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.

How fast do you really need your information?

Tom Davemport published two good posts in his blog at Harvard Business Review, based in a research project with Jim Hagemann Snabe, co-CEO of SAP, about what kind of information managers need and how quickly they need it delivered. In the first post, called Are You Getting the Information You Need When You Need It?, he told on the need for speed in information delivery, and in the second post, called How Do You Speed Up Information Delivery?, he described what organizations can do to speed up the information that really matters.

They interviewed both senior executives (15 current or former CEOs and business unit heads) as well as managers who are charged with information delivery. Tom and Jim also surveyed 302 senior executives at large U.S. companies about the speed with which they get the information they need and their desires for faster information delivery.

They said that the executives wanted their information faster. But there were major variations in which specific types of information they wanted at a faster pace and under what business conditions it was essential to have more speed. There is an obvious need for greater flexibility.

He commented about the influence of the state of the economy in the organizations' information needs. In a down economy, executives want information on receivables and payables more quickly (50% mentioned this type) as well as on budgets, spending, and costs (also 50%), cash flow (47%), strategic and operational risk (40%), and employee performance and productivity (36%), he said, And in a growing economy, executives said they want information more quickly on employee satisfaction (27%), market share (13%), inventory levels (12%), supplier and partner data (12%), and scenario plans and simulations (12%).

Some types of information are required more quickly than others, he said. In terms of what information executives currently receive, the fastest to arrive (combining real time and daily frequencies) are sales and news on competitors and customers. The slowest to arrive (i.e., the information is received annually or quarterly) are employee satisfaction, market share, customer satisfaction, and planning scenarios or simulations.

He did an interesting comment: that not everyone wants their information faster, and sometimes it is not desirable to make all information available in real time. The percentage of respondents wanting their information faster than they currently receive it ranged from lows of only 36% for inventory information and 38% for competitor news to highs of 61% for customer satisfaction information and 71% for employee satisfaction.

In the second post, he described what organizations can do to speed up the information that really matters. He commented about technical advances that can help with this problem, like "in-memory" technology, new forms of databases that allow faster data retrieval and analysis, faster microprocessors in PCs and servers that have been created for the purpose of data analysis, and easy-to-use software that allows executives to do their own queries and analyses with a few clicks of a mouse. There are also process, behavior, and management changes that can accelerate information delivery and application.

It's important to identify what information really needs to be delivered more quickly. When you know what you need and how quickly it's needed, you can redesign information-creation and delivery processes to achieve the needed speed. Because managers want information when they want it, it's better to employ pull approaches whenever possible. Alerts — not full reports, but warnings that certain information parameters have gone outside expected boundaries — are often more useful to circulate, and they help to create demand in pull-oriented processes. Analysts and user-focused IT professionals can help to train executives to use the needed tools. IT executives and professionals will need to work hard to ensure adequate data governance, integration, and currency for the information that really matters to decisions.

According him, there is the final step: improving the speed information is used to make decisions. In many cases, decision makers demand faster information only to sit on it in a slow decision process. Putting a clock on the cycle time of key decisions can help not only to speed them up but also to limit unnecessary requests for more data and analysis.

He finished with the following statement: None of these steps alone will solve the information timeliness and flexibility problem. However, together they can speed cycles of business monitoring and decision making, and can yield a more responsive, flexible management approach.

Tom and Jim really did a good study on how quickly the executives need the information delivered, with some expected results, but also with some interesting and surprising findings.

Tom Davenport wrote several books. He is co-author of the excellent book Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning (I did a book review on this book). His latest book is Analytics at Work: Smarter Decisions, Better Results, written with Jeanne G. Harris and Robert Morison.

How to Build a Billion-Dollar European Software Company

Timo Elliott published in his BI Questions blog, a nice video with a presentation by Bernard Liautaud at London Business School. Bernard is founder of Business Objects, and led the company until 2007, when sold to SAP for 6.7 Billions Dollars. In the video, he talks about his experiences at Business Objects. He is now a General Partner of Balderton Capital, one of the largest venture capital funds in Europe.



Bernard Liautaud published in 2000, a good book entitled e-Business Intelligence: Turning Information into Knowledge into Profit, one of the first books I read about BI.

Improving Organizational Performance Management Through Pervasive Business Intelligence

The IDC published a good white paper entitled Improving Organizational Performance Management Through Pervasive Business Intelligence, sponsored by SAP Business Objects. The white paper considers that the evidence of the competitive value of business intelligence (BI) and analytics solutions is growing, and the fact-based decision making is spreading throughout all organizations.

They identified five key factors that have the strongest influence on BI pervasiveness:

1 - Degree of training on the data, tools, and analytic techniques
2 - Design quality of the BI solution
3 - Prominence of data governance
4 - Non executive involvement in promoting the design and use of BI solutions
5 - Prominence of a performance management methodology

They also identified six pervasive BI indicators:

1 - Degree of internal use
2 - Degree of external use
3 - Percentage of power users
4 - Numbers of domains
5 - Data update frequency
6 - Analytical orientation

They defined a model with the relationship between the six pervasive BI indicators (dependent variables) and the five key factors leading to pervasive BI (independent variables).

The white paper can be downloaded, with free registration required.

In my opinion, Business Intelligence and Performance Management are critical during this time of tight economy, and increasingly important the companies to use BI and PM to make better decisions. In general, the organizations that are investing in BI and PM have a positive impact on their business performance.

