BI Questions Blog

Google have upgraded their gadgets. How long before they present themselves as an alternative to dashboards?

Posted by Timo Elliott at 10:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

As I've written before, if BI 2.0 is to mean anything, it should be about "collective intelligence": letting people add value to the BI solution through their actions.

There have been several companies that have touched on different aspects of BI 2.0 solutions, but what I've seen so far from Antivia takes it to a whole new level.

The company, headed by ex-Business Objects employees, has introduced Antivia Desktop, a product that can be easily (even virally) deployed on top of existing Business Objects installations to add easy-to-use Web 2.0 functionality.

The desktop interface is designed to be modular, allowing extra add-on functionality to deployed to users, independently of the underlying Business Objects architecture. The system works with any environment from version 6.5 up, and supports multiple Business Objects document formats, including WebIntelligence, Crystal Reports, Desktop Intelligence, and Xcelsius.

Antivia Desktop

Once downloaded and installed, the Antivia Desktop is "self-learning": users don't have to tell it anything -- whenever they open standard Business Objects documents, those documents will start appearing in the desktop interface, ready for rating and other added community features.

All information collected by the system is stored either within the firewall, or securely on Antivia's servers, making viral and partial deployments easy with minimal need for IT support.

Screen shot: The Antivia desktop "learns" by watching user interaction with the system, and gives users easy access to a full range of Web 2.0 functionality applied to BI deployments, such as report rating, "users who liked this report also liked...", discussion threads, etc.  

The easiest way to explain the power of the product is to take a tour of the interface:

Left-hand menu bar

Events. Users can create and sent invitations to communities, to take part in an insight discussion or a poll

Contacts. My BI / work / social contacts, just like the types of lists in instant messaging, facebook, etc., but focused on business intelligence. The list can be supplied using standards like LDAP.

My Favorites. The system automatically maintains a list of my favorites based on my viewing patterns.

What's hot: A list of "hot" reports, based on the report's rating, and the number of times it has been viewed. By default, people can see the names of reports even if they do not have access to it. This is an invaluable way of avoiding the traditional BI "catch 22" situation where people can't ask for access to reports they don't know exist. If necessary, reports can be hidden from all users.

Scenarios. The scenarios feature is part of the "let users adapt things themselves" aspect of BI 2.0. Antivia lets users change how information is categorized in existing reports by creating their own hierarchies. For examples, if I'm a manager for a region of several countries, I can easily group those countries for reporting, on the fly, without changing the database, and without having to ask for IT help. The hierarchies are saved so I can easily apply them to all my other reports, and a full audit trail is maintained for compliance purposes.

Right-hand properties bar

Content rating. Users are automatically prompted to rate reports when they use them, by applicability to their role, quality of content, and usability.

Users who like this report also liked... Using the content rating information, users are shown--Amazon-like--a list of other reports that they may be interested in.

Similar resources. The system automatically indexes documents, and finds other document that, for example, have an 80% or higher match on contents. This helps users find and share reports that already exist, without any need for central IT intervention, rather than creating reports from scratch. Given the propensity for similar users to create lots of overlapping redundant documents, this alone could be worth the investment in the product.

Applicable scenario. The scenario currently being used in the document (see Scenarios section above)

Top menu bar

New community. Users can create new communities, by dragging and dropping people from their contact lists -- for example to discuss a particular issue such as "analyzing the results of our marketing campaigns". The person creates a welcome message, and invitations are sent out. The system automatically keeps track of members' contribution to the community, such as number of reports rated, discussions started / contributed to, polls started, etc.

Insight discussions. Any member can drag and drop a report into the community and create a discussion about the contents, for example a discussion about what is causing the observed results, and plans for the future. Other members can reply, and post other resources giving more information.

Polls. A BI competency center, for example, can poll users to determine whether a new report is ready for production, or any other aspect of how they are using the system. 

The system in action

Click below for a tour of the product narrated by Mark Hudson.

The bottom line

Antivia provides a web 2.0 BI solution today that goes further than most vendors' future-vision slideware -- and the team are only just getting started, with lots of other great features in the pipeline.

The product is so innovative that organizations may find it hard to get it to the top of their BI priorities, but informal discussions with IT departments have convinced me that it meets a real need for both users and administrators. By using people's everyday activities to continually improve the system, I believe that it will improve BI deployments while lowering IT and administration overhead. In particular, any organization that has a BI competency center today should take a long, hard look at Antivia's solution.

