Data Doghouse - performance management, business intelligence, and data warehousing

Pervasive Business Intelligence Solutions

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>>> Listen to my webinar on Pervasive BI Solutions

Letters to Santa

In previous years SearchDataManagement.com has posted my articles with letters to Santa. Until the new one is published later this week, here's a reminder of what a data warehouse manager might have asked for in the past.

2007 - I've Been a Good Data Warehouse Manager, Santa
I've been a very good data warehouse manager all year long. I've been nice to everyone -- even business users. I've kept up with the industry by reading articles and analyst opinions. I have also tried to follow all the best practices that are recommended in these articles and opinions. But I feel like the business users just don't appreciate what we are doing to get them a "single version of the truth."

Read the rest of the letter.

2005 - Dear Santa, I've been a good data management manager
I've been a good data management manager all year long. I've been nice to my business users, managers and peers. I've provided thorough materials explaining the value of our company's data management efforts to my managers so they could present it to upper management. I've kept up ith the latest data management best practices, technological innovations and industry trends. I've even championed data stewardship and ownership; explained the connection between financial transparency and metadata (which made everyone think I was an alien!); and encouraged the IT staff to document its applications. But sometimes, Santa, I think I am Don Quixote chasing the windmills.

Read the rest of the letter.

The 2008 letter will be coming soon!

Upgrading your data integration efforts to enable Business Intelligence (BI) 2.0

People have been using the term “business intelligence 2.0” for a few years, but it’s described in different ways. In Business Intelligence 2.0: Simpler, More Accessible, Inevitable Neil Raden says:

"…the current era of BI is coming to an end and will be succeeded by a BI 2.0 era that promises simplicity, universal access, real-time insight, collaboration, operational intelligence, connected services and a level of information abstraction that supports far greater agility and speed of analysis. The motivation for this "version upgrade" for BI is the need to move analytical intelligence into operations and to shrink the gap between analysis and action."

Charles Nichols writes, in BI 2.0: The Next Generation that:

"BI 2.0 is a term that encapsulates several important new concepts about the way that we use and exploit information in businesses, organizations and government. The term is also intrinsically linked with real-time and event-driven BI but is really about the application of these technologies to business processes."

BI 2.0 is not really about a new generation of BI tools to perform analytics but getting more comprehensive, consistent, correct and CURRENT data.

>>>Continue reading Upgrading your data integration efforts to enable Business Intelligence (BI) 2.0

It’s Not the Tool, but How it is Used

A research note from the 451 Group “Open source is not a business model” discussed that selling open source is a tactic rather than a business model.  They then went on to discuss the various business strategies of 114 open-source vendors.

I’ve got a couple of thoughts on this, but I’d also really like to hear your take on this in your comments.

First, there are other technologies that are also tactics, not business models. These include on-demand or software-as-a-service (SaaS) software and cloud computing. There are many people who hope that all three will change how software is distributed and used in our industry. All claim to have a lower TCO (total cost of ownership), but whether that is true depends on the specific business strategies employed by each vendor.

The advocates of these technologies proclaim that they are the wave of the future.  This may indeed be true, but just as PCs, client server computing and the web took years to become “mainstream,” it may take a while for these technologies too. Keep in mind that the leaders in these technologies, especially if they are small vendors, may not be the leaders (or even exist) by the time these technologies “cross the chasm.”

Second, and more important, is the underlying fact that it is the business use of these technologies that will drive their adoption and spread not the tool itself. There has to be a business use for the software before it is adopted. If a business does not need the required application then it does not matter whether it is offered on-demand versus on-premise, proprietary versus open source, or just hanging out on a cloud.

We have been experiencing a bear market and a recession lately. In general the stocks in our On-Demand Software and Business Intelligence indexes have fared poorly. When these stocks and companies rebound, besides the usual stock fundamentals, one of the key ingredients to success both in the marketplace and the stock market will be whether the vendors have the business applications that corporations are willing to pay for. Companies that are laying off people and have hiring/expense freezes are probably not going to adopt salary or expense management software regardless of the cost. Software targeted at new automobile or real estate sales will also get a lukewarm reception. Software oriented towards health care, particularly helping health care providers operate more efficiently, are likely to sell well.

Selling is always about meeting someone’s needs. Technologists too often think it is about the tools. Early adopters, often other technologists or companies with deep pockets, reinforce the Technology is King mindset. Sometimes it takes a bear market and a recession to highlight that it is not about the tool, it’s about how it’s used.

Business Intelligence Strategies in a Down Economy

There is a lot of worry on Wall Street and Main Street these days. Are we in a mild or severe recession? Is it the next Great Depression? How long will it last? No one knows the answers to these lofty questions, but Forrester Research has been busy recalibrating on the impact the economy is having on IT spending.

