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Quick Takes for the Week of May 11, 2009


May 15: Ajira Technologies’ Nari Kannan, writing at ebizQ, makes a bookend point to Bradbury’s piece noted yesterday. Kannan says that despite all the great sounding terms and concepts thrown around by BI folks, in many instances a company ends up relying on Excel based “skunk works.” The reason, he feels, is that the various tools still are evolving and in most cases don’t satisfy all of an organization’s many needs. The natural response, then, is to create homegrown Excel-reliant solutions to solve specific problems.

May 14: British site Silicon has a nice roundup, written by Danny Bradbury, of important steps to healthy BI. The five are to have a clear set of user-driven goals; to train and encourage users to take advantage of the platform; to start with small and achievable goals; to think in terms of a wide-ranging program, not a isolated project and to ensure clean data through a master data management function.

May 13: This is a long but very worthwhile piece in Intelligent Enterprise by the Aberdeen Group’s David Hatch. Hatch, whom The IT-Finance Connection has spoken to before, discusses the rising costs of BI implementations. The story, based on a new report from Hatch and firm, describes how best-in-class companies finish projects on budget, shorten project completion times, reduce the cost per user and cut the time it takes to change or modify a report or analytic view.

May 12: This posting by Matt Richtel at The New York Times doesn’t directly mention BI, but it has significant ramifications for folks in the business. According to telecom researcher Chetan Sharma, during the first quarter of the year the United States became the first nation to reach $10 billion in mobile data services revenue. The post offers a lot of details, including precisely how Sharma defines the category and which wireless carriers are ahead. The bottom line for business intelligence clearly is that cell phones and smartphones will be an increasingly dominant conduit for the data with which they deal. Richtel points out that the arrival of the Palm Pre, the possible arrival of a new iPhone this summer and various other gadgets will accelerate the trend.

May 11: The South African site ITWeb offers a piece from IS Partners–a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner based in New Zealand–that looks at the differences between integrated and point BI approaches. The jumping off point for the discussion is the integration of Microsoft’s PerformancePoint into SharePoint. The writer argues that the platform approach is simpler, more cost-effective and offers greater feature flexibility.

–Carl Weinschenk