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 …
BI 2.0?
First, I agree with most of the coverage of business intelligence 2.0 so far: yes, the term is a little tacky — but it’s irresistible (and a great way of finding people blogging about Business Intelligence) An irresistible term A great example is the experience of Gartner’s Andy Bitterer. Despite his criticism of the term, …
Data Integration and Web Mashups on Collision Course?
Here’s an interesting Techcrunch post on “5 Ways to Mix, Rip, and Mash your Data“. It includes Yahoo! pipes that I wrote about a couple of weeks ago, but also several other ETL-like technologies. One in particular, called Proto, has the ability to mash together local data with information from the web (e.g. “map my Outlook …
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Swivel.com: Flickr for Data Lovers?
After ManyEyes, Swivel is another site that another site that lets users upload and share information. It’s more explicitly modeled after Flickr and other web 2.0 sites, with community building and “fun statistics” (highlights today include chart showing number of people attending the burning man festival and the nationality of cyclists in the 2007 Tour of …
BI Forum Zurich
I presented on the topic of “BI Market Dynamics and the Three Pillars of BI” at the Business Objects Zurich BI Forum on March 1st. A Business Objects customer, Atel Electricity, presented their BI project, and there were around one hundred or so attendees. Here are the slides from the event in pdf format (contact …
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 …
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 …
Comparing Apples and Oranges on the Web?
IBM’s Many Eyes site lets users carry out analysis over the web, using information from a range of public sources, or with data that they have uploaded, and then share their analysis with others. Interestingly, one of the team was apparently the creator of the baby name popularity chart that did the tour of the …
Yahoo! Pipes: ETL for the Web?
Yahoo! recently released Yahoo! Pipes, an “interactive feed aggregator and manipulator”. With a user interface reminiscent of enterprise data integration tools such as Business Objects Data Integrator, it lets anybody create RSS mashups from multiple different sources, complete with transformations and different output formats. Here’s a quick example of how to build one, courtesy of …
BI As a Service: Ready to Explode?
A post by David Linthicum on the Intelligence Enterprise weblog called “SaaS Explodes…” has statistics on the growth of software as a service in large organizations that can give some hints about the future of BI as a service. It’s a cultural issue I wholeheartedly agree with David’s sentiments: “What’s significant is not that SaaS is growing, …