Data Warehousing, Business Intelligence & CPM
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Shallow impact, deep insight: Ian Hodgson, Oxsoft (July 2012)
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With 10-11% annual growth and projected sales of £8.5 billion by 2013, the data warehousing market looks set to
outstrip even the previously dominant CRM marketplace. Data warehousing’s future also looks bright in terms of
creativity – with lots of open-source and small independent software vendors muscling in on the now-familiar major
players of Oracle, IBM, Teradata, Microsoft, EMC/Greenplum and SAP/Sybase. So what explains this market boom? Well, let’s look at some fundamentals.
The general requirement for a data warehouse or data store is for an integrated set of servers, online storage and
operating systems. These incorporate a DBMS system of some sort and a bespoke software application specifically
written as an easy-to-use ‘front end’ (a la EIS system), and very often with an equally easy-to-use reporting engine for
the activity now known as data warehousing (DW).
Meanwhile, DW ‘appliances’ have emerged, driven by the need to continually simplify and package IT applications and
their associated hardware in such a way as to make them appear to be ‘off-the-shelf’ products, much as you might buy
an internet box.
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Socially acceptable BI: Adam Bimson, PA Consulting Group (December 2011)
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The social media mash-up with traditional business intelligence (BI) goes under a range of
names and I’ll use ‘collaborative BI’; but irrespective of the label, what is certain is that BI is
innovating, and central to this is a push to apply concepts borrowed from social media to how
organisations exploit their data.
First things first though: organisations have long looked at their data and speculated what might
be possible if they could harness the information contained within. Faster, better decisions
beckon, bringing with them the promise of being able to keep a few steps ahead of the market,
control costs and grow profitably. These aspirations haven’t changed though, so presumably
collaborative BI is just an additional means to these ends.
Some, though, see it as the industry jumping onto the bandwagon of the success and ubiquity of social media on the internet,
such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and a myriad more.
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Collaborative approach to content: Ted Carroll, i2n2 (November 2011)
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The growth in social networks is a trend that large organisations are attempting to harness,
although implementing a Facebook equivalent is not likely to be the most significant
development – a deeper understanding of the importance of social networks for sharing
information or knowledge within organisations is potentially much more significant.
By a happy coincidence, organisations with electronic document & records management
(EDRM) requirements are increasingly turning to network-based collaboration tools to store and
manage documents, challenging the hierarchical Corporate File Plan (CFP) approach to storing
information.
So how should our implementation of document management systems support the way that
employees work and network?
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Is your data safe?: Robert Winter, Kroll Ontrack (October 2011)
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Information governance and data storage are important topics for businesses. Governments are
taking a tougher stance on regulation and compliance, analytics tools are becoming more
advanced, providing greater value and business insight than ever before, and the sheer volume
of data that is being created by modern businesses is exploding.
All of which means that proper data management and backup is more important than ever. Yet
recent data loss events, like Amazon’s well-publicised outage, emphasise the continued difficulty
of protecting data – and the fact that the reputational damage caused by losing sensitive data is
significant, while the financial cost of downtime on core IT systems can be huge.
To cope with the increase in data volumes we are seeing many new technologies aimed at
helping businesses store more data at lower cost. But new technology is not a magic wand and
must be implemented properly to achieve the desired effect and to properly protect the data
being stored. This article reviews the new and emerging technology available.
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Danger of unstructured data: Bill Boyle, Eskenzi PR (September 2011)
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As news of a major data breach involving the computer system of a major US Department of Defense contractor is unfolding –
with 24,000 ‘sensitive’ Pentagon files being lost in the process – the incident is a classic example of what can happen when
large volumes of sensitive data are not adequately identified and protected.
Although the exact details of the data loss are still being revealed, it is likely the Pentagon is now trying to identify how much of
the stolen data was sensitive and where it was stolen from. Much of the data was also likely unstructured or semi-structured,
residing on file shares accessible throughout the organisation.
With 26,000 employees, the Pentagon generates a vast amount of digital data every day – and trying to manage and protect
all this data without some type of automation that provides visibility into what data is sensitive, where it resides and the access
permissions settings, leaves the organisation vulnerable.
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CPM evaluation – protect yourself!: Michael Coveney, STW Consulting (August 11)
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The evaluation of software systems is fraught with pitfalls. On the one hand you have a business issue that has to be solved
with the best, affordable solution and on the other hand is a salesman who must make a sale at the maximum price. In
between lies an evaluation process on which success or disaster will be decided for one, both or either party.
Corporate performance management software promises much – the ability to develop, implement and monitor strategy. But like
some other software, CPM can often fail to deliver.
Many organisations employ a rigorous evaluation process that takes many months and involves collecting and comparing a
myriad of functions. There are endless presentations, demonstrations and fact sheets to study. There are case studies,
reference sites to visit and price lists to compare, and yet the chosen solution can often turn out to be not what was expected.
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BI: born to fail?: Glen Bremner Stokes, Open Business Associates (July 2011)
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Insert the term ‘BI’ into most search engines and you will be presented with multiple listings of
technology companies, all offering solutions and services which will deliver BI projects to
enhance their customers’ business productivity, increase customer loyalty and improve sales.
From this preliminary search, it may appear that BI is the domain of multinational IT vendors
who develop and market everything that companies need to implement BI successfully. Recent
statistics from Gartner would seem to support this view: the analyst firm reports that the global
BI market was worth $10.5 billion last year, and is dominated by just four of the world’s largest
technology firms.
Gartner’s figures also show the global market grew by over 13% between 2009 and 2010,
adding weight to the view that many companies have understood BI’s potential and have
embarked on projects to realise their own efficiency and improvement goals.
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Is warehousing the way to ease the legacy headache?: L Kershaw, Macro 4 (Jun 11)
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ERP hardware, software and support costs are a major burden on companies as they seek to
survive the recession. One approach that could help is to allow your legacy applications to be
decommissioned once they are no longer being actively updated.
