BI Questions Blog

Just like your mutual fund portfolio, there's no disassociating performance and risk -- time and time again, organizations merrily optimizing their business bite the dust because of "unforeseen circumstances" -- i.e. badly-managed risk and compliance.

Today's example: IT administrator Terry Childs has managed to lock everybody else out of San Francisco's wide-area network, containing the city's "emails, law enforcement records and payroll documents, and god knows what else".

I wonder how that will impact the IT organization's KPIs (and the city budget)?

Posted by Timo Elliott at 07:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A couple of recent Boston globe articles talk about IBM/Cognos returning $13m because of bidding irregularities and questions over conflict of interest.

I've been competing with Cognos for over 15 years, and I consider them a very ethical organization. The big problem seems to be simply that state was very keen to implement performance management, and so missed a few steps in the process.

State senator Salvatore F. DiMasi is apparently a fan of performance management, and the Massachusetts Department of Education was required by the federal No Child Left Behind Act to generate reports about student, staff, and program performance.

This led local districts to start purchasing their own software, so the state decided on a larger, centralized data warehouse with data about students, teachers, and finances across the state.

The RFP process doesn't seem to have gone smoothly, since Cognos was selected despite coming fifth on a scoring system that considered cost and other factors. I believe many (most?) RFPs are a waste of time and money, but they're essential for transparency in the public sector, and if you're going to do them, you have to at least pay lip service to the results.

Interestingly, the state was "sharply criticized" for doing something that I consider is almost a success factor for BI: taking a leap of faith that better access to data will bring improvements, without knowing exactly how the software will be used:

"the inspector general is urging that the administration first determine whether it needs to make such an expensive purchase. Before rebidding the contract, he said, the state should talk to employees "to see how or if they would use such a type of software."

(For more on why I believe this, see point three of this post, or review this presentation).

Overall, there was apparently no great dissatisfaction with the Cognos software, so the biggest result is to delay 20,000 people from improving the Massachusetts education system through better performance management.

Posted by Timo Elliott at 11:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Fern Halper of Hurwitz recently published a blog entry on some BI survey results, showing that:

• Perhaps surprisingly, over 30% were already using text analytics
• The highest usages were for "voice of customer" and "competitive intelligence"

Also of interest was the ranking of BI technologies in order of importance -- Query and Reporting 1st, OLAP Data Cubes last.

I believe there's an opportunity there, between Business Objects Web Intelligence and Crystal Reports products, and SAP's NetWeaver BI data warehousing environment...

Posted by Timo Elliott at 03:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Business intelligence standardization (which I define as "pragmatically reducing the number of overlapping tools in order to reduce costs and maximize the benefits of business intelligence") seems to be on the rise, at least in my neck of the woods.

Several large customers are looking for external validation of how many BI users they "should" have, and of what profiles (simple reporting, interactive reporting, ad-hoc reporting, OLAP analysis, etc.), in order to have a basis for negotiating an enterprise-wide BI platform deal.

Despite the best efforts of a bunch of very smart people, I haven't yet found anything like this. Obviously it's hard to have a definitive "answer" when organizations differ widely in their information use, BI penetration is a moving target, technology is improving, etc., but it is something that many organizations are increasingly interested in....

Does anybody out there know of something relevant? If so, please let me know, (telliott@timoelliott.com) and many thanks in advance!

Posted by Timo Elliott at 12:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Here's another presentation from Sapphire in Berlin. The overview was:

"Learn how to avoid the mistakes that other companies have made implementing business intelligence solutions and ensure success for your own projects. Discover the major assumptions and pitfalls that can lead to project failure and learn what other companies have done to avoid these problems and ensure long-term success."

One participant came up to me afterwards and told me enthusiastically that "you've just described the last six months of my life"! -- I hope things have gone better since...

Link to a PDF version of the presentation

Link to the PPT file (15mb)

Posted by Timo Elliott at 09:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Here's one of the presentations I gave at Sapphire last month. It is a high-level, introductory overview that covers key business intelligence themes and how to overcome the major barriers to successful deployments: data integration, ease of use, and cost of deployment. It is illustrated (inevitably) with examples of Business Objects technology.

Link to a PDF version of the presentation

Link to the PPT file (15mb)

Posted by Timo Elliott at 08:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

It's SAPPHIRE Berlin next week -- I'll be giving presentations on "Why BI Projects Fail And What To Do About It" and "Delivering Results with Business Intelligence"

Since the theme of the SAP / Business Objects combination is fixing the gap between strategy and execution, a quick Berlin-appropriate cartoon:

Posted by Timo Elliott at 07:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)