The Business Intelligence Blog

Is building an enterprise data warehouse (EDW) the best path to business intelligence (BI)? It’s a perennially vexing question that — thanks to a couple of recent trends in BI and data warehousing (DW) — has taken on new life.

The value of the full-fledged EDW seems unassailable. Over the last half-decade, however, some of the biggest EDW champions have moderated their stances, such that they now both countenance the existence of alternatives and, under certain very special conditions, are even willing to admit they’re useful. The result is that although the EDW is still seen as the Holy Grail of data warehousing, departmental (and even enterprise) data marts are now countenanced as well.

Active EDW giant Teradata Inc. is the foremost case in point, but other players — including relative newcomer Hewlett-Packard Co. (HP), which is in the high-end DW segment (by its acquisition of Knightsbridge Solutions) and markets Neoview, a DW appliance-like offering — are staking out similar ground. (In addition to Neoview, HP also partners with both Microsoft Corp. and Oracle Corp. to market appliances in the 1 to 32 TB range.)

Interesting debate on TDWI.

A must read about Semantic Intelligence, the next generation business intelligence. Very similar to the concept of semantic web.

Semantic intelligence provides early identification and analysis of consumer sentiment, purchasing trends, market deals, and competitive information – and uncovers this data not only from within a organization’s network, but also from the most unstructured corners of the Web. You may be thinking that a normal Google search can uncover any Web-based information, but unlike simple keyword search, semantic intelligence uncovers the meaning the words express, in their proper context, no matter the number (singular or plural), gender (masculine or feminine), verb tense (past, present, or future), or mode (indicative or imperative).

For example, say you’re a chef and you’re looking for details on how to make soup with healthier ingredients, so, you keyword search “apple stock.” Try it right now – you’ll get dozens upon dozens of pages about Apple, the company. If you try to narrow the search and type, “apple stock and cook,” you will still get hundreds of erroneous search results about Tim Cook and Apple, the company.

Semantic intelligence incorporates morphological, logical, grammatical, and natural language analysis that translates into higher precision and recall when searching for information. By providing information in the requested context and form, semantic intelligence helps organizations strategize, analyze, and make predictions because you’re getting the correct data – and in these economic times, having the right foresight can save a business.

The “Microsoft SMB Insight Report” reflects the insight of Small Business Specialists from the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, France and Brazil. The following are some of Microsoft’s key findings on the technologies most likely to drive growth and profitability for SMBs in 2009:

— Fifty percent of the surveyed Small Business Specialists identified virtualization or IT consolidation through a small or midsize server as the technology most likely to reduce operating costs.
— The Small Business Specialists expect a 20 percentage point increase this year in the number of SMBs that use software as a service.
— More than 50 percent of the Small Business Specialists considered customer relationship management (CRM: 34.05, 0, 0%), virtualization or IT consolidation through a small or midsize server as the best investment for maximizing business growth in a down economy.
— Nearly 40 percent expect an increased interest in business intelligence and identified it as a critical tool for helping improve a customer’s experience and increase loyalty.
— More than half of the surveyed Small Business Specialists anticipate an increase in the number of SMB remote workers, and nearly 60 percent expect that the shift to more remote workers also will lead to bigger roles and more responsibilities for those individuals working remotely.

The key here is the increased interest in business intelligence which I think makes total sense given the state of business. From the PRNewswire[Fox]

Some progress on the healthcare BI Apps. Read more from dBusiness News.

In the newly released benchmark report “Business Intelligence in Healthcare: Have Providers Found a Cure?,” Aberdeen Group, a Harte-Hanks Company , found that Best-in-Class organizations achieved a 15% increase in patient satisfaction scores through the use of Business Intelligence (BI) and analytical tools. This study collected data from nearly 100 healthcare providers and found that these organizations are increasingly deploying BI tools in the hospital in order to combat the challenges of rising healthcare costs and the pressing need to enhance patient care.

Prior Aberdeen research revealed that healthcare organizations have been hesitant to deploy analytical tools, lagging behind industry norms in both adoption and maturity of BI implementations. The challenge many hospitals face is making sense of a tangled web of disparate back-end data sources. Showing a lucid connection between analytical capability and enhanced quality of care is often a complicated task. Through the use of BI and analytical tools, healthcare organizations have been able to leverage financial and clinical data in order to better manage patient flow, streamline their operations, and deliver an elevated standard of patient care. Best-in-Class organizations have been able to achieve these performance improvements through an efficient combination of organizational capability and technology enablers such as HIS (Hospital Information Systems). Drawing on a solid foundation of organizational capability the Best-in-Class were able to drive an 11% reduction in overtime incurred, a stark contrast to all other organizations that experienced a 7% increase in overtime incurred.

From TMCNet -

Pentaho, the commercial open source alternative for business intelligence (BI), has announced the availability of a new Pentaho iPhone application, saying that it provides native iPhone web navigation of Pentaho BI content.

The integration was developed using the iUI project, currently hosted on Google Code. According to company officials, the new iPhone BI extension from Pentaho offers an intuitive way for business users to access and navigate business intelligence information.

“The demand to provide BI where business users operate has changed significantly as mobile devices like Apple iPhone have simplified business computing dramatically,” said Mark Smith, CEO & executive vice president of research at Ventana Research.

From ITP

The Oracle Business Indicators applications will take data from Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition Plus (OBIEE) and Oracle Business Intelligence Applications, Fusion Edition and push it to authorised iPhone users, allowing managers to receive alerts based on pre-defined parameters.

