Category: Uncategorized
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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…
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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…