Business Intelligence Blog

Social Media and BI - Part 3 & 4

2011-06-14T13:33:00.000+10:00

Well, due to a change in roles, I will be closing down my blog. Here are the last 2 parts to Social Media and BI - Enjoy! And stay tuned to a future blog on Project and Portfolio Management.

Extending Business Intelligence to Social Media

Web 2.0 applications are revolutionising the way that we interact with the web. Most of the existing Social Media examples mentioned in this article exist as a result of new innovations in web application developments. Web 2.0 doesn’t necessarily refer to a new technological advancement in the Web itself, but rather a group of technologies that have advanced Web usage and turned the web into a development platform for the enterprise. ^{(Ferguson 2007)} Many of the innovations in Web 2.0 leverage applications that include the ability to read/write on the Web. The World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee insists that the original vision of the Web was to provide “a collaborative medium, a place where we [could] all meet and read and write” ^{(BBC 2005)} so the term “Web 2.0” is somewhat of an actualisation of that vision.

Some of the innovations in Web 2.0 technologies include:

· Blogs

· Wikis

· Mashups

· RSS (Really Simple Syndication)

· Search & Tags

While this is not an all-encompassing list, these technologies are tightly linked with Social Media and increasingly developed in Business Intelligence platforms. These are examples of how BI can be actively extended to include Social Media using the latest Web technologies.

Blogs as an Enhancer to BI

Blogs are an excellent way to share opinions and ideas to a wider community on the Web in an easy-to-use manner. If you are able to open an online bank account, or write an article in a word processor you already have the required skills to create and manage a blog. The usability of a blog, in combination with BI can be very powerful for enhancing the information provided through enterprise BI platforms.

What a blog can do in the context of BI is provide an opportunity for the producers of the dashboards or other type of reports to create a forum for users to comment and share interpretations of the information they are viewing. This type of forum can also be encouraging for analysts and executives alike to become more engaged with the information they are viewing. The dashboard or report with the additional commentary enhances the overall quality of the published information. When a business user creates a report, they may select it and publish it for the explicit purpose to get feedback from the community of users.

Security needs to be a consideration with this type of collaborative environment, but with attention to the different profile of user to be in line with the profiles of the dashboard and report viewers this is an easy hurdle to overcome to add value to distributed information.

How a BI Wiki Can Work For You

Wikis are quite similar to blogs in that many people are able to contribute and extend the information that may be published in a BI platform. The major difference is that with a wiki it is possible to edit what other people may have written. Wikis provide a structured way for a group of people to edit and collaborate on a specific subject area with each person contributing as much or as little as they want to the topic. A wiki (like a blog) can enrich the information provided through an enterprise BI platform by providing a collaboration vehicle to either educate on business practices or performance at a departmental or enterprise level. An example could be a wiki about the common uses and characteristics from a product that a company offers that is linked or viewed through a sales dashboard. The wiki can provide a “FAQ” for the salespeople accessing these relevant dashboards. The salespeople may choose to help edit the different entries as each of the products mature in the marketplace or extend the information regarding their experiences.

Mashing Up BI Information

Mashups are a simple concept and currently most enterprise BI platforms offer the capability to “mashup” information. The mashup term arose and became popular in the music industry through the introduction of two or more different songs, and two or more different music styles into one musical accompaniment. In a business context, this is the combining of a multitude of different data sources using a variety of different technologies to provide enhanced BI information. The information sources could also include a variety of different Social Media types.

A BI mashup may include geographical representation of sales, with inventory levels, combined with a wiki on the service offerings. This concept is not new, and in a lot of ways this is essentially what business intelligence is. The value comes in taking advantage of new Web 2.0 technologies embedded in many of the BI software vendor offerings to provide business users with multiple streams of information in a self-service environment. The user experience is enhanced greatly, especially when external information such as news, investor information and relevant search capability from the Web is embedded to expand the value of the BI landing page.

Streaming Information with an RSS

Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds are widely available in most web browsers and email clients. It enables one click subscription to websites, blogs or BI websites to provide a simple alert that something has been added to the source. From an email client, the alert looks like a new email message that arrived in the business users inbox. Probably the single biggest advantage to the use of RSS feeds is ease of use. Every user in a company is familiar with an email client. Additions to the relevant BI pages can be delivered through the subscription service. This brings us to the other very important feature of RSS in that user doesn’t have to login and access their personalised BI page, but are alerted to changes relating to their function. If they choose to investigate further, they can click on the link and login to do further analysis. This provides more pervasive information in a way that business users can evaluate quickly resulting in a more productive workforce. Subscribers to RSS feeds can select organisational blogs or wikis that get updated daily or with each post so there is a constant awareness of their colleagues activities relating to the business.

Finding and Organising BI Information with Search & Tags

The use of advanced search and tags is another Web 2.0 innovation that found extensive use in Social Media and can be applied in a BI framework to traditional BI data and to the Social Media applications in the enterprise. Tags are a way to visually represent and organise information on the Web as well as provide advanced search criteria. In the context of a BI platform, a business analyst may want the ability to tag to give additional meaning to the information presented in a dashboard or web page. If an analyst produces a report that shows product sales by region, it helps to introduce additional information (even from the accompanying commentary) that can give a more “human” meaning to the information. In this instances tags such as “sales”, “region”, “product X”, “profit”, “market penetration” and “sales utility” can all produce additional information that can be searched on and assist with interpretation of the report. A tag cloud visually represents the information in the web site showing common searched terms or frequency of the words such as in Fig. 5, which shows a tag cloud for this article.

Fig.5 – A Tag Cloud for this Article

The value tag clouds and enhanced search can bring across Social Media and BI is mainly in accessibility and usability of the information. Tag clouds and enhanced search can be used in Social Media elements in the organisation in order to navigate from BI dashboards to Social Media enhancers ultimately developing the information and making it interactive and navigation user-dependant.

Incorporating Social Media into Business Intelligence

As we’ve moved along the gradient in Fig. 4, we’ve explored how BI can be used passively to monitor Social Media and how BI and Social Media can be blended within an organisation to improve the value of the information to the business stakeholders. In the last stop, we extend the BI platform into the Social Media forums to encourage those outside of the organisation to explore and improve BI data and representations of that data.

Open source BI is an example of the use of social media in order to facilitate the development of BI solutions. Eclipse (http://www.eclipse.org/) works with contributors from all over the Web to develop its open source BIRT (Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools). While this isn’t a great example of how Social Media (such as Twitter, YouTube etc) has facilitated specific changes to BI, it does show how a community of users can collaborate on a project using many of the same Web 2.0 technologies to influence the direction of BI software.

A stronger representation providing a looking glass into how Social Media is used to create, share and provide a true interactive community for BI is through public BI galleries such as those provided by software vendor Tableau ^{(Tableau Software 2011)}. Tableau Public offers individuals the capability to create a user account, download Tableau BI software, conduct online training and then get started with creating their own BI visualisations. The creator then uses the Tableau Public site to publish their charts and other visual representations for other visitors to share with Tweets, and Facebook posts. The forum can also be used to promote businesses or even the written articles that were improved with the Tableau visualisations. There are visualisations showing everything from an “Earthquake map of New Zealand” to “Social Network Market Share”. The immediate ROI may not be clear with this type of investment of time in creating these visualisations, but for a company involved in the development of BI software the ROI is extremely evident. With more people trained, using Tableau BI, and embedding the results across the Web, Tableau is creating a real presence for its BI software. It can also use the information from the community of users to determine where to focus development. This really blurs the lines of BI and Social Media and shows how BI can be put in the hands of and defined by the masses.

