Category: Uncategorized

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…