So far, this posting reads like an infomercial, so some caveats: Antivia is a young company, I haven't yet used the solution myself or talked to customers, and I can't speak to the robustness of the system and technology used.

But I'm convinced that the type of functionality that Antivia provides is an essential part of effective BI deployments in the future, and I wish the team the best of luck. 

Posted by Timo Elliott at 05:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

It may be the information age, but what we experience on a daily basis has a lot more in common with the middle ages--with feudal lords and knights--than it does with the modern economy.

Most of the infrastructure that we associate with the modern state has yet to be implemented when it comes to information. In other words, there's a lot of work to do before we get anywhere close to the nirvana held up by BI analysts and vendors.

1. There's no equivalent of a common currency to facilitate trade--i.e. a universal layer to connect different information sources. Today, we're still at the stage of barter, with painful one-off transactions each time we need to compare and combine information. The semantic web, among many other initiatives, aims to help the problem, but progress remains limited. If you compare modern finance to barter, you can't help thinking that we have a long, long way to travel.
2. There's no equivalent of a central jurisdiction and police force to enforce information rules and regulations -- each company / industry / country sets its own rules on who can access what information in which circumstances. We can expect this problem to becomes proportionately more important and difficult to resolve the closer we get to achieving point 1.
3. There's no equivalent of democracy. Today's corporate hierarchies resemble nothing so much as the (surprisingly complex) systems of lords and vassals. Today, everybody has their part to play in the modern economy. But strategy and information sharing are still thought to be something that only the elite care about. The arguments used to defend this sound strikingly familiar to those used to oppose the expansion of democracy over the last few hundred years: "you can't have too many people involved", "people don't care", "people aren't informed enough to pass judgment", etc.

The good news? Maybe thanks to "internet time", we can fast-forward to the age of information enlightenment in less than four centuries.

Posted by Timo Elliott at 09:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

It is often reported that Howard Dresner coined the term "business intelligence" in 1989, at least in the sense it is typically used in the industry today ("end user access to and analysis of structured content, i.e., data").

But especially now that text analysis is becoming part of mainstream BI, the real credit for the term should probably go to an earlier pioneer: Hans-Peter Luhn, who wrote a 1958 IBM Journal article titled "Business Intelligence".

A prolific inventor and an expert in text analysis, Mr Luhn proposed that systems could be used to automatically analyze and distribute documents according to the interests and needs of deciders or "action points" in the organization.

Reading the article almost fifty years later, one is stuck by the prescient nature of the system he proposed. Among other things, it includes:

• The difference between regular broadcasting of new information and individual queries
• The importance of search and query metadata
• The notion of expert users, or "librarians", to carry out difficult queries -- and he mentions that in simple situations, the business users could be allowed to carry out their own queries
• The term "information on demand"
• The need for system auditing, to optimize performance, and to reduce redundant querying
• The importance of security and data ownership

And he even envisages features that still aren't typically available in today's systems, often talked of as part of "BI 2.0":

• Automatically learning the interests of users based on information use
• Creating communities based on similar interests
• Identifying experts on a particular topic within the greater community
• Listing documents "similar to this" for use as reference

He ends the article describing the prospects of actually creating the system he has described:

"The auto-abstracting and auto-encoding systems are in their early stage of development and a great deal of research has yet to be done to perfect them. Perhaps the techniques which ultimately find greatest use will bear little resemblance to those now visualized, but some form of automation will ultimately provide an effective answer to business intelligence problems."

As even Howard says: "I take my hat off to Dr. Luhn. Clearly he was well ahead of his time."

The full text of the article follows below.

IBM JOURNAL OCTOBER 1958

H.P. Luhn

A Business Intelligence System

Abstract: An automatic system is being developed to disseminate information to the various sections of any industrial, scientific or government organization. This intelligence system will utilize data-processing machines for auto-abstracting and auto-encoding of documents and for creating interest profiles for each of the "action points" in an organization. Both incoming and internally generated documents are automatically abstracted, characterized by a word pattern, and sent automatically to appropriate action points. This paper shows the flexibility of such a system in identifying known information, in finding who needs to know it and in disseminating it efficiently either in abstract form or as a complete document.

