Influential Business Intelligence Blogs

Recently I was surfing the web and found out by accident that my blog was named as one of the 23 most influential Business Intelligence blogs by Justin Heinze at BI Software Insight. I'm honored to have been mentioned in the list, with so great other blogs.

According the article: "Criteria used to select the bloggers included the quality of their writing and insights, size of their following, and their impact on the BI community. Each represents a valuable resource for anyone interested in Business Intelligence."

The marriage of Big Data and Data Warehousing

IBM published a good two part video series, where Big Data evangelist James Kobielus discusses the marriage of Big Data and Data Warehousing that is leading us toward the Hadoop Data Warehouse. In part 1 of this 2 part video, James defines Big Data and discusses some use cases.

In the second part of this video series, James discusses the attributes of a Big Data platform that encompasses traditional data warehousing, big data analytics at rest and in motion, the importance of MDM and governance and what you should be looking for from your Big Data platform vendor.

Four Ways to Leverage BI for Executive-Level Reporting

Although companies have many tools to help to make decisions, many of them have difficulty in delivering insights to their management teams. The Information Management  published a good article on how to leverage BI for executives, written by Trevor Dunham. In the article, he mentions that many companies struggle to turn data into actionable insights at the executive level. He touches on a point still common in many companies: executives that depend on manually produced spreadsheets for managing and tracking performance. He cites four ways organizations can leverage existing business data intelligence to improve reporting at the executive level:

1. Be Visual: Keep it Simple.
Reports filled with endless rows and columns of  static, numerical data that take hours to sift through and weeks to assemble don’t enable decisions. However, using the data to see cues and visualize trends, increases understanding, allows for predictability and enables more informed decision-making

2. Be Concise: Get To The Point.
BI reports should not force management to wade through pages of data. Rather, these reports should be presented like a strategy plan or a news website. The goal is to present contextual meaning and actionable insight in an easily searchable format.

3. Be Timely: Distribute Real-Time Data Alerts.
Data alerts are unique visual indicators based on a defined key performance indicator. The ability to deliver real-time data alerts is an important best practice for any sales organization.

4. Be Mobile: Deliver Insight To The Point of Action.
For business intelligence to be useful, it has to be delivered to the point of action, which usually means a mobile device. Mobile BI is simply a must-have for any organization looking to improve business performance.

Companies that generate and deliver BI that is visual, concise, timely and mobile can achieve new levels of performance and the greatest possible competitive advantage.

Some advice for your BI initiative does not become a scary halloween story

Today is Halloween, it's celebrated in a variety of ways and activities including trick-or-treating, wearing masks and telling scary stories. But when you are implementing an BI initiative, you don't want to hear scary stories. Here are some advice for your BI initiative does not become a scary halloween story:

The definition of a BI strategy plan is crucial to implement a successful BI.

First of all, you need understand your business issues before implement your BI, aligning the business goals with the BI strategy.

When you start the process to implement BI in your company, it is essential that you have an executive sponsor that has influence on all divisions and business units of the company, because it is necessary to show and persuade the business that BI is not just another IT project, is a continuous process to delivery better information to the company make better decisions.

It is interesting to consider the creation of a Business Intelligence Steering Committee. The BI Steering Committee includes the senior representatives of the principal areas of the company and the BI manager. The BI Steering Committee will work like a gear to BI.

It is interesting also to consider the creation of a Business Intelligence Competency Center (BICC). The BICC must be a center of expertise for BI, sharing resources, best practices and support to maximize its use in the company. The BICC can be physical or virtual (a team with defined roles and tasks).

Create and maintain a high-performance BI Team.

The BI Team and the business users need to develop together a business-focused metadata that provide all the business requirements.

Identify the gaps between the current state of your organization and the state you want when you implement your BI, and define a plan to close the gaps and achieve the goals.

Choose carefully your BI Tools, and it's important to have ongoing training the users on the BI tools and how to use better the data in the tools, also offering the right BI tool to the right user group, recognizing the importance of BI front-end tools in attracting the users.

Big Changes for BI, Big Opportunities for IT

Recently, I watched a very good video with two Business Intelligence thought leaders, Howard Dresner and Donald Farmer. In the video, entitled Big Changes for BI, Big Opportunities for IT, they discuss the evolving landscape of BI. Worth watching!

According the video description:
"The BI landscape is rapidly shifting to take advantage of new technologies, including consumer-like apps, mobile devices, and self service. That evolution presents IT with some exciting opportunities—and some daunting challenges. In this video, independent analyst Howard Dresner and QlikView's Donald Farmer help prepare you for both. Dresner also shares the findings from his recently completed Wisdom of the Crowds BI Market Study. This user-driven assessment of the BI industry provides timely insights you won't find anywhere else."

Business Intelligence Trumps Facebook

Baseline published a post commenting on their research Top 10 Tech Trends of 2011, where they identified that the enthusiasm is for business analytics and knowledge management, where nearly two-thirds of new commitments are expected to be at a strong or very strong level. According Baseline research, while social networking may be a hot topic, finding a way to make sense of all that data with BI systems will be the 2nd biggest tech trend of 2011.

The survey showed about 9 percent more organizations expecting significant deployments of Business intelligence (BI) systems in 2011, compared with last year’s survey. And it’s high on end-users’ and finance’s wish lists. The driver of this interest seems to be the need to corral all these new, usually disorganized information sources.

