What I Found Interesting About Gartner BI Summit 2012 London
As always, it was a huge pleasure to catch up with customers, colleagues, analysts, partners, and competitors at one of Europe’s largest BI conferences. It was a great show overall, and I came away even more optimistic about analytics for the coming year. Here are some quick thoughts about what I thought was interesting / different about the Gartner BI Summit 2012 compared to previous years: The band played on: Gartner analysts Nigel Rayner and... [Read More...]
Are You in Denial About Governance, Risk, and Compliance?
In a previous post, I talked about the “illusory superiority” effect, and how it blinds people to the fact that, on average, it’s unlikely that they use data better than their competitors. Guess what? It turns out that it applies to governance, risk, and compliance, too. Here are some figures from another Economist Intelligence Unit Survey, “Ascending the Maturity Curve, Effective Management of Enterprise Risk and Compliance”: We can see... [Read More...]
Survey: Everybody Uses Data Better Than Their Competitors?
Here’s a chart from a recent study by the Economist Intelligence Unit called “Big data: Harnessing a game-changing asset”, showing that only 9% of respondents believe that they use data worse than their competitors. Let’s face it, they’re probably in denial. It’s often called “Illusory Superiority” or the “Lake Wobegon Effect” (a radio show where “all the children are above average”), and it’s a real force in the analytics... [Read More...]
Data Analysts, Data Scientists, and the Rest of Us
This post is part of a “blogorama” organized by smartdatacollective.com– see “The Emerging Role of the Analyst” for links to other bloggers’ views of this theme. Recently, I’ve been feeling like I’ve stepped through a looking glass to another similar-but-very-different world. I’m steeped in 20+ years in corporate data warehousing and business intelligence practice. Throughout that time, there have been big... [Read More...]
Business People Are Dumb On Average(s)
Here’s one real-life example of the limits in quantitative thinking observed in an average company, shared with me by Michael Thompson. He recently worked with Dan Rosenberg’s UX team on a SAP research project that isolated over 100 distinct, real-life uses of business analytics across dozens of roles and business functions. A retail analyst was attempting to figure out the success of product promotions on the “sales” page of a web site.... [Read More...]
Carbon Footprint Analysis Leads to Concrete Savings: Walkers Crisps
I’ll confess upfront that I’ve always been slightly dubious about the assertion that “sustainability is about making money”. After all, if it’s about making money, it’s something that companies should be doing anyway – it’s only when there’s a tradeoff between sustainability and money that there’s room for interesting debate about to what extent it should be one of the goals of the organization. However, as Diversey’s CEO Curt... [Read More...]
Flawed Decision Process and the Deadly Sproutbreak
Why did it take so long to discover the source of the deadly outbreak of E.coli poisoning in Germany? Since the start of the outbreak, 35 people have died, over 100 will need kidney transplants or life-long dialysis, more than 3,000 people are ill, and falsely-accused Spanish cucumber producers have lost millions of Euros. Researchers initially relied on the most obvious source of data: the tests carried out on suspect food. Unfortunately, the thousands... [Read More...]
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...]
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...]
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...]
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