Top Trends That Will Impact Business Intelligence in 2012

The Business Intelligence scenario has evolved greatly in recent times, with new trends, approaches, concepts and tools. Early this month, I already shared my thoughts for the TIBCO Spotfire's Business Intelligence Blog, in a post entitled Top BI Resolutions and Trends for 2012 from Industry Experts, where Julie B. Hunt, Gregory Piatetsky-Shapiro and I talked about the BI Resolution for Companies and the Top 3 Trends for Industry. It's worth reading.

Here are my BI Resolution and a more comprehensive list of the top trends, that in my opinion, will impact Business Intelligence in 2012:

BI Resolution for Companies

Take advantage of the emerging BI trends to make organizations actually become a democracy of information, with business intelligence being used for everyone, anywhere, anytime.

Top Trends That Will Impact Business Intelligence in 2012

Mobile BI – The proliferation of smartphones and tablets in the enterprise, and the need to make decisions anywhere/anytime accessing real-time analytics make mobile BI remain a hot topic. There are several companies that specialize in developing mobile BI applications and most BI vendors also have developed a mobile version. Howard Dresner, who recently published the latest version of the Mobile Business Intelligence Market Study, considers that mobile BI becomes fundamentally the new platform for business intelligence.

Cloud BI – The cloud-based BI will boost the use of BI. The cloud model allows the companies to save money, with faster implementation without substantial investments. It is also ease of use. Although there are many concerns about implementing BI on the cloud (mainly security), the vendors and the market as a whole have matured. It is important to remember that it’s necessary to have a well-defined data integration strategy to implement a successful cloud-based BI.

Big Data – The amount of data in our world has been growing exponentially, and the uses of big data in the BI scenario will allow companies to put data to work more efficiently. They could really turn into data-driven enterprises.

Self-Service BI - With BI tools even easier to use, and the results easy to consume, enabling more flexibility and analytics capabilities to nontechnical users, the business users are less dependent on the IT.

In-Memory Analytics - The growing need of companies for high-performance analytics applications, with the ability to provide high speed of access in a big amount of data, make the interest in In-Memory Analytics platforms increases more and more.

Open Source BI - The Open-source BI has evolved significantly with more complete and sofisticated tools. They are being implemented by large, medium and small companies, moving toward mainstream.

Text Analytics and Sentiment Analysis - The growing use of social media for the companies (several companies have Twitter account and Facebook page) along with the need of collect and analyze many kinds of unstructured data are becoming the text analytics and sentiment analysis increasingly important.

Collaborative BI - BI tools with embedded collaboration capabilities allow BI users to share information and work together more easily and efficiently. People like and are familiar with the use of social media tools, thus facilitating the widespread use of Social and Collaborative BI.

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."

Profiles in Performance: Business Intelligence Journeys and the Roadmap for Change

Profiles in Performance: Business Intelligence Journeys and the Roadmap for Change - Howard Dresner

Howard Dresner touched on a crucial point in this book: before an organization can succeed, it first must create a culture that values performance, transparency, and accountability.

He said when he began work on his book, his intention was to capture and present best practices of performance management, but along the way, he realized that the missing element that determines success or failure really boils down to the notion of culture. Just as well that he decided to write about performance-directed culture, because he wrote a great and insightful book.

In the book, Howard explains the Performance Culture Maturity Model, a comprehensive model created by him to understand the way of organizations have taken in their search for better performance. The model has six dimensions and four levels of achievement, where the four levels of maturity determine how mature an organization is in each of six performance-directed culture criteria.

He used the Performance Culture Maturity Model as a filter to help select four organizations, and wrote well detailed case studies about them. He wrote one chapter for each organization, showing the issues and efforts to build and sustain a performance-directed culture, and also sharing their setbacks and successes.

I completely agree with his definition: “The performance-directed culture is a journey, not a destination.”

The book is an outstanding reference on how to build a culture of performance in the organizations, and is highly recommended reading for everyone involved with performance management.

