Business Analytics vs Business Intelligence?

What’s the difference between Business Analytics and Business Intelligence? The correct answer is: everybody has an opinion, but nobody knows, and you shouldn’t care. Having worked in the industry over twenty years, I can confidently say that everybody has a different notion of what ANY particular term associated with analytics means. For example, when SAP says “business analytics” instead of “business intelligence”, it’s... [Read More...]

Bad BI Marketing

I received this as a comment on one of my posts: “Although every enterprise is definitely unique, they all share the common challenge of keeping up-to-date with the ever-increasing speed of business. Today, most companies must operate on tight budgets, improved efficiencies, and an ever-changing marketplace. An enterprise’s ability to compete is directly linked to its ability to respond. With the above in mind, Operational Intelligence is... [Read More...]

Internal BI Promotion Video from the SAP BI Competency Center

SAP drinks its own champagne! One often-underestimated element required for successful business intelligence projects is strong communication skills. Here’s a great example of a BI competency center (BICC) explaining and promoting BI to the rest of the organization. In this case, it’s SAP’s own BICC that created the video, destined for SAP’s 5,000+ employees worldwide. It was uploaded by Matthias Wild of SAP’s Global IT group... [Read More...]

CeBIT Roundtable: Game Changers in Today’s Business

It was CeBIT in Hannover, Germany last week, and I participated on a panel talking about “Game Changers in Today’s Business”, including Jake Klein the project lead for SAP HANA (“High-Performance Analytic Appliance”). We discussed future trends in analytics, the new release of SAP BusinessObjects BI and EIM 4.0. Much of the discussion was about whether SAP’s customers are buying into the vision, and if SAP was communicating its vision... [Read More...]

Business Analytics in Istanbul

SAP Business Analytics Forum in Istanbul Turkey saw lots of people interest in this fast-growing area, in a fast-growing country: over 1,400 people registered for a packed agenda of 42 sessions on every aspect of business analytics. As usual, here’s my presentation available for download in PowerPoint or PDF format. For a longer explanation of some of the themes in the presentation, see this post: Why The Last Decade of BI Best-Practice Architecture... [Read More...]

Why The Last Decade of BI Best-Practice Architecture is Rapidly Becoming Obsolete

Business analytics, or solving business problems through better use of data, is absolutely nothing new. But every decade or so new technology takes a big leap forward (client/server, web, etc.) and makes previous architectures obsolete. The next big wave of business analytics infrastructure is poised to start arriving this year. Let’s take a look at an analogy from the history of computing. The first ever computer used for commercial business applications... [Read More...]