The Business Intelligence Blog

Short and Interesting Post by Jason Busch -

There are a few reasons why the nirvana of BI supplier and supply chain visibility is most certainly a noble objective, but one that is unlikely to ever fully take hold outside of a few very expensive, highly customized implementations. For one, BI tools (especially those we think of, which are tied to an underlying data warehouse) mimic the inflexible characteristics of the ERP systems, which generate the data that we need to analyze. In other words, once you “pour the enterprise-data concrete” so to speak, such systems become rigid and unbending and make it difficult to rapidly adopt new data sources into an analysis. Perhaps there’s a new third-party data enrichment that you want to add (one not supported or resold by your BI vendor), or maybe you’ve acquired a new facility from a supplier that is running a different ERP environment. Good luck rapidly adding these new data sources into any BI model.

From BEye Networ article on Knowledge Management/Business Intelligence –

If you’re a KM or BI champion looking for ways to boost your discipline’s visibility, take a cue from the communication masters: politicians. Campaign platforms are based on three principles: clarity, consistency and frequency. Every stump speech, every sound bite, every public conversation is rigorously “on message,” and yours should be too.

There’s usually a flabby communication strategy behind any really good idea that doesn’t quite get off the ground. KM and BI evangelists often focus so intently on the business case that they fizzle out on the “hearts and minds” part; namely, communicating with key constituents before, during and after the launch.

And which are the key constituencies for knowledge management and business intelligence? In the government, you must address at least the principal users of the tools, the funders of your initiative and those who will benefit from it.

From the Press Release:

WiseWindow, developer of Mass Opinion Business Intelligence, the next generation of web measurement, today announced that company founder and chief technology officer, Rajiv Dulepet, has been named advisor and architect for a new project funded by the National Institute of Health and executed by Caltech. The open-source project will develop a web-based bio-computational tool that allows bio-scientists and bio-computation engineers to “crunch data in the cloud” for large-scale tasks such as processing gene sequence data sets on a large cluster of computers. The new tool allows scientists to save considerable time that’s now spent waiting for computations on their desktops by moving these operations to the cloud, thereby freeing up their computers for other work.

“Working as a lead advisor to Caltech on cloud computing is both a privilege and passion for me,” said Dulepet. “It allows me to exercise skills in Internet data gathering and analysis as well as computational framework development.”

The Ness Technologies Market Pulse Study of top level business and IT executives at companies with over $500 million in revenues was conducted in the fourth quarter of 2009. Among the major findings are:

– BI initiatives are being driven by the ability to have better
transparency into company data for business planning and decision-making
(54%), a desire for more insight into the business to keep up with rapid
change (43%), and real-time analysis capabilities (43%).

– Although companies feel they have adequate access to planning
data (73%) and financial data (61%), they are less comfortable about
their access to customer data (53%) and market trend data (52%).

– The top four BI pain points are all centered on data: data silos
(47%), data integration (35%), mapping data (31%), and data
cleansing/modeling (31%).

– More than half of respondents report that results achieved are
lagging expected outcomes in 14 of 16 potential outcome categories. The
largest gaps are in business agility, data integration, and new revenue
opportunities.

What contributes to BI success?
The survey uncovered actions companies can take to increase the effectiveness of their BI programs. Alignment with business strategy and good organizational communications are strong indicators of success for BI initiatives.

“Although the benefits of BI have been elusive to many organizations, there are steps that can be taken to move the needle on your BI program from expected to achieved outcomes,” continued Scott. “Managing data integration more effectively and ensuring alignment across the company or business unit can bring companies both operational and competitive advantage.”

More from the Press Release. And more.

This year’s MS BI conference takes place in New Orleans in conjunction with Tech·Ed 2010.

More from the site:

The co-location allows Microsoft to meet the needs of customers and partners looking to focus specifically on Business Intelligence while also significantly increasing the opportunity to learn about this critical technology for all Tech·Ed attendees.