Predictions and Trends for 2010

Every new year the people make their predictions for the future and also comment on trends. I've read many posts and articles about predictions and trends for 2010 on business intelligence and performance management. Below is a summary of some that I found most interesting:

Early december Nenshad Bardoliwalla published in Enterprise Irregulars and in his personal blog, a very good and well detailed post entitled The Top 10 Trends for 2010 in Analytics, Business Intelligence, and Performance Management, where he described his trends:

1 - We will witness the emergence of packaged strategy-driven execution applications. As we discussed in Driven to Perform: Risk-Aware Performance Management From Strategy Through Execution (Nenshad Bardoliwalla, Stephanie Buscemi, and Denise Broady, New York, NY, Evolved Technologist Press, 2009), the end state for next-generation business applications is not merely to align the transactional execution processes contained in applications like ERP, CRM, and SCM with the strategic analytics of performance and risk management of the organization, but for those strategic analytics to literally drive execution. We called this "Strategy-Driven Execution", the complete fusion of goals, initiatives, plans, forecasts, risks, controls, performance monitoring, and optimization with transactional processes.

2 - The holy grail of the predictive, real-time enterprise will start to deliver on its promises. While classic analytic tools and applications have always done a good job of helping users understand what has happened and then analyze the root causes behind this performance, the value of this information is often stale before it reaches its intended audience.

3 - The industry will put reporting and slice-and-dice capabilities in their appropriate places and return to its decision-centric roots with a healthy dose of Web 2.0 style collaboration.

4 - Performance, risk, and compliance management will continue to become unified in a process-based framework and make the leap out of the CFO’s office. The disciplines of performance, risk, and compliance management have been considered separate for a long time, but the walls are breaking down.

5 - SaaS / Cloud BI Tools will steal significant revenue from on-premise vendors but also fight for limited oxygen amongst themselves.

6 - The undeniable arrival of the era of big data will lead to further proliferation in data management alternatives.

7 - Advanced Visualization will continue to increase in depth and relevance to broader audiences.

8 - Open Source offerings will continue to make in-roads against on-premise offerings. Much as Saas BI offerings are doing, Open Source offerings in the larger BI market are disrupting the incumbent, closed-source, on-premise vendors.

9 - Data Quality, Data Integration, and Data Virtualization will merge with Master Data Management to form a unified Information Management Platform for structured and unstructured data.

10 - Excel will continue to provide the dominant paradigm for end-user BI consumption. For Excel specifically, the number one analytic tool by far with a home on hundreds of millions of personal desktops, Microsoft has invested significantly in ensuring its continued viability as we move past its second decade of existence, and its adoption shows absolutely no sign of abating any time soon.


James Kobielus published his thought-provoking post Advanced Analytics Predictions For 2010 in the Forrester's blog:

- Self-service operational BI puts information workers in driver’s seat: Enterprises have begun to adopt self-service BI to cut costs, unclog the analytics development backlog, and improve the velocity of practical insights. Users are demanding tools to do interactive, deeply dimensional exploration of information pulled from enterprise data warehouses, data marts, transactional applications, and other systems. In 2010, users will flock to self-service BI offerings as the soft economy keeps pressure on IT budgets. In the coming year, BI software as a service (SaaS) subscription offerings will be particularly popular, in a market that has already become fiercely competitive. So will the new generation of BI mashup offerings for premises-based deployment.

- User-friendly predictive modeling comes to the information workplace: Predictive analytics can play a pivotal role in day-to-day business operations. If available to information workers—not just to Ph.D. statisticians and professional data miners—predictive modeling tools can help business people continually tweak their plans based on flexible what-if analyses and forecasts that leverage both deep historical data as well as fresh streams of current event data. In 2010, user-friendly predictive modeling tools will increasingly come to market, either as stand-alone offerings or as embedded features of companies’ BI environments.

