Proposed Themes For BI Trends 2011

Business Intelligence remains a top priority for companies. A successful BI has a positive impact on business performance, helping companies make better decisions at every level of the business from corporate strategy to operational processes. There are several trends in the BI area, recently I commented on this issue in a guest blog post for the TIBCO Spotfire's BI Blog. Boris Evelson also wrote a post on this issue in his Forrester's blog, where he made a list with the major themes for BI in 2011:

BEST PRACTICES TO ADOPT IN 2011

- Emphasis on business ownership and data governance
- Combining top-down performance management, with bottom-up approaches
- Emphasis on change management
- Loosely coupling data preparation vs. data usage
- Different treatments for front-office vs. back-office users and applications
- Using a hub-and-spoke model for data architecture and organizational structures
- Using Agile development methodology
- Working with SMEs
- Using BI on BI and aligning BI with incentive comp
- Achieving tangible BI ROI
- Providing self-service capabilities to end users

NEXT-GENERATION BI TECHNOLOGIES TO IMPLEMENT IN 2011

Technologies to make BI more automated:

- Automated information discovery
- Making BI contextual
- Full BI life-cycle automation
- Automating decision management

Technologies to make BI more unified:

- Logically unifying data sources
- Unifying structured data and unstructured content
- Unifying disk and streaming data
- Unifying historical, current, and predictive analysis
- Unifying complex data structures
- Unifying BI, DW, ETL, and ERP metadata

Technologies to make BI more pervasive:

- BI within processes
- BI within the Information Workplace
- Self-service, which includes BI SaaS
- Offline/disconnected
- Mobile

Technologies to reduce BI limitations:

- Adaptive data models
- Unlimited dimensionality
- Exploration + analysis
- Elasticity via cloud

And last, but not least:

- Technologies to enable BI self-service
- Technologies to make BI more agile

IBM Advances Analytics With Acquisition of Coremetrics

IBM announced Tuesday an agreement to acquire Coremetrics, a privately held business analytics software company. Financial terms were not disclosed. With Coremetrics' acquisition, IBM will be able to deliver new business analytics solutions, including tools that give managers real-time insights into sales trends, and web analytics capabilities to help measure the effectiveness of marketing campaigns and customer interactions. Coremetrics' Customers include Bank of America, Holiday Inn, Office Depot, Victoria's Secret and Virgin Atlantic Airways.

"With this acquisition, we are extending our capabilities to give clients greater insight about customer behavior and sentiment about products and services, and give true foresight into their future buying patterns," said Craig Hayman, general manager, IBM WebSphere. "Marketing departments can benefit from these capabilities very quickly because we are delivering this in a Software-as-a-Service model. The combination of IBM and Coremetrics will maximize marketing expenditures and also make the buying experience more convenient, personal and interactive for consumers."

"Marketers increasingly need the ability to see across their organizations and the agility to make split-second decisions based on real-time data," said Joe Davis, CEO, Coremetrics. "The combination of Coremetrics and IBM will deliver deeper business insights to address the real challenges and opportunities all companies face in an increasingly digital world."

Coremetrics' acquisition is another move by IBM in direction to consolidate in the business analytics market, and to extend the company's analytics strategy, with an overall investment of more than $11 billion in acquisitions in the last five years. The main steps in this direction were when IBM bought Cognos in 2007 and SPSS in 2009.

Boris Evelson, an analyst of Forrester Research, commented: "with the acquisition IBM has a chance to integrate Web analytics into its core BI platform. Currently, companies that want to do such integration have to rely on consultants and customized development. Fellow mega-vendors Oracle, SAP and Microsoft have made various attempts at entering the Web analytics market, but so far with little success. None of the large BI vendors, they don’t really have anything comparable”.

10 Components Of A Successful BI Strategy Plan

The definition of a BI strategy plan is crucial to implement a successful BI. Boris Evelson did a good list with the 10 components of a successful BI strategy plan in his Forrester's blog:

1 - First defining what BI is and what it is not. Is it just reporting, analytics and dashboards? Or does it involve ETL, DW, portal, MDM, etc as well?