According Bill Bosler, CIO at Texas Consultants: “Some social networking techniques will clearly impact all users, and deployments will continue at their own pace -- independent of corporate intent”, which recently designed an ambitious BI tool as part of a new oil refinery project in the Middle East. “There will be plenty of action on the analytics side, crunching all the new real-time data collected by both new and traditional means, and anticipating and mitigating challenges before they occur.”

Leveraging Business Intelligence to Achieve Strategic Priorities

B-Eye-Network published a nice post, written by Nancy Williams, where she commented how companies are using BI to drive profits and business performance. She compared a recent IDC study of corporate priorities that drive the use of consulting firms, with a her survey, about how companies are leveraging business intelligence. The top three of IDC study were improving operational efficiency, creating a more effective business model, and reducing costs, and she got similar results in her survey.

She commented that well-designed BI applications give companies the ability to measure, manage, control, and improve business performance. From scorecards and dashboards that report on performance, to sophisticated analytics that uncover root causes of unfavorable trends and predict the impact of alternatives courses of action, BI is a critical tool in the modern manager's toolkit. She mentioned some examples:

Business Intelligence and Operational Efficiency: For the COO and operations management professionals, BI provides precise and granular information for cost analysis, analytical tools for monitoring and improving customer service and product quality, and high-quality historical facts about demand for forecasting and capacity planning.

Business Intelligence and More Effective Business Models: From a strategic perspective, a more effective business model is one that enables a company to achieve sustained growth, competitive advantage, and suitable profitability. Business intelligence provides critical information about growth and profitability trends from a number of key perspectives

From a tactical or operational perspective, BI provides CFOs and financial management professionals with a precise and granular understanding of the relationship between operational performance and financial results and better tools for performance management, forecasting, and working capital management. BI provides the CMO, sales leaders, and marketing professionals a key tool for better customer segmentation, more precise campaign targeting, improved customer service and customer retention.

Business Intelligence and Cost Reduction: Business intelligence allows cost analysis from multiple perspectives, such as activity costs, relevant costs, incremental costs, fixed and variable costs, and controllable costs. Armed with better cost information, managers can reduce costs in intelligent ways that leave critical capabilities intact.

In order to leverage BI to achieve your company's strategic priorities, it helps to have a BI strategy that is well-aligned with your business strategy, she wrote. She recommends companies take the following key steps for leveraging Business Intelligence:

1. Do a structured analysis of opportunities where better BI would be useful for improving operational efficiency, creating a more effective business model, and/or reducing costs.
2. Prioritize the BI opportunities according to business impact, technical risk, business adoption risk, and competitive impact.
3. Develop a business case built around the prioritized BI opportunities, which together comprise a BI portfolio.
4. Assess your current state capabilities for executing a BI program and identify key gaps, if any.
5. Develop a pragmatic roadmap that includes program management activities, BI application projects, technical infrastructure projects, business process change management projects, and generation of BI program performance metrics.

In addition to ensuring tight alignment between the BI program and strategic business priorities, this approach will enable the CIO and BI Director to do a better job of meeting the demands of business users, she concluded.

Nancy Williams co-wrote with Steve Williams, a very good book called The Profit Impact of Business Intelligence (I wrote a book review on this book)

11 Guiding Principles for a Successful Business Intelligence Implementation

Tibco Spotfire has one of the most prolific corporate blog in the BI area. Updated nearly every day, the blog, entitled Trends and Outliers, is a great source of news and information about Business Intelligence (Full disclosure: I already wrote guest posts for the TIBCO Spotfire's Business Intelligence Blog). Last week, they published a great post on Successful BI Implementation, where they listed 11 guiding principles for a successful business intelligence implementation from Booz & Co. Below is the list:


1. Drive Change From The Top Down and The Bottom Up
Like any new solution, business intelligence is only effective if people use it. For it to be completely adopted, it needs to be used not only by line managers but also by executives.

2. Create a Comprehensive Definition of Business Intelligence
Business intelligence puts emphasis on measuring performance against goals and establishing accountability for reaching those goals. Make sure you have the supporting processes, systems and change management protocols in place to support this new way of running the business.

3. Use an Agile, Modular Approach
You can achieve more flexible and more effective implementations of business intelligence faster with agile development and by focusing on specific areas that are guided by an integrated, overall strategy.

4. Focus On The Right Metrics
Metrics must be aligned with the company’s strategy and capabilities, including both internal and external inputs, and consisting of both leading and lagging indicators.

5. Keep It Simple
Even though technology might let you drill down 16 levels into the data or slice and dice it 100 different ways, that kind of analysis may be irrelevant and distracting. Be selective by including a few key metrics that are the most important and drill down to the top three or four levels.

6. Build a Unified BI System
Some of the most important insight from a BI system can come from discovering how interdependencies impact outcomes across an organization. Integrate data and data analytics across the organization to allow for custom analytics that can identify root causes of issues.

7. Launch Early
To gain acceptance and support you may need some early wins with a BI project. Start with high-priority areas that have high-quality metrics. Demonstrate the value of a BI solution to help build momentum for the project.

8. Create Detailed System Requirements and Select The Right Partners
Successful BI implementations require a partnership between IT and the lines of business. They also require strong project management skills, systems integration know-how and software tools. Make sure you’ve included and selected the right teams across all these areas.