- Advanced analytics sinks deep roots in the data warehouse: Advanced analytics demands a high-performance data management infrastructure to handle data integration, statistical analysis, and other compute-intensive functions. In 2010, in-database analytics will become a new best practice for data mining and content analytics, in which the enterprise data warehousing professionals must now collaborate closely with the subject matter experts who build and maintain predictive models. To support heterogeneous interoperability for in-database and in-cloud analytics, open development frameworks-- especially MapReduce and Hadoop—will be adopted broadly by data warehousing and analytics tools vendors. In the coming year, we’ll also see the beginning of an industry push toward an open development framework for inline predictive models that can be deployed to CEP environments. Clearly, in-CEP predictive analytics will be a critical component of truly adaptive BAM for process analytics.

- Social network analysis bring powerful predictive analysis to the online economy: Social network analysis thrives on the deepening streams of information—structured and unstructured, user-generated and automated—that emanate from Facebook, Twitter, and other new Web 2.0 communities. In the coming year, many vendors of predictive modeling tools will enhance their social network analysis features to support real-time customer segmentation, target marketing, churn analysis, and anti-fraud.

- Low-cost data warehousing delivers fast analytics to the midmarket: Though enterprises can certainly do BI without a data warehouse, this critical infrastructure platform is essential for high-performance reporting, query, and analytics against large data sets. In 2010, many data warehousing vendors will lower the price of their basic appliance products to less than $20,000 per usable terabyte.At the same time, enterprises will see a growing range of cost-effective solution appliances in 2010, combined DW appliances with preconfigured BI, advanced analytics, data cleansing, industry information models, and other data management applications and tools.

- Data warehousing virtualizing into the cloud: The data warehouse, like all other components of the BI and data management infrastructure, is entering the cloud. In 2010, we’ll see vendors continue to introduce cloud, SaaS, and virtualized deployments of their core analytic databases.


Howard Dresner wrote a nice and interesting post in his blog, called A thought (or two) for the New Year. He asked a question: why do we (still) struggle to effectively use information to make better decisions and what can we do to improve?, and told about five ideas that might help:

1 - Get the culture right: If a culture is not receptive to BI and EPM, those efforts will have limited impact. This is the basis for my latest book, Profiles in performance – Business Intelligence Journeys and the Roadmap for Change. In it I assert that organizations need to establish a “performance-directed culture” first – as a context or rationale for these solutions. To this end, I developed the Performance Culture Maturity Model (Patent Pending) and related methodologies for assessing an organization’s culture and offering a path to becoming more “performance-directed”.

2 - Don’t get overly enamored with technology: This is not to say that technology isn’t important. You certainly will want to have appropriate technology once you have the right environment in place to use it. However, it’s a means to an end, not an end in itself and large sums of money can be wasted with a “technology-led” strategy.

3 - Get strategic: There was a time when many/most organizations had “strategic planning” functions. They were chartered to think and plan for the future – developing multiple scenarios and associated action plans. Today, few organizations have this sort of a function and it shows. Most organizations have allowed themselves to become overwhelmingly tactical and reactive in nature.

4 - Get the metrics right: Assuming we have a well defined and communicated mission and strategy, we can use metrics as a means of measuring and managing execution. This is where things get complex and there’s a real risk of providing large quantities of information with little impact. Here’s where “less is more”. Metrics need to be focused upon alignment with the strategy in a way that they’re actionable.

5 - Take action: Many of us either engage in “analysis paralysis” or rely upon intuition when faced with a critical decision. Instead, we should view Business Intelligence and associated analyses as part of a learning process – which uses information to inform our decision-making, but doesn’t make the decision for us. This requires taking calculated risks, since information will typically be incomplete. However, the former two scenarios expose the organization to completely unknown risks. So, frame the decision to be made. Collect and analyze enough information/facts to build workable assumptions. Assess the benefits, risks, and alternatives and make your decision. Finally, monitor the impact and adjust if possible and as needed.


