Comments on: Research Report: Rethink Your Next Generation Business Intelligence Strategy

By: News Analysis: Tidemark Gains $24M in Series C Funding, Redpoint Ventures Leads Round

Fri, 20 Jan 2012 04:00:26 +0000

[...] of big data, aging BI systems, and the need for cloud based approaches lead many organizations to rethink their business intelligence (BI) and business analytics strategies. As BI continues to evolve from fragmented and historical reporting to pervasive, predictive, and [...]

By: News Analysis: Tidemark Gains $24M in Series C Funding, Redpoint Ventures Leads Round - Forbes

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 13:13:12 +0000

By: R "Ray" Wang

R "Ray" Wang — Sun, 05 Sep 2010 03:54:43 +0000

Caitlyn – The right info to the right people at the right time. What do others think? – Ray

By: caitlynbarker

caitlynbarker — Sun, 05 Sep 2010 03:35:55 +0000

how this stuff help improve my business?..check this out. KPI KPI Capital

By: Event Report: SAP Australian Users Group Summit 2010

Event Report: SAP Australian Users Group Summit 2010 — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 15:56:47 +0000

[...] Excitement in putting Business Intelligence (BI) to work. A combination of pent up demand, SAP marketing of Business Objects, and early adopters of BW led to many interesting conversations about the future road map. Users sought clarity on the future direction and for the most part received it around BEX support and future investments. Many continued to wonder if SAP would clean up its master data management strategy and address the need for a stronger next generation BI platform. [...]

By: Dyke Hensen

Dyke Hensen — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 14:41:21 +0000

Ray, this report is a reality check for Business Intelligence. You’ve done a nice job outlining something I
strongly believe – a one-size-fits-all approach no longer fits evolving customer requirements.
BI has expanded well beyond its original definition when the term was coined by Howard Dresner, and
the old BI guard has contributed to the problem with homogenized on-premise BI platforms that layer
on more and more complexity. No matter how hard they work to label it “innovation,” I agree, it’s more
about vendor lock-in.
The next gen requirements you outlined are consistent with what we hear as customers roll out modern
BI strategies. They’re embracing next gen BI solutions that embody aspects like role-based designs,
which I agree, are about configuration and user self-service, not a vendor-defined role. Business process
alignment is also key, particularly the ease and speed at which the BI solution adapts to changing
requirements. These and the other elements in your top 10 (Figure 3) are rock-solid guidance for
organizations that are embarking on this process.
This report sparks a bunch of related questions, such as: When do you require a BI platform, and why?
Does dashboard lipstick really make something BI? I’ve started to tackle a few of these in my separate
post and look forward to continuing this outstanding discussion about where BI is headed.
Thanks for the reminder of something Peter Townsend said, “…don’t get fooled again.”
Dyke Hensen
SVP Product Strategy, PivotLink

More discussion here http://blog.pivotlink.com/2010/07/rethinking-business-intelligence-strategies/

By: R "Ray" Wang

R "Ray" Wang — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 13:56:00 +0000

Shirish – Great questions. 1. Decision making is the point of BI, especially at the role level. Do your employees have the right info to take the next action? 2. You are right. We should have the next blog post on this? Any takers? – Ray

By: Shirish Patwardhan

Shirish Patwardhan — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 09:38:57 +0000

HiRay,

Thank you for a very comprehensive blog on next gen BI. I have come across some very fundamental issues and would like to know your POV.
First, Most BI solutions are designed to help decision making. Do we ever actually evaluate the quality of decisions taken, in presence (or absence) of BI?
Second,
Do we actually find out what information is requied to make a high quality decision?
How much information from BI is actually used for decision making and which other information has enhanced the quality of decisions?

May be it calls for an independant blog.

Thanks,
Shirish

By: R "Ray" Wang

R "Ray" Wang — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 18:32:48 +0000

Zoe – thanks. that sounds like a good idea to build scorecards and dashboards tied back to relevant groups. as BI gets collaborative, you can expect solutions to allow you to publish and share reports with team members, groups with similar security settings. Have you tried Power Pivot with Microsoft? 100M rows in XL – sort on the fly =) – Ray

By: Zoe

Zoe — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 11:59:43 +0000

Smashing article.