9. Leverage Existing Infrastructure
Business Intelligence implementations should align with a company’s IT strategy and vision for how IT will support the business. BI should complement existing IT capability which can often be achieved by leveraging current IT infrastructure to provide the back end, and using business intelligence solutions to provide the front end.

10. Establish a Centralized Governance Structure
A business intelligence implementation can touch every area of an enterprise. It requires cooperation and shared ownership from the business and IT, new data management protocols, strong project management and ongoing analysis of the metrics used. For maximum success, you should create an overall governance structure led by the business and supported by IT.

11. Proactively Manage Change
Introducing business intelligence requires extensive change management. When evaluating performance against metrics, there should be clear accountability, consequences for not meeting goals and incentives for exceeding them. As with any initiative that requires change management, a successful BI implementation requires senior leadership support, training and communication throughout the enterprise.

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

7 Hot Trends in Business Intelligence

I was invited to write a guest blog post for the TIBCO Spotfire's Business Intelligence Blog. TIBCO Spotfire is a leader in the data visualization space. Today they published the post, entitled 7 Hot Trends in Business Intelligence. Thank you to the people of Spotfire blog for the invitation.

Are You Ready to Reengineer Your Decision Making?

Increasingly the organizations have implemented business intelligence and business analytics solutions, but they have been used for decision making effectively? Thomas Davenport gave a nice interview to MIT Sloan Management Review’s editor-in-chief, Michael S. Hopkins, where he told about that and other issues and what it would take to change that. Davenport said that the link between analytics and decision making needs to be relearned: “What I’ve seen a lot with the proliferation of data and data warehouses and business intelligence systems is that the tie to actual decision making has been lost. We generate a lot of data, we supply a lot of tools and we say to people, ‘Okay, go at it, have fun, play, make better decisions.’ But we never actually ensure that they do.” Below I highlight some parts of the interview:

What’s changing in the world of analytics that CEOs ought to know? Davenport answered: "There are a couple of things. One is that we used to have this distinction in organizations between transactional information systems and decision-oriented systems, and I’m starting to see that distinction break down. You have big enterprise systems vendors like SAP and Oracle saying, “We’re going to put all of our technology into memory so you can get an answer immediately out of a transaction system.” The integration of basic transaction systems, ERP systems, CRM systems, point of sale systems, web ecommerce environments – all of which generate vast amounts of data – means being able to get good answers about what’s going on in your business without having to go to nearly as much trouble as you did in the past. This is less a technology issue, I think, than a management issue. We’ll see an increased focus on decisions and how they’re made. We’ve reengineered a lot of things – our processes, our organizational structures – and I’ve been trying to persuade people that this is the time when we could really start to reengineer our decision making."

Asked to describe what he means by reengineering decision making, he said that he did a study of 57 companies that had improved their decision making in one way or another, and he asked them what they used to make those decisions better. The number one intervention tool they cited was analytics – about 85% said analytics. But right after that was change in culture or leadership, followed by better data, followed by change in business processes, then the education levels of the people doing the decision making.

The use of “decision analysts” is more the exception than the rule, Davenport said. It’s very politically difficult for people to say, “I need help making decisions.” The technical challenges of having analytics managers help executives in decision making pales compared to the cultural and political challenges.

The analytics of collaboration are another trouble spot, according him. The tools for internal collaboration are getting more sophisticated all the time, whether it’s the older knowledge management stuff or the newer Enterprise 2.0 stuff. What companies don’t do much of yet is to view collaboration as a mission-critical activity that needs to be measured and optimized. In the same way that we know how long our customers spend on our website and how many unique visitors we get, we could measure who’s collaborating with whom about what. He calls this the science of collaboration.

About the pressure that the organizations are going to be under to aggressively incorporate analytics and other predictive approaches into decision-making, Davenport thinks the speed depends on the industry. In some industries where there’s a lot of data, like financial services, retail or online, it’s already a business necessity, and getting competitive advantage will require some creative new applications. others, you can still get early competitive advantage.

Davenport said when asked if everybody knows what analytics is: The problem is that the definition is changing. “Business intelligence” was the umbrella term for looking at the past and looking at explanatory and predictive models. Now that umbrella term is “business analytics.” The whole category is just using data and analysis to understand and manage your business more effectively.

He has an acronym: DELTA model, to explain the skills and capabilities that people need in order to take advantage of the opportunities: D is for data. E is for enterprise orientation, which is viewing this not as a series of little silos but something we try to be good at as an enterprise, by getting people talking, sharing data, sharing solutions. L is for leadership. T is for targets, where you figure out where you want to apply it in your business. And then A is for analysts. You really need a lot of smart people.