Introduction

Efficient communication is a key to progress in all fields of human endeavor. It has become evident in recent years that present communication methods are totally inadequate for future requirements. Information is now being generated and utilized at an ever-increasing rate because of the accelerated pace and scope of human activities and the steady rise in the average level of education. At the same time the growth of organizations and increased specialization and divisionalization have created new barriers to the flow of information. There is also a growing need for more prompt decisions at levels of responsibility far below those customary in the past. Undoubtedly the most formidable communications problem is the sheer bulk of information that has to be dealt with. In view of the present growth trends, automation appears to offer the most efficient methods for retrieval and dissemination of this information.

During the past decade significant progress has been made in applying machines to the processes of information retrieval. Automatic dissemination has so far been given little consideration; however, unless substantial portions of human effort in this area can be replaced by automatic operations, no significant overall improvement will be achieved. Even the information retrieval processes mechanized so far still require appreciable human effort to organize the information before it is entered into machines.

It is believed that techniques now being developed will greatly contribute to the solution of the problem by extending automatic processes to the preparatory phases of mechanical information-retrieval systems, to the are of dissemination and to associated functions. Ideally, an automatic system is needed which can accept information in its original form, disseminate the data promptly to the proper places and furnish information on demand.

The techniques proposed here to make these things possible are:

1. Auto-abstracting of documents;
2. Auto-encoding of documents;
3. Automatic creation and updating of action-point profiles.

All of these techniques are based on statistical procedures which can be performed on present-day data processing machines. Together with proper communication facilities and input-output equipment a comprehensive system may be assembled to accommodate all information problems of an organization. We call this a Business Intelligence System.

Objectives and principles

Before the system operation is described, the term Business Intelligence System should be defined and the objectives and principles stated.

In this paper, business is a collection of activities carried on for whatever purpose, be it science, technology, commerce, industry, law, government, defense, et cetera. The communication facility serving the conduct of a business (in the broad sense) may be referred to as an intelligence system. The notion of intelligence is also defined here, in a more general sense, as the "ability to apprehend the interrelationships of presented facts in such a way as to guide action towards a desired goal." (1)

The term document is used to designate a block of information confined physically in a medium such as a letter, report, paper or book. The term may also include the medium itself. The objective of the system is to supply suitable information to support specific activities carried out by individuals, groups, departments, divisions, or even larger units. These are the action points previously referred to. To this end the system concerns itself with the admission or acquisition of new information, its dissemination, storage, retrieval and transmittal to the action points it serves.

More particularly the object of the system is to perform these functions speedily and efficiently, taking advantage of novel procedures which utilize the inherent capabilities of electronic devices.

One of the most crucial problems in communication is that of channeling a given item of information to those who need to know it. Present methods of accomplishing this are inadequate and the general practice is to disseminate information rather broadly to be on the safe side. Since this method tends to swamp the recipients with paper, the probability of not communicating at all becomes great. The Business Intelligence System provides means for selective dissemination to each of its action points in accordance with their current requirements or desires. This is accomplished by the mechanical creation of profiles reflecting the sphere of interest of each point and by updating these profiles as dictated by changes in the attitude of the respective action points and as recorded by the system on the basis of certain transactions.

Another problem in communication is to discover the person or section within an organization whose interests or activities coincide most closely with a given situation. Presently, the difficulty of finding such relationships often results in improper decisions, wrong actions, inaction, or duplication. An objective of the Business Intelligence System is to identify related interests by use of profiles of action points. The problem of discovering information which has a bearing on a given situation has probably received the most attention in recent years, and various mechanical systems have been developed and put into operation. This phase of communication is commonly referred to as information retrieval or, more broadly, as the library problem. Information retrieval is necessarily a major function of the Business Intelligence System. Means are provided not only to integrate this function with the rest of the system but also to produce additional useful functions, as will be described later.

The achievement of these objectives is governed by principles essential to effective service and convenience of the user. Some of these are listed below:

1. Information admitted to the system includes communications, addressed to action points individually, which contain information of potential interest to other action points.

2. New information which is pertinent or useful to certain action points is selectively disseminated to such points without delay. A function of the system is to present this information to the action point in such a manner that its existence will be readily recognized.

3. Transmittal of information either as a result of dissemination or of retrieval is to be guided by progressive stages of acceptance by an action point. This procedure saves the recipient's time by reducing the amount of material to be transmitted and eliminating the non-pertinent material.

4. The system is to provide means for quickly discovering similarity of interests and activities that might exist amongst action points so that subjects and problems of common concern may be discussed and advanced through direct interchange of ideas between such points, if so desired.