Conclusion

Social media and BI are in an exciting stage in the Gartner hype cycle ^{(Gartner 2010)} where mainstream adoption could be as long as 5-10 years out for technologies such as collaborative decision making or as soon as 2-5 years away for mainstream use of Web 2.0 and BI. Expect to see more vendors including the capability to reach out and make sense of the background social media noise and be prepared to revolutionise the way you work with others through blogs, videos, wikis and other interactive ways in the increasingly “virtual” office. Embarking on a journey to gain competitive advantage with any new technology is met with risk since the market is still trying to work out what will return the most value in social media.

Two statements worth pondering are that:

1) Higher risk means higher reward

2) There is immense value with clever interpretation of social media interactions.

A calculated assessment of your use of social media and BI is a good place to start followed by a way to incorporate passive and active engagement with Social Media to realise value.

Works Cited

Allen, Tom. Harvard Business School. http://hbswk.hbs.edu/archive/1691.html (accessed March 10, 2011).

BBC. Berners-Lee on the read/write web. 09 August 2005. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4132752.stm (accessed March 10, 2011).

Chadha, Karan. Can Social Media be the Next Big Lever for Business Intelligence? 07 February 2011. http://www.cmswire.com/cms/web-engagement/can-social-media-be-the-next-big-lever-for-business-intelligence-010118.php (accessed March 10, 2011).

Facebook. Press Room: Facebook. 2011. http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics (accessed March 10, 2011).

Ferguson, Mike. Web 2.0 and Business Intelligence. 07 September 2007. http://www.b-eye-network.co.uk/view/5913 (accessed March 10, 2011).

Gartner. Employing Social Media for Business Impact: Key Collective Behavior Patterns. White Paper, Gartner, 2011.

Gartner. Hype Cycle for Business Intelligence, 2010. Research Paper, Gartner, 2010.

Humphries, Matthew. Geek.com. 03 March 2010. http://www.geek.com/articles/chips/twitter-and-facebook-generated-9-million-for-dell-last-year-2010033/ (accessed March 10, 2011).

Olcaytocengiz. olcaytocengiz.com. http://olcaytocengiz.com/tag/social-media/ (accessed March 10, 2011).

Solis, Brian. Brian Solis - Defining Social Media. 2007. http://www.briansolis.com/2010/01/defining-social-media-the-saga-continues/ (accessed March 10, 2011).

Tableau Software. Tableau Public. 2011. http://www.tableausoftware.com/public/gallery (accessed March 10, 2011).

Twitter. Twitter About. 2011. http://twitter.com/about (accessed March 10, 2011).

Wikipedia. Wikipedia. 2011. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Statistics (accessed March 10, 2011).

—. WikiPedia Business Intelligence. 2006. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_intelligence .

Yahoo! News. Yahoo! News. 01 March 2011. http://news.yahoo.com/s/mashable/20110301/tc_mashable/cocacola_to_help_maroon_5_crowdsource_a_new_song (accessed March 2011, 2011).

YouTube. YouTube Press Statistics. 2011. http://www.youtube.com/t/press_statistics (accessed March 10, 2011).

Social Media And BI - Part 2 of 4

2011-05-04T14:42:00.000+10:00

This is a 4 part series that explores BI and Social Media.

Part 2

Part 1 explored the emergence of social media and collaborative decision making. In Part 2 we explore the different role of social media and the scales of engagement.

Customers and Social Media

From the social media statistics quoted earlier, it is easy to see how a walk down the street would reveal customers, people, employees, students that are getting involved in making their thoughts known online in a collaborative fashion. These groups of people are almost all consumers and will play a role in how your company is perceived in the market, develops its products, is serviced by corporate entities and whether they will want to work for you in the future. While it is almost a certainty that they will become involved in social media of some description, the question is how involved? There is a spectrum of engagement in social media that is worth exploring before uncovering the value that these participants can provide since this involvement has a direct relationship with value.

Fig. 3 – Examples of Participant Involvement in Social Media

Referring back to the original examples from the introduction, participants in social media can have a very passive involvement but still contribute to the overall theme or meme and ultimately still have a big impact on how one is perceived depending on how influential this individual is. Twitter has also been renowned as a crowdsourcing vehicle. In crowdsourcing, an individual or company looks to a wider audience (crowd) in order to assist with gathering ideas, content or general assistance in resolving a problem. Although this is off the topic of BI and Social Media, it is interesting to realise how powerful and lateral crowdsourcing and passive Social Media can be. In a more interesting example, Coca-Cola will use a combination of Twitter and Facebook to crowdsource a new song for Maroon 5 ^{(Yahoo! News 2011)}. Fans will be able to provide feedback during a 24 hour period where Maroon 5 will develop lyrics and sounds for immediate feedback. Both Coca-Cola and Maroon 5 will benefit from the exposure and create a new way for them to interact with their customers.

Moving along the spectrum to a more collaborative style of social media is YouTube. Subscribers and users of YouTube have a more active engagement with Twitter in that rather than simply tweeting thoughts to a wider community there is the opportunity to truly interact with the other users in a meaningful way by commenting on uploads, viewing videos, uploading videos and developing user profiles to create a true web presence and identity. The value in a collaborative type of social media is not so much on an individual contribution, but rather on the aggregation and analysis of a group of people sharing common ideas. If you were to search on YouTube for “funny cat videos” and only 1 video were displayed with a funny cat, this might be interesting (and hopefully humorous) but the impact to what you might do from a marketing and sales perspective would likely be minimal. The reality is that a search on YouTube using these key words returns over 755,000 results with the top funny cat video being viewed almost 50 million times! This isn’t necessarily an indication that you should move into the business of making funny cat videos, but knowing this content and these categories can be mined from collaborative Social Media networks can be powerful in devising the next marketing campaign or investment in social causes such as the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) in the event where funny cat videos are in favour.

In the most involved category of Social Media are examples like Wikipedia where a community of users is actively creating, editing, reviewing and sharing ideas to create something that the world can benefit from. These active participants are quite different from the majority of passive contributors. These are people that have a vested interest and are emotionally attached to the outcomes and products produced. The Wikimedia Foundation operates some of the largest collaboratively edited reference projects in the world, including Wikipedia and the extent of involvement is a clear indicator that people are willing to contribute online to something they believe in. Understanding that there is a massive community that is willing to actively participate is a first step. The next is to use expertise location techniques (potentially evolving into your BI platform) to understand who in the community of customers may be willing to become contributors to the betterment of your product or service. An electronics manufacturer found that there was a customer who understood its products as well as the engineers who designed them.^{(Gartner 2011)} By identifying this talented individual and proposing they become involved with online help the company was able to better serve its customers and reduce customer service costs.

Using BI to Deliver Value from Customers Using Social Media

The story of the poor beggar is a reminder of what can happen when we don’t notice what simply standing up and doing things differently can find. A poor beggar sat on a box for years and asked for money from passer-bys. One day a rich man asked, “What’s in the box you are sitting on?” Surprised and somewhat annoyed the beggar stood up and looked inside the box he had been sitting on for years. To his surprise it was filled with gold. To look inside the box and discover how much gold is there for you, it is useful to refer to a framework for an outward-looking model of Business Intelligence and Social Media.

Fig. 4 – Applying BI to Social Media and Social Media to BI

The spectrum in Fig. 4 represents ways in which to engage the Social Media content to add value and accumulate knowledge about customers, suppliers, partners, investors and other stakeholders in order to achieve a competitive advantage. Broadly speaking depending on the application of technology, the type of industry, external stakeholder involvement and a variety of other factors will determine the actual value that your organisation will receive. One of the biggest challenges of using BI with Social Media information is the unstructured nature of the data. I will try to address these questions through each topical area.