Cindi Howson published in Intelligent Enterprise a good post entitled Predicting BI Highlights for 2010, where she mentioned her thoughts:

- In-memory will be a key theme this year as Microsoft will ship Gemini, SAP opens up BW Accelerator, IBM Cognos increasingly leverages TM1, and MicroStrategy 9 OLAP Services gains traction. In-memory approaches are not only key to BI platforms but also to any analysis that involves both speed and analytic complexity (Spotfire, SAS JMP, QlikView). The winners in this are the customers; the losers will be the vendors who have no strategy in this space or where in-memory is their only differentiator.

- Cloud computing and SaaS will become less niche as both BI heavy weights and vertically-focused vendors recognize that the infrastructure side of BI offers little competitive advantage; instead, it's the time-to-value and agility. IT owners who don't want to give up any control are in for a bruising.

- SMBs will embrace BI but, faced with a myriad of good BI tool choices, these customers will choose products from vendors who offer better service, clarity of value, a partnership mentality, and at the least cost.

- The enterprise vs. departmental BI debate will continue but will be tempered with the reality of "best" and "right" doesn't matter if you get outsourced, laid off, or go bankrupt. Those burned by over spending on software will look for IT to offer some enterprise restraint. The wiser of the industry will find an ideal balance of having an enterprise focus on those items that bring economies of scale and synergies, while departmentalizing those aspects in which differentiation and time to value matter more.

- Got dashboards? This category of tools only keeps getting better. Dashboards will become as commonplace as reporting and ad hoc query capabilities; but in 2010, they will be more animated, better integrated, packing more effective insights, on whatever device users prefer (including the iPhone and Droid).

- Good data, bad decisions remain BI's biggest problem. I'd like to be optimistic and think that we will rid the BI industry of all that ails it, but the world economy, corruption in politics, the epidemic of overweight people while others starve -- you name it -- tell me that human nature will continue to sabotage even the best of BI deployments.

- Social networking and sentiment analysis should be on everyone's radar. Now that it seems every company has a Facebook presence (maybe for marketing, maybe for customer support), the need for sentiment analysis grows. So all those tweets, blogs, and social network updates only add to the data explosion and sense of information overload.

The culture of performance

Howard Dresner gave a nice interview to Intelligent Enterprise, where he answered the questions of Doug Henschen and told about his upcoming book: Profiles in Performance: Business Intelligence Journeys and the Roadmap for Change.


In the interview, he explained the concept of "Performance Culture Maturity Model", described in his book, with six dimensions and four levels of maturity. He also told about the organizations that he published the case studies in the book.

Below I highlighted some answers at the interview:

I'll describe the six major dimensions. Two of them are strategic, two of them are operational in nature and two of them are technical. The first one is alignment with the mission as a cultural tenet. In other words, it's about people who really believe in what they're doing. That's clearly culture. Another one is transparency and accountability. If you're aligned with the mission and believe in what you're doing, next you have to share information, and everybody has to hold themselves and the organization accountable. The information may come from computer systems or it may not. The point is that it's open and transparent. If everyone is open it's really a good thing. The problem is that in most organizations, everybody wants everyone else to be open and they want to stay closed.

Another dimension is being able to resolve conflicts. A performance-directed culture is able to air these conflicts and resolve them in a positive way. You get the issues out there.

Action on insight is another dimension, that simply means when you learn something, you're able to act upon it in a coordinated fashion. In so many environments, when something becomes known, people stick it in their hip pocket and don't do anything. Acting upon insight is simply about taking information, changing behavior to take advantage of what you've learned and, at the highest level of achievement, doing it in a coordinated fashion.

The technical dimensions starts with trust in the data. A lot of information is going to come directly or indirectly from some sort of a system, but not always. Where did it come from? And what do I do with that information? That's really important. Am I going to be transparent? Am I going to make sure that we share this insight openly and that we act upon it as a single organization? How does an organization behave like a single organism and achieve its objectives as effectively as possible?

The sixth dimension is availability and currency of information. And does the currency of that information actually match the application? Those last two are technical and are very much about data, because information is the lifeblood of a performance-directed culture.