While these are separate conferences, BI Conference attendees will be exposed to additional networking opportunities with customers and partners as part of Tech·Ed, and will also have access to the Tech·Ed Keynote, Pre-Conference Seminars, more Hands-on Labs, onsite Certification Testing as well as a larger Expo showcasing more Microsoft demo stations, Exhibitors and Sponsors.

More on Microsoft BI. Follow them on Twitter.

Microsoft has made much of the self-service Business Intelligence and integration with Office. In order to make best use of the BI features it is definitely worth upgrading to Office 2010, released to beta last week. A beta version is available for download here. Excel 2010 allows much better slicing and dicing of data, and through the SQL Server PowerPivot add-in for Excel that was known as Gemini, users can investigate data to reveal the information hidden therein.

The Report Builder is also much improved and looks much more like one of the Office 2010 family. It has become much easier to split out various components of a report: If you have a grid, a map and a logo in a report, these can be copied to a Report Part Gallery, effectively a library of elements that can be used time and time again.

A look at SQL Serrver 2008 R2 Preview.

From the Press Release -

Tableau Software today announced that Tableau was named as a gold medal winner of the “2009 Editors’ Best Awards” in the Business Intelligence and Reporting Tool by Penton Media’s SQL Server Magazine.

Tableau’s BI suite brings dashboards and data visualization to organizations of all sizes. Award-winning Tableau Desktop lets people create interactive reports, dashboards and visualizations using an easy drag & drop interface. Tableau Server, also an award winner, is a complete web-based business intelligence solution.

“Our win as Best Business Intelligence tool is attributable to the fact that we are invading an industry dominated by complicated, expensive solutions and providing a fun, rapid-fire alternative,” said Christian Chabot, Tableau’s CEO and co-founder. “Now more than ever, companies need rapid access to business analytics. At the same time, few can afford traditional business intelligence platforms with high fees, complicated architectures and long roll-outs. Customers tell us that Tableau is a new kind of BI – rapid-fire BI – that gives people of all skill levels the power to build and share data visualizations and fast analytics in just minutes.”

A good starter video for someone who is completely unaware of what BI is all about.

Let’s take a step back for a moment to see the trend in performance measurement in healthcare. Most quality measurements on the clinical side of healthcare deal with the inputs to care. For instance, HEDIS measures such as weight assessment and counseling for nutrition and physical activity for children and adolescents, well-child exams, childhood immunizations, breast cancer screening, cholesterol management for patients with cardiovascular condition, etc. measure the actions taken by healthcare providers to improve health. Joint Commission measures also evaluate the inputs leading to healthy outcomes. Readmission rates are an example of measurements of the results of those actions in terms of whether the inputs worked the first time. Analysis of these results will lead to further analysis of the inputs that led to a readmission, or better yet, to the inputs that prevented a readmission.

This means that clinical performance measurement will come full circle. In doing so, clinical performance measurement will mirror financial performance measurement. No business would have its financial analysts measure investments or operational activity without evaluating them in terms of the results on the bottom line. Nor would that business simply report the financial results without a thorough analysis of the causes for those results. We take this for granted in financial management. We will now be seeing more of this cause and effect analysis in clinical performance management as well.

Interesting post by Scott Wanless in B-Eye Network.

Think of SharePoint as the jack-of-all-trades in the business software realm. Companies use it to create Web sites and then manage content for those sites. It can help workers collaborate on projects and documents. And it has a variety of corporate search and business intelligence tools too.

Microsoft wraps all of this software up into a package and sells the bundle at a reasonable price. In fact, the total cost of the bundle often comes in below what specialist companies would charge for a single application in, say, the business intelligence or corporate search fields.

While Microsoft’s Windows sales fell for the first time in history this year, its SharePoint sales have gone up. Microsoft declines to break out the exact sales figures for the software but said that SharePoint broke the $1 billion revenue mark last year and continued to rise past that total this year, making it the hottest selling server-side product ever for the company.

Companies like Ferrari, Starbucks and Viacom have used SharePoint to create their public-facing Web sites and for various other tasks. All told, more than 17,000 customers use SharePoint.

More from NY Times.