Moving from left to right (passive to active) across the spectrum, the categories can be summarised as:

· Using Business Intelligence to Analyse Social Media

· Extending Business Intelligence to Social Media

· Incorporating Social Media into Business Intelligence

Using Business Intelligence to Analyse Social Media

Any marketer will get excited at the prospect of uncovering information about her customers. Even better, in the sales department the rising and extensive use of Social Media such as Twitter and Facebook have contributed $9 million ^{(Humphries 2010)} to the top line at Dell through its more than 3.5 million followers in 2009. So the big question is “How can I mine this information to turn it into more sales, higher customer satisfaction, lower costs and decreased customer churn?” A good starting point is to start using business intelligence analytics to identify the major trends in the market that you are interested in.

The challenge is easily recognisable. There is an immense amount of information and interactions. The volumes that were referred to in the introduction is incredibly vast, and arguably the information largely not useful for the business purposes of your organisation. The data is fluid, and not meaningful unless the context of the text, video or sound is fully understood. If I did a search on Twitter for “Coca Cola” and “happy” one might think that the responses would all be positive for the brand. Having done the search, it is true that generally these encapsulate a trend of loyalty to the brand such as “Coca Cola makes people happy” from one Tweet. On the other hand there is another that states “Happy Mardi Gras(: tonight's the last night for Coca Cola for me :(“ These reveal two very different messages about the brand.

Social Media Intelligence (SMI) tools are developed and evolving to make sense of Social Media in the context of your company and its initiatives. Karan Chadha of Infosys summarises the key functions of SMI tools^{(Chadha 2011)}:

· Geographic and Demographic Bucketing: An insight like “half the people liked this new launch and half didn't” is far less useful than an insight like “most of the teens liked it and most of the middle aged didn't.” These kind of bucketed insights empower companies to prepare segment specific strategies.

· Knowing the Influencers: Among millions of participants on the social space, there are a few who drive conversations and play a critical role in shaping opinions. For instance, a few social activists can frantically post all over the social space about environmental unfriendliness of a new product and thus influence opinions of many. Several SMI tools provide this feature of identifying such opinion leaders giving companies a chance to foster relationships with them.

· Red Flag Alerts: Several SMI tools provide red flag alerts when a situation demands an immediate action. For instance, a company comes up with a new version of its free-to-download music player software having a critical bug. An SMI tool, by analysing comments over Social Media space will raise a red flag thus alerting the company. This insight gives the company an option to immediately fix the bug and put it back thus preventing a widespread loss of face.

Tying this back as a passive approach to monitoring Social Media interactions, it is important to evaluate the type of monitoring that will be most useful and provide the highest return on investment in your industry. Even though the technology to understand human languages at a meaningful level is still in the future, the high-level classification of interaction types as they pertain to business functions can provide immediate value.

Social Media And BI - Part 1 of 4

2011-04-07T12:20:00.000+10:00

This is a 4 part series that explores BI and Social Media.

Introduction

In this digital age, there is virtually no way to escape it. Facebook reports they have more than 500 million active users ^{(Facebook 2011)}, Twitter boasts over 95 million tweets per day ^{(Twitter 2011)} , and YouTube announced that it passed 2 billion views per day ^{(YouTube 2011)}… Almost a year ago! Wikipedia has had almost 500 million page edits ^{(Wikipedia 2011)}by contributors since its founding. The message is clear. Social media is here to stay and it is a tool that you should capitalise on. In 1999 it was Microsoft who completely changed their strategy in order to capitalise on the latest trend. Up to that point, Bill Gates was stuck on the concept of PC-based solutions and arguably saved his company by recognising the importance in this evolving technology. That technology is famously the internet and the flip-flop on strategy to leverage the web rather than fear it changed the world we live in today. This is an example of what could have happened if Microsoft had missed what was seemingly an obvious goldmine of opportunity.

It is a prudent exercise to revisit some terms that happen to be the topic of this paper. Since both of these areas are constantly evolving (just like the English language), it is acceptable to select one that is in the spirit of the concepts and supportive in a way that allows this evolution to occur. It is a certainty that these terms are widely misinterpreted and misused in businesses today.

I have chosen a 2006 Wikipedia definition of business intelligence. If you were to search the term today you will find that it has changed and has become much narrower and focussed on systems and software. The earlier definition captures a broader meaning behind business intelligence in an organisation. This definition also doesn’t limit the information to what can be found inside the systems of a company, but describes it more broadly as incorporating information from other sources such as those found in social media.

Business Intelligence (BI): is the process of gathering information in the field of business. It can be described as the process of enhancing data into information and then into knowledge. Business intelligence is carried out to gain sustainable competitive advantage, and is a valuable core competence in some instances. ^{(Wikipedia 2006)}

Social Media: is the democratization of content and the understanding of the role people play in the process of not only reading and disseminating information, but also how they share and create content for others to participate. It is the shift from a broadcast mechanism to a many-to-many model, rooted in a conversational format between authors and people. Social media describes the online tools that people use to share content, profiles, opinions, insights, experiences, perspectives and media itself, thus facilitating conversations and interaction online between groups of people. These tools include, message boards, podcasts, micro-blogs, lifestreams, bookmarks, networks, communities, wikis, and vlogs. ^{(Solis 2007)}

Fig.1 - Social Media Collection and Classification ^{(Olcaytocengiz n.d.)}

The definition on Wikipedia and even generally in the social media field is still on a journey as the wider populations become more in tune with the impact this will have on every person wired to the web. Again, the concept of a broader definition that allows growth and incorporation of other ideas is useful to bear in mind as these concepts are communicated to the business.

In Fig. 1 there is a visual representation of some of the growing number of social media services available for individuals to present their views, thoughts, images, feelings and tastes to a wider audience. Social media truly represents a shift from institutional control to consumer control. This shift is why companies are so interested. If you follow the audience, you follow the money. If you are able to understand the habits and behaviours of this audience (whether they are an employee or customer), the ability to unlock value is certainly not that far behind.

The convergence of business intelligence and social media is focused on gathering and making sense of information published by social media networks. The value of this analysis can generally be examined from an internal (employees) or external (customer/supplier/partner) perspective. Gaining knowledge from the social interactions of all individuals that touch your organisation will give you a competitive advantage…if you are doing it better than your competitor that is!

Collaborative Decision Making

One of the emerging concepts that looks to unlock value within an organisation using business intelligence and social media is collaborative decision making (CDM) platforms. Every company is organised around workgroups often loosely defined functionally. In addition to the segregation based upon roles and function, there is a physical separation as well. Sales people sit with sales people, finance mingles with finance and product development are locked away somewhere from everyone else. I am always reminded of Tom Allen’s “30-meter rule” ^{(Allen n.d.)} when I think about lost potential in a company due to the low likelihood of interaction due to spatial or role-based reasons. In Allen’s studies, he found that engineers and scientists whose desks are more than 30 metres apart have a communication frequency of almost zero. Incredibly, it was found that the relationship between the volume of communication between co-workers was in inverse proportion to the distance they sat from each other at work. This study was completed before the rise of email and social media and could be used to explain why water-cooler talk seemed to be so invaluable. This demonstrates the natural tendency of humans to feel limited by distance. CDM platforms provide a means to have a “virtual water-cooler” to enhance overall communication.