5. The system is not to impose conditions on its user which require special training to obtain its services. Instead the system is to be operated by experienced library workers. Thus, in the case of an inquiry, the user will be required only to call the librarian, who will accept the query and will ask for any amplification which, in accordance with his experience, will be most helpful in securing the desired information.

6. Similarly, information lingering at an action point but of potential value to other action points is mobilized for efficient communication through inquiries of skilled reporters.

Description of the Business Intelligence System

The following description is given in rather general terms, and references to any specific type of business have been substantially avoided. Furthermore, the fact that certain devices are being referred to as implementation of the system, should not be interpreted as implying a specific size of the operation.

The description is given in accordance with main functional sections of the system, each illustrated by the diagram. Our assembly of these functional sections into a complete system is shown in Fig. 1.

Document input

Each document entering the system shown in Fig. 1 is assigned a serial number and is photographically reproduced on some medium such as microfilm. In those cases where the document has been addressed specifically to an action point, the original is promptly transmitted to the addressee. In all other cases the original is stored in a file for a reasonably short time and thereafter destroyed, unless there are reasons for preserving it for longer periods.

The microfilm copy of the document is transcribed onto magnetic tape by a human transcriber or a print-reading device. In those cases where the original document is available in machine-readable form, the transcription is done mechanically. The document is now available both as a microfilm copy and a magnetic tape record.

The microfilm copy is then recopied onto the storage medium of a document microcopy storage device. The microfilm record is stored elsewhere to constitute a microfilm master file which may serve to regenerate records in cases of emergency.

The magnetic tape record is now introduced into the auto-abstracting and encoding device. This device submits the document to a statistical analysis based on the physical properties of the text, and data are derived on word frequency and distribution. From these data the device then selects certain sentences of the document to produce an auto-abstract. (2) This is printed out, together with the title, author, and document serial number. This printout is photographically transferred onto the storage medium of the auto-abstract microcopy storage device.

The process of creating auto-abstracts consists of ascertaining the frequency of word occurrences in a document. A predetermined portion of the words of highest frequency is then given the status of significant words and an analysis is made of all the sentences in the text containing such words. A relative value of sentence significance is then established by a formula which reflects the number of significant words contained in a sentence and the proximity of these words to each other within this sentence. Several sentences which rank highest in value of significance are then extracted from the text to constitute the auto-abstract.

As soon as the auto-abstract has been created, the statistical data are further processed to derive an information pattern which characterizes the document. This process of encoding constitutes a further abstraction and involves procedures such as the categorization of words by means of a thesaurus.(3)

Useful patterns may be derived by listing a given portion of the words of highest frequency together with a selection of specific words. The interrelationship of words may also be indicated and certain frequently occurring combinations of words may be noted. Because of variation of word usage amongst authors the normalization of such words becomes an important function of encoding. Index lookup in a thesaurus-like dictionary will replace words, including those of foreign languages, by a notional family designation. The selection of specific words may also be accomplished by index lookup.

The document pattern derived by the above process is then transferred into a special pattern-storage device together with the title, author, and document serial number. This information is stored in coded form on a medium that may be subjected to serial scanning. As an alternative the resulting pattern may be rearranged and be distributed over a storage array to permit random access according to characteristics.

The tape or film transcript of the document may be stored in a library for reference if it later becomes necessary to change the method or scope of encoding.

Action-point profiles

As indicated earlier, one of the basic requirements of the system is the ability to recognize by mechanical means the sphere of interest and the type of activities that characterize each of the action points the system is to serve. This is accomplished by means of an information pattern similar to that of the documents.

Initially, the creation of these action-point profiles is best accomplished by having each action point create a document describing the various aspects of its activities and enumerating the types of information needed. Such documents are then introduced at the input of the system and are identified by action-point designation. The machine-readable transcripts of these documents are then described in connection with the document input. The resulting patterns are then stored in the Pattern Storage area in a special profile-storage device. Also stored, with each of these profile patterns, is the date of entry.

Selective dissemination of new information

Based on the document-input operation and the creation of profiles, the system is ready to perform the service function of selective dissemination of new information.

As soon as a new document has been entered into the system and its pattern developed, this pattern is set up in a comparison device which has access to all of the action-point profiles. The comparisons are carried out on the basis of degree of similarity, expressed in terms of a fraction, for each of the profile patterns. This fraction is subject to change as time goes on, depending upon conditions to be explained later.

