Top BI Questions Blog Posts of 2009

January saw Obama’s inauguration, and a reflection on Bush’s analytic legacy, a discussion on whether “gut feelings” have any basis in science, a dashboard showing the best companies to work for in the US, and a quick demonstration that Malcom Gladwell was right.       February’s posts discussed the power of having the right data, and that dashboards have been around for a long, long time, but if they have poor data... [Read More...]

Integrating Live Twitter Streams into PowerPoint Using Xcelsius

As a frequent presenter, I’ve been wanting to add some more interaction to presentations for a long time. A couple of years ago, I used some .php code I found on the web and an early version of Xcelsius to display a ticker bar during the presentation that contained the subject lines of emails sent to a particular address. And after some frustration, I even managed to put together a simple voting-by-email service that was adapted by the BusinessObjects... [Read More...]

Delivering Results with Business Intelligence

Here’s one of the presentations I gave at Sapphire last month. It is a high-level, introductory overview that covers key business intelligence themes and how to overcome the major barriers to successful deployments: data integration, ease of use, and cost of deployment. It is illustrated (inevitably) with examples of Business Objects technology. Link to a PDF version of the presentation Link to the PPT file (15mb) Was this interesting? Share... [Read More...]

Crossing the Chasm: Delivering a Strategic, Enterprise BI System

The third and final web seminar presentation on BI Maturity that I did last week with Wayne Eckerson: how to make BI a strategic asset for the organization. As I joked with Wayne on the call, I think the maturity model probably needs extending with an additional ”canyon”, because many organizations have managed to deploy BI enterprise-wide, but still haven’t managed to connect it with the strategy and finances of the organization. Click... [Read More...]