Data Quality and Bandit Sheep?
It was widely reported this week that more than one out of every 100 Americans is a criminal. That’s nothing… There’s a country that I can’t name (but they play rugby and have lots of sheep). The national police force wanted a “single view of the criminal”, and so created a central data warehouse from a variety of operational and legacy systems. The ended up with a database of 4.5 million names. This was a problem,... [Read More...]
SAP and Business Objects
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BI Success Factors: What’s Your Job? (Superhero)
If you are in charge of a business intelligence project, your job is not to implement software. It is not to “keep the business happy”. It is to use your expertise to help the company transform the way it does business. BI is useless unless something changes as a result of the data that you’re providing. It’s not about “working with the business”. You should assume that the business people are there to help you... [Read More...]
Antivia: The First Real BI 2.0 Solution?
As I’ve written before, if BI 2.0 is to mean anything, it should be about “collective intelligence”: letting people add value to the BI solution through their actions. There have been several companies that have touched on different aspects of BI 2.0 solutions, but what I’ve seen so far from Antivia takes it to a whole new level. The company, headed by ex-Business Objects employees, has introduced Antivia Desktop, a product... [Read More...]
Profitability Analysis: The “Magic Bullet” for Strategic BI Success?
I’ve recently had the opportunity to discuss profitability analysis with a series of companies as diverse as Alcoa (Aluminum products), Otto Group (German multi-channel retailer), La Poste (the French postal service), and Heineken (surely no explanation needed?) I’ve come away convinced not only that profitability analysis is not only an asset for all these organizations, but also that it may even be a “magic bullet” that helps... [Read More...]
Why Build Your Own BI Platform?
Sure, you can cobble together your own BI platform, by combining data integration, data quality, metadata management, master data, query and reporting, analysis, publishing, etc. etc. But, just like the “make your own umbrella” kit above, it will seem increasingly ridiculous to do so. Read More →
The Information Age = Middle Ages Feudalism?
It may be the information age, but what we experience on a daily basis has a lot more in common with the middle ages–with feudal lords and knights–than it does with the modern economy. Most of the infrastructure that we associate with the modern state has yet to be implemented when it comes to information. In other words, there’s a lot of work to do before we get anywhere close to the nirvana held up by BI analysts and vendors. There’s... [Read More...]
BI and Societe Generale?
Much has been written about the approximately 5 billion Euros that Société Générale lost because of Jerome Kerviel, a junior arbitrage trader. What’s interesting about it from a BI point of view? Can BI help? First, it’s worth noting that Société Générale is a big Business Objects customer, so their problems came despite having having the best BI tools available What’s in a number? How much did Kerviel lose? He argues that... [Read More...]
BI vs. the Web?
BI is like a worldwide web where implementing each link costs $100k and takes IT six months to implement… Fantastic possibilities. Slow progress. Read More →
Top 5 BI Predictions for (the Rest of) 2008
OK, so it’s February, and I’m late to the party (it got busy for a while), but here’s my belated thoughts on the top five BI trends this year. I’ll avoid the standard laundry-list of “BI 2.0″ (or even BI 3.0, sigh) tech trends, and instead concentrate on some of the BI market and customer impacts. 1. The BI World Divides into Three The BI market will now be split into three different types: “megavendors”... [Read More...]
I was the eighth employee of 
