Browse > Home / Quick Takes for the Week of May 4, 2009

Quick Takes for the Week of May 4, 2009


May 8: Mike Vizard at eWeek comments on Oracle Business Intelligence Applications Release 7.9.6. The company has created “pre-built” BI applications that can be put to work immediately and customized over time. Vizard draws a comparison to software evolution in the enterprise resource planning (ERP) sector. There, he says, the presentation of a simplified and set group of applications around business processes was a key to success.

May 7: Understandably, during the past few months sites and publications have run tons of articles offering advice on cutting expenses. This piece by Gordon Daly at Enterprise Systems is an example, and a good one. Daly advocates turning “householding” – the practice of using BI tools and principles to upsell and cross sell customers – inward. This approach, he says, can lead to “substantial material and manufacturing cost reductions, increased productivity, improved sales performance, and a ‘move up and to the right’ on the profitability chart.”

May 6: During our podcast yesterday, Good Data’s Roman Stanek mentioned a BusinessWeek article about the challenges facing SAP. The main topics of the story are the ascendancy of CEO Léo Apotheker and the company’s reaction to Oracle’s purchase of Sun. Within that context, writer Steve Hamm discusses the problems that SAP is having adapting to cloud computing. It’s interesting to see that SAP’s Business Suite 7 makes functionality available in standalone modules—an acknowledgment, among other things, that SaaS is here to stay—and is adding analytic capabilities to its programs.

May 5: Steve Dine, the President of Datasource Consulting LLC and a BeyeNETWORK contributor, has posted an interesting column about a concept he calls Lean BI. Dine defines Lean BI as increasing the platform’s value by eliminating waste in existing resources. Lean BI is a synthesis of lean manufacturing, systems theory and agile project management concepts.

May 4: On Friday MSNBC offered a piece–which initially was posted by Entrepreneur.com–looking at how collected information can be put into a usable context. This challenge–which of course always has existed–is growing as the amount of data explodes and social media sites make the ways in which people use the Internet more diverse and fragmentary. Writer Marshall Sponder looks at new approaches from Tealium, Radian6, Rapleaf and Unbound Technologies, Searchmetrics and Omniture SiteCatalyst.