One of the pre-suppositions of CDM is that an enhancement of the overall communication and collaboration in a company is a valuable thing. In instances where sales communicate regularly with Product Development, Marketing aligns and talks to Sales and Finance regularly visits IT. According to Gartner “CDM improves the quality and transparency of decisions by bringing together the right decision makers and information, assisted by the relevant decision tools and templates, to examine an issue, brainstorm and evaluate options and agree on a course of action.” ^{(Gartner 2010)} There should be countless examples how an organisation’s effectiveness can be improved by the introduction of CDM platforms.

CDM platforms combine business intelligence with social networking, collaboration, decision tools and workflow to help make and capture better decisions. Social networking in this instance refers to making use of social media such as wikis, vlogs, forums and blogs to enhance an organisation’s interactions. Social networks have evolved to include multi-dimensional connections with real conversations between users.

There are at least two ways in which BI and CDW are converging. Software vendors are increasingly enhancing their BI platforms to include elements of social media, while others have built their solutions with social media in mind. Lyza (www.lyzasoft.com) provides a way for business analysts to complete analysis such as querying a data source and producing a dashboard, which is not uncommon for any BI tool. The difference is that the dashboard or other information can then be disseminated to what Lyza calls its “Lyza Common” where members in the workgroup can then blog, rate, forward, search and comment on the business intelligence results. The applications for this approach to BI can be profound. The users of the information are able to play an active role in enhancing the output through social commentary. Analysts can respond to the feedback. Users of the information can participate in the shaping of the information and identify any shortcomings in the information that was provided. In a way, it really personalises the delivery of BI from the perspective of an end consumer of the information and the analyst who is delivering it as an information caretaker. This is a radical approach to BI and over the next 18 months as vendors provide more options; other unexpected benefits will surely emerge. One example that comes to mind is when a project manager used BI to deliver project-tracking metrics to her team. In an environment where deadlines and internal expectations are paramount, it is vital to have honest, open communication with the team. The project manager utilised social media to provide a forum for the team to anonymously submit feedback on the timelines and tasks to understand if the goals were achievable. In a perfect world the team would have open channels of communication, but this allowed individuals that were non-confrontational in nature to stream feedback across multiple regions to the project head allowing her to have a clear understanding of the project status from the team.

While there is importance in finding ways to improve and deliver BI within the social network at the office, there is also value in applying BI to the CDM platform and other means of communication within the business, which highlights the other intersection. Learning how departments and functions relate to each other at a macro level can help drive internal operational strategies. For instance, if customer satisfaction with a product is at a low as determined from feedback surveys, the obvious next step is to discover why customers aren’t happy with the product. Is it the quality? Expectations of what the product could deliver? Using the latter example, assuming the customers weren’t provided with a product they were expecting, then how can we work towards resolving this issue and why did the problem occur in the first place? By applying BI to the social interactions, one can create a social map of the interactions to determine where the problem might exist.

Fig.2 – Internal Social Network Analytics

In the simplified example in Fig. 2 using business intelligence to monitor the social media has uncovered that Product Development is regularly in contact with Customer Service rather than marketing. This could be for a variety of reasons including that because of dissatisfaction with the product, customer service representatives are often in contact with the Product Development team to solve or query the issue. The real opportunity and a way to future-proof new innovations is to improve social interactions between Product Development or potentially with the customers themselves. It is increasingly common for expert users of a product to either advise Product Development teams or become part of Customer Care. Regardless of the approach, this demonstrates the value of having this type of information readily available to a business embarking on a social media initiative.

Part II in 2 weeks....

Gartner Information Management Summit : Feb 22nd & 23rd

2011-02-03T11:44:00.002+11:00

This is a re-post of a note from Gartner. I thought these were interesting trends. Make sure you attend the Summit to find out more!

As technology, market and management trends begin to transform BIIM and analytics, understanding and embracing these impending changes is critical in order to improve performance and your organization’s success. According to Gartner, there are four trends that BIIM and analytics leaders need to embrace, which are highlighted in this month’s e-newsletter. You can learn more at the upcoming Gartner Business Intelligence & Information Management Summit, 22 – 23 February, Sydney, Australia.

Four key BI predictions to help organizations plan for 2011 and beyond

By 2013, 33% of BI functionality will be consumed via handheld devices.

Current adoption rates and the broad availability of mobile devices are promising to quickly generate a strong wave of mobile BI users. At first, mobile BI will consist largely of existing reports and dashboards ported to the mobile device. By 2012, organizations and vendors will develop mobile analytic applications for specific tasks or domains. Mobile BI will significantly expand the population of BI users to include a more mainstream audience and this opportunity will attract significant investment.
By 2014, 30% of analytic applications will use in-memory functions to add scale and computational speed.

By 2014, 30% of analytic applications will use proactive, predictive and forecasting capabilities. The growing use of sophisticated analytic functions will accelerate the growth of the performance management and the analytic application market. Packaged applications will incorporate data and text mining, forecasting and regression, optimization, scoring and simulations using complex business rules and data modelling. As the speed-of-response and data volumes increase, organizations will look for columnar data repositories and in-memory online analytical processing that is faster and easier to architect.
By 2014, 40% of business analytics expenditure will go to system integrators, not software vendors.

The growth of user-driven initiatives, external information sources and the integration of unstructured content make the traditional approach of buying products almost exclusively from software companies and system integrators increasingly risky and potentially uncompetitive. Buyers can now evaluate total packages and select a lead provider, often a service provider to deliver it.
By 2013, 15% of BI deployments will combine BI, collaboration and social software into decision-making environments.

Organizations are starting to piece together collaboration technology, social software and BI to create collaborative decision-making environments. These efforts will continue to grow as organizations start to more proactively manage, capture and optimize decision processes and outcomes to improve performance beyond the decision inputs such as BI.

For a comprehensive look at Gartner recommendations for these predictions and today’s hottest BI priorities, join us in 2 weeks!

For full details on the comprehensive agenda program, visit gartner.com/ap/bi.

3 WAYS TO REGISTER:
Online: gartner.com/ap/bi
Phone: +61 2 8569 7622
E-mail: apac.registration@gartner.com

Ten Reasons to Attend the Gartner Information Management Summit: February 22 & 23 Sydney

2011-01-20T15:15:00.000+11:00

10 Reasons to Attend

Access an unrivalled pool of Analysts to gain timely advice and strategic guidance on your BIIM and PM strategies and integration
Speak directly with one Gartner analyst in a private 30 minute One-on-One meeting
Learn, analyze, evaluate and decide your next steps, having gained insight and information into the future of BIIM and PM
Hear Guest Keynote by Anders Sorman-Nilsson, Creative Director, Thinque: Future Thinking - Global Trends and Thinking that are Upending your Business
Make wise investments guided by the expanded Magic Quadrant Locknote
NEW for 2011! Contract Negotiation Clinics delivering a powerful combination of Gartner insight and peer best practices
Customize your own agenda based on maturity level and topic: View Agenda Builder now
Gain an understanding into the future role of BIIM and PM to develop forward looking strategies and actions
Benefit from the collective wisdom and experiences of your peers, Analysts and industry experts
Meet the world's leading providers of technology solutions who understand the challenges unique to business intelligence and performance management. Discover, compare and evaluate products and services as you develop your shortlist if partners to support your business goals

Listen alongside your peers

At the Gartner Business Intelligence & Information Management Summit, you will learn from the experiences of your peers through networking, roundtable discussions and workshops.

Don’t miss out – register your place today!

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Why You Should Attend the Gartner BI Summit: Sydney, March 2 & 3, 2010

2010-02-02T17:31:00.000+11:00

Now that everyone has made their way back from the break, it is time to start thinking about projects for 2010. With BBQs and beaches seemingly a distant memory, it is time to think about the other "B" that will consume us at the office - Business Intelligence.

