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Quick Takes for the Week of July 6


July 10: This certainly is more techie than the material this site usually covers, but worth a look for business people who want to stay in touch with – or be exposed to — the fundamentals. Aaron Alton, a Microsoft Certified IT Professional, writes at The HOBT about his preparation for the Microsoft certification exam on SQL Server 2008 in business intelligence development and maintenance. The post, which won’t mean much to most of us, is a good reminder of the complexity and demanding nature of BI technology.

July 9: Doug Lautzenheiser writes about job at the SmartData Collective. He opens with comments about software jobs in general – the news isn’t good – and then focuses on BI jobs. His forecast is that the total will be down 10 percent from January through June. Crystal Reports, he says, had 35 percent fewer job postings at Monster. The rare piece of good news is Business Objects, which saw 2 percent growth in postings. There are many numbers in the report. Leader SAS, IBM Cognos and Microsoft Reporting Services all are down, according to Lautzenheiser.

July 8, 2009: OStatic’s Sam Dean offers a commentary playing off the site’s coverage of the North Bridge Partners’ 2009 Future of Open Source Survey. Dean says that survey respondents tabbed business intelligence as an application that is “highly likely to cause disruption in the next five years.” Dean subsequently ties this to an interview he did with Forrester Research analyst Jeffrey Hammond, who pointed to Jaspersoft, Pentaho, SpagoBI and Actuate as open source BI companies that are excelling.

July 7: Information Management’s Rene Muiyser takes a look at the tug of war between users of BI platforms and IT. The key is that the role of IT departments is shifting. Muiyser said that in the past IT was clearly a support organization. Now, however, IT has “started to operate like independent companies within a company.” Related to this are efforts of IT to take over BI projects. Muiyser goes into great detail on the ramifications of the evolution of IT’s role and its impact on BI.

July 6: ebizQ’s David Linthicum discusses the growing availability of data sets that don’t belong to the organization. This mountain of data adds valuable context to the data that the company owns. Linthicum acknowledges that supplementing company-owned data has been a standard operating procedure for years. The difference is that the proliferation of independent data sources means that companies that resist reaching out in this way are at an increasingly dangerous competitive disadvantage.

–Carl Weinschenk