The MIT Sloan Management Review mentions some interesting further reading related with the Davenport's interview:
- What People Want (and How to Predict It) - Thomas H. Davenport and Jeanne G. Harris
- Value-Creation, Experiments, And Why IT Does Matter - Michael Schrage, interviewed by Michael S. Hopkins
- The Collective Intelligence Genome - Thomas W. Malone, Robert Laubacher and Chrysanthos Dellarocas

Rethink Your Next Generation Business Intelligence Strategy

Several organizations are rethinking their business intelligence strategies due many factors. R "Ray" Wang recently did a great research on this issue and published some results in his blog, in an article entitled Rethink Your Next Generation Business Intelligence Strategy. The research report is well detailed and graphically illustrated, and is worth reading. Accordind Wang, the research from this document came from conversations with 37 buyers (users) and the following sellers (vendors): Actuate, IBM Cognos, Informatica, Information Builders, myDials, Oracle, QlikTech, Proferi, SAP Business Objects and SAS Institute. Below is a summary of Wang's research:

As BI continues to evolve from fragmented and historical reporting to pervasive, predictive, and real-time decision support, an organization’s success increasingly depends on the support for a expanding information:
- New and traditional data types. A proliferation of data types from social, machine to machine, and mobile sources add new data types to traditional transactional data.
- Visualization and reporting paradigms. Users expect more than the traditional charts, gauges, and dials. Web 2.0 innovations show how Rich Internet Applications (RIA) through tools such as AJAX, Adobe Flash and Microsoft Silverlight can create interactive BI experiences.
- Approaches and styles. Analytical techniques continue to improve as data volumes explode. New and traditional approaches include advanced analytics, business activity monitoring (BAM), BI workspace, decision support systems, low latency BI, meta data generated BI apps, non-modeled exploration and in-memory analytics, scenario analysis, and OLAP.
- Deployment options. With data coming from so many different sources, users are seeking new deployment options. Common solutions in the BI portfolio include BI appliances, BI in the Cloud, BI specific DBMS, Mobile BI, open source BI, on-premises packaged BI apps, private BI clouds, and SaaS based BI.

Figure: The Information Management Matrix Drives Next Gen BI
Copyright © 2010 R Wang and Insider Associates, LLC. All rights reserved.

The explosion in semi-structured and unstructured data challenges existing solutions. Unfortunately, no single vendor can support all the data types that fit into the following three categories:
- Structured data. Structured data remains the most understood type of data. Traditional sources comprise of data in transactional systems such as ERP, CRM, SCM and other database management systems.
- Semi-structured data. Common examples include flat files in record format, RSS feeds, XML documents, and data in spreadsheets.
- Unstructured data. Sources include natural-language text from e-mail, blogs, SMS, social networking sites, text fields, audio, video, and images.

Wang listed 10 emerging and evolving next gen requirements that span dynamic user experiences, business process focus, and community connectedness:
1 - Support role based designs.
2 - Deliver consistent experience across channels and deployment options. 3 - Enable contextual, timely, and relevant delivery of information.
4 - Align with configurable and adaptive business processes.
5 - Facilitate outcome-focus and results-orientation.
6 - Foster proactive, predictive, & actionable insight.
7 - Empower all types of stakeholders.
8 - Provide pervasive and natural collaboration.
9 - Engage self-learning and self-awareness.
10- Permit security, scalability, and safety.

The long term BI strategy must support a multi-disciplinary integrated approach, he mentioned:
- Business process management. A strong linkage between BI and business process management will enable operational BI (OBI). Organizations will transition from reactive to proactive process management.
- Content management. Unstructured information tied back to BI will bring new dimensions to information management. Organizations can expect improved informed decision making and richer context to analytical reports.
- Data governance. Formulation of an organizational strategy and data stewardship methodology must align with the BI strategy. Organizations must model business rules and controls that span cross-functional teams to improve the success of data quality and BI deployments.
- Master data management. Master data management forms the foundation of successful BI engagements by acquiring, cleaning, distributing, organizing, and managing master data.
- Social technologies. BI’s reach into social apps and the social metadata layer bodes well for an industry just starting to explore social technologies.

Comparing Vendor BI Strategies, Wang listed 3 approaches:
- Application and business process centric. These solutions take an application or business process centered approach based on applications such as ERP and CRM.
- Pure play best of breeds. These solutions provide deep capabilities in a subset of data types, visualization and reporting paradigms, BI approaches and styles, and deployment deployment options.
- Strategic BI platforms. These solutions seek to build a comprehensive approach to supporting data types, visualization and reporting paradigms, and BI approaches and styles.

When evaluating next gen BI strategies, Wang said to consider the following best practices in vendor selection:
- Focus on enabling all types of users. Solutions should enable anyone from a front line employee to a power user to view reports, build ad-hoc reports, collaborate, and improve decision making.
- Support highly differentiated processes. Take advantage of industry specific solutions that meet critical vertical requirements and reduce time to market. Over time, expect BI to continue to specialize by verticals. Certain industries will require different levels of information optimization.
- Stay flexible. Ensure the systems supports multi-channel heterogeneous data sources.
- Avoid vendor lock-in to one set of technologies.
- Expect to move beyond departmental. Choose technology approaches and styles that can scale across different business functions, data types, reporting paradigms, and deployment options.
- Factor existing infrastructure. Consider when it makes sense to invest in or throw out existing systems. Astute next gen enterprises find ways to simultaneously leverage existing investments and innovate.
- Apply selection tools. Save time and use independent vendor selection short list and check list tools to map business requirements such as organization and team structure, business and process maturity, technology strategy, and technology solution ecosystem.

Tibco announces Tibco Silver Spotfire, a cloud-based BI/analytics

Tibco announced today Tibco Silver Spotfire, a cloud-based BI/analytics. According the press release: "Tibco Silver Spotfire is a fully functional on-demand offering designed to enable anyone to create, publish and share custom dashboards or reports for business analytics and business intelligence (BI) in the cloud. TIBCO Silver Spotfire is more than traditional BI in a SaaS offering; it is essentially a “social BI” offering that enables business teams to easily build and share reports, dashboards, charts, and other visualization and calculations in order to grow a corporate analytics knowledge base. TIBCO Silver Spotfire can be integrated with social media, allowing users to embed live dashboards into their business blogs and online articles, thereby distributing their analytic knowledge base more broadly than is possible with traditional BI tools. "

The good news is: You can use one-year free trial, with no cost or obligation. That is an interesting initiative by Tibco.