At least half of large corporations will be increasing their budgets in Business Intelligence this year. One of the best ways to prepare for discussions internally, and be in a position to sell your strategy and ideas is to take an opportunity to meet your peers and the industry specialists at Gartner for this invaluable conference.

For a link to the conference details, you can click here Gartner BI & Information Management Summit but in the meantime here are some of the reasons I think you will get value from this Summit.

1. You Can Get More Value from Your Data.

Every organisation has data that is locked up, and understanding the tools, solutions and methods to reaching this data and converting a diamond in the rough into a sparkling gem is truly money in the bank. There is no stronger business case than one that tells the story of how to not only inform management, but add value back to existing ERP systems. One of the themes of the Summit is "Exploit Your Data or Become Obsolete". I couldn't agree more.

2. Nils Vesk

I am a big fan of Edward De Bono, or rather lateral thinking. Nils Vesk will bring lateral thinking to the fore front on the topic of Creative Intelligence. He promises to deliver an exciting and though-provoking key-note. This session will be sure to energise and re-set the way you look at your organisation and its challenges. I can't wait for this one.

3. Discover New BI Trends and Tools

An informed decision needs to start with understanding what tools are available to get the job done. Sometimes the answer is that it requires no tools at all and with direction and leadership that the task at hand can be achieved. With a new world order post the GFC, we need to be creative with our solutions and exploit technology to its fullest. What's hot and what's not. What will work for you, and what has worked for your peers? These are all themes of the Summit, and let's face it, we all love to see new technology work for us!

4. A Clever and Relevant Agenda

The agenda has been devised in a way that caters to different competencies. I have copied it below to see what you think.

Gartner BI and Information Management Agenda Tracks

Track A: The People & Process - Building Stronger Relationship with the Business
Adoption of BI usage is predicted to double within organisations in the next five years, and IT is struggling to manage this increased demand. Because of this, Gartner predicts that 40% of BI budgets will be held by business units by 2012. It is therefore imperative that all areas of the business and IT work together to ensure success through the effective use of BI, analytics and performance management initiatives. This track focuses on the management frameworks and process issues, compliance to achieve consistency as well as best practices for establishing excellence centres.

Track B: The Planning & Performance - Managing Performance Rather Than Just Measuring It
Information derived from business intelligence systems is rarely linked directly to business decisions. Most organisations still struggle with fragmented BI initiatives, proliferation of BI tools and silos of departmental analytic applications. Bringing these initiatives together into a coherent strategy is vital for success in BI, analytics and performance management. Learn how to link performance management to planning, budgets and operational and governance activities to aid strategy execution, as well as identifying the right metrics to improve organisational performance.

Track C: The Platform - Evaluate Market, Tools & Technologies for Better Investments
The BI marketplace continues to grow more complex. Markets are increasingly dominated by mega-vendors, which is forcing organisations to re-examine their vendor selection. Meanwhile, emerging trends and alternative delivery models are radically changing views of how to build and deploy BI. Sessions in this track provide a deeper understanding of these shifts in areas of BI platforms, data warehousing, data integration and quality, and ways of integrating those emerging technologies with existing infrastructure - as well as a view on how the market will change in the next few years.

I hope that I will see you at the Gartner BI Summit this year, it could be the most important Business Intelligence Event of 2010.

The Melbourne Cup and Business Intelligence – Just another Horse Race?

2009-11-04T17:59:00.000+11:00

As I shook the cobwebs away, counted my losses (only $35 this year) and reflected on the selections I “should” have made, it was clear that another Melbourne Cup had came and went. For those of you that are reading this from outside Australia, the Melbourne Cup is truly a grand event that has been coined “the race that stops a nation”. For one day in the year, an entire country gets involved in this horse race directly by betting or buying a ticket in sweeps or indirectly by having a statutory holiday and/or watching the replay of the horse race finish again, and again and again in the media. This year’s winning horse was “Shocking” – one of the favourites with a great track record. Sitting at my desk I was thinking about the Melbourne Cup and wondered how gambling could appeal to such a large audience. How much was spent on the Melbourne Cup this year? About the same amount that Gartner predicts will be spent on Business Intelligence software this year - $175 Million AUD - some punters will have turned a profit, but the majority will have parted with their money with no returns.

BI in Horse Racing

In the Melbourne Cup there are 20+ horses, all competing for the glory. There are statics on the Form guide which detail success in the last several racing events, the weight of the jockey, age of the horse, starting price, the trainer and owners are all information that is considered before a serious gambler (or investor) will back a horse. The actual selection, once the information is reviewed, will be based on the best information available and is changing right up to the seconds before they rush out of the starting gate. This is similar to the decisions that are made in businesses every day. Managers require a medium (Form guide) for the business which will give them up-to-the minute information to base decisions upon. Of course it is rarely the occasion that only one manager (punter) will be involved with the decision, but the importance of the information should never be undermined. If even one of these statistics is compromised such as the previous success of the horse, the punters will never trust the betting house again. Similarly, the information within an organisation needs to be water-proof or the most important element of working with other departments/functions will be lost – TRUST.

Picking a Favourite

On the Melbourne Cup day, generally the favourites do well, but 3 times in its 149 year history a 100-1 horse has won the Cup. How does this happen? Maybe the horse wasn’t the strongest, and the statistics didn’t seem to add up, but ultimately the jockey probably read the race and the horses talents resulting in a completely unexpected win. To me, this highlights the importance of management in any situation – especially in business intelligence. Let’s say you have a BI toolset that is considered a “favourite”. Gartner has identified several large players and niche players in the BI space that could be labelled this way. With an industrial strength (favourite) solution in your organisation you are increasing the odds of success. There will be broader skills in the marketplace, more R&D being poured into the suite, and generally a favourite will have more experience. These will all work towards increasing the odds of success, so why don’t we always win with the favourites? There is competition all around you causing distractions including other competing projects (other horses), the BI management team may not be aligned with the organisation (jockey not understanding the horse), a clear execution strategy may not have been defined (understanding when to gallop and when to take the inside rail), or it can happen when there is no executive buy-in (a horse has a failed support team on the day). Looking at it from another angle organisations can be successful with their BI implementations even though the tool-kit isn’t a “favourite”. With the right mix of management, vendor, and strategic execution it can easily take 1st place.

While the Melbourne Cup only occurs for a few minutes each year, business intelligence is used religiously every day in all organisations. Picking a solution and deploying a BI strategy shouldn’t be a gamble, but with the right mix of leadership, training, tools and strategic direction you will be across the finish line ahead of your competitors and enjoy the profits that come with this success. Now excuse me, but I have to do some predictive analytics on which horse will win this week-end in Sydney – who needs to wait for next year ?!

The Six Hats of Business Intelligence

2009-10-14T19:22:00.005+11:00

Six Thinking Hats and BI

If you are one to enjoy giving your brain a work-out, like to think outside the square and want to learn how to do it better, or are interested in learning new management methodologies, you have probably read one of Edward De Bono's books in the past. The first time I heard about Edward De Bono was when I was teamed with a business improvement consultant who had previously worked with Michelin. Michelin were huge advocates of Edward de Bono's methodologies, as you can imagine in the tyre business one of the greatest differentiators is innovation. At Michelin it was De Bono's techniques that led to allowed the organisation to look at making tyres differently. The concept of looking at nature for innovative ideas was a new one at the time, and it was De Bono's lateral thinking principles that contributed to Michelin's leadership in lateral thinking. The interaction with this consultant inspired me to read the book "Six Thinking Hats" - an international best seller. It has been years since I read this novel and thought about the impact of lateral thinking to day-to-day activities, so I decided to pick it up and review the concepts in the context of Business Intelligence decision-making.

