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Quick Takes for the Week of July 20, 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