2 - If former, you then need to define linkages, dependencies, overlaps and integration with all of the latter. If latter, it’s a whole different subject. You then really do need to read a few thick books.

3 - Ensure senior business executive commitment and top down mandate. If you cannot get that, do not proceed until you do. Two ways to “sell BI” to them (even though that’s not a good position to be in: Educate them on BI ROI, and show them how you compare to your competitors and peers within or across your industries, geographies and markets.

4 - Establish BI PMO, BICC, BI governance, etc.

5 - Documents the current state of your BI environment.

6 - Envision and propose a target state for the BI environment that includes identifying.
Requirements for all:
. styles of BI (reporting, ad-hoc querying, OLAP, dashboards, etc)
. people and roles: all stakeholders that will be affected
. business vs. IT roles
. decision types (strategic vs. operational)
. end user BI self service requirements
. agility, flexibility requirements
. process requirements
. BI on BI requirements

* Dependencies, constraints (standards, other projects, initiatives, etc)
* Architecture: Technical, Metadata, Data, Integration (with other apps, processes, portals, etc) architecture, Information delivery (desktop, portal, mobile, disconnected, etc)
* Operational, training, support requirements

7 - Based on the target state requirements, build vendor/technology shortlist, considering potential multiple vendor co-existence scenarios

8 - Identify gaps between the current state and the targets state

9 - Design a road map to close the gaps and achieve the target state with:
* Priorities and dependencies
* Strategic vs. Tactical steps (or a mix)
* Top down vs. bottom up design approaches (or a mix)
* Plans, such as: Change management, QA, Risk management, Scope management, Communications
Now that all the plans and details are in place, you can proceed with building a detailed BI business case.

10 - Select software vendor(s) and (if necessary) systems integrator.

The interest in BI, both in relation to use as the sophistication of applications has grown every year. However, to achieve good results, before the implementation of BI is necessary to define a BI strategy plan. The companies need to link the BI with corporate strategy, with the strategies defined by executives applied to BI efforts. It is also important to involve business managers and end users, so that the BI can be embraced by the entire organization.

Why Isn't My BI Application Useful?

Boris Evelson wrote a nice post in Information Management, with a list of answers to the question: Why Isn't My BI Application Useful? He said that he can count at least 11 possible meanings, and potential reasons:

1. The data is not there, because:
- It's not in any operational sources, in which case the organization needs to implement a new app, a new process or get that data from an outside source
- It is in an operational source, but not accessible via the BI application.

The data is there, but:

2. It's not usable as is, because
- There are no common definitions, common metadata
- The data is of poor quality
- The data model is wrong, or out of date

3. I can't find it, because I:
- Can't find the right report
- Can't find the right metadata
- Can't find the data
- I don't have access rights to the data I am looking for

4. I don't know how to use my application, because I:
- Was not trained
- Was trained, but the application is not intuitive, user friendly enough

5. I can't/don't have time do it myself - because I just need to run my business, not do BI !!! - and
- I don't have support staff
- I am low on IT priority list

6. It takes too long to:
- Create a report/query
- Run/execute a report/query

7. I need to report/analyze on something that SQL can't do, such as:
- Faceted search
- SQL on data with uneven, unbalanced, ragged, recursive hierarchies

8. It's a wrong BI application:
- I have strategic decisions to make, but the app is designed for operational decisions, or
- I have operational decisions to make, but the app is designed for strategic decisions

9. The app is not integrated with other applications, processes or desktop so:
- I loose context
- Have to switch apps, cut & paste
- Don't know how to act on the info that I find

10. I don’t know what I am looking for, but my application is asking to:
- Run a specific report
- Pick specific facts and dimensions

So I don't know where to start.

11. The app stops short of helping me, directing me to make the actual decision, even if I know how to use the app, have access to the right data, and can find what I am looking for. It's a loooooong way between finding the right info and actually make a decision based on the info.

That is an interesting list. Have you heard some of those answers?

Does your company have a BI strategy?

