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...]
ITWeb BI Summit BI Competency Center Workshop
Here are the slides from today’s workshop on BI Competency Centers at the ITWeb BI summit in Johannesburg, in PowerPoint and pdf format. Read More →
ESP and Business Analytics
The New York Times reports that a respected psychology journal is due to publish a paper purporting to show “strong evidence” for extra-sensory perception: “A software program randomly posted a picture behind one curtain or the other — but only after the participant made a choice. Still, the participants beat chance, by 53 percent to 50 percent, at least when the photos being posted were erotic ones. They did not do better than chance on... [Read More...]
Top BI Events in 2010, Top BI Trends in 2011
Ajay Ohri of DecisionStats.com has posted my email interview on Business Intelligence trends – you can read a copy below. What do you think I missed? Ajay: “What are the top 5 events in Business Integration and Data Visualization services you saw in 2010 and what are the top three trends you see in these in 2011.” Top five events in 2010: (1) Back to strong market growth. IT spending plummeted last year (business intelligence continued to grow,... [Read More...]
What Does a World-Class BI Program Look Like?
I was asked this question last week at an internal meeting for the BI teams of a large Nordic telecom company, who had invited me to do a presentation on BI trends. Here’s my answer: “It’s one where that successfully changes the information CULTURE of the organization” Business intelligence is about business and people, not information and technology. Information is useless unless you actually change something in the way your organization... [Read More...]
Forrester IT Forum EMEA 2010: Five Next-Gen BI Technologies
Here’s my Five Next-Generation BI Technologies presentation from today’s SAP sponsor session at the Forrester IT Forum 2010 in Cascais, Portugal, in pdf and pptx format (note that if you’re downloaded my previous presentations about the “Clear Intelligence Future”, you’ll find a lot of the same material). The full download includes extra hidden slides and the interactive Xcelsius models (unzip the file and keep the .swf files in the same... [Read More...]
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