2012: The Year Analytics Means Business
The real trend this year is not the technology. It’s about helping business people make better decisions, and actually change the way companies do business. Analytics has always been about transforming business, but the recent huge changes in analytic technology have created interesting new opportunities for business innovation. Most organizations are now starting to understand the technical opportunities, but many struggle to apply those new opportunities... [Read More...]
Social + Product = Better Products: Meet The Panelists
[UPDATE: Here's a link to the recorded panel session of Social+Products=Better Products on Wednesday, February 15th, from 3pm to 4.30pm PST, as part of Social Media Day at SAP Palo Alto. See this post on Products+Social=Better Products for more details of the topics discussed. ] Panel Session Outline Here’s the outline of the panel session: 3:00-3:15 Key themes and Introductions: 3:15-3:35 Improving products through social techniques: 3:35-3:55... [Read More...]
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 Jason Rose and I having an off-the-cuff discussion of what we found interesting about the latest Gartner BI Summit 2012 in London this week: And here are some longer thoughts about the... [Read More...]
Products + Social = Better Products
Update: as part of this year’s Social Media Week, I hosted one of the sessions at a free one-day event held at SAP Palo Alto on February 15th. Accompanied by a star-studded lineup of guests (meet the panelists) we discussed how companies can make better products using social media — here’s a link to the recorded panel session: Social+Products=Better Products. In this post, I’d like to share some ideas about why I believe that... [Read More...]
Join Us For Social Media Day in Palo Alto on Feb 15th
Interested in Social Media? (and everybody should be, because these techniques are changing EVERY business process, not just marketing). Come and join us! As part of this year’s Social Media Week, SAP Palo Alto will be hosting a free, day-long non-SAP-focused event on Wednesday, February 15th with a glittering array of industry experts discussing a variety of key social topics: Just some of the participants: Maggie Fox, CEO... [Read More...]
BI and The Limitations of Human Cognition in Den Bosch
I presented at my first conference of the year last week, the Heliview Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing 2012 conference in ‘s Hertogenbosch, Netherlands. The first keynote, by Erasmus scholar Dr. Roeland Dietvorst, was about “Performance Management in the Brain”, and a subject close to my heart: the (severe) limitations we evolved apes have when trying to make rational decisions. He illustrated his point with examples of great research... [Read More...]
Scoring My 2011 Analytic Predictions
Last year, Ajay Ohri of the DecisionStats web site asked me to predict the top three analytic trends for 2011. He recently challenged me to score how well I did – here’s a copy of the post he put on his site, with the predictions and some comments on what actually happened during the year: (1) Analytics, reinvented. New DW techniques make it possible to do sub-second, interactive analytics directly against row-level operational data. Now BI processes... [Read More...]
What Mobile BI Used To Look Like, And Where It’s Going (Back to the Future!)
Note, this is an adapted, extended version of my post on the SAP Analytics Blog. Mobile BI has been around for a long time. Starting in the late-1990s, the first SMS-enabled telephones became mainstream in Europe, with basic broadcasting of the latest figures available in your BI system (or email, fax, pager, etc.). By the end of the decade, the first telephones with WAP browsers were used to provide interactive BI, quickly followed by connected PDAs... [Read More...]
Building Competitive Advantage (SAP World Tour Keynote)
Here’s a recording of a World Tour keynote presentation (it happens to be from Belgrade, Serbia, but I did similar presentations in several different regions). It covers how companies can build competitive advantage through customer intimacy, product leadership, category renewal, and operational excellence, using examples from SAP’s customers. You can download the slides in either PowerPoint or pdf format. 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...]
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