Boris Evelson wrote today a short but nice post in Information Management, called Ten Strong Hints Your Enterprise May Not Have a BI Strategy, where he lists 10 hints why the companies don't have a BI strategy. Below is his list:

"You know that you don't have an enterprise BI strategy if:

1 - Your end users keep pointing to IT as the source of most BI problems
2 - Your business executives view BI as another cost center
3 - IT staff keep asking end users for report requirements
4 - Your BI is supported by IT help desk
5 - You can’ tell the difference between BI and Performance Management
6 - You can’t measure your BI usage
7 - You can’t measure your BI ROI
8 - You think your BI strategy is the same as your DW strategy
9 - You don’t have a plan to develop, hire, retain and grow BI staff
10- You actually don’t know if your enterprise has a BI strategy!"

Although BI remains at the top of the list of IT priorities, the most of companies still lack a cohesive strategy for Business Intelligence. The companies need to understand that BI is not just another IT project, is a continuous process to delivery better information to the company makes better decisions. The companies need to link the BI with corporate strategy, with the strategies defined by executives applied to BI efforts. BI also must be connected with the business process. For all of this to happen, it is essential that the company has an executive sponsor that has influence on all divisions and business units (who is not the CIO).

Nine Choices on the Road to BI Solution Centers

Intelligent Enterprise published this month a good article about Business Intelligence Solution Centers, by Boris Evelson and James Kobielus, analysts of Forrester Research. This article is based on the Forrester Report Implementing Your Business Intelligence Solutions Center.

They said as BI grows more pervasive, complex, feature-rich, and mission-critical, it also becomes harder to implement effectively. Many information and knowledge management professionals question whether they architect, implement, and manage their BI initiatives properly. Doing so requires sound BI and performance management best practices — and an awareness of the myriad ways it can all go wrong.
Forrester defines a BISC as: A permanent, cross-functional organizational structure responsible for governance and processes necessary to deliver or facilitate delivery of successful BI solutions, as well as being an institutional steward, protector, and forum for BI best practices.

The chief symptoms of suboptimal BI management practices include:
- The lack of a single trustworthy view of all relevant information.
- BI applications too complex and confusing to use effectively.
- BI applications too rigid to address even minor changes.

You need to customize your BISC approach, and the intersections of these four dimensions — process, people, data, and technology — create multiple BISC scenarios and approaches that information and knowledge management pros must consider when developing a BISC most relevant to support your BI efforts.

The nine scenarios and approaches you must consider when implementing your BISC are:

1 - Strategic Or Operational Objectives?
Some organizations deploy BISCs that are purely strategic or advisory in nature. In those organizations BISC accepts the role of being a BI champion, providing subject matter experts, and overseeing BI standards, methodologies, and a repository of best practices. When these BISCs take on more operational duties they become responsible for tasks like the BI project management office (PMO), training, and vendor management.

2 - In-house or Outsourced?
Enterprises deploying BI will need help from experienced consultants and systems integrators (SIs). This expertise is critical because BI is very much an art and will remain that for the foreseeable future, since it involves engineering a complex set of systems and data to address the changing imperatives of business organizations. As a result, most of the more successful BISC organizations include both internal and external staff.

3 - Virtual Or Physical?
Organizations have a choice of leaving their BISC staff within their lines of business (LOBs) or functional departments, or moving them to a centralized physical BISC organization.

4 - Operational or Analytical in Scope?
A BISC for some may focus on addressing the front-end access, presentation, delivery, and visualization requirements of analytic applications. Alternately, others may encompass a wider scope including data warehousing; data integration; data quality; master data management (MDM); and many other analytics-relevant infrastructures, processes, and tools.

5 - Support IT only or All Stakeholders?
Information and knowledge management pros must determine whether their organizational culture is ready to support BISC beyond BI infrastructure in scope.

6 - Type of Funding Model?
BISC can be treated as a corporate cost center, and all departments across the enterprise can use and benefit from BISC services. A cost allocation model based on the actual usage of BISC services can be fairer, but detailed, activity-based cost allocation models can be tricky to set up, implement, and manage.

7 - Narrow or Broad Scope?
Forrester recommends business leadership and business-led governance orientation, not a technology-centric focus, for the BISC. The same road map principles that apply to the best practices of implementing BI apply to the BISC: strategy first, architecture next, technology last.

