twist to the idea that all roads lead to security. The premise is that security departments are positioned to use their tools and know-how for tasks that are far broader than pure security. Examples are as nebulous—but important—as “brand protection” and as granular and mundane as helping to choose off-site meeting venues. In the longer term, Slater says, security staffs may help improve business processes. The connection to BI is clear: Moving beyond the bits and bytes of pure security requires security folks to have access to a great percentage of the data a company collects.

–Carl Weinschenk

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Quick Takes Week of June 1

June 8, 2009

June 5: Peter Thomas has a long and insightful post at SmartData Collective dealing with the failure of BI projects. The lion’s share of the piece deconstructs three statements about projects that don’t make it: “The business did not need or want better information,” “The business needed or wanted better information, initially supported the concept of BI delivering this, but their enthusiasm for this approach waned over time” and “The business needed or wanted better information, but didn’t think that BI offered the way to deliver this.” There is a lot more to the piece – all of it informative – but one statement by Thomas stands out: “I firmly believe that BI done well is both the easiest of IT systems to sell to people and has one of the highest paybacks of any IT initiative. BI done badly (at the design, development, implementation or follow-up stages) will fail.”

June 4: It’s nice to read a piece that describes how BI platforms are being used to improve education. InformationWeek describes how the schools in Columbus, Ohio are using WebFocus tools from Information Builders. The school system, working with personnel from Nationwide Mutual Insurance, are proactively analyzing student data to proactively spot problems, improve performance and raise graduation rates.

June 3: This very well done piece makes two assumptions: That the basic BI tools are in place and that the company’s strategy has stalled. SearchCIO.com Senior News Writer Christina Torode offers five steps to get things moving in the right direction: Work through a “proof of concept” exercise with a business group; don’t skimp on evangelization; cross-pollinate the IT and BI management teams; make sure that the questions being posed by the project are on the mark and make sure that initiatives are transparent.

June 2: Ann All has a post at IT Business Edge that focuses nicely on the importance of getting end users involved in BI initiatives. She quotes Scott Lowe, the CIO for Missouri’s Westminster College, who says that the CIO must be the “facilitator, enabler, and advisor in BI efforts.”

June 1: Don Campbell, the CTO for Business Intelligence and Performance Management at IBM, discusses the security ramifications of the movement of valuable BI data to mobile devices in this WirelessWeek piece. The keys, Campbell says, are to implement authentication, encryption and authorization tools and procedures, to use encryption and complex passwords to have a procedure in place to kill devices that are lost or stolen.

–Carl Weinschenk

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