This technique involves removing key data from the legacy applications and keeping it in an
accessible, searchable archive within an online warehouse – where it remains available to
support customer service and other operational needs, as well as compliance.
With the data kept alive in a separate store, the original applications can be switched off,
freeing staff from maintaining obsolete systems.
This is not a brand-new idea, but it is certainly increasing in popularity in the current downturn
as organisations seek ways to make cost savings and allocate resources as efficiently as
possible.
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Great expectations: Cliff Mills, NCC Research (May 2011)
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Modern business relies on data, be it for improving the quality of decision making and operational performance or providing
insight into business trends. In recent times both the amount of data flowing into organisations and the variety of data sources
have risen dramatically, necessitating robust BI solutions for data integration, storage and analysis to support effective decision
making.
This has led to an increase in the quality of management information expected by business users, both in terms of the range of
data to be considered and the level of analysis required. From strategic issues to routine tasks, executives, managers,
information workers and staff all expect more information and clearer insights to support decision making.
Financial information alone will not suffice. Management information must relate financial to non-financial data – just reporting
on past performance is no longer good enough, businesses need insightful information that can help them predict the future.
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End of OLAP as we know it: Enzo Martoglio, Steria (April 2011)
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An OLAP tool is essentially an approach to swiftly answer multi-dimensional queries and
calculations based on an optimised proprietary data storage design. It offers a data
representation of a multi-dimensional matrix – a cube – where each cell contains a tuple of data
(eg, sales values by product, time, customer, salesperson, etc).
This original approach (often referred to as MOLAP) had some limitations, especially in the
maximum practical size of the dimensions used. Later, to bypass these limitations it became
possible to map MOLAP data structures over a relational database (often referred to as
ROLAP). The resulting increased query time was balanced by the scalability of the relational
approach.
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Overcoming obstacles to data sharing: Barry Tuckwood (March 2011)
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Here’s what we know about data. Data should be simple but the purposes for which we use it
are complicated. Data needs to be useful to specific customers for their given purposes – but
we cannot know what the customer will want to use data for, so we need to trust them to use
the raw data in whatever way they choose. This use of data is made even more difficult
because of the obstacles to sharing data successfully.
The good news is there are common obstacles to data management, regardless of industry or
market, and there are ways to improve data and its management for all users. To illustrate this,
let’s look at six examples of data sharing problems drawn from different areas of business and
domestic life.
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BI – right, on time: Herman Heyns, KPMG Performance & Technology (February 2011)
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The search for insight from data comes down to a simple equation: accurate business
intelligence (BI) + access to timely information = better decision making, the key driver of
corporate performance.
Giving valuable data to the relevant people at the right time doesn’t just enable them to make
the right choices. When used correctly, BI systems also deliver real business benefits and
create value; they can provide new performance insights that enhance an organisation’s
efficiency and effectiveness – allowing for faster, better decisions.
BI can also reduce costs and simplifies complex information processing. An additional potential
benefit is that employee engagement and usage of information can increase across the
business if the strategy is successfully executed.
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Why in-memory is top of mind: Clive Margolis, Acestar Solutions (February 2011)
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SAP recently announced its new in-memory analytics application, SAP HANA. QlikTech, which
manufactures the major in-memory solution QlikView, is growing like a virus. IBM has it and
Oracle is involved in it too…so what exactly is in-memory analytics?
This technology is designed to address a key problem facing business intelligence users: the
sheer volume of data you need to crunch in order to analyse it down to useful information.
Until recently, the BI team’s response to this problem would probably be to summarise more
data in the data warehouse, which could well involve some redesign of the data warehouse
itself.
In-memory analytics is another way to solve it. Largely driven by the business users
themselves, products such as SAP HANA and QlikView stream the data into high-speed RAM
and give you a toolset to roll it into the right shape to get you the answers you need.
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Who are my best customers?: Andy Hayler, The Information Difference (Jan 2011)
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Most large organisations struggle to answer surprisingly simple questions about their business.
“Who are my most profitable customers and products?” would seem like the most basic of
information needed to run a business, yet the complexity of a global company makes such
questions awkward to answer due to the proliferation of systems and data definitions.
For example, the audit of one company I am familiar with showed 23 different uses of the term
‘gross margin’. And a 2008 study by The Information Difference reveals that a typical large
organisation has an average of six different systems generating customer data, and nine
systems generating product data (some companies had literally hundreds of competing
systems) – so it is not hard to see how confusion can arise.
There have been several attempts to deal with this thorny issue. In the 1990s data warehousing
became popular, the idea being that a single database, where all the different source data could
be gathered and the differences resolved, could produce a single accepted version of the truth.
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Beyond budgeting and dashboards: John Colbert, BPM Partners (December 2010)
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Many companies who adopted first-generation business performance management (BPM)
applications like budgeting & planning or key metrics dashboards are now expanding beyond
these base capabilities to a broader range of business solutions – dubbed ‘BPM 2.0’.
This more advanced area of BPM is often a distillation of available analytics for use in a vertical
market, or to solve a specific business or regulatory issue that is outside the widespread uses of
BPM. Initiatives in these emerging BPM areas are often led by finance – so it may come as a
surprise that the benefits and usage of new initiatives are frequently concentrated outside the
finance area.
In its annual ‘BPM Pulse’ survey, BPM Partners asked organisations about the analytic areas they
are focusing on in today’s economy.
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Running the last mile: Jon Collins, Freeform Dynamics (October 2010)
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Over the years, we have been told how IT capabilities such as business intelligence will
transform how we use information. However, recent research (link:
www.freeformdynamics.com/download.asp?file=10-06-state-of-play.pdf) conducted by
Freeform Dynamics suggests that organisations might face an uphill struggle, not least due to
the continually increasing volumes of information that need to be dealt with.
