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, …
Better Security Through BI?
Computerworld has an interesting article about the difference between trust and security. A county coroner gave out his logon information to a confidential police 911 system so that newspaper reporters wouldn’t bother him each time they needed information. This resulted in, for example, a drug informant being badly beaten up when his name was revealed. …
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 …
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BI Instead of Expense Controls?
Your organization has a travel and expense policy. It’s probably long and complicated, with lots of rules that your employees roll their eyes at, and your financial controllers probably struggle to implement it. Why? Because the role of finance includes controls, and because “control” is too often translated into “rules.” A BI approach to expense …