First, the good news, IT spending was better in the first half of this year than expected. The bad news, IT spending is being hit adversely now and probably into 2009. According to Forrester Research:

“The economy's affect on IT spending is evident in some specific data points contained in the report: Forty-three percent of firms have already cut their overall IT budgets in 2008 in reaction to the slow down in the global economy, while 24 percent of firms have put discretionary spending on hold. Twenty-eight percent of respondents said the economy has had no impact on their IT budgets.”

“Forrester: Impact Of Economic Downturn On Tech Spending Varies By Region And Sector”, Forrester Research, September 9, 2008

Even under the best circumstances it’s important to maximize the value from your BI/DW projects.  But with these conditions it becomes even more of an imperative.

No one can afford to be sloppy or wasteful in their business intelligence and data integration strategies. Cost cutting and getting by with what you have is the norm.

But mistakes are expensive. Businesses, now more than ever, need to understand who their current and potential customers are as well as how much revenue and profit each product or service line generates. This demands current, consistent, clean and comprehensive data.

>>>Continue reading Business Intelligence Strategies in a Down Economy

2008 Olympics Dashboard

Whether you are caught up in watching the 2008 Olympics or not, it is a welcome relief to have something else on the front pages of the (US) newspapers other than the presidential elections or the latest war, i.e. Georgia/Russia. If you are interested you are probably watching particular athletes or sports and checking out results at Sports Illustrated, ESPN or the official Olympic site.

You have an alternate to the classic media sites created by iDashboards a business intelligence company. As a way to demonstrate their dashboard capabilities iDashboards has created an Olympic Dashboard (http://live.idashboards.com/beijing2008/?guestuser=guest) for the 2008 Olympics. The dashboard tracks the results for all countries across 28 sports. The dashboard illustrates graphic capabilities such as bar charts, speedometers, gauges, interactive country flags, and medals.

If you are interested in the 2008 Olympics or if you want to look at dashboard capabilities check it out. It might be an interesting way for IT to show business people what all this business intelligence and dashboards is about.

fyi: I do not write about press releases (PR) passing it off as news nor do I pass on sales pitches sent to me from marketing/PR people from many software companies. In this case, however, I appreciate the guerilla marketing effort and think it is a great way to demonstrate what one can do with dashboards.

Control versus communication: You decide

A recent column in Information Week “Don't Let Tech-Savvy Business Execs Do An End Run Around IT -- CIO Effectiveness -- InformationWeek was filled with the usual sentiments that I have heard all too often.

The title portrayed the attitudes that break down communication between IT and business groups. IT says they are in control of all things related to technology and how dare business groups act without them. Business groups feel they either do not need IT or cannot afford to wait for them. Who is right? Neither!

Like a parent, IT needs to let go or realize that control is no longer possible or maybe not even desirable. IT needs to resist becoming “helicopter” parents. IT has to embrace business groups as their customers as opposed to their children. Customers come back if you provide great service and rarely return if made to feel foolish.

Business, on the other hand, has to understand that IT sometimes has to take a little more time on projects in order to better serve them in the long run and support the enterprise as a whole. Business groups have to resist the vendor PowerPoint slides that promise nirvana if only they buy the latest and greatest emerging technology. Toys are fun but not always the answer to your problems.

Today, especially in this economy, businesses need more information to make informed decisions. That information has to be consistent, comprehensive, correct and current to be of value. There have been many articles of late discussing how IT is becoming irrelevant because either technology has become a commodity or business groups can get that technology without IT. I’ll skip that debate for now and say that regardless of the technology used the key to the business is not the tools but the data.

IT can provide short and long-term value to their businesses by concentrating on transforming data into relevant information. Sure, there will be some tools involved but success of these efforts relies on data governance and data integration. And these efforts involve business and IT groups working and talking with each other.

BI from a student perspective

I teach data warehousing (DW) and business intelligence (BI) courses evenings for the Graduate School of Engineering at a university in the Boston area. I have been doing so for a few semesters and enjoy teaching students. It is fun getting the students’ feedback and their academic viewpoints which many times contrast with my day job, i.e. consulting with IT/business groups and software companies.

Last week, I found out that my students are sometimes skeptical of the “war” stories I tell to illustrate the state of many companies’ BI/DW efforts. A former student sat in on my latest class so she could talk to me afterwards about her co-op job and see if I was teaching my advanced course in the Fall. She said that she has been finding herself trying to keep from laughing when she is working with her company’s BI/DW applications and their users. She is amazed at how many data silos the company has created and how dependent the business people are on these data shadow systems, i.e. spreadsheets strung together to provide reporting and analysis.

She said she has listened to my stories with a grain of salt because she could not believe most companies had so many silos especially those who had invested in DW/BI. She had thought that will all the instant access to information we have via the internet about so many subjects that companies would have their internal information freely available to their employees. She was surprised at how difficult it is for business people to get timely, consistent and comprehensive data.  When we talked I laughed. I said I only wish I had been exaggerating in my “war stories”.