I read several comments on blogs and on Twitter about the Tibco's announcement, I would like to highlight:

Sandy Kemsley commented in her blog:"This shouldn’t be a huge surprise to those watching TIBCO announcements to date: at their conference in May, “Silver Analytics” was mentioned in the general session as an upcoming product release, and they’ve made much ado about moving all of their other products onto the Silver cloud platform that this seems inevitable."

Merv Adrian commented in his blog: "Spotfire has had a “visionary” reputation for some time now (Gartner has recognized it as such in Magic Quadrant research), and Tibco has steadily grown its market share, though like other portfolio software vendors, it is unwilling to break individual product numbers out for a clear comparison. Its strong visualization, powerful statistical engine, and in-memory performance focus (with load balancing in the server in its latest release) have extended its reputation. Spotfire also leverages Tibco’s long experience with event processing to provide context-aware features that have driven continued expansion. Silver Spotfire confirms its preference for the visionary play with an authoring client, andweb-based sharing and hosting that will be available for a monthly fee after the trial."


You can register for use the free software trial through the Tibco Silver Spotfire website.

Business Intelligence and the Soccer World Cup

The 2010 FIFA World Cup South Africa finished today (Spain won the World Cup, congratulations Spain!) During the world cup, I saw some interesting initiatives regarding BI and the world cup.


SAP created a BI solution called SAP BusinessObjects 2010 Football Experience. According SAP's website: "Can't travel to South Africa this year? Let SAP bring the excitement of world soccer to you! Whether you're a novice or an obsessed fan, "YOUR World Soccer Experience" lets you become part of the action and participate in a whole new way. See how a live working business intelligence system from SAP can help enhance your experience of the game." Timo Elliott published a good post in his blog detailing the SAP solution.



idashboards created an interactive dashboard software to track the 2010 World Cup tournament. According idashboards' website: "These dashboards monitor the matches played by each team, match scores and points earned by each team in easy-to-view charts and graphs which are updated after each game. Teams compete to make it past the Group Stage and be among the top 16 teams. From the Round of 16, users can view at-a-glance information on team standings and follow who wins the title. There is also an interactive customized map of South Africa where users can roll-over a stadium to see the matches being played there."


Bruno Aziza created a YouTube channel called Soccer Analytics, where he is publishing several videos about analytics and soccer.

Strategies for Creating a High-Performance BI Team

Wayne Eckerson writes a good blog in The Data Warehousing Institute (TDWI)'s website, where he publishes posts about BI issues. Recently, he published two great posts regarding to create high-performance BI Team, entitled Strategies for Creating a High-Performance BI Team and Attracting and Retaining Top BI Professionals. In my opinion, create and maintain a high-performance BI Team is one of the most important steps to develop a successful BI initiative.

In the article Strategies for Creating a High-Performance BI Team, he defined seven guidelines that can help to create a high-performance BI team that delivers outstanding value to your organization:

1. Recruit the best people. The companies shouldn’t hire people just because they know a specific tool or programming language or have previous experience managing a specific task, such as quality assurance. If you need specialists like that, it’s better to outsource such positions to a low-cost provider on a short-term contractual basis. Although you should demand certain level of technical competency and know-how, you ultimately want people who fundamentally believe that BI can have a transformative effect on the business and possess the business acumen and technical capabilities to make that happen.

2. Create multi-disciplinary teams. The key to remaining nimble and agile as your BI team grows is to recreate the small, multi-disciplinary teams from your early stage BI initiative. Assign three to five people responsibility for delivering an entire BI solution from source to report. Train them in agile development techniques so they work iteratively with the business to deliver solutions quickly. With multiple, multidisciplinary teams, you may need to reset the architecture once in awhile to align what teams are building on the ground, but this tradeoff is worth it. Multi-disciplinary teams work collaboratively and quickly to find optimal solutions to critical problems, such as whether to code rules in a report, the data model, or the ETL layer. They also provide staff more leadership opportunities and avenues for learning new skills and development techniques.

3. Establish BI Governance. Once a BI team has achieved some quick wins, it needs to recruit the business to run the BI program while it assumes a supportive role. The key indicator of the health of a BI program is the degree to which the business assumes responsibility for its long-term success. Such commitment is expressed in a formal BI governance program.

Most BI governance programs consist of two steering committees that meet regularly to manage the BI initiative. An executive steering committee comprised of BI sponsors from multiple departments meets quarterly to review the BI roadmap, prioritize projects, and secure funding. Second, a working committee comprised of business analysts (i.e., subject matter experts who are intensive consumers of data) meets weekly or monthly to define the BI roadmap, hash out DW definitions and subject areas, suggest enhancements, and select products. The job of the BI team is to support the two BI governance committees in a reciprocal, trusting relationship.

4. Find Purple People. The key to making BI governance programs work is recruiting people who can straddle the worlds of business and information technology (IT). These people are neither blue (i.e., business) nor red (i.e., IT) but a combination of both. These so-called purple people can speak both the language of business and data, making them perfect intermediaries between the two groups. Astute BI directors are always looking for potential purple people to recruit to their teams. Purple people often hail from the business side where they’ve served as a business analyst or a lieutenant to a BI sponsor.