Review the Six Thinking Hats

You should buy or re-read the book if it's been a while, but briefly, De Bono outlines a methodology to problem solving and interacting which uses "role-playing" to analyse the problem from 6 different angles, each point of view is a different coloured hat. Not only is each hat a point of view, but together using the hats can facilitate meetings, discussions and used correctly can truly change the culture of a company to be more accepting of new ideas, and encourage giving different points of view without criticism. You can see already how this simple methodology can be effective. I'll review the hats quickly and then apply them in the world of BI.

White Hat - Facts and Figures. An objective and neutral hat.

Red Hat - Emotions and Feelings. This is an emotional view.

Black Hat - Cautious and Careful. Serious and a hat used to point out weaknesses.

Yellow Hat - Speculative - Positive. An optomistic hat with lots of hope.

Green Hat - Creative Thinking hat.

Blue Hat - Organising the use of the other hats. Executive hat.

Each of the hats can be combined with other hats, but for my analogy, I will assume a position including the use of only one hat at a time. If you are looking at the description of the hats, you probably already have an idea of which person you work with wears which hat most of the time. The concept that De Bono introduces is that although you may normally wear a yellow hat, if you put on a black hat for example, how would your decision change. In this article, I will play on the typical roles, departments and/or responsibilities in an organisation, and demonstrate how their hat might give them a certain point of view. I would also go on to say that if you are in one of these positions, that it is okay (in fact encouraged) to put on a different hat to see another department's point of view.

The Six Hats of Enterprise Business Intelligence

I will use an example of an organisation that has a variety of tools scattered about the enterprise. Some of the activity is "under the wire" but much of the reporting and analysis activity is known. It has been decided that a business intelligence strategy will be crafted and deployed. Here are some of the hats that will surface as we take this journey. Note: The concept of the Six Thinking Hats is if you typically wear one of these hats, to try to put on another hat for a differenct point of view. When each participant wears and "tries on" another angle using the Hats terminology, it can allow new ideas surface without hurting others feelings etc. Below I have tried to have a bit of fun and start with some of the hats that we often see, but challenge you to wear another hat.

White Hat - The white hat is often worn by the enterprise architects. Their role is to be unbiased, and provide an objective long-term strategy for business intelligence. Even though the business may be emotionally attached to solution, it may not be architecturally sound - physically or economically.

Red BI Hat - The emotionally charged red hat can sometimes come from a department that has a need to solve a dire problem like not being able to track profitable customers, not knowing which segments to target. Bonuses and KPIs may be matched against these outcomes, bringing a personal attachment to a solution that may need agreement by executives, IT support and other stakeholders.

Black BI Hat - The black hat should be worn by those involved with developing the business case that will outline a solution for enterprise reporting, or any solution for that matter. The cautious black hat should in fact be worn at various stages of discovery, evaluation and deployment. As De Bono states, the Black hat is the most important of the hats, and all involved with developing a BI strategy should put it on at one stage or another.

Yellow BI Hat - The optimistic yellow hat will be likely be worn by the planning and strategy team responsible for the development of a BI strategy, or can also be worn by external parties like BI consulting firms employed to support the initiative. This is an important hat since this hat will provide a vision, and a picture of what information and results can be obtained once the BI strategy has been actioned. This hat can really keep things moving when it seems there will never be an end to feral reports production!

Green BI Hat - Creativity is so important in deploying a BI strategy, and for success here all participants should try it on. Ideas on using existing infrastructure and software, narrowing the requirements, how to get more with less and creatively resourcing requirements at various stages. Again, this is a hat that is typically worn by all, but the core BI strategy team need to have it on often, and encourage stakeholders to wear it from time-to-time.

Blue BI Hat - The blue hat is reserved for the playmakers. The executive team that need to pull the BI team together, paint a vision for the future and enforce a sense of urgency. Within the cross-functional team there also needs to be a leadership hat that can be used to orchestrate the goals, talent and tools.

You may call me a mad hatter, but utilising the hat methodologies in a BI implementation helps to enact change, manage processes and create a common language. Being aware of the different hats in the organisation and some of the styles will allow effective implementation and drive you towards success.

Maybe you have other examples of hats that you have seen in a BI implementation (departmental or otherwise). Drop a note below with your examples. I'll be wearing my yellow hat with anticipation!

What Business Intelligence Decision Makers Want

2009-09-15T13:47:00.003+10:00

Mel Gibson Knows a Successful BI Approach

If anyone has seen the Mel Gibson film “What Women Want”, you wouldn’t forget the scene where Mel Gibson’s character falls into a bathtub complete with ladies shoes, lipstick, nail polish and to top it off ... wearing tights. He was trying to understand how women think (and evidently what they might want to buy) in order to be a more successful marketing professional. Ultimately the fall into the bathtub electrocutes him and he emerges with the ability to listen to the thoughts of women. Besides the inevitable romantic match-up with Helen Hunt’s character, he becomes incredibly successful at understanding his target market – women. The Edward De Bono book “Six Thinking Hats” hammers home this concept in a variety of business scenarios. De Bono (one of the great lateral thinkers of our time) devises a method of problem solving using 6 different “hats” or ways of thinking to analyse and ultimately resolve problems. Like in the film “What Women Want” putting yourself in the shoes (or under the hat as it were) of the people you are trying to reach out to, will allow you to better understand their requirements.

Thinking Hats, Mel Gibson & BI...I’m Confused!

If you are charged with the task of assembling a team to deliver information to the business, you will be successful if you follow Mel Gibson’s lead and put on the thinking hat of a BI Decision Maker. Often times the business will examine their existing reports (often cobbled together in Excel or Word) and ask the BI deployment team to replicate the report. I’ve often heard these decision makers referred to as being “very particular” business users. If your team walks away from that meeting with the mandate to replicate this report line-by-line, format-by-format, you have not really made an attempt to understand the needs of the business. In order to truly meet their needs, you will need to put on the BI thinking hat, and get inside the head of one of these decision makers. You may come to the conclusion that there is a very good reason that the report needs to be replicated verbatim, but you will probably find that there was a lot missing, or too much information in the status quo. By examining the needs of the decision maker, following the information flow (who is receiving the information that they are producing) and seriously examining the present report framework, you have an excellent opportunity to stream-line and improve the overall information reporting process. One of the exercises I like to promote is taking a report and asking the question “Who will be upset if this report doesn’t go out tomorrow?”, when we get the answer for that question we drill a bit further “If we produced the report with X,Y,Z missing as sections, who would ring you to complain?” You get the point. Just because a report has been produced the last 2 years, doesn’t mean it is relevant any longer. Additionally with new technologies, there are ways to deliver information and report results like we haven’t seen ... there should be an opportunity to educate your decision makers, understand their position and collaboratively work towards a solution.

What DO BI Decision Makers Want?

Depending on the role of the team in question, the flavour of information could be operational, financial etc. The way the information is delivered, examined or moved through the organisation is part of the foundation for any BI strategy. When it comes to the enterprise software that you are planning to use for your BI solution, many of them have a variety of these functions. But, just because you grew to 6’5” doesn’t mean you necessarily want to play basketball. What message I am trying to get across here is that even though a particular delivery method or function may exist in your BI systems, it may not be right for what you are trying to achieve. Often times a sleek, lean solution is driven towards the complex because the leaders of the BI deployment catered too much to the draw of the “gadget”. I’ll talk about the draw of the fancy dashboard in another blog entry, but for now, let’s look at what I have found businesses are looking for in a BI solution:

Play with the Data - Ad hoc, What-if?, OLAP

Let’s face it. Users of BI information want the ability to get their hands dirty. Although they may not be a full-fledged mechanic, they work on restoring cars on the week-end...and want to learn more! The best way to understand what is happening under the hood is to give them the tools to play with the data. There is nothing more in demand and successful to a BI deployment than to provide them with this capability.

