The Case for Independent Business Intelligence
The time is ripe to discuss the future of independent BI, after the purchase of Hyperion by Oracle and continued speculation on the future of the remaining vendors. Will there be a ”domino effect”? A commentary in Business Week sums up the “domino effect” opinion (more prevalent among financial analysts than industry analysts) that the deal will lead to the purchase of the remaining large independent players. Here are... [Read More...]
The Five Fatal Flaws of BI
Over the last eighteen years, I’ve been associated with a large number of BI projects and have been able to see first-hand what behaviors correlate most closely with success and failure. In particular, there are five main erroneous assumptions about implementing BI that can lead to failure. This list is condensed and a little simplistic: every single one of these bullets could be a blog posting on its own — and I hope to get around... [Read More...]
Oracle Support Doesn’t Use BI?
One interesting aspect in Oracle’s lawsuit against SAP is how they apparently noticed that something was wrong: Intelligent Enterprise: “Ultimately, Oracle caught on to the unusual volume of requests…. Oracle says an investigation into huge traffic spikes on its Customer Connection servers…” Oracle’s complaint document: “In late November 2006, there occurred unusually heavy download activity on Oracle’s... [Read More...]
Why Data Quality is Important…
A true story of data quality problems. Just for fun. (2 mins) The Camtasia Studio video content presented here requires JavaScript to be enabled and the latest version of the Macromedia Flash Player. If you are you using a browser with JavaScript disabled please enable it now. Otherwise, please update your version of the free Flash Player by downloading here. // More seriously, data quality is a real issue for today’s organizations.... [Read More...]
The Other EPM?
It turns out that EPM also stands for “experience and performance management”, and: A comprehensive EPM system captures and reports real metrics about application usage. Who is using which transactions? How long are they active? How long are they idle? EPM gives you the ability to pinpoint and analyze user adoption issues that are hindering the achievement of business results. As the article says, “ROI isn’t real until it’s... [Read More...]
A Criminal Misuse of Statistics?
One of my favorite topics is the very human tendency to misuse and misunderstand the information that is provided by business intelligence systems. Here’s a link to a TED Talk by Peter Donnelly, an Oxford statistician, pointing out some of the common errors that people make, and the serious consequences that can result. Here’s a taste of the material: (1) Imagine you’re sequentially tossing a coin. On average, which... [Read More...]
Putting the ‘Business’ back into Business Intelligence
In the What’s in a Name post, I wrote about an opportunity to update the “business intelligence” term. Gartner has been thinking about the same thing. It’s the Gartner Business Intelligence Summit this week, and in an Intelligent Enterprise article, Bill Hostman talks about the key trends and themes from the event: Bill Hostmann “We’ve started to get away from the term ‘BI’ because we want... [Read More...]
Google and Mobile Consumer BI?
According to their 2005 patent filing, Google may be interested in providing information to people’s mobile phones based on their location: “The generating of the dictionary data may also include producing data related to the information indicative of the user location. The generated dictionary data may be associated with places near the user location. Also, the generated dictionary data may be associated with common query data from... [Read More...]
What’s in a Name? PM / BI / IM
To successfully provide information in a form that business people can use, you need three types of technology, to: Tame information chaos: Collect, manage, and integrate information, and fix any data quality problems (data quality, data integration, metadata management, etc) Turn information into insight: Analyze the information, gain understanding of what is happening, and communicate it to others (query, analysis, reporting, etc.) Use insight... [Read More...]
BI 2.0?
First, I agree with most of the coverage of business intelligence 2.0 so far: yes, the term is a little tacky — but it’s irresistible (and a great way of finding people blogging about Business Intelligence) An irresistible term A great example is the experience of Gartner’s Andy Bitterer. Despite his criticism of the term, he couldn’t resist mentioning it (negatively) during his keynote at Gartner’s BI Summit in London.... [Read More...]
I was the eighth employee of 