The four levels go from "chaos" to "departmentally optimized" to "the performance-directed culture emerging" to "the performance-directed culture realized."

If you want to have things like transparency and accountability, well, that's BI and performance management in terms of an implementation perspective, but not in terms of a cultural perspective. You have to have the systems and support if you want to achieve this on any kind of scale, but there's an attitude that goes with that.

I agree with him, the culture of the organization is determinant to the success of a performance management initiative. Based in the interview, I am anxious to read his book.

Business Intelligence: 10 Common Mistakes

Datamation published an article called Business Intelligence: 10 Common Mistakes, written by Larry Marion, with a list of the top 10 mistakes about BI that you should avoid, why and how (with some comments of the experts Howard Dresner, Wayne Eckerson and Mark Graham Brown):

1- Lack of executive sponsorship and active business involvement
Everyone knows that any major IT effort needs executive sponsorship, but in the case of a BI implementation the big mistake by the CFO, the chief marketing officer or other sponsor is to not be actively involved. It takes frequent injections of business process and strategy savvy to guide the IT team and prevent scope or data creep.

Without continuous guidance from the business side, "IT tries to stuff everything into a warehouse to address absolutely any question a user could conceivably ask," notes Howard Dresner.

2- Inadequate scrutiny over the data
Poor quality data can destroy the credibility and utilization of data warehouses and business intelligence systems.

3- Not easy to use
The user interface, graphics and what-if query capabilities have to be intuitive.

4- Poor performance
User expectations about query response times will be much higher than you realize. "Some organizations are cursed with success and can't seem to keep up with user demand," warns Wayne Eckerson.

5- Too many or too few tools
Both Dresner and Eckerson warn that IT has to be careful about how many tools are available. Too many tools lead to a lot of confusion and soaring training costs. Too few tools frustrate the users.

6- Going it alone
If you're in a big company, urge the CIO to develop a BI Competency Center. A core group of experts within your organization can become internal consultants to business units. The competency center approach will help avoid a huge number of mistakes and wasted money.

7- Allowing the spreadmart plague to spread
Eckerson invented the term spreadmart in 2002 as a label for the proliferation of mini-data warehouses and business intelligence systems based on spreadsheets. Eckerson wrote an article, called Reeling in Spreadmarts- The Proliferation of Spreadmarts, with a number of tips on how to combat the problem.

8- Inflexible design
Build a rigid data warehouse and business intelligence system is a sure fire route to misery. IT should consider which parts of the system are most likely to need updating or revision.

9- Ignoring external data
Mark Graham Brown, a performance management expert, says that external factors such as economic, political, regulatory and consumer trends may need to be considered and incorporated into a BI or performance management system to make it truly effective and useful.

10- Wrong customer data
If customer satisfaction is a key metric for your organization and the IT department is asked to implement a performance management system to create and track this, ignore urges to just use survey data.

When you are developing a BI/PM initiative, is very important take care with the mistakes like these. At the most times, those kind of mistakes can make the initiative fails.

Why Performance Management and Business Intelligence are Crucial at this Moment

Howard Dresner wrote recently in his blog, a nice post called Why Performance Management and Business Intelligence are Crucial at this Moment, where he told about the importance of use BI/PM to direct the companies to make better decisions during the world crisis.

He said: "the wise organization carefully analyzes the current threat, developing multiple scenarios for the future and creates suitable short and long term plans. This forward-thinking approach allows management to proceed strategically, with an eye to the future, but still grounded in the present." and "EPM and BI are critical during this time. This is true. However, I don’t mean just the technology. I mean the philosophy! This begins with transparency and accountability. Without those as core tenets of an organization, the best technology won’t help. However, under the right conditions, BI and EPM can work wonders – allowing an organization to quickly develop perspective, to assess strengths, weaknesses and capabilities."



