Innovation Evangelism

  • 10 Cool Cutting-Edge Technologies And How They Relate to BI?

    Each year, Computerworld chooses ten innovative technologies that meet the needs of corporate IT. Here’s a look at how the 2007 Computerworld Horizon Award winners (and honorable mentions) announced yesterday might effect the business intelligence market, sorted by relevance: Highly Relevant Memory Spot. This miniature wireless data chip, 2mm to 4mm square, can be stuck on, or…

  • Free-Wheeling Business Intelligence?

      Later today, the Tour de France will be rolling into Paris to complete the final leg on the Champs-Elysées, so it seemed a good time to share this story of business intelligence and bicycles. The city of Paris recently rolled out their latest big initiative in making Paris a more livable, green city: 10,000…

  • What Executives Want from BI?

    What Executives Want from BI?

    Joe McKendrick recently posted on the ongoing difficulties faced by companies trying to use business intelligence effectively, especially for executive users: Many of today’s BI solutions, in fact, ‘have only exacerbated the amount of information that is bombarding senior management and left it up to them to decipher, collate and try to find the nuggets…

  • BI Briefs: UPS, Facebook, MySQL, SAP, Microsoft

    UPS minimizes left-turns. Advanced route planning minimizes fuel consumption and accidents. An old story, but given new life with a recent InformationWeek interview with UPS CIO Dave Barnes (and a good example of delivering effectively on a strategic multi-year IT project). Facebook’s community app platform. As BI vendors try to web-2.0 themselves, they will need to…

  • 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…

  • Insight User Conference in Berlin Photos And “Five Fatal Flaws” Presentation File

    Insight User Conference in Berlin Photos And “Five Fatal Flaws” Presentation File

    I’m finally getting around to posting materials from the Business Objects Insight User Conference in Berlin, 21-23 May 2007. You can find my photos from the event here — mainly from the main stage, including the inxight purchase announcement and keynotes by John Schwarz, Bernard Liautaud, and the climber Reinhold Messner. I did a presentation on…

  • 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…

  • Will BI 2.0 Sparql Thanks to the Semantic Web?

    The Tech Sanity Check blog has a great ZDNet interview with Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the worldwide web, on the standards underlying the “semantic web”. As I’ve noted on this blog before, I’m not a fan of using the phrase BI 2.0 to simply cover a laundry list of features that enterprise BI vendors were already planning…

  • 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…