I have been working on BI project for a while at a company that uses a “big vendor” ERP. Our initial approach was very role based but what we are missing is something similar to what Doug was talking about. Role and Goal.

So here is what we are doing now. Instead of Roles (that match the ERP) we build groups that are separate. Each group gets a set of metrics and goals, something that looks a bit like the balanced scorecards of the past.

Currently we are using Microsoft BI stack (with some problems) and are going to add to that some open source in-memory DB cubes. I did notice that MS is not on your vendor list. Is because, like we found out, they are coming up way short?

Again, good read!!

By: R "Ray" Wang

R "Ray" Wang — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 20:18:38 +0000

Wayne – good points. The intersection of analytics and scenario analysis could be called out more under the Business Process Focus if “Foster proactive, predictive and actionable insight”. This is the holy grail when looking for ROI in BI – Ray

By: Next Generation BI Strategy

Next Generation BI Strategy — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 20:06:59 +0000

[...] really liked Ray Wang’s recent blog titled “Rethink Your Next Generation Business Intelligence Strategy”. Ray provides [...]

By: R "Ray" Wang

R "Ray" Wang — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 14:15:41 +0000

Doug – once again, many great points. 1. Role and goal – based for some reason keeps getting the short end of the stick as people put lipstick on pigs (bad UI and call it role based). There needs to be a complete rethinking of the type of information needed to support decision making. Activity streams could be one approach, dashboards, alerts, notes, these are all elements that are required. 2. DIY BI – the holy grail. enough said on my end. 3. Great points on data and relationships. Add hierarchies and you have a full complement. Once again, great stuff on your end! – Ray

By: Doug Hadden

Doug Hadden — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 14:05:55 +0000

Ray,

There is no question that social networking is showing us the BI path: role and goal-based design and DIY/self-service. It’s also showing how to break the structured/unstructured hegemony.

1) Role and goal-based

Enterprise software continues to suffer from “functional” design where users have to know where they are and where they are going. There hasn’t been a lot of advancement in the basic metaphor or dealing with screens as data input forms since the green screen days – just enhancing the form. Yet, social networking sites have been able to break out role-based designs that generally require little or no help. Finding and paying for an airline flight online is much easier than filling out an expense report in enterprise software.

2) DIY BI
Business intelligence software has always relied on the IT gurus who understand the SQL black magic and the underlying business rules of enterprise software to generate ad-hoc reports and cubes. It’s almost as if there are master data management trolls secretly transforming data in enterprise dungeons. We need DIY to enable data discovery and analysis through different visualization media – as you’ve described. Text reports are not that useful for decision-making. It is important that there are organizational KPIs that form the core of performance management, but there needs to be data discovery. The various BI categories are slowly merging and much of the capabilities are held natively in databases.

3) Hegemony of structured and unstructured data

This is going to be the next opportunity for innovation in business.
-First, I think that we tend to discount the structured nature of unstructured data – there is often a structure of headers, footers, heading, bullets, subject lines etc.

-Second, although structured data is well-understood, it isn’t as effective as many think. There are often relationships in data that is not stored structurally in a relational database. Addresses are an example: the address might refer to a city, state/province, country – but there are notions of west/north/east/south or Europe/Asia/Africa not in the database. (That’s why this need to be introduced as dimensions in OLAP). Title is another: a President & CEO in the United States is equivalent to a Managing Director in the UK.

-Third, there are ways to integrate structured and unstructured data, probably through the use of semantic web. My sense is that this technology is crossing the chasm and is able to provide that extra insight that has been missing. In principle, we talk about drill down in OLAP from summary to detailed data – but what about drilling to documents? We may find that the relational database infrastructure that supports structured (SQL) and unstructured (blobs/XML) needs to undergo significant changes to be effective in the next generation BI. For one thing, MDM is likely to transform to an even more semantic exercise than it is now.