Implementing Business Intelligence Standards: Save Money and Improve Business Insight

At the end of last year, I wrote a white paper on implementing business intelligence standards – here’s a blog post that adapts the context (the full white paper is available as a download at the bottom of the post) Executive Summary: Business Intelligence, Essential in a Tough Economic Climate Citing business intelligence (BI) as a strategic technology, analyst firm Gartner observes, “BI can have a direct positive impact on a company’s business... [Read More...]

What Might Go Wrong in Business Intelligence in 2009?

Faced with the current tough economic conditions, can we predict how organizations might react? (1) People will try to do without BI — and fail BI is important, but rarely urgent. In dire economic conditions, some organizations will be too busy trying to survive to think about doing analysis. But action without analysis is called guessing, and is unlikely to help. (2) People will revert to hand-coding and excel macros — and waste a... [Read More...]

Asking for Your Help: User Percentage Research?

Business intelligence standardization (which I define as “pragmatically reducing the number of overlapping tools in order to reduce costs and maximize the benefits of business intelligence”) seems to be on the rise, at least in my neck of the woods. Several large customers are looking for external validation of how many BI users they “should” have, and of what profiles (simple reporting, interactive reporting, ad-hoc reporting,... [Read More...]

How’s Your BI Maturity?

Wayne Eckerson and I will be presenting two web seminars this week on the subject of putting TDWI’s BI Maturity Model to Practice: Recording – Benchmarking Your BI Maturity OverviewProvides an overview of the five stages of the BI Maturity model and the two major obstacles – the Gulf & Chasm. The goal is to demonstrate how the model can be used to help assess and evolve any BI/DW program. September 25 at 12:00 pm EasternSpanning... [Read More...]

Is BI Standardization a Myth?

Despite some people dismissing it as a myth, BI standardization is alive and well in organizations around the world. Here’s a quick primer on what, why, and how. What is BI Standardization? The phrase “BI standardization” often gets a negative reaction, because people equate it with choosing only one tool to the exclusion of all others, and taking away existing products from happy business users. My definition is this: Pragmatically... [Read More...]

Two Key Steps From Project to Enterprise BI

A lot has been written about what typically goes wrong in individual BI projects (see my blog postings on the five fatal flaws, or check out articles such as Madan Sheina’s recent “What went wrong with business intelligence?“) But even when individual BI projects are successful, many organizations stumble on the journey to true enterprise BI deployments. What goes wrong? First, organizations must realize that implementing enterprise... [Read More...]

Microstrategy Top Standardization Product?

According to this article, the latest OLAP report ranks MicroStrategy as the top product for BI standardization. This seems counter-intuitive, to say the least: from my experience, standardization deals usually boil down to a face off between the top two vendors in the account (typically Business Objects and Cognos), and the winner is almost inevitably the product that currently has the most usage. In the remaining cases, the decision... [Read More...]