Making Tough Decisions
There’s increasing agreement that business intelligence and performance management technology has to go further than “just” data, analysis, and planning, to helping with the intrinsically human process of making decisions. Today, most corporate decision-making happens in meetings and conference calls, with little support from technology. As a process, it functions, but most of us would be hard-pressed to call it optimized. in many ways, corporate... [Read More...]
The Web 2.0 Manager (Cartoon)
Who Has the Data?
Most organizations like to assert that they are “fact-driven”. But the reality of mundane, everyday decision making doesn’t always match the rhetoric, and force of personality (or simply seniority!) often swings the debate. But information is still power. As SAP BusinessObjects marketing VP Franz Aman explained in a recent podcast with Jon Reed of JonERP.com “It’s stunning every single time when you get into a discussion, whether it’s... [Read More...]
Is There Such a Thing as Good Gut Decisions?
Thinking and Emotions are Inextricably Linked It’s long been known that real-life decision-making involves more than just data and logic. For example, people that have lost their sense of emotions find it impossible to make even simple decisions. Donald Norman (author of the classic “The Design of Everyday Things“), in a Scientific American article called “Why Machines Should Fear“, explains: ‘Emotion was traditionally... [Read More...]
Bush’s Analytic Legacy?
It’s a historic day. I’ve already posted about who Europe would have voted for in the US election. Many an executive would prefer to ignore the bad information that comes from their systems… here’s a quick illustration of President George Bush’s approach, below… Happy inauguration everyone! Read More →
SAPPHIRE Berlin
It’s SAPPHIRE Berlin next week — I’ll be giving presentations on “Why BI Projects Fail And What To Do About It” and “Delivering Results with Business Intelligence“ Since the theme of the SAP / Business Objects combination is fixing the gap between strategy and execution, a quick Berlin-appropriate cartoon: Read More →
Thanksgiving Predictive Analytics
One of the difficulties of predictive analytics is that it relies on the past being a reliable predictor of the future — which is rarely the case in today’s fast-moving economies… Happy Thanksgiving. Unless you’re a turkey. Read More →
SAP and Business Objects
It hasn’t always been easy to access data from SAP systems. The Business Objects acquisition will help… Read More →
Who Really Wants Predictive Analytics?
The value of predictive analytics seems obvious: who wants to “drive looking out of the rear view mirror”? Several recent books, articles and blog postings point to a resurgence of interest in the topic, but what the term actually means is — as usual in our industry – subject to some debate. I’ve tended to use the term to refer to predictive models, overlapping with the term “data mining”,... [Read More...]
What Executives Want from BI?
Joe McKendrick recently posted on the ongoing difficulties faced by companies trying to use business intelligence effectively, especially for executive users: Many of today’s BI solutions, in fact, ‘have only exacerbated the amount of information that is bombarding senior management and left it up to them to decipher, collate and try to find the nuggets of useful and relevant information for their particular responsibility.’ What... [Read More...]
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