Gary Cokins commented: "It baffles me why some organizations hesitate to apply business intelligence (BI) tools and the performance management methodologies that convert BI’s potential into realized results."

Neil Raden commented: "You're of course right that many organizations will take the knee-jerk approach and cut expenses. Despite all of our exhortations, '09 will probably be a weak year for BI/EPM software. I hope I'm wrong." I also hope Neil Raden is wrong, but unfortunately I agree with him, because I also think 2009 will be a weak year for BI/PM software.

I agree with Howard Dresner, PM and BI are critical during this time, and increasingly important the companies to use BI/PM to make better decisions. Mainly because of the crisis, with the companies cutting costs and decreasing budgets, they should think of BI/PM not only as a cost, but a necessary investment to help them to drive their companies to an effectively strategic management.

Indeed, I think there are some ways for companies save money and reduce BI/PM costs without affecting their business objectives. I believe that companies should consolidate existing solutions and projects, or to develop new solutions using their already purchased BI/PM softwares (I am considering companies that have good BI/PM tools). Thus, the companies can save money on software, hardware and training, and don't fall into the trap of buying one more BI tool. However, if the companies really need to adquire tools, Open Source Business Intelligence (OSBI) or Software as a Service (SaaS) can be good choices to be evaluated.

TDWI World Conference

The Data Warehousing Institute (TDWI) will promoting their TDWI World Conference, from 17 until 22 August, in San Diego, California.

This is a great opportunity to attend courses, lectures and presentations with the main speakers of DW/BI/PM fields, and also to visit the stands where the leading providers of hardware, software, and services for business intelligence, data warehousing, and related technologies will demonstrating their solutions.

The courses are divided by subjects: Leadership & Management, Business Analytics, Administration & Technology, Data Analysis & Design, Data Integration, Career.

The Keynote Presentations are:
- Howard Dresner - Information Democracy—Information Equality for All!
- Bill Schmarzo- BI Meets Web Analytics: Through the Looking Glass


Co-located with TDWI’s World Conference, will happen the TDWI BI Executive Summit, from 18 until 20 August, with Special Focus on Analytics. The TDWI explains the difference between the two events and also explains that the BI Summit is important to the participants to validate their understanding of best practices, and stay on top of the latest research, trends, and technologies in the industry.

Is Your Company's Strategy a Secret, Even to Your Employees?

Timo Elliott wrote in his blog, a short but nice post called Is Your Company's Strategy a Secret, Even to Your Employees?

He talks about the confusion that some executives are making about the concepts of strategic maps when the company is implementing performance management.

He wrote: "I was recently in touch with a team implementing performance management in a large technology company. To their frustration, the project stalled when the company's executive team refused to roll out the strategy maps to the rest of the organization on the grounds that it was "confidential"...
Given this type of behavior, is it really any surprise that 95%* of a typical workforce does not understand their organization’s strategy?!"

Howard Dresner, in his blog, also wrote a post where he mentions the same kind of issue (I commented in a previous post called Some worrying issues about IT), when he comments that many people have difficulty in developing Performance Management initiatives.

Unfortunately, in several companies are happening something like that. It is a very difficult issue, and I think that the professionals responsible to implementing performance management need to make sure that the board of the company is understanding all the process. For this, it is necessary an executive sponsor highly committed.

He mentioned the classical book The Balanced Scorecard, by Robert Kaplan and David Norton. This book is mandatory reading for who wants to apply the concepts of Balanced Scorecard and Strategic Maps. I also would like to mention the others books of Kaplan and Norton, mainly Strategy Maps: Converting Intangible Assets into Tangible Outcomes.

DM Review presents live Web broadcast: Everything-as-a-Service

Tomorrow, August 7th at 3PM ET, the DM Review,in its initiative called DM Radio, will provide a live web broadcast called Everything-as-a-Service.


According DMReview: "Wherever you look these days in the world of information management, the word “service” seems to appear, particularly in the domain of Software-as-a-Service. In fact, research giant IDC says there’s an emerging trend these days of “everything as a service,” noting that industry titans IBM, Microsoft, Sun, and Cisco, as well as many other smaller players, will dive feet-first into the online provisioning of services.