Most will be familiar with this phenomenon; data quantities are increasing across the board –
including both structured information stored in databases, and unstructured documents and files
being shared by email and other such mechanisms.
An increase in data quantity does not necessarily equate to an increase of quality, as illustrated
by a number of study findings around information-related complaints. When we compared areas
of complaint against a similar survey three years ago, the feeling was that things were getting
worse, particularly in terms of information fragmentation and the consistency of information
across systems.
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Time is right: Mike Ferguson, Intelligent Business Strategies (September 2010)
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In a tough economic climate, most companies tend to focus on high-priority initiatives that help them survive and remain
competitive. These include activities like analysing market opinion (eg, product rating sites), competitor pricing, customer
retention, cost reduction and risk management.
At the centre of all these initiatives is business intelligence – the information that gives you insight into market opinion,
competition, risk, costs and customer sales. However for most companies, even if they do have intelligence available in each
of these areas, it is often in the hands of too few people and not on hand in the right places at the time needed to maximise
business performance.
The challenge therefore is to work out who needs what intelligence and when, in order to enable the business to run at optimal
strength.
Just imagine the impact on a company’s performance if you could co-ordinate the masses to all ‘pull in the same direction’,
optimising costs and revenues. This kind of vision goes way beyond just giving people access to intelligence. It moves the
company to a new dynamic approach of ‘right-time business optimisation’.
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BI: still a long way to go: Tim Ring, NCC (July 2010)
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Business intelligence (BI) and data warehousing technology is one of the fastest growing areas
of IT, as companies move from automating their core processes to focusing on how to make
best use of the growing information held within those core business systems.
That was the message from leading data warehousing and BI consultant John Donoghue of
Steria, speaking at the inaugural Evaluation Centre Networking Forum event, held recently in
central London.
The Forum was attended by senior IT managers from more than 20 organisations – including
AstraZeneca, John Lewis, Johnson Matthey and public sector agencies such as Whitefriars
Housing Group and Lambeth and Greenwich councils – who discussed trends in data
warehousing and BI and the main issues facing organisations in this area.
“It’s a buoyant market in the face of recession,” Donoghue told the audience, with an estimated
20% growth in the BI platform market in 2009, according to Gartner.
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Data revolution: Rob Toguri, Capgemini (June 2010)
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How much more could you do with your information if you took a fundamentally different
approach – one that freed up significant data management costs for re-investment in activities
such as analysis, forecasting, ensuring compliance and addressing performance management?
This is the premise of an ‘informational’ approach to data management as opposed to the more
typical application-driven management.
So why do we need this new approach? Information is the lifeblood of business. Without it we
can’t plan strategy, serve our customers, manage our suppliers and partners or empower our
workforce: everything is governed by the data we hold within our enterprises.
But something is going wrong. Organisations today are experiencing data overload and
information starvation. Against this background, the whole data and information management
landscape is changing. There has been a shift in the drivers for information that has had an
impact on our informational requirements, altering the focus from historical views to forward views.
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How do you want your data?: Chris Bradley, IPL (April 2010)
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Most organisations today have a business intelligence and data warehouse solution of some sort. The maturity of this technology has moved on from departmental and then operational BI to the position we now see in many corporates – ‘enterprise BI’. The availability of a new generation of BI tools and solutions which easily integrate with ERP systems has undoubtedly provided real benefit. However, the information explosion, the plethora of tool options available and information regulation and compliance, together present companies with two key challenges: 1. Data migration and ETL vs EII (or both?). By now most IT users will be familiar with the purpose of extract, transform and load (ETL) tools. Less well-known, however, are the capabilities of data virtualisation or enterprise information integration (EII) tools such as Composite or MetaMatrix.
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Now and for ever: Graham Spicer, SolStonePlus (February 2010)
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In the current economic conditions, many organisations are looking to ease the financial
pressure and business uncertainty they face. In this environment, one of the main factors
influencing businesses when deciding which initiatives to take is the desire to identify and
implement short-term gains, such as process automation and budget process efficiencies.
More than ever, businesses are now looking for an immediate return on any investment.
However, this focus can have a potentially adverse effect on long-term strategies. Neglecting
the longer-range vision is dangerous, and any initiative organisations take in such uncertain
economic times must deliver value in both the short and long term.
Businesses currently face a range of issues. Firstly, the recession is expected to continue well
into 2010. Despite a declaration from the National Institute for Economic and Social Research
that March 2009 was the turning point, things have not changed for businesses at all. Many are
still weighed down with debt and will be looking at initiatives to position them as market leader.
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It's no-show time: Cliff Mills, NCC Research (February 2010)
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It has often been said that information is the lifeblood of any company. Yet extracting relevant information from across the organisation seems to be as difficult and complex as ever, despite the growing availability of data warehousing and business intelligence tools. For years, companies have been introducing financial, transactional and production applications that provide a wealth of data; but analysing this data and turning it into meaningful information has been akin to searching for the Holy Grail. Many companies have gone through a number of iterations of management information systems and have ended up with a mishmash of different data warehouses and analysis tools. One underlying problem is in ensuring the quality and consistency of data across the organisation. While many departmental systems may provide satisfactory information in their own right, when users try to extend the analysis across the business, then the systems can be found wanting.
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Is the mid-market missing out?: Clive Longbottom, Quocirca (January 2010)
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Recently, Quocirca carried out research into the use of corporate performance management
(CPM) and business intelligence (BI) tools by mid-market organisations across the UK.
The findings were worrying when one considers the need for organisations to be completely
aware of the shortcomings in how they see their business in the current financial climate.