8 - Performance Measurement Approach?
BISC stakeholders require transparent measurements of the success of the BISC program in order to support ongoing momentum and funding. BISC leaders must establish a clear set of BISC performance metrics and clearly communicate them on a periodic basis.

9 - Isolated or Aligned With Other Solution Centers?
No BI environment is an island from the rest of the data management infrastructure. Just as BI applications touch, depend on, and overlap with many related processes and technologies, BISCs cannot exist in isolation from other competency centers, solutions centers, or centers of excellence. Federation between the BISC and other data management competency centers is a best practice.

The Forrester wrote a good report, and I think this report can help companies to implement an effective BI Solution Center.

The Promise and Challenge of Role-Based BI

Tomorrow, November 6th at 3PM ET, will happen a live Web broadcast presentation entitled The Promise and Challenge of Role-Based BI, provided by DM Review and hosted by Eric Kavanagh with Jim Ericson, in its program called DM Radio.

According DM Review: "The promise of Role-Based BI is nothing new: delivering targeted intelligence to business users throughout an organization, thus empowering them to make informed, savvy decisions that positively affect the bottom line. Likewise, the challenge remains the same: finding a cost-effective way to deliver meaningful intelligence to an array of business uses, whose information needs vary widely.

Today, a confluence of several key factors makes Role-Based BI more plausible than ever. Pricepoints have come down dramatically over the years, not just for BI solutions, but for their underlying database and integration technologies. Meanwhile, Software-as-a-Service continues to gain in popularity, due to its ease-of-access, affordable cost and negligible implementation time. Additionally, more and more business professionals now know about, and appreciate, the value that BI can deliver.

Tune into this episode of DM Radio as we talk to the experts about the role of Role-Based BI, and how it can help your organization. We'll hear from Forrester Analyst Boris Evelson, and two special guests, Cloud 9 Analytics Founder Swayne Hill and Cognos executive Jacqueline Coolidge. Attendees will learn:

- Key considerations for exploring Role-Based BI
- Best practices for leveraging SaaS solutions
- Hot spots for Role-Based BI within an organization
- How Role-Based BI can help companies transition to Pervasive BI
- Why MDM helps facilitate Role-Based BI"

In the DM Review website, you can register for this live Web broadcast.

You also can check out the DM Radio archives to hear previous programs with a variety of other issues.

DM Radio presents: On The Cutting Edge with Operational Analytics

Tomorrow, September 4th, at 3:00 PM ET, will happen a live Web broadcast presentation entitled On The Cutting Edge with Operational Analytics, provided by DM Review, in its initiative called DM Radio, hosted by Eric Kavanagh with Jim Ericson.


According DMReview: "For companies on the cutting edge, operational analytics can provide real-time insights that improve corporate performance significantly. Whether for operational reporting, real-time analytical reporting or business activity monitoring (BAM), operational analytics deliver the kind of information that can successfully guide organizations through even the most challenging situations.

Getting the necessary ducks in a row to accomplish this type of business intelligence can be quite a challenge, however. Dashboards, real-time integration, key performance indicators and powerful analytics are all part and parcel to such solutions. And then there's the foundation: are traditional data warehouses suitable for this task? Or are new technologies such as complex event processing (CEP) and event stream processing (ESP) necessary?

Tune into this episode of DM Radio to hear from the experts – including Forrester Research Analyst Boris Evelson and industry consultant John Ladley of IMCue Solutions – about how your organization can use operational analytics to achieve a competitive edge.

Attendees will learn:
- how CEP and ESP can facilitate operational analytics
- why traditional data warehousing approaches may not be sufficient
- the building blocks necessary for operational analytics
- where companies are employing this kind of functionality
- why understanding KPIs is critical to success
- how to link operational analytics with performance management
- why data quality problems can derail the most robust solution"

In the DM Review website, you can register for this live Web broadcast.

You also can check out the DM Radio archives to hear previous programs with a variety of other issues.

The Forrester Wave: Enterprise Business Intelligence Platforms, Q3 2008

Recently, Forrester published the report The Forrester Wave: Enterprise Business Intelligence Platforms, Q3 2008, written by Boris Evelson. You can get a free copy courtesy of SAS.