Tune into this episode of DM Radio to hear the experts discuss SaaS and what it means to you. We'll hear from industry stalwart Howard Dresner, a founding father of the BI industry, now an independent consultant; as well as analyst and Web 2.0 guru Mark Madsen, Principal of Third Nature; plus a special guest."

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

In my opinion, this episode of DM Radio is unmissable. First of all, SaaS and services are trends for BI. Howard Dresner is a leading voice of BI industry, and knows BI a lot. Finally, Mark Madsen is a well-know consultant focused in emerging technology and web 2.0 for BI.

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

Some worrying issues about IT

Howard Dresner published today in his blog, an interesting post, where he wrote about his experience and learning on the road.

He wrote about three worrying issues:
- IT budgets are getting cut;
- Many people have difficulty in developing Performance Management initiatives;
- The inclination of companies to buy “yet-another-tool”.

I think the first issue may be due to the recession that round the American economy.

The difficulty in developing BI/PM initiatives is common in several companies, a sponsor with access in all business units of the company helps so much.

About the last issue, although several BI consultants are always talking about standardization, many companies still want to buy more tools; I totally agree with him, it is easier buy more tools than solve the real problem: a lack of management commitment and organization dysfunction.

I think currently the main challenge of BI/PM professionals (analysts, consultants and managers) is to revert those kind of issues, because those issues are showing clearly the difficulty in implementing a BI/PM project in the companies.

The professionals need to show and persuade the board of companies that a successful BI/PM project, using best practices, will allow the companies better management in their business.

The Performance Management Revolution

- The Performance Management Revolution - Business Results Through Insight and Action - Howard Dresner


This book, written by Howard Dresner, is a guideline to help who wants to understand and implement the concepts of Performance Management in the companies.

Howard Dresner is known as the analyst that coined the term Business Intelligence, when he was working in the Gartner, the world's largest IT advisory company.

It is very interesting how he divides the book into three parts, and puts the name on each party in reference to the steps to make a revolution.

In Part One, entitled "A call to arms", he talks about what need to change due a paradigm shift that is occurring in how business is organized nowadays and also how to define a model for a modern management system. For it, he defines as the better process to use is the Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) process, and divides the model view in four: Vision and Strategy, Goals and Objectives, Execution, and Evaluation. He talks also about the barriers to adoption the EPM and the current tools and technologies.

In Part Two, that he called "Preparing for Battle", he explains how to implement an Enterprise Performance Management, the best practices, how to define and implement a Center of Excellence, with its roles and responsibilities, required skills, and how to standardize and consolidate the tools. He also defines how deploy an EPM system, mentioning all the components that consist an EPM Applications: planning, modeling, dashboards, scorecards, reporting and analysis. Finally, he talks about forms to obtain a comprehensive view of Performance Management, and how you can link the specific elements of an EPM solution to specific business problems.

In Part Three, defined for him as "Let the Revolution Begin", he makes several questions to you determine your immediate priorities and explains how to implement a model EPM Methodology and how to measure outcomes and define metrics and targets that drive the right behaviors.

Great book, inspiring and instigating, written by an expert.

Highly Recommended Reading.

New Books about Business Intelligence and Performance Management

Lately, I have read several good books about Business Intelligence and Performance Management.

The growing interest in these areas are making that increasingly expert professionals write books.

Some of them are:



- The Performance Management Revolution - Howard Dresner





- Data Warehouse Lifecycle Toolkit - Second Edition - Ralph Kimball and Team






- Successfull Business Intelligence - Cindi Howson









- Five Key Principles of Corporate Performance Management - Bob Paladino









- Business Intelligence Competency Centers: A Team Approach to Maximizing Competitive Advantage - Gloria Miller, Dagmar Brautigam and Stefanie Gerlach











I will make book reviews of them later.