Category: Uncategorized
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Making the World a Better Place?
A new site launches today, sponsored by Business Objects. Insight is designed as a community site for anybody who cares about using information to make the world a better place. Initial content includes an “information challenge” around reducing carbon footprints, a space for sharing interesting visualizations, and a blog, hosted by me, which will deal with…
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The Case for Independent Business Intelligence
The time is ripe to discuss the future of independent BI, after the purchase of Hyperion by Oracle and continued speculation on the future of the remaining vendors. Will there be a “domino effect”? A commentary in Business Week sums up the “domino effect” opinion (more prevalent among financial analysts than industry analysts) that the deal…
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Oracle Support Doesn’t Use BI?
One interesting aspect in Oracle’s lawsuit against SAP is how they apparently noticed that something was wrong: Intelligent Enterprise: “Ultimately, Oracle caught on to the unusual volume of requests…. Oracle says an investigation into huge traffic spikes on its Customer Connection servers…” Oracle’s complaint document: “In late November 2006, there occurred unusually heavy download activity…
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The Other EPM?
It turns out that EPM also stands for “experience and performance management”, and: A comprehensive EPM system captures and reports real metrics about application usage. Who is using which transactions? How long are they active? How long are they idle? EPM gives you the ability to pinpoint and analyze user adoption issues that are hindering…
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A Criminal Misuse of Statistics?
One of my favorite topics is the very human tendency to misuse and misunderstand the information that is provided by business intelligence systems. Here’s a link to a TED Talk by Peter Donnelly, an Oxford statistician, pointing out some of the common errors that people make, and the serious consequences that can result. Here’s a taste of the…
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Putting the ‘Business’ back into Business Intelligence
In the What’s in a Name post, I wrote about an opportunity to update the “business intelligence” term. Gartner has been thinking about the same thing. It’s the Gartner Business Intelligence Summit this week, and in an Intelligent Enterprise article, Bill Hostman talks about the key trends and themes from the event: Bill Hostmann “We’ve…
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Google and Mobile Consumer BI?
According to their 2005 patent filing, Google may be interested in providing information to people’s mobile phones based on their location: “The generating of the dictionary data may also include producing data related to the information indicative of the user location. The generated dictionary data may be associated with places near the user location. Also, the…
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What’s in a Name? PM / BI / IM
To successfully provide information in a form that business people can use, you need three types of technology, to: Tame information chaos: Collect, manage, and integrate information, and fix any data quality problems (data quality, data integration, metadata management, etc) Turn information into insight: Analyze the information, gain understanding of what is happening, and communicate it…
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Oracle Buys Hyperion
After the months (years?) of consolidation rumors, finally something happened…. Thoughts: Less change than you might expect It doesn’t change the BI market share picture much, based on the latest IDC numbers, from 2005 (2006 figures presumably due out soon, not expecting any huge changes in the relative positions). Hyperion is currently #5, and Oracle…
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SAP Buys an EIS Pioneer
SAP just purchased Pilot Software, which first came out with an executive information system (EIS) in 1986. I remember evaluating Pilot Lightship, a windows-based EIS solution, in 1992 or so. Then they had almost no discernable impact on mainstream BI for fifteen years, only to pop up recently as a “company to watch” according to…