The biggest issue revealed was a lack of knowledge about what ‘performance management’
actually is – with one third of respondents seeing it as a means of measuring the performance
of staff, and almost the same number believing it is purely for measuring the performance of the
salesforce.
Only one quarter understood performance management to be a means of monitoring,
measuring, reporting on and predicting the financial health across the whole organisation – the
definition that the vendors would prefer to see in use.
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Into analysis: Philip Howard, Bloor Research (November 2009)
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Companies can use any database as a data warehouse or to support analytics or business
intelligence. However, if there is a substantial requirement for complex or ad-hoc analytics,
then general-purpose databases without specialised facilities will fail to give adequate
performance.
If your query and report processing is well-defined in advance, then you won’t need an analytic
warehouse. But if you have to do potentially unexpected things with your data, or you want to
combine it in complex ways, or you have very heavy processing requirements (for example,
processing geospatial data in insurance applications, asking questions like which addresses are
prone to flooding), then you may very well need an analytic warehouse.
If you do require such a beast, then it comes in two flavours: either as a data mart or as an
enterprise data warehouse.
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Blame game: Peter Thomas, Element Six (October 2009)
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The proverb “a bad workman blames his tools” is one which has a degree of history to it.
Indeed its lineage has been traced to 13th century France as in: mauvés ovriers ne trovera ja
bon hostill (les mauvais ouvriers ne trouveront jamais un bon outil being a rendition in more
contemporary French).
To me this timeless observation is applicable to present-day business intelligence (BI) projects.
Browsing through internet forums, it is all too typical to see discussions that start, “What is the
best BI software available on the market?”, “Who are the leaders in SaaS BI?” and (rather
poignantly in my opinion), “Please help me to pick the best technology for my dashboard”.
I feel that, in an important sense, the people asking these questions are rather missing the
point. To explain this view, I am going to offer a sporting analogy. Indeed sporting
performance is an area in which the aphorism “A bad workman blames his tools” is frequently
applied.
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Best of both worlds: Nigel Dowden, Anari (September 2009)
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In these tough times, many companies are looking to their business intelligence (BI) teams to
answer some key business questions: where can efficiencies come from? Where can cost
savings be achieved? How should we target our resources to improve revenue?
In this shifting BI landscape, IT directors are being challenged to deliver the same or better
projects with fewer resources, and faster. As a result, companies are looking very hard at: where they invest their BI budgets; their project cost/timeline expectations; and whether they can deliver BI quicker/cheaper.
The nature of BI projects is also changing. Prior to the recession, companies were happy to invest in BI projects which simply
provided better information – such as automating existing Excel-based reports or bringing information together in a
consolidated dashboard-style information pack.
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Good on paper: Cliff Mills, NCC Research (July 2009)
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The management of paper-based information can present many problems. Organisations that
have processes around a physical item of paper – such as a supplier invoice, contract or letter –
take on a significant burden in duplicating, storing and retrieving multiple copies of that document.
Yet even with the best-run physical filing system, inefficiencies are inherent. If different parts of
the business need copies of the same document, you hit problems of version control and
access. These issues are exacerbated if the organisation works over multiple sites, introducing
unnecessary delays as staff track down time-sensitive information.
There is also the physical storage of the document ‘mountain’. A customer file can end up as a
hefty item taking up space, and is prey to physical damage by flood, fire or theft.
For many organisations the majority of documents are now created and stored electronically
and they may well have implemented an electronic document management (EDM) system, from
a vendor such as EMC, OpenText, Microsoft, etc, as their document management solution.
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BI and SOA: making the leap: Bikram Sankar Das, TCS (July 2009)
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As the shock waves of the financial crunch reverberate across the globe, there is a need within
companies everywhere to identify areas of process optimisation and cost cutting.
The corporate ideals of achieving business agility (by reducing time-to-market for new
products), adaptability (to new economies/markets or mergers/acquisitions) and efficiency (by
reducing operational costs and providing better value) need to be translated from vision and
mission statements to operational plans and activities.
What’s required is performance management (PM) at all levels of the organisation – and the SOA
enablement of corporate information availability can play an important part in making this happen.
In industries where competition for market share is especially intense, such as telecoms, BI-PM
is an increasingly important part of customer service applications; meanwhile in heavily
regulated sectors, like financial services, BI-PM has become a key tool in enforcing compliance.
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Cultivating the green shoots with BI: Russell Facey, Morgan Benjamin (June 2009)
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Although the headlines have moved away from prophesies of doom and gloom and are making
some reference to ‘green shoots of recovery’, organisations are still looking for ways to reduce
their budgets. However, major spending cutbacks are a potentially false economy for many
business IT services, not least the new generation of business intelligence (BI) tools.
Sales may slow down when finances are tough, but they do not stop altogether – which means
there are more people fighting for a piece of a smaller pie. Therefore, when budgets are tight,
your organisation’s competitive edge is more critical than ever. That means the management
team need complete visibility of everything happening across all functions so they can make
informed choices.
In the current climate, the business-critical nature of these decisions is heightened because
they determine the ongoing success, or potential failure, of the company. BI uses data
generated on an ongoing basis, which in turn offers a better understanding of operations so that
processes can be fine-tuned to maximise both efficiency and sales.
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Tuning up your data: Steven Shove, OneSource Information Services (April 2009)
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Winston Churchill once concluded: “We have no money therefore we have to think.” Likewise,
those companies that survive and even grow during the current recession will be those who
think smartly and adopt better strategies than their competitors – those who focus on long-term
efficiency and risk reduction as well as any desired short-term cost savings.
A company’s growth is directly affected by its acquisition and use of competitor, market and
customer data in strategic and operational business decision making.
This belief is supported by a study commissioned by One Source and carried out by the
University of Hertfordshire at the end of 2008. The study found that 70% of companies
experiencing high growth place a high value on the use of business data, compared to 52% of
low-growth companies.