Whenever a profile agrees to a given extent with a given document pattern, the serial number, title, and author of the affected document, together with the action-point profile designation, are transferred and stored in a monitoring device. This procedure is repeated for any subsequent similar occasion. The monitor is substantially a random-access storage device and has the functional capabilities of performing inventory operations. In this capacity it will transmit the serial number, title and author of the document in question to the desk printer at the selected action point and keep a record of this transaction. Of the various ways in which such an announcement may be transmitted to the affected action points, the most effective one is by means of a printing device at each action-point location. An objective of the system is to command attention of the recipient. The use of individual printing devices is more effective than are centrally located devices serving several action points.

Selective acceptance of disseminated information

The dissemination of information so far has consisted in furnishing the action point with the serial number, title, and author of documents selected for it. This selection, however, is considered to be a provisional one, and the system withholds any further information if the action point can determine, on the basis of information given so far, that certain of the selected subjects are not of sufficient interest. If an announcement is of interest, and more detailed information on the subject is desired, the system will produce such information on demand. This step is initiated when the action point connects itself by telephone to the monitor and dials the serial numbers of the documents affected. Upon receipt of this message the monitor will relay an instruction to the microcopy storage device to produce photoprints of the auto-abstracts of these documents and to mark them with the action-point designation. The auto-abstracts are then transmitted to the action point either in the form of a paper copy or by speedier means, such as Telefax or TV display.

The action point may now peruse the abstracts to determine which of the documents are desired in their entirety. These decisions are then entered into the system in the form of acceptances. An acceptance is made at an action point by dialing the document number, prefixed by a code symbol, whereupon the monitor will instruct the microcopy storage device to produce a photocopy of the complete document, properly marked with the action-point designation. These photocopies are then delivered to the action point.

The monitor will record the incidence of acceptance by modifying the affected records contained in its storage. At the same time the monitor will also instruct the auto-encoding device to transfer copies of the code patterns of the affected documents to the profile section of pattern storage, together with the identification of the action point involved and the date of transferal.

As a result of these operations the profile of a given action point has been updated to reflect interest in a currently communicated subject. As time goes on there is the probability that an increasing number of new documents will be announced to an action point because of possible shift of interests. In order to avoid such cumulative effects, the system is so arranged that the response to past interests is gradually relaxed. This relaxation is related to the date affixed to each new pattern that is superimposed on an action point's profile. Depending on the age of each of these patterns, an adjustment is made on the fraction of similarity that must be met in the comparison process of new documents. The older the profile pattern, the closer an agreement is needed for selection for dissemination, and consequently the fewer documents are selected. On the other hand those documents selected are more closely related to the original subject.

Information retrieval

This phase of the system concerns itself with the retrieval of those stored documents which might be relevant to a topic under consideration by an action point. The information to be discovered may vary widely and may consist of anything ranging from factual data to an extensive bibliography on a broad subject. Under the supervision of an experienced librarian the process of information retrieval is performed in the following way.

An action point telephones the librarian and states the information wanted. The librarian will then interpret the inquiry and will solicit sufficient background information from the action point in order to provide a document similar in format to that of documents normally entering the system. This query document is transmitted to the auto-encoding device in machine-readable form. An information pattern is then derived from the query document in a manner similar to that used for normal documents.

The resulting query pattern, together with a serial number and designation of the originating action point, is then sent to the queries section of the pattern-storage device. Subsequently, a copy of this query pattern is set up in the comparison device and. is compared with all of the document patterns stored in the document-pattern storage device. This operation is similar to the one described in connection with selective dissemination. In the present case, the query pattern replaces the profile pattern.

Whenever similar patterns are detected by this means, the document designation is transmitted to the monitor, where it is registered and then announced to the action point.

Although the service of a librarian is considered a convenience to the action point, in certain cases, means may be provided at the action-point location to permit direct access to the system. This would be justified where many of the inquiries concern lookup-type retrieval of data.

When an action point desires information relative to a given document, the number of the document at hand would be dialed and instructions for search given to the monitor. Thereupon the monitor would select the corresponding pattern from document-pattern storage and provide instruction for use as a query pattern in the ensuing comparison operation.

Selective acceptance of retrieved information

The considerations which prompted the step-by-step acceptance of documents in the dissemination process are also applied to information retrieval. The processes employed, therefore, are identical.

The function of information retrieval, however, differs from that of dissemination in that the choice is not that of accepting or rejecting one document, but rather a selection of one or several from a special group of potentially relevant documents. Although in some cases a first search may have produced satisfactory references, in other cases the material produced may not be satisfