The 5 Ingredients of Good Decision-Making
The Need for Informed Decisions The results of a survey analyzing the current status of corporate decision-making were announced today, called “In search of clarity: unraveling the complexities of executive decision-making” The survey of 154 global C-level executives, conducted by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) and commissioned by Business Objects, found that more than nine out of 10 corporate executives admit they are making... [Read More...]
Adding Text and Search to BI — Are Customers Ready?
Business Objects turns Inxight into insight: following the purchase of text analytics leader Inxight, Business Objects launched two new products today: “Text Analysis” and “Intelligent Search“ Here’s my take: The integration process has been excellent — the new products are out just four months after the acquisition was announced. The products are integrated, not just rebadged. For example, existing WebIntelligence... [Read More...]
How’s Your BI Maturity?
Wayne Eckerson and I will be presenting two web seminars this week on the subject of putting TDWI’s BI Maturity Model to Practice: Recording – Benchmarking Your BI Maturity OverviewProvides an overview of the five stages of the BI Maturity model and the two major obstacles – the Gulf & Chasm. The goal is to demonstrate how the model can be used to help assess and evolve any BI/DW program. September 25 at 12:00 pm EasternSpanning... [Read More...]
Is BI Standardization a Myth?
Despite some people dismissing it as a myth, BI standardization is alive and well in organizations around the world. Here’s a quick primer on what, why, and how. What is BI Standardization? The phrase “BI standardization” often gets a negative reaction, because people equate it with choosing only one tool to the exclusion of all others, and taking away existing products from happy business users. My definition is this: Pragmatically... [Read More...]
Microsoft Launches Impressive New Suite… of BI Cliches?
Yesterday, Microsoft launched PerformancePoint Server 2007 using an impressively dense array of well-worn BI clichés, presumably confident that many of their potential purchasers had never heard any of them before. Here’s the ComputerWorld article on the launch. If any other BI vendor had said these things, would they have printed it? Cliché #1: Information vs. insight “Customers have spent hundred of billions of dollars... [Read More...]
BI is Deploying Information as a Factor of Production
From Frank Buytendijk’s blog, and Andries Bottema: “BI is deploying information as a factor of production.” In other words, BI makes information the fifth factor of production, next to labor, capital, materials, and facilities. Quite simply: Yes! Information is the last great underdeveloped asset in today’s organizations. And unlike other assets, it can be used by multiple people and processes, and it’s also a... [Read More...]
Fixing the BI Tragedy of the Commons
Cindi Howson talks about the “BI Tragedy of the Commons” in her latest Intelligent Enterprise post. The “tragedy of the commons” is a well-known issue in economics, involving a conflict between what’s good for the individual and what’s good for a group as a whole. Cindi uses it to describe the problem of departmental BI silos when it would make more sense to use a more enterprise-wide approach. One... [Read More...]
eBay Information on Demand
I’ve written before about the increasing importance of external data and benchmarking for the future of business intelligence. Business Objects today announced the launch of their information on demand store: With an easy-on-the-eyes flex-based interface, the store is designed to sell information on line that can be used to supplement internal data. Along with the Thomson Financial and Dun & Bradstreet sources already... [Read More...]
Oracle Buys Cartesis!
Market consolidation reaches absurd new heights! Many thanks to Piet Loubser for forwarding a link to this DM Review article by David O’Connell of Nucleus Research: Oracle’s recent acquisition of best-of-breed performance management vendor Cartesis means that ERP vendors want to take their BI-related functionality up a notch. Wait! Didn’t Business Objects buy Cartesis?! The article should of course read “…performance... [Read More...]
Who Really Wants Predictive Analytics?
The value of predictive analytics seems obvious: who wants to “drive looking out of the rear view mirror”? Several recent books, articles and blog postings point to a resurgence of interest in the topic, but what the term actually means is — as usual in our industry – subject to some debate. I’ve tended to use the term to refer to predictive models, overlapping with the term “data mining”,... [Read More...]
I was the eighth employee of 