This discussion reminded me of the first class that I taught at the University. When the University recruited me to teach DW/BI courses they suggested that I use the same course materials that I was teaching IT and business people in the corporate world with. I assumed there would be some changes but I naively went to my first class loaded with my corporate slides. I was only fifteen minutes into that class when I realized I was in a separate reality from my corporate consulting day job. I was going through some very basic and high-level introductory slides but I realized I was not connecting with the students. It turns out almost all of the three dozen students there were full-time students without a background of working in corporations. When I was talking to them about corporate applications such as ERP (Enterprise Resource Reporting), SCM (Supply Chain Management) and CRM (Customer Relationship Management), they had no frame of reference to understand how business data was created and transformed in a corporation.

The students' frame of reference has also made it more difficult to build the case for data warehousing and data integration since they were having tough time understanding how scattered data is within a corporation and even more so when interacting with customers, suppliers and partners. As soon as I saw their blank stares I stopped using those slides and started discussing how businesses work, at least from a business data and process perspective. I used examples like iTunes, Amazon and being a student at a university to illustrate the creation and slow of data, as well as, what the business people in these enterprises would like to report on and analyze.

It is great getting other perspectives. Hopefully my corporate perspective helps my students. I know their academic perspective keeps me on my toes.

Disclosure: The picture is not the university that I teach at but rather where I am an alumnus. Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI.)

The Intelligence is in the Data, not the Software

I am an avid reader of the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) Business Technology blog written by Ben Worthen. In his post “Good Decisions Aren’t Easy” on December 19, 2007 he states that:

Business intelligence’ isn’t just an oxymoron. It’s also a hot new technology that your business is most likely trying or evaluating. But be prepared: One BI veteran warns that it’s not as easy as just installing software.

And concludes that:

Businesses that decide to buy BI and data warehousing software need to understand the effort it takes to ensure the integrity of the data that they’re hoping to base decisions on.

I couldn’t agree more. It’s not about the technology; it’s about the data. More precisely it’s about data integration. Tools help implement, but it’s the people, politics and processes that enable the definition of your data, business transformations and performance measures.

That means IT talking to business people and business people talking to each other to reach consensus on these definitions. If you don’t have data governance in the long run it won’t matter what BI software you are using, the business users won’t be getting value out of your BI efforts or maybe they won’t even be using the software.

As an aside, it’s funny to hear BI described as a “hot new technology.” Although it is hot, for the veterans who have been working on these solutions for a while (two decades in my case) new doesn’t seem to be the case.

Also, I’d modify the statement “…that your business is most likely trying or evaluating (BI software)” to say your company IS most likely using, trying or evaluating BI. Many companies already have a couple of generations of BI projects under their belts. But BI is NOT pervasive yet, even at many of the companies that have had BI for a while, so there is a lot of potential for growth.

The bottom line: Business intelligence is hot because business information is hot. You’ll need software to get that information to business people so they can use it, but you’ll need data integration to make the right information available.

BI independents get no respect

After SAP announced it was acquiring Business Objects the speculation immediately started about when and who would buy Cognos (COGN).

Although Cognos might very well be acquired, let’s examine two related arguments that people made. First, they infer that a BI independent company will not survive against the tech titans of Oracle, SAP and Microsoft. Second, when people refer to Cognos as the last major independent BI company they imply that there are not any other thriving or viable firms in the industry.

BI independents cannot survive

Oracle (ORCL) and SAP just spent $10 billion collectively to buy a couple of the top independent BI firms, Hyperion Solutions and Business Objects, during the last year. If the titans were so dominant why did they feel they needed to buy these firms? If the titans are the preferred business choice for BI software why are they ranked # 4, 7 and 8 according to IDC’s 2006 estimates for BI tools revenue?

There is a split personality in business technology purchasing: one side wants to purchase everything from one vendor, the other side just wants to buy the best tool to do the job. It is clear that to date, there are plenty of businesses buying the best rather than just buying whatever their app vendor sells.

Cognos is the last one standing

According the IDC 2006 estimates on BI tools revenue there are five firms with approximately $200 million or more sales that are not the titans or anyone they have acquired to date. SAS was number two, ahead of Cognos, but it seems to be forgotten because it is private. MicroStrategy, Information Builders, SPSS and Actuate have been successful in this market and have had loyal customers for years.

And there are plenty of smaller (less than $100M revenue) BI firms that sell very capable BI solutions. These include companies that you might have seen on industry analysts’ charts such as QlikTech and Panorama Software, as well as those firms below everyone’s radar except their customers such as Dimensional Insight and Board International. All of these BI independents have tools that their customers have chosen over the titans' products.

Finally, the rise of open source software (OSS) BI, such as Pentaho and JasperSoft, also shows there are market opportunities beyond the titans.

Wrap-up

The tech titans have been on a M&A (mergers & acquisition) binge the last few years, but large firms gobbling up smaller ones is not new to our industry. People will continue to launch new, innovative and nimble companies. Some with thrive and some will not. Those that succeed will offer their customers software of value. And maybe they will be acquired eventually only to replaced by newer firms.  

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