5. Aspire to Becoming a Solutions Provider. The best BI teams aren’t content simply to provision data. BI directors know that if the business is to reap the full value of the BI resource, their teams have to get involved in delivering BI solutions.

High-performance BI teams work with each department to build a set of standard interactive reports or dashboards that meet 60% to 80% of the needs of casual users in the department. They then train and support each department’s “Super Users” -- tech-savvy business users or business analysts--to use self-service BI tools to create ad hoc reports on behalf of the casual users in the department, meeting the remaining 20% to 40% of their information requirements.

6. Give Your BI Team a Name. A name is a powerful thing that communicates meaning and influences perception. Most business people don’t know what business intelligence or analytics is (or may have faulty notions or ideas that don’t conform with the mission of your team.) So spend time considering appropriate names that clearly communicate what your group does and why it’s important to the business.

7. Position BI within an Information Management Department. The BI team should be organized within a larger information management (IM) department that is separate from IT and reports directly to the CIO or COO. The IM department is responsible for all information-driven applications that support the business. These may include: data warehousing, business intelligence, performance management, advanced analytics, spatial analytics, customer management, and master data management.

Attracting and Retaining Top BI Professionals

In the article Attracting and Retaining Top BI Professionals, he wrote that to create high-performance BI teams, we need to attract the right people, and there are a couple of ways to do this: Skills Versus Qualities, and Performance-based Hiring.

Skills Versus Qualities

Inner Drive. First, don’t just hire people to fill technical slots. Yes, you should demand a certain level of technical competence. The bottom line is that you shouldn’t hire technical specialists whose skills may become obsolete tomorrow if your environment changes. Hire people who have inner drive and can reinvent themselves on a regular basis to meet the future challenges your team will face. If you need pure technical specialists, consider outsourcing or contracting people to fill these roles.

Think Big. To attract the right people, it’s important to set ambitious goals. A big vision and stretch targets will attract ambitious people who seek new challenges and opportunities and discourage risk-adverse folks who simply want a “job” and a company to “take care” of them. One way to think big is to run the BI group like a business. Create mission, vision, and values statements for your team and make sure they align with the strategic objectives of your organization. Put people in leadership positions, delegate decision making, and hold them accountable for results.

Performance-based Hiring

Proactive Job Descriptions. We spend a lot of time measuring performance after we hire people, but we need to inject performance measures into the hiring process itself. To do this, write proactive job descriptions that contain a mission statement, a series of measurable outcomes, and the requisite skills and experience needed to achieve the outcomes. If done right, a proactive job description helps prospective team members know exactly what they are getting into. They know specific goals they have to achieve and when they have to achieve them. A proactive job description helps them evaluate honestly whether they have what it takes to do the job.

Where are they? So where do you find these self-actuated people? For example, you can find on online forums, such as TDWI's LinkedIn group, and on Twitter. You can assess the quality of advice they offer.

Retaining the Right People

Finally, to retain your high-performance team, you need to understand what makes BI professionals tick. Salary is always a key factor, but not the most important one. BI professionals want new challenges and opportunities to expand their knowledge and skills. One way to retain valuable team members is to create small teams responsible for delivering complete solutions. This gives team members exposure to all technologies and skills needed to meet business needs and also gives them ample face time with the business folks who use the solution. BI professionals are more motivated when they understand how their activities contribute to the organization’s overall success. Another retention technique is to give people opportunities to exercise their leadership skills. For instance, assign your rising stars to lead small, multidisciplinary teams where they define the strategy, execute the plans, and report their progress to the team as a whole.

Wayne Eckerson defined very well in which their articles the way to create a High-Performance BI Team. Certainly companies that create their BI teams following those guidelines will have a great chance of developing a successful BI program.

Wayne Eckerson is the author of the book Performance Dashboards: Measuring, Monitoring, and Managing Your Business (I wrote a book review on this book)

Business Intelligence and Performance Management for the 21st Century

Ventana Research is a benchmark research and business technology advisory firm. They usually publish good studies, researchs and white papers. They also have a good blog, where they publish posts on the business, IT, technology and industry issues. Recently, Intelligent Enterprise published a great article about a new study by Ventana Research, entitled Business Intelligence and Performance Management for the 21st Century. According the article, Ventana Research undertook this benchmark research to assess the current state of maturity, trends and best practices. The goal was to determine how organizations approach BI and performance management and prioritize their key components, and to identify what elements they desire in a comprehensive approach.

The research found strong interest in and growing demand for BI and performance management. However, the research paints a picture of a market in an early stage of development. It shows that most organizations face considerable obstacles. According the study, they have only basic BI capabilities such as querying sources for specific data (74%), generating reports from data (74%) and accessing data from a spreadsheet for further analysis (70%). These and other findings lead Ventana to conclude that in general, organizations are still maturing in their use of BI and performance management. Organizations’ most important goals in deploying BI tools are to provide access to data through a variety of tools (cited by 57% of participants), to make it possible to apply analytics to the data easily (61%), and to communicate and collaborate on the analytics (55%).