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From the top: Clive Margolis, Acestar Solutions (March 2009)
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“All successful people have a goal. No one can get anywhere unless he knows where he wants
to go.” – Norman Vincent Peale.
Having a strategy is the cornerstone of a successful business intelligence project. Yet all too
often, BI projects fail to deliver anywhere near the value they are capable of providing because
they do not follow an effective strategy.
The main reasons why BI strategy is so often overlooked are historic: thinking within the
organisation fails to keep up with the pace of developments within the IT industry that provides
the technical capability to ‘do’ BI.
Managers often fail to see that business intelligence is something more than just an updated
equivalent of the old computerised reports they are used to.
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BI at a crossroads: Peter Simons, CIMA (January 2009)
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Business intelligence (BI) software users are struggling to integrate the many different products involved. Typically, the big
software vendors have acquired leading accounting tools in order to be able to offer an integrated company-wide BI solution.
But – lacking expertise in the accounting area – IT professionals have often allowed accountants to acquire their own BI
applications tactically as accounting software, rather than as modules of a company-wide BI solution. And, lacking expertise in
BI, accountants have usually limited their use of these tools to improving the efficiency of their reporting cycle processes such
as preparing budgets, consolidations, forecasts and reports.
The problem of product proliferation can initially be traced back to the emergence of the data warehouse in the 1980s, which
marked the dawn of business intelligence. Data warehousing meant batches of operational data could now be copied across to
a centralised pool of data structured to facilitate access and analysis. Queries could be run without affecting the live data in the
operating systems.
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Consolidated and confused: Surya Mukherjee, Datamonitor (November/December 2008)
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The business intelligence (BI) market has recently witnessed a flurry of large-ticket acquisitions,
the simultaneous entry of several software conglomerates and rampant commoditisation.
Last year alone, three of the largest independent pure-play BI software suppliers were acquired
by larger IT conglomerates – Cognos by IBM for $4.9 billion, Business Objects by SAP for
$6.8 billion and Hyperion by Oracle for $3.3 billion. This has resulted in market consolidation,
ushering in commoditisation that threatens smaller and larger vendors alike.
In the wake of this, the larger vendors are quickly bridging gaps in their offerings and trying to
present an holistic portfolio to their customers, while the remaining smaller and pure-play
vendors are trying to establish themselves in their respective niches.
But where does all this leave users and purchasers of BI software? In a market shaken up by such large-scale acquisitions,
users are visibly in two minds – with some waiting for more stability in the market, whilst others are looking for lower prices and
added value from bundled offerings.
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'B' is for business: Rick Anderson, A de V (October 2008)
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The SAP Business Warehouse (BW) comprises three main elements – data extraction, warehousing and reporting. But which
of these is most useful to the business?
Consider a conventional retail or supermarket warehouse. However well-designed the delivery and storage process is behind
the scenes, ultimately success depends on whether customers buy the products.
Similarly, however elegant is the technical design of your BW-based warehouse, it is the end users and business leaders who
will judge its success. And their evidence for success will come from answers to questions around how many users there are,
what new insights are being gleaned and what decisions are made with the information – basically, are the reports working, not
just technically but in the widest sense?
In line with this, the recent release of BW is called BI: ‘warehouse’ has become ‘intelligence’, but ‘B for business’ is still the
same.
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Perfecting performance: Tom Griggs, Parson Consulting (September 2008)
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In recent years, the concept of corporate performance management (CPM) and the adoption of performance technologies has
garnered substantial attention, with mixed reviews.
No-one disputes the potential benefit of performance management as these kinds of initiatives continue to rank number one in
priority and are a high area of importance for executives. In fact, a 2006 AMR Research report predicted that CPM spending
would reach nearly $23 billion – with BI spending increasing by 10% and the dashboard/scorecard segment by 26%.
Nevertheless, even with all the investment, the pay-off still remains elusive for many. A high percentage of companies are not
achieving their desired results and subsequently falling short of their performance goals.
Why is it that so many CPM initiatives fall short? Is it the strategy itself or the execution?
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The need for mature migration: Philip Howard, Bloor Research (August 2008)
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Data migration is a major part of the data integration business – according to Bloor research,
the market for data migration products, services and staff was significantly in excess of
$5 billion in 2007.
But not only is data migration big business, it is also in need of review. Historically, the task has
been accomplished using conventional data integration and data quality tools, or by means of
hand-coding. However, research undertaken by the Standish Group in 1999 found that more
than 80% of data migration projects ran over time or budget. When Bloor Research conducted a
survey on the same topic in 2007, we found that this figure had not changed.
In other words, seven years of general-purpose enhancements to the tools available made no
difference to the success rate of such projects.
One of the conclusions to be drawn from this is that traditional tools, on their own, are not enough. Companies need data
migration methodologies, they need experienced professionals, and they need special-purpose tools; or at least add-ons to
conventional tools that have been specifically designed to support data migration.
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In search of the truth: Chris Butler, Aspective (June 2008)
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As business intelligence continues to feature highly on the IT agenda of companies around the
world, it seems appropriate to look at one of the key tenets of the subject – the single version of
the truth. Is it possible to implement and maintain one without bankrupting your company?
The theory is simple: in order to manage and develop any business you need to understand
how that business is operating, and a key insight into this operation is provided by data. But for
this to be of use, the data presented at all levels of the organisation must be consistent,
allowing all departments to make the right decisions at the right time.
Everyone can tell an anecdote of the meeting from hell where 90% of the time was spent
establishing where the data came from and a mere 10% on making a decision. The single
version of the truth solves this by providing a single trusted source of data for the organisation
from which all decisions can be made.