Deliver Information - Standard Reporting

Going back to the early comments relating to the status quo, there will be an inevitable need to provide the business with information that is fairly static, but informative. Getting these reports refreshed in a timely and relevant manner will be key for success in developing your standard reports strategy.

Simplify Information - Dashboards

Dashboards are effective In order to see the forest for the trees, with a difference. A dashboard is most effective when you can see the forest, then a stand of trees, a particular tree, a leaf (drill-downs!) ... Decision makers want to be able to identify a problem area, and then understand the cause and effect relationship, even if it means drilling to the invoice level.

Leverage Existing Skills - MS Office Integration

Where would we all be without Microsoft? I would probably have a few less grey hairs, but the reality is most business users are comfortable with using MS Office tools. Leveraging these tools effectively by connecting and controlling access to the underlying data, will increase user adoption and enhance the capability and investment in Microsoft Office.

Consolidate Information - BI Portals

When your users fire up their PC, PDA or other web-enabled device, the last thing you want them to do is have to search for what they need to make their decisions. A BI portal can combine internal and external information to empower them, rather than frustrate them. This improves user adoption, and aligns the business and should be an important part of any BI strategy.

Predict an Outcome - Predictive Analytics

How did you know I was going to talk about predictive analytics? If your business users can spot trends in the information it can give you a competitive advantage since you are looking 4 moves ahead on the chess board while they are still working on their opening move. Predictive analytics seem to be mature around marketing and fraud detection, but there are countless opportunities in operations and other parts of the business that have yet to be exploited.

Wear the BI Hat for Success

I have discussed one aspect of what makes up a successful BI deployment...thinking like the user. Of course whether you are part of a Business Intelligence Competency Centre, managing divisional information or responsible for some of the reports that are delivered to your cohorts, this is only a sliver of what is required for successful, ongoing results ... but by putting on your BI hat you can get closer to that goal.

Cricket and Business Intelligence – Hitting Runs with BI

2009-09-07T16:04:00.006+10:00

How Could Cricket and BI Possibly be Connected?

As the Ashes series came to a conclusion, and the One Day International series between England and Australia powered on, and with so many late evenings watching cricket it was bound to happen...my thoughts on business intelligence and cricket started to collide. Being a naturalised Australian, heralding from Canada; this was a strange experience indeed. I could blame it on the late nights, the newness of the sport, or the countless white papers and presentations I have participated in, but in the end my “cricket brain” and my “BI brain” began to merge as one.
So where do you start when drawing parallels between sport and BI? Well, the need to extract information from businesses for decision making has existed before the first widget came off the assembly line, and it is now a global requirement...BI is a global sport. Cricket on the other hand has been around just as long. It is believed it evolved from the game “Rounders” in the 16th century – the seed from which baseball was born as well - and became the national pastime in England by the 18th century. Cricket is played in many countries, but only a handful of countries really excel at the sport. Alright then it’s fair to say both BI and cricket are widespread, but it is very difficult to really excel at either given all the variables in the environment. We have our first run! Here’s a few more:

The Cricket Pitch and Ball is Constantly Changing

Captains, bowlers, batsmen and spectators are obsessed with the pitch and ball in cricket the same way CEOs, senior managers and investors need information on the changing conditions within a business. If the pitch forms a crack and it goes unnoticed, it could mean disaster for a batsman. Not having the tools in place to recognise where costs are pouring out of the organisation from an unmanaged crack will have the same consequences. Competitors and investors will punish this negligence making it more difficult to defend your wicket (customers, products, market share). Ensuring that you have solutions in place to monitor business performance will enable you to be confident when you are defending your wicket and aggressively playing the ball.

Different Skills for Different Conditions

In a test cricket series, the game is played on different pitches, in a variety of towns with variable weather. The history of the pitch is used with current information relating to the weather and the caretaking practices that were conducted on the days and months leading up to the competition. The captain and selectors determine what the team needs to look like in order to be successful over the next 5 days. Should there be more spinners or fast bowlers? Should elect to bat first? In the same way, a business intelligence initiative needs to be flexible enough to adapt to the requirements of different departments, regions and countries. Keep in mind that we are not breaking up the team here, we are ensuring the team is well equipped to manage these changes. If one department needs more technical or BI product support, then the captain needs to be able to cater to this requirement in order to be successful in enabling BI. A region may need most information delivered in a multi-dimensional portal in order to be competitive. The captain needs to consider this when planning a roll-out and success against competitors.

If You Can’t Defend Your Wicket, You will Be Bowled Out

In cricket there are 10 ways to get out. A few of the most common are being caught out, leg before wicket (LBW) and bowled out when the ball hits the stumps knocking off the bails. During the entire time the batsman has 10 men who only want to do one thing – “Get him out!” One overly aggressive, careless or miscalculated move, and the batsman will need to be replaced until all 10 (in most cases) have been bowled out. Business Intelligence information whether its operational, sales focussed, or for process improvement will be surrounded by an onslaught from competitors and sometimes internal attacks. With good information you will be able to defend the attacks, and with great information be able to turn the intelligence into runs that result in real profit.

Cricket and BI Come in a Variety of Flavours

Cricket in its “purest” form is as a test series that could take a couple of months to determine a victor (and even then it could be a draw). Rather than a 5 day test, cricket can also be enjoyed by limiting the number of overs to 50 as in a one day match-up or 20 in the popular Twenty20 cricket. The idea is that spectators and players can enjoy the sport with varying levels of commitment. Often times fans of Twenty20 will enjoy the sport enough to begin committing to the “One Dayers” or even a Test Series. Business Intelligence is the same in that corporations have the ability to invest in a small proof in one department, and after enjoying success they can look to deploy a wider solution. The goal may be to even centralise BI as I suggested in a previous article.

So you can see that maybe my cricket brain isn’t too far off the stumps when it comes to comparing it to Business Intelligence. I’m sure you could draw other examples, post them below if you suffer from a cricket/BI conflict as well.

Business Intelligence Defined ... Almost

2009-09-01T13:58:00.005+10:00

The Tragedy of “Data Mining”

I suppose before we get into how Business Intelligence (BI) is used in different organisations, I should start by defining what business intelligence actually encompasses. I think it is one of those business terms that is often confused, but it is broad enough that most people feel comfortable talking about it. Before you start to engage across the business you should have an idea of what this means for your organisation and what is understood in the BI community or we could force BI into the same situation that the term “data mining” is currently. I would say that the term “data mining” is one of the most widely misused words in the BI field. I feel that this is because people hear the word “mining” and automatically attach the real-world understanding, which is to basically dig into the ground to dig up precious “stuff”. It must mean the same in a data context right? Well... sort of. It is more than just trawling through a mess of a data warehouse and finding the magic number you were looking for, it extends to identifying trends in the data by way of clustering, regression, classification and other relationships...this is more than simply finding a data point!

Back to the task at hand of defining Business Intelligence, one way to help with a definition is to start with what it is not. It is not a data warehouse, data mart or any other large store of information. This is certainly part of a BI framework the same way a wheel on a car is a part, and not the whole. A data warehouse gets BI moving, but on its own it is certainly not the final solution to most organisations challenges of access to information. I have been in meetings with customers stating that their BI woes had been resolved with an investment in a data warehouse. Relational data is great, but these companies will lose any competitive advantage they have if this investment is not leveraged.