Enterprise Information Management

Lyndsay Wise published last month two articles about Enterprise Information Management in Dashboard Insight. In the first article, she provides an overview of information management and in the second article, she looks the Business Objects/SAP view of EIM.

She said that whether it is called enterprise information management, data management, or information management, the general understanding is that managing information across the organization includes the concepts of data governance, data integration, data quality, and master data management.

The Basics Of Information Management


According her, Enterprise Information Management (EIM) is gaining momentum. Organizations are hard pressed to find ways to adequately manage their data without affecting production systems and operational processes.

Enterprise information management takes MDM and other data related initiatives to the next level by enabling organizations to manage their data across sources, ensure a level of quality at each stage of the integration process, and enable organizations to govern the various processes that are associated with the various data points.

With a unified view of data, organizations no longer see separate views of that result from business units, but see how they relate to the overall picture of performance as well.

Data quality adds the final touch to the integration and beginning of MDM mix. To maintain these initiatives, information constantly needs to be validated to preserve valid and accurate data being entered into and moved across various operational systems and within multiple data stores.

This expansion of how data is managed across the organization will continue to converge. Organizations will begin to look at data management as an overall solution that includes integration and data quality initiatives as an extension of current MDM related projects.

Organizations are clearly starting to move towards EIM. Part of this means not only adopting an EIM solution but adopting a data governance framework which includes developing a process for managing data and having a committee of stakeholders that help define taxonomy, hierarchy, etc. and managing these processes across the organization.

The concept of a holistic approach to data management enables organizations to develop end to end solutions that take into account disparate business units and how the data processed within those units translates into valuable information at different touch points across the organization.

I think with the complexity of the companies nowadays, the necessity of information management is increasingly important to enable the companies to manage their data effectively, transforming data into valuable information to make better decisions.

The Role of Data Quality With The Business Objects/SAP EIM Platform


About the approach of the Business Objects, she said that is to combine their data services for data integration and data quality. This removes a barrier of cleaning and integrating data separately and creates a single environment. The solution works by identifying how a change in the source system will affect the various processes and give users the ability to look at calculations and identify where numbers come from, which expands confident decision making based on data as well as compliance and audit requirements.

Business Intelligence Gets Smart

Intelligent Enterprise published today, an article about what the trends top companies are incorporating in their BI initiatives, called Business Intelligence Gets Smart, written by Doug Henschen, Intelligent Enterprise's Editor-in-Chief.

The article talks about the results of InformationWeek Special Report Survey (download here, requires free registration), with 358 business technology professionals and also what the companies are doing in their BI initiatives.


I would like to highlighted:
- The companies have managed to centralize BI planning and standardize practices, capabilities, and technologies.
- The companies are getting more competitive with the aid of low-latency data access and near-real-time analysis, but today you need more than broad deployments or innovative technologies. Successful companies are also far more likely to report "pervasive" or "fairly broad" BI adoption.
- The users are looking for BI tools easy to use, how we can see when "complexity of tools and interfaces" was ranked first by survey respondents as impediments to success. In this case, vendors have responded to demands to make BI more accessible and user-friendly with Web-based options, including visual dashboards and key performance indicators, that can be embedded within portals or applications.
- The users have more deployed than integration with desktop applications, with Microsoft Excel usually the tool of choice. Within the last year, vendors including Microsoft and SAP's Business Objects unit have added two-way integration functions that let authorized users edit or revise information in Excel and then update the central repository.
- Complicated interfaces and data latency be damned—visionaries, and some vendors, increasingly are saying we should look beyond BI to automating decisions, using the concepts of Enterprise Decision Management(EDM).
- Contextual BI has been around for years in the form of "smart" or "analytic" business applications, such as customer relationship and supply chain management tools with embedded reporting and analysis capabilities.
- Performance management applications are designed to not just provide insight—the part powered by conventional BI—but also to help people take action to improve the performance of the business.

I also think it is very interesting the prediction of Marge Breya, executive VP and general manager at SAP's Business Objects unit, when he said: "Within three to five years, there will not be an application on the face of the planet that does not have embedded BI. The question is, what do you do when you have to look at information outside of the application?"

The BI tools are increasingly smart and pervasive, and the companies can benefit from it.

Business Objects announces the latest Enterprise Performance Management(EPM) version

Business Objects announced today, at the Business Objects Influencer Summit in Boston, the latest versions of its solutions for enterprise performance management (EPM).

SAP announced that Business Objects is the only vendor to offer both the vision and products that unite EPM, GRC and BI. Traditionally distinct disciplines, the combination of EPM, GRC and BI enables deeper visibility into unified information, greater context for collaborative decision making and better organizational alignment. For example, without a foundation of trustworthy and accurate business data, companies cannot effectively manage EPM processes such as financial consolidation. Similarly, the combination of GRC and EPM is critical to helping customers clearly understand potential risks to their business strategy.

“As EPM extends beyond finance to include operational performance and GRC, companies can make a significant step forward to manage their businesses more efficiently and within compliance requirements,” said Kathleen Wilhide, research director of Compliance and Performance Management, IDC. “Aligning risk and strategy management helps business users plan and execute corporate strategy within the context of managing risk. The comprehensive suite of EPM solutions offered by Business Objects –in conjunction with GRC and BI – gives companies the foundation for developing effective, far-reaching EPM strategies. This latest EPM release also shows that SAP is executing on the strategy it has outlined and is delivering its commitments.”

I think the trend is increasingly the BI, PM and GRC products working together to allow the organizational alignment and to drive the companies to execute their business strategy effectively.