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Green business intelligence: Howard Pull, Conchango (May 2008)
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Picture the possibilities… Sales soar at a UK supermarket when ethically minded customers
flock to its newly improved e-commerce site which allows them to order their usual basket of
groceries, and then rank and substitute products based on their green credentials. With a
click of a button they substitute their usual basket of products with a rival brand with a lower
carbon footprint, whose packaging is bio-degradable or used the least energy in its
production.
Elsewhere, a high-street chain announces a ‘green initiative’ of energy and emission savings to
the stock market, but then finds the data it uses to support this fails to meet the industry-defined
GRI reporting standards. The company defends the initiative as a success – but its share price
suffers.
These scenarios illustrate the power of ‘green’ business intelligence and the kind of business
opportunities and risks it presents.
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Navigating CPM's new landscape: Simon Bell, Opal Wave Solutions (April 2008)
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There have been many changes in the corporate performance management (CPM)
software market over recent years. We have seen vendors delivering greater
functionality, ease-of-use and value, and finally seen them step up to the mark with the
delivery of platforms that are actually capable of fulfilling their marketing promises.
Last year, however, saw something different. A flurry of acquisitions –including both
some long-anticipated deals and some surprises – brought a complete and rapid change
in the market structure.
Hyperion was acquired by Oracle, Cartesis and ALG were acquired by Business Objects,
which was then taken over by SAP. SAP itself had only just bought OutlookSoft to add to
its earlier Pilot purchase. The last of the big players was snapped up when IBM took
over Cognos which had itself just bought Applix.
All this left the market in confusion with a completely new triumvirate of big vendors trying to convince customers that
they knew what they were doing but that each of their competitors was in disarray!
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Getting real: Peter Scott, Rittman Mead Consulting (February 2008)
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My car does real-time computing (or at least I hope the engine management, traction control and ABS systems are real time!).
My mobile phone is real time, even some of my home entertainment gadgets are real time – but what about business
intelligence systems?
In the early days of BI (or was it called decision support back then?) reporting data for the current month was an achievement.
As techniques and technologies evolved, companies moved to report on the previous day but were still reliant on an out-ofhours
batch process to move data from the source systems and store and aggregate it in their data warehouses and data
marts.
But with 24-hour business days and the need to report across multiple time-zones, the traditional batch window is being
squeezed into near non-existence. New data extraction and load paradigms have also been developed to trickle-feed reporting
systems. But are these really real time – and does it really matter?
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Silencing the sceptics: CJ Cox, BearingPoint (January 2008)
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For many years, corporations have sought the holy grail of increasing their competitive advantage and profit by harnessing
their corporate data as a strategic and tactical tool. As a result, a growing number of companies have invested in a new
generation of business intelligence solutions that gather, provide secured access to and analyse data.
While these solutions can be powerful tools that save money, raise performance and meet the needs of information workers
across an organisation, many companies find they are not receiving the return on investment (ROI) they had hoped for. Much
of the disappointment in BI performance can be traced to user dissatisfaction, which results in employees either not using the
new systems well or, worse, not using them at all.
The good news is that this problem can be addressed by creative companies through a mix of technical improvements, change
management, communications and training programmes – helping them get what they hoped for from BI.
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Three paths to pervasiveness: Vuk Trifkovic, Datamonitor (December 2007)
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Business intelligence (BI) has been attracting a lot of attention in the last few months. The
continuing vendor consolidation stepped up a notch as two of the market leaders, Business
Objects and Cognos, were acquired by SAP and IBM respectively. At the same time, Oracle
announced that embedding BI directly in enterprise application transactions is one of the core
design principles behind its forthcoming Oracle Fusion applications.
Large acquisitions are always noteworthy. In this particular case, however, they were not
entirely surprising. They are indicative of broader trends in the BI market identified in
Datamonitor’s recently published report Economic Outlook: Business Intelligence – in particular,
commoditisation and convergence.
Through ongoing technological development, the bulk of traditional BI functionality has become
increasingly commoditised. As a result, competitive differentiation within the BI market is
shifting.
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Over-engineered and under-used: Roger Freeston, Medley (November 2007)
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The use of data warehouses to support a company’s customer relationship management (CRM)
strategy is now becoming increasingly commonplace. These solutions are typically seen as the
cornerstone for the success of the CRM initiative.
However, if this is the case, why – when looking at organisations that have recently completed
a CRM initiative – do we find that the CRM data warehouse (CRM DW) is often under-used,
misunderstood and is failing to deliver the expected benefits to the business?
To understand this, we must first take a step back and consider what the rational for the CRM
DW was in the first place.
The overall objective is to provide business intelligence to achieve the company’s objectives in
attracting, servicing and retaining customers.
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Analyse this, and that: Fern Halper, Hurwitz & Associates (October 2007)
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Text analytics has recently burst on the scene as an important technology to help companies understand and gain insight from
their unstructured information. The technology’s value proposition is compelling and companies are starting to sit up and take
notice.
The technology is rapidly moving out of the early adopter stage into the early maturing stage, with vendors reporting growth
rates of 30-50%. But as with any early maturing technology, questions still remain as to exactly what text analytics software is,
how it works, and how companies are using it. Also worth noting are the challenges that early adopters have faced when
implementing analytics applications.
As part of a major research initiative in this area, Hurwitz & Associates conducted interviews with text analytics software
vendors and companies using the technology. We also conducted an online research study in April 2007, involving large
companies across three categories: those who had already deployed the technology, those who were planning to deploy the
technology, and those who had no plans to deploy the technology but were at least somewhat familiar with it.
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Who's in charge?: Darron Chapman, TFPL Recruitment (September 2007)
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Information and communications technology (ICT) plays an important role in organisations. It enables us to communicate
constantly, collaborate virtually, compete globally, share information widely across geographic boundaries and time zones, and
operate at a speed earlier generations could only imagine.