Based on the research, Ventana listed 10 recommendations on how to proceed. Below is a summary of Ventana's recommedation:

1. Assess your organization’s maturity in BI and performance management. Applying the Ventana Research Maturity Index methodology, Ventana found that only 15 percent of organizations reach the "Innovative" level in all four functional categories of maturity (People, Process, Information and Technology). Ventana's analysis also reveals that maturity across these categories is uneven. From a technology perspective, organizations still use spreadsheets and e-mail too often to perform BI tasks. Examine your own capabilities in each of the four maturity categories and research how organizations that rank higher are able to do so.

2. Consider the effectiveness of your current tools and applications. Ventana found that most organizations have at least some doubts about the technology they currently use for BI and performance management. Only 12 percent of participants said they are completely confident in their BI technology, and only 9 percent made that assertion for the technology they use to manage performance. Explore users’ feelings about the tools they use and identify to tools that should be replaced.

3. Reduce the number of BI tools and the use of spreadsheets. BI systems have been around for years now, yet all but 10 percent of participants said they have at least some degree of difficulty standardizing BI into a consistent and reliable technology. Spreadsheets are an impediment to collaborative processes in enterprises. They are prone to errors and conflicts in data between files that are thought to be the same. Ventana advises taking steps to reduce the number of BI tools in use and standardize them. This research reinforces the many past findings that spreadsheets should not be used for this or any collaborative, enterprise purpose.

4. Compare the BI capabilities you have with those you want. The research shows that most participating organizations have deployed or are deploying basic BI capabilities such as querying sources for specific data (74%), generating reports from data (74%) or accessing data from a spreadsheet for further analysis (70%). However, notably fewer have more advanced capabilities. For example, only 30% can apply analytics to data effectively, 24% can collaborate on data and metrics, and 22% can conduct what-if analysis for planning and forecasting. Decide what BI capabilities you want and examine products that can supply them.

5. Determine whether products currently in use can handle performance management well. Participants in our research said their most important goals in managing performance are to align actions and decisions to goals and strategy (cited by 77%) and to be able to plan effectively for improvement (75%). Business intelligence can be a key tool for helping organizations understand, align and optimize their performance; however, participants expressed mixed feelings about how well their BI tools help them in these efforts. In several aspects of understanding performance, fewer than 10% said their current products are superior, and the largest percentages called them only adequate or worse. In aspects of aligning performance, products fared worse: Again fewer than 10% rated their products superior in any category, and inadequacy outpolled basic adequacy. For optimizing performance, responses followed the same pattern, with no aspect exceeding 10% in superior rating. These findings suggest that you should take a hard look at the adequacy of the tools and systems you use to manage performance; determine whether other tools would enable more cost-effective performance management.

6. Identify the types of data you need to access and analyze. A majority of participants (57%) said that an important goal in providing BI tools is to provide access to data through a variety of methods. Asked to identify the types of data they consider most critical to access, 71 percent of participants cited not a type but a source: databases residing in data warehouses or operational data stores. The next two most-often-cited data types involve business activities important to a range of job functions: finance data (67%) and customer data (61%). More than half of participants said they need to access spreadsheets (55%) or transactional data (54%) from enterprise systems such as customer relationship management (CRM), enterprise resource planning (ERP) or online transaction processing (OLTP). Indicating the increasing diversity of data types, one-third (34%) said they need to access unstructured content such as text, images, voice or Web data. To put BI and performance management to the best use, Ventana advises identifying the types and sources of data your company or unit needs to access most often and then evaluating tools that can help you do so easily.

7. Consider adopting or expanding metrics for performance management. The ability to measure and track performance is an integral component of performance management. Currently 41% of participating organizations evaluate performance data and 29% are assessing metrics or measures to do so; more than one-third of executives (37%) measure performance. Find which processes and employees in your organization might perform better if metrics were available for evaluating their performance, then deploy systems that can monitor those metrics.

8. Address organizational barriers to improving BI and performance management. While research participants clearly recognize the worth of improvement, they also acknowledge a number of barriers to implementing projects to do that, mostly involving money or institutional support. The barrier cited most often is lack of resources (60%), followed by lack of a budget (43%). The top two people issues are lack of awareness (cited by 36%) and lack of executive support (26%). Determine what barriers exist in your own organization and discuss how to overcome them.

9. Look into alternative means of software deployment. Asked how they deploy this software, half (53%) of participants said they currently install and manage it on their own premises in the established manner; however, that percentage drops dramatically regarding plans for deployment in the next 12months (13%) or 12 to 24 months (11%). Nearly as many said that in the next 12 to 24 months they will choose hosted software managed off-site (13% and 9%, respectively) or renting software as a service (SaaS) on demand (12% and 10%). These options can help address organizational barriers such as lack of resources to provide BI and performance management.

10. Examine software that can be deployed across roles in the enterprise. The research found that two-thirds (66%) of organizations are planning to evaluate new technologies for BI and performance management. In terms of roles, managers (72%) were most assertive about planning to consider new products. Consider the breadth of implementation you require from software to support BI and performance management and make that a criterion when evaluating products and vendors. Challenge vendors to demonstrate the appropriateness and usability of the products they’re offering, and ask to speak with customers in situations similar to yours.

You can download the complete executive summary version of the Ventana Research report (registration required).

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”.

Self-Service BI: Empowering the Line-of-Business Manager

In the recent released report, entitled Self-Service BI: Empowering the Line-of-Business Manager, written by Michael Lock, Aberdeen Group found that top performers were able to drive higher adoption of their BI tools by eliminating or reducing IT involvement, and developing their top managers into analytically inclined decision makers. This report is based on direct feedback from 223 executives across the globe.

