Category: Uncategorized

  • Intestine-Based Decision-Making

  • Hansel and Gretel Explain Data Lineage?

    The Camtasia Studio video content presented here requires JavaScript to be enabled and the latest version of the Macromedia Flash Player. If you are you using a browser with JavaScript disabled please enable it now. Otherwise, please update your version of the free Flash Player by downloading here. The importance of data lineage is in…

  • Performance Excellence, Past and Future?

    Performance Excellence, Past and Future?

    One of the problems of explaining the value of business intelligence is that every layer of computing has always promised some variation on “better management” as the ultimate benefit of purchasing the system. From 1959 mainframes (above), early “executive information systems”, the 1982 IBM PC (right), the first spreadsheets (far right), 1980s ERP systems and “decision…

  • Performance Excellence vs. BI + PM

    Yet more on the use and abuses of the terms BI and PM. Mark Smith of Ventana recently published a note called “BI is Not Performance Management“, and his sentiments were echoed by Jonathan Becher in a note called “BI vs. PM“. I believe much of the confusion comes from using the same terms to…

  • The Latest on BI+PM = ?

    In two earlier posts, “What’s in a Name?” and “Putting the Business Back into Business Intelligence“, I talked about the ongoing debate about what we should all call the combination of business intelligence and performance management. With the recent wave of PM acquisitions by Oracle (Hyperion), SAP (Pilot and OutlookSoft), and BusinessObjects (Cartesis), the two…

  • Business Objects Gets Greater Inxight

    Business Objects Gets Greater Inxight

    At the European Insight User Conference, Business Objects just announced the purchase of Inxight, a text analytics company. (Welcome!) Inxight Founder Ian Hersey and Marge Breya, CMO of Business Objects, announcing the intention to purchase, on stage at the European Insight User Conference in Berlin. The worlds of structured and unstructured analysis are (finally) coming…

  • 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…

  • The Case for Independent Business Intelligence

    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…

  • 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…

  • 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…