As organisations look to realise the promised return on investment in ICT, it has become apparent that the value lies in the
content it carries and not in the technology itself. So ICT has helped bring information centre stage as a key resource, a
commodity and a power base.
Excellence in information management (IM) now looks set to become a major organisational target. Like total quality
management (TQM), business process re-engineering (BPR) and knowledge management (KM), some organisations are
embracing the concept with early-adopter zeal, some protest that it is just a fad, while others point out that it is something they
have been doing for a long time.
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MDM: the task ahead: Mike Ferguson, Intelligent Business Strategies (Jul/Aug 07)
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Many organisations have recognised that in order to make full use of their information, they need to extract business
intelligence from their whole complement of applications. To do this, the data held across the company has to managed in the
same, standard way. This is known as introducing enterprise-wide master data management (MDM).
In fact, organisations can deploy four kinds of MDM systems – a rules-based MDM synchronisation system, a virtual (aka
registry-based) MDM system, an MDM data hub, and an enterprise MDM system (see ‘Master Data Management: Creating a
Single View of the Business’ by Colin White and Claudia Imhoff at www.beyeresearch.com/study/3360).
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Future of BI may not be BI...: Gerry Brown, Bloor Research (June 2007)
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Many BI vendors and industry commentators have been promoting the idea of ‘BI 2.0’. This new
generation of BI software is easy to use, fast and flexible. It is said that BI 2.0 will rocket user
adoption from its 25% or so penetration level of business users to 85%-plus. BI will then be truly
‘pervasive’.
This is an attractive vision from a vendor perspective. But from a buyer perspective, it raises a
number of issues.
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Turning information into intelligence: Eleanor Windsor, Osborne Clarke (May 07)
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Business intelligence (BI) is often associated with expensive and complex IT systems. Although
these systems impress with their ability to gather data and management information, it is the
mixing of these reporting tools with the all-important human element that can really help to
improve business decision making.
BI is not just about data collection and data presentation – and it should not be sited or seen as
part of either IT or marketing.
To really work, it needs to be a function in its own right. It needs to be focused on drawing
together information from across the business, analysing and interpreting that data, and
communicating that analysis with the appropriate recommendations to the right people within
the business at the right time.
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Go configure: Keith Inight, Atos Origin (April 2007)
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Configuration and asset management is rising up the IT agenda. Why is this? There are
three main drivers:
1. Compliance: including software licensing, where over 30% of companies can expect
to be audited by a vendor each year; security, where it is necessary to show that the
production environment includes the correct versions of all software including patches
and other security requirements; business control, to continuously demonstrate that
business processes are not being impeded by IT failures; and asset reporting, a
laborious but necessary fiscal process.
2. ITIL. The IT Infrastructure Library is becoming a de facto standard – together with
implementation to ISO 20000.
3. Business alignment. Infrastructure consumes over half the IT budget and business managers are increasingly
expected to understand the links between what they pay and the quality of services they receive – involving a complex
relationship of services and IT assets.
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Blame the governance: Rupert Cavendish, Iconium (March 2007)
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The world of business is constantly evolving. As organisations are increasingly subject to legislation and need to build more
complex and time-critical forms of risk management – driven by the FSA, Sarbanes-Oxley, IT security, etc – so the number of
policies, standards and procedures needed to inform and obligate staff grows larger.
Unfortunately, more policies does not mean more understanding, as staff will be even less able to find the things that relate to
them and their job, that are most immediately relevant to the projects they are working on today.
The increasing weight of legal requirements such as FSA regulation, the Freedom of Information Act, data protection, privacy
law, information security and health & safety legislation requires organisations not only to comply, but also set up audit trails to
demonstrate their compliance. Organisations also need to establish and use procedures which allow them to operate efficiently
in all departments and locations, in line with internal or external standards.
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The new information professionals: S Manwani, Henley Management College (Jan 07)
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People know only too well the importance of information in competing in a global economy or protecting our society against
terrorism. This information comes in many different forms from a variety of sources and has to be validated, consolidated and
presented in order to take the right decisions.
We also appreciate that this information has to be controlled and secure so that it is not misused. The public and private sectors
have these common challenges even though their ultimate use of information is different in regards to organisational aims.
This link is illustrated by two case studies detailed below – the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) and Yell UK. Both Steve
Farquharson, group information management director at MPS, and Mike Fishwick, head of customer information management
at Yell, have recognised that information needs to take precedence over technology in setting and implementing policies.
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The danger that's over-looked: John Morris (December 2006)
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The failure rate when companies introduce new software or systems should be enough to make
people stop and think. Some commentators suggest that as many as 80% of IT migration
projects either fail or overrun their planned budgets. Indeed there is an almost fatalistic
resignation to the inevitability of difficulty and failure. When asked about the success of their
latest programme, many a project manager will shrug and say: “It was a success – there were
the usual data glitches of course.”
Does it have to go on being that way? Do our expectations have to be set so low?
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Enterprise insight: Maggie Scott, Detica (November 2006)
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Data warehousing; customer insight; business intelligence; the ‘single view’ of the customer – the promise of these capabilities
is driving increasing investment in insight across organisations, suggesting an end-game in which data can be gathered from
disparate sources across the organisation, collected, integrated and transformed to create a coherent source of information. As
a result, decision making across the organisation should be both more efficient and effective.
The term ‘enterprise insight’ is often used to encompass these capabilities, bringing a range of benefits.
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It's not what you have – it's the way that you flex it: Rupert Booth (Oct 2006)
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Consultants’ articles on corporate performance management often begin by advancing the
latest ‘solution’ and then move onto a proposing a set of startling benefits. This article takes a
sceptical approach by considering recent initiatives in CPM and examining the evidence for
claimed benefits, then summarising what has been shown to work – and on this basis indicating
where to invest in solutions and how to prepare a business case.