According the executive summary: "Today's Line-of-Business (LoB) managers need to make quicker decisions based on cleaner and more relevant information. Waiting for a report to make its way through an IT queue is no longer an option as timely decisions carry a higher business premium than ever before. LoB decision makers now require self-service access to their analytical solutions in order to stay abreast of market trends and react quicker to threats and opportunities. Aberdeen's research shows that Best-in-Class companies have a comprehensive strategy to develop their non-technical LoB managers into analytically inclined decision makers, spread business intelligence (BI) capability to more organizational functions, and drive significant internal and external business efficiencies as a result."

"Through training programs and leveraging cross-functional input from multiple lines-of-business, leading companies are able to create their own breed of 'power user'. This type of user is not an IT expert, a software developer, or a database administrator. The power user has the ability to create their own functional specific views and reports, can do ad-hoc discovery on their own data, and can generate self-service business insight from the tools at their disposal", wrote Lock.

You can obtain a complimentary copy of the report in the Aberdeen Group website. This Benchmark report is provided free for a limited time by its sponsors Noetix and SAP.

Increasingly there are companies intending to reduce or eliminate IT involvement in creating analytic applications, and vendors are offering a path around IT, mainly through Web 2.0-Oriented BI Tools, enabling business users to create their own BI applications.

BI: one of fastest-growing cloud SaaS solutions

The Business Intelligence is one of the kind of applications with a greater growth potential to move into the cloud-based computing, according a new study, from research company IDC, entitled Worldwide Business Analytics Software-as-a-Service Forecast, 2008-2013. Search CIO published today an article commenting about this study. The study finds that the number of business analytics SaaS users will grow rapidly from a small base, however market revenue will remain low relative to on-premise software throughout the forecast period. According the study, over the next five years, the business analytics software-as-a service (SaaS) market will grow more than three times as fast as the total business analytics software market with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 22.4% through 2013.

According the SearchCIO's article, of all the apps moving into the cloud - email, customer relationship management, disaster recovery (DR) and so forth - BI is the one causing the most commotion. That's because traditional BI vendors got too comfy with their six-digit contracts and forgot to innovate, experts say. Meanwhile, upstart BI SaaS solution vendors are coming out with on-demand services that combine BI with data integration. The article mentions several examples of companies that are using BI SaaS solutions.

The article also mentions another recent IDC study: Improving Organizational Decision-Making Through Pervasive Business Intelligence: The Five Key Factors That Lead to Business Intelligence Diffusion. According this study, the evidence of the competitive value of business intelligence and analytics solutions is growing. Business intelligence, data warehousing, and analytic application, collectively business analytics, technology and processes are being deployed to support decision-making. The study included in-depth interviews with 22 companies and a survey of more than 1,100 additional organizations in 11 countries. It found that making BI available throughout an organization means much more than distributing reports to all stakeholders. In some cases, BI solutions are deployed to automate an existing way of making decisions; in others, BI solutions are deployed to change the way decisions are made - on the basis of fact, rather than opinion.

How to Get Executive Involvement

When you are starting a Business Intelligence initiative, one of the most important steps is the management commitment. Executive support is critical to any Business Intelligence program. Information Management published an article on this issue, entitled How to Get Executive Involvement - Ensure that sponsors and leaders understand the importance of business intelligence, written by Jonathan G. Geiger. In the article, Jonathan told about the great resistance to establishing an executive steering committee at numerous companies and some approaches for overcoming executive reluctance to participation.

In general, the executives are too busy, unaware or disinclined to support a given program, he said. Some executives simply do not know what BI is and why it is important to the enterprise. These executives may be receptive to requests for their time, but before making the commitment, they will need to understand how the BI program will help the company.This group of executives is ambivalent about BI. The best way to bring these people on board is to provide them with an executive-level briefing about BI, to show them examples of success stories at other companies within their industry.

The greatest challenge will come from key executives who think they understand BI but are openly nonsupportive. Most often, these detractors form their opinions based on personal negative experiences, misinformation or a desire to remain in control. Executives in opposition to a program cannot be ignored. These are influential people, and they are capable of derailing the program when it does not serve their objectives.

He commented about some approaches for overcoming executive reluctance to participation:

- Use an existing committee. Some companies are very resistant to forming committees. In such a situation, rather than establishing a new steering committee for BI, see if an existing executive committee exists with the same kinds of people that should provide BI oversight. If such a panel exists, consider appending BI topics to that committee's agenda on a periodic basis. While this approach does not provide a committed oversight group for BI, it can still provide direction, monitor progress, enlist funds/resources, and resolve issues. Over time, as the BI program grows, the members may choose to create a separate committee or devote specific meetings just to BI.

- Create a tactical committee. While it does not have the same level of authority, a tactical committee of middle managers can provide guidance on a day-to-day basis. If there is enough support for such a committee, it should be formed, and only issues that require higher sign-off would be raised to the executive committee. Keep in mind that limited executive involvement or response sends a clear negative signal concerning their perception of the program's importance.

- Make good use of their time. The BI director should set a process whereby executives can be assured that 1) they are needed, and 2) their time at BI steering committee meetings will be well spent. If executives feel their participation was worthy of their role, they will continue to participate; otherwise, they will send lower-level substitutes or choose not to be represented at all.