Where Was BI Born?

A good place to start with the definition of BI can is in its traditional nomenclature as a Decision Support System (DSS) for the business. This definition has its grass-roots at MIT and Carnegie Institute in the 60’s. A DSS is differentiated in that it is a computer-based information (and knowledge-based) system that supports decision making activities rather than relying wholly on gut-feel and paper-based models of yesteryear (although these are still important aspects of decision making today). If we take this to the next level of detail, what we are talking about is information that we receive from our computer-based systems that assists in decision-making that may take the form of reports, alerts, portals, OLAP cubes, data warehouses/marts, and results from analytics (statistical and other). The information presented for decision making encompasses historical, present and predictive views and is customised by role – no matter where they sit in the organisation.

It’s Up To You

Ultimately BI should provide you with an intimate, interactive experience for developing a relationship with your data – no matter where it sits (internally and externally), but the reality is that you are responsible for defining what your organisation needs recognising that the solutions are there to unlock your information for decision making. To find out more on how your organisation can unlock your information, contact me for a workshop: Jason.Gates@Oracle.com

Business Intelligence Competency Centres (BICCs) & Better Business Information: Breaking the Silos

2009-08-25T12:36:00.005+10:00

Say it Together

It’s no secret. Let’s say it together “My name is ______ and I suffer from silos of information.” Doesn’t it feel better to say it out loud? The information in the form of data, processes and people is locked up in different parts of your company just waiting to be discovered. Sometimes it is simply unused, it may be used dangerously (since it probably contains unreliable information), and at times it is part of a report that IT create to highlight just how bad the problem actually has become. I can’t count the number of times that I sat down with someone in IT or a business systems role who would desperately proclaim “We have a couple hundred information systems and DB’s, and we might know how half of them are being used by the business!”

We have to realise that there was probably a good reason to invest so much time into this legacy system, and at one time it was used fervently by the business. What your concern should be is that it has been thrown into the corner of the closet like that high school Rugby shirt. While I’m not proposing that the shirt should be binned (which is probably what your partner advised), there should be an assessment as part of larger strategy to determine its longevity and use in future games. Leave the nostalgia behind!

How can a BICC Help?

Creating a Centre for Business Intelligence, or as it is commonly referred Business Intelligence Competency Centres (BICC) should be part of your strategy to unlock hidden information, centralise BI control , processes & systems, and extract value from the entire framework of information. The truth is that this is no easy task, and this approach has only recently caught on in the Australia. It requires a strong team led by “C”-levels (especially the CFO/CIO), IT Managers and Business Managers across the company. Recognition of the silo problem is the first step, but it needs to be followed by an analysis of the skills required to run a BICC, how to get funding to effectively run a BICC, and the limits of control and governance of the BICC need to drawn. If we pretended the BICC were a person, s/he would have the strongest leadership skills in the business, be able to talk business & IT, have extreme credibility, and be able to manage and communicate analytical needs.

The challenge of setting up will allow your organisation to reap the rewards of better business information, data integrity, cost savings and reliable enterprise business intelligence.

To learn more about how a BICC can break the silos of information and deliver enterprise business intelligence, contact me for a workshop.

Top 5 Reasons: Sustainability Reporting

2009-08-19T09:50:00.014+10:00

Sustainability and how it should be reported is constantly changing, but the need for it certainly is not going away any time soon. The role that corporates play in communities, countries, regions and globally has never been more important and scrutinized as it is today. Similarly the expectations on the corporate citizen to present that impact has never been in such demanded as it is from internal and external stakeholders.

Given that this is an emerging area, it is generally accepted that there isn't one definition of what sustainability reporting actually encompasses. Probably the best starting point is with the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) who describes sustainability reporting guidelines as "...the practice of measuring, disclosing, and being accountable to internal and external stakeholders for organisational performance towards the goal of sustainable development."

Whilst countries like Germany, Japan and the UK seem to be leading the pack when it comes to sustainability reporting, Australia is considered to be lagging. So why would your company initiate sustainability reporting? Here are my top 5, although there are many more.

Top 5 Reasons to Start Sustainability Reporting Today:

1. Reputation.

The reputation of your company is weighted on the alignment to global trends and how your company's activities affect stakeholders. The perception of participation in programs that distinctly demonstrate a proactive role in the community and the environment show a measurable concern that works towards enhancing the corporate reputation.

2. Financial Returns

Deploying a sustainability initiative involves gathering data across the organisation and often times the supply chain. Resource usage, waste and analysis of business processes is typically aggregated in a way that allows companies to understand inefficiencies and cost savings opportunities.

3. Compliance

The areas of compliance are always changing and seem to becoming more demanding, but it is almost certain that there will be more requirements relating to reporting carbon credits and green house gas emissions. By becoming savvy in sustainability reporting now, you can be ahead in the race to provide this information.

4. Competitive Advantage

What better way to differentiate your company's brand, products and services from the others in your industry than to establish a centre of excellence relating to sustainability? Customers have been making purchasing decisions based upon the environmental and social footprint for years. This trend continues to differentiate those that are conscious from the companies that are oblivious to the effect on global stakeholders. Trading partners and the supply chain that are effectively "going green" will demand the same transparency relating to sustainability.

5. Attract Financing

Sustainability reporting will provide a view for investors that insist on understanding the company's position on sustainability. Investment portfolios that are labeled "green" will require a mechanism to report back to investment analysts and the investment community.

These are a few examples of how sustainability can benefit your company. To learn more about sustainability you can download a white paper here or if you are an Australian-based company you can contact me jason.gates@oracle.com to learn more.

Event Alert: Monday, August 31st, Sydney

2009-08-18T13:37:00.004+10:00

If you are a CFO, Finance Director, Financial Controller or Financial Modeller and would like to learn more about how OLAP can help you manage your costs and contribute to your profit then this event is for you. Not only will you be able to meet with your peers in an interactive environment with one of the most seasoned professionals passing on his knowledge, but there is also a bottle of Grange to be given out at the end of the session.

A synopsis of the event is below. Feel free to contact me if you have any questions.

Dare to OLAP With Oracle Essbase

Understand Your Costs and What is Contributing to Your Profit

Organisations prosper or fail according to the sophistication and speed of their information systems, and their ability to analyse and synthesise information using those systems.

Oracle’s Essbase is a business analysis server technology that provides an environment for rapidly developing custom analytical applications that deliver strategic, high return on investment solutions to business challenges such as “Which customers are most profitable?”, “What if demand falls short of supply?” or “How will an increase in costs affect my revenue and growth plans?”

In many organisation this is performed in spreadsheet based technologies with all the shortcomings and opportunities for potential errors that desktop based environments provide.

Oracle Essbase is an easily deployed and highly adaptable solution. Prototype OLAP applications can be deployed in days, and the average time to deploy production OLAP applications is measured in weeks.

Oracle Essbase was named as one of the 10 most influential technology innovations of the last 10 years by Information Age magazine in its August 2005 issue. Editor Kenny MacIver said: “Essbase was the multi-dimensional database technology that put online analytical processing on the business intelligence map. It has spurred the creation of scores of rival OLAP products – and billions of OLAP cubes.“

Please join us at this executive seminar to hear from our guest speaker, Dave Collins, Director Analytics, Oracle Performance Management and BI Business Unit, who will discuss in detail real world case studies and provide a live demonstration of the software. Dave has been involved in numerous global deployments of Essbase applications in organisations that are household names.

If you would like to attend this event, please contact me on +61-2-9491-1251 or send me an email: jason.gates@oracle.com Don't miss out!