There are two sources of evidence of the benefits of corporate performance management and
measurement – the more robust is retrospective academic analysis, and the more persuasive is
feedback from executives on their experiences.
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Icing on the cake...or staple diet?: Michael Collins and David Willis (Sept 06)
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In the information age, with the internet providing us with news and comment from all
corners of the world, data exploitation has been elevated from its traditional place in the
marketing mix to become a 21st century corporate necessity. In essence, businesses
have a wealth of data but a shortage of actionable information, and delivering the right
information to the right people at the right time has never been so critical to an
organisation’s success. The integration of data and its packaging up in a form that business managers can
comprehend and action is what bridges the information void. Technological advances
mean it is now within any organisation’s capability to exploit its data. Graphical data
integration tools can increase productivity, with application definitions managed via
metadata, and ongoing support no longer presents such a headache to IT heads.
Similarly, intuitive data-quality tools can quickly identify issues th
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A balanced information diet: Bob Barnes, Conchango (August 2006)
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Companies are realising that the provision of information to internal and external stakeholders is
vital, but they often lack a clear approach for delivering it. Consumers of information often find it
difficult to obtain the correct information and sometimes receive conflicting information from
different parts of the same company.
So what is the answer? To draw a parallel, people need both food and water to thrive. But not
just any food – what the meal is made up of is important. People may want a complete meal,
not the uncooked ingredients as they might not have the time or skills to prepare them.
Consider a company and its need to be fed by information. This structured information is like
‘drink’ – you need it regularly and it must be clean and of good quality. A lot of companies do
realise the importance of this and have their handling of this data well under control. However,
their ‘unstructured’ information – documents, emails, etc – is like food. Again this should be of good quality, clean, wellpresented
and hopefully a pleasure to consume. However when it comes to how some companies serve up their unstructured
information, it is often an unappealing stew.
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BI: the thinking executive's way to get ahead: Jake Liddell, Charteris (July 06)
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In the renowned movie ‘2001: a Space Odyssey’, the on-board thinking computer, HAL, is a
great friend in a crisis until he actually causes one. Confronted for the first time with the threat
of disconnection, HAL immediately sets out to kill every human on the spaceship – and nearly
succeeds.
Today, businesses that really want to get ahead are confronted by the need to develop their
own computer-based intelligence – business intelligence. In practice, business intelligence is
not ‘intelligence’ as such – just as HAL himself perhaps wasn’t really so intelligent because he
didn’t know he could be switched back on again. Instead of trying to simulate genuine human
intelligence, BI provides what is essentially a distillation of information. This distillation allows
people to apply their own decision-forming where and when it matters, rather than taking up
valuable thinking time in mundane sorting, sifting and calculating.
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Quality concerns: Sarah Burnett, Butler Group (June 2006)
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Business intelligence (BI) has become an important organisational capability in today’s
information age. Driven by the need to make sense of the massive amounts of data that they
have at their disposal, organisations have turned to BI to convert raw data collected from daily
operations and transactions into useful intelligence to support business decision making.
Their efforts, however, continue to be hampered by data quality and integrity issues. In some
organisations source-data quality is often inconsistent at best. So there’s a need to understand
how we go about making poor-quality data better, and dirty and inconsistent data clean.
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Beyond the hype: Simon Bell, BPM Partners (May 2006)
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Within the data warehouse and BI marketplaces, some key topics head the list of what is
hot and what is not. Data quality; integration in its various forms; real-time (or maybe
more appropriately right-time) architectures for warehouse delivery; offshoring or
rightshoring - all these trends have received their fair share of column space. But master
data management (MDM) in particular is a topic that has been warming up for a couple
years and is now pretty hot.
The question is: how much of this is hype and simply the vendors of technology and
services looking for the next sale - and how much is valuable reality where managers
should be spending their time investing and developing capability?
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Reality check list: Pete Singleton, Analitica (April 2006)
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If you believe the analysts, business intelligence (BI) and corporate performance
management (CPM) are set to top the list of IT priorities in the coming years – and there
is no doubt that successful implementations have reaped huge rewards, for all sizes of
organisations. It is one area of business systems that can be equally rewarding to the
multinational blue-chip as well as the £100 million turnover business, and it spans a
range of industry sectors and requirements.
A good BI system should provide visibility and clarity of decision making to the business.
Executives should have simple navigation points to view performance, dig into detail and
make decisions. Analysts should have ‘speed of thought’ capabilities to analyse, answer questions and predict and
model. Operational staff should have clear and defined information that aid in their jobs.
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Triple whammy: Chris Howard, TLCC Global (March 2006)
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Businesses in the 21st century are under greater pressure than ever to perform, both in terms of competing with their
global rivals and satisfying the demands of their shareholders. Technology plays an ever-increasing part in enabling
those businesses to operate efficiently and effectively – so you would expect it to have a significant role in delivering
corporate business performance (CPM) information.
In many organisations, corporate performance management is indeed undertaken using information technology. But for
many businesses, it’s a labour-intensive, time-consuming, manual operation, often undertaken with spreadsheets. And
due to a lack of common definitions for key business metrics, it can be prone to error or subjective interpretation.
So how can data warehousing and business intelligence (BI) technologies be used to deliver corporate performance
management in an automated manner?
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Too much of a good thing?: Eduard Gracia, Deloitte MCS (February 2006)
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For the last decade or so, offshoring has been the most remarkable trend observed in the IT arena. Put simply, offshoring
is the logical consequence of market globalisation, driven by the emergence of technologies that enable companies to
provide remotely services that until very recently could only be supplied from the location where the end customer sat.
Offshoring has already left behind its heroic days and is rapidly becoming a widespread practice. Nevertheless (or
perhaps precisely because it is becoming standard practice for many service types, such as call centres or basic IT
development), many companies assume it is easy to extend the concept to other business processes – and learn the
hard way that it is not.
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