The applications are available from the Apple App Store, and are free to Oracle business intelligence customers. The application will provide data on business intelligence metrics in either graph or table form.

From Intelligent Enterprise -

In leveraging the new technologies, Jaspersoft has built a UI that runs in all the major browsers and uses a drag-and-drop approach to using business intelligence tools.

Users start with a list of domains, such as billing, inventory, sales, marketing or any other topic for analysis and reporting. Under each domain is a list of data items organized in a typical tree structure. After a user drags data items to the workspace on the right side of the UI and clicks “done,” the software automatically generates the SQL statements for querying data stores.

Once the queries have been generated, the retrieved data can be dragged onto a designer workspace for generating reports that can be saved in the Jaspersoft repository and then used in a variety of ways, such as in a PowerPoint presentation, Excel spreadsheet, a PDF document or email.

From Silicon Republic, an interesting article on the exponential growth of data -

CURRENTLY the amount of data worldwide is doubling every 11 months – by 2010 it will double every 11 hours.

Ireland stands in the direct path of this tidal wave of data, warns a senior executive with business intelligence (BI) giant SAS.

Dr John Brocklebank, director of analytic solutions at privately held software giant SAS Institute, believes Irish firms are ill-equipped to deal with this rapid growth in the world’s data.

He says the challenge for Irish companies is to capture and exploit the 1-2pc of data that is relevant to their decision-making processes and strategic objectives.

“We know that, on average, managers spend two hours a day looking for data and that more than half of this is useless to their decision-making process,” Brocklebank explains.

“Most frightening is that 42pc of managers say they accidentally use the wrong information to make a decision at least once a week. So never mind trying to deal with the data in its entirety; it needs to be made meaningful and accurate to support business decisions.

From Aptech Press Release -

There’s a fine line between having the right information you need to make hotel budgets and solid business decisions, and being confronted by so much data that it paralyzes thinking. For numbers-driven hotel companies, information should be king. But today it is too often the opposite, arriving as a stack of spreadsheets that managers must carefully review and analyze to see how their organization is performing–or was a week or more ago.

Business Intelligence (BI) applications solved this problem and are now widely used throughout the hospitality industry. A true BI system consolidates information from financial and non-financial sources such as multiple property management systems and financial planning software, Smith Travel Research (STR), guest satisfaction scoring, payroll and other systems and delivers an analysis that enables users to identify the reasons behind the numbers that affect how their hotel management business is performing. Today, over 20 hotel management companies and ownership groups with over 2,500 total properties use Aptech’s BI solutions to automate, analyze and deliver forecasting and performance information.

To make business intelligence data more accessible and the systems easer to use, hospitality BI leader Aptech Computer Systems, which utilizes the Cognos database engine, is rolling out a new version of its Execuvue Business Intelligence System based on the latest Cognos 8.3 technology that provides a much wider scope of data delivery options and formats. The new Execuvue BI platform ‘humanizes hotel software’ by making the system easier to use and enables a hotel company to customize its BI information output so each manager sees the data they need in the delivery format they can use best for faster and more profitable decisions.

From Internet News, an article on how Web 2.0 is not the only new kid on the block.

“BI is getting bigger, growing from a departmental solution or application to an enterprise resource, so it needs an infrastructure that can support thousands or tens of thousands of users, not hundreds,” Microstrategy vice president of products Mark LaRow told InternetNews.com.

The traditional method of building reports on request consumes a lot of resources, and an IT department would have to build more than a million designs to cover a modest data warehouse, according to LaRow.

Now, IT designs “a small number of reports — maybe 1,000,” and users can take one report, click on different rows and columns to drill down, LaRow said.

He said they can surf the data they want, adding the data they need dynamically and either saving their version of the report or using it online.

For example, one of Microstrategy’s customers, the Loews (NASDAQ: LTR) hardware retail store chain, has 94,000 reports anyone can use. Only 3,000 were “explicitly designed by IT,” and the rest are variations of those with additional data added by users, LaRow said, adding that some of the derivative reports are “much larger than the originals.”

None of these approaches is fast enough for Terry Cunningham, the founder of Crystal Decisions, which sold the Crystal Reports BI tool. He is often considered the father of business intelligence.

BI is “evolving into what we call continuous BI; it never rests,” Cunningham told InternetNews.com. “Things need to be understood, and decisions need to be made in real time,” he explained. “There’s no such thing as ‘I’m going to run the report tomorrow and see how we did today.’”

Business Objects is now officially into Predictive Analytics with its new tool Predictive Workbench and that’s a good news. Read more from Infoweek.

Business Objects on Wednesday announced Predictive Workbench, a new module for its business intelligence platform that lets businesses make predictions about such things as customer behavior and business performance. The module, based on technology from SPSS Inc., is the latest example of a traditional BI company looking to move beyond its expertise in reporting and analysis tools.

Predictive Workbench is the result of an OEM deal Business Objects struck last December to offer SPSS’s technology. IBM (NYSE: IBM)’s Cognos struck a similar deal with SPSS in March, and also plans to integrate IBM-developed predictive analytics within Cognos. Both efforts take a direct competitive shot at SAS Institute, by far the market leader in predictive analytics.

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Since the December OEM deal, Business Objects has worked to integrate the SPSS technology, called Clementine, into Business Objects X1 3.0 so that it’s “totally transparent and seamless for customers,” said Franz Aman, VP of BI product marketing. The result is Predictive Workbench, from which a user can launch the Business Objects Universe metadata layer to run predictive analytics against various databases and data warehouses. Business Objects will disclose the price of the module only to interested customers, Aman says.