Concrete Examples of How Health Intelligence Saves Lives

An excellent article in Health Data Management by Greg Gillespie gives some wonderful examples of the power of analytics to improve health outcomes, looking at data from some of the 2,000+ clinical trials that Cleveland Clinic is currently running. I strongly encourage you to read the original article (also available in pdf format), but here are summaries of the three use cases highlighted: hand-washing analytics, central-line analytics, and blood-transfusion... [Read More...]

Business Intelligence Best Practice Twitter #SAPChat

I will be the host of the next #SAPChat, an interactive panel discussion carried out entirely over Twitter. It’s scheduled for 9am PST / 18:00 CET on Wednesday February 29th, and the subject will be “Business Intelligence Best Practice”. We will be discussing how best to implement business intelligence projects successfully, with an emphasis on people-focused hints and tips rather than technical discussions. And with only 140 characters available,... [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...]

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...]

The Inevitable Wolfram|Alpha Problem: Semantics

Now that Wolfram|Alpha has launched, I thought I’d go take a look. After failing to find out the average happiness of France vs US (not a supported database yet, apparently), I tried out some of the examples and then checked out the “community” area. Inevitably, Wolfram|Alpha suffers from the same problems that have plagued every attempt to provide answers to human questions using technology since the dawn of computers: semantics, and specifically... [Read More...]

Branding Your BI Solution: Everything Up to And Including Theme Music?

Branding and other forms of internal marketing are absolutely essential for successful BI projects — and it’s an area where the teams don’t often have a lot of expertise. Use whatever resources you have Sometimes implementation teams have access to internal resources for brochures and other materials – e.g. see the example below for an example of a brochure that was produced for a large French public sector BI project. Even... [Read More...]