This report is an evaluation of enterprise business intelligence (BI) platform vendors, and according it, Forrester conducted lab-based evaluations in March 2008 and interviewed 12 vendors and 24 user companies, including Actuate, IBM Cognos,Information Builders, Microsoft, MicroStrategy, Oracle, Panorama Software, QlikTech, SAP, SAS Institute, and TIBCO Spotfire.

The report considers that Business Intelligence is not just for reporting anymore, and now expand into the following eight major BI product functionalities:
- Production/operational reporting for pixel-perfect mass report distribution
- Ad hoc query tools provide a quick answer to a business question
- OLAP tools, when business questions are more about “whys” than “whats”
- Dashboards as an interactive, visual UI — not a reporting or analytical tool by itself
- BAM to report on real-time data and process information streams
- Predictive modeling answers questions about what’s likely to happen next
- BI workspaces enable true end user self-service
- Guided BI search tools support free form ad hoc queries and analysis

The report also considers the Evaluation Criteria are Current Offering, Strategy, And Market Presence and the Evaluated Vendors Must Meet Architecture, Functionality, and Scalability Criteria. IBM Cognos and SAP Business Objects maintain their leadership positions, while Oracle and SAS Institute move into leadership positions in enterprise BI thanks to the richness of their functionality, ability to scale, and the completeness of their corporate and product vision and strategy.

About the leaders: most large enterprise BI vendors finally “get it” and offer robust, scalable, well-integrated BI platforms with rich and broad BI functionality, and highlighted:
- Business Objects, an SAP company, provides some of the best-in-class tools for each use case
- IBM Cognos provides one of the most modern and scalable BI environments
- SAS is the best one-stop BI shop that includes high-end analytics from a single vendor
- Oracle brings the best of its rich BI portfolio into Enterprise Edition Plus

Forrester always writes interesting reports. This report is a good way to the companies get an overview about the main features of the main BI platforms.

Is Excel a Complete BI Solution?

Today, Rajan Chandras wrote a nice piece in his blog on Intelligent Enterprise, entitled Is Excel a Complete BI Solution?, where he poses some arguments about to consider Excel as a BI tool, based on Forrester report The Forrester Wave: Enterprise Business Intelligence Platforms, Q3 2008, with free copy courtesy of SAS. The report, written by Boris Evelson, does not include Excel as one of the 12 solutions.

Rajan asked: Should Excel be considered a BI tool, worthy of inclusion in surveys such as the Forrester Wave?

Boris is also the author of an interesting report last year on the use of Excel as a BI tool, called Ouch! Get Ready — Spreadsheets Are Here To Stay For Business Intelligence.

Boris Evelson wrote both reports, and answered in his blog.

I agree with Boris when he said: "I vote for Excel as a BI UI, or Excel as a lightweight, departmental or SMB BI solution. But stand-alone Excel cannot be one and only BI tool to fulfill complex and broad BI requirements in large enterprises."

BI Workspaces: BI Without Borders

Recently Intelligent Enterprise published an article, commenting the Forrester Report called "BI Workspaces: BI Without Borders", written by Boris Evelson.

The Forrester Report defines BI Workspaces as "a data exploration environment where a power user can analyze production, clean data with near complete freedom to modify data models, enrich data sets, and run the analysis whenever necessary, without much dependency on IT and production environment restrictions."

According Forrester report, various compliance requirements have in many ways restricted the flexibility of reporting and analysis, and affect demands of analysts and power-users. Perhaps most restrictive is the architecture of many BI environments, which creates a cascading effect of interdependent components.

The Cascading Effect Of Interdependent BI Components:


The report defines three approaches to providing BI Workspaces, using MOLAP (multidimensional online analytical processing), BI SaaS and DW SaaS, and In-Memory Analytics.

The report also offer four recommendations to use BI Workspace:
- Include BI workspace functionality in overall BI requirements
- Support BI workspace users by providing clean and timely data
- Understand the implications of using a different technology/approach for BI workspaces
- Consider risks associated with SaaS-based BI/DW.

You can obtain a free download of the report in the Forrester website (registration required).

I think this is a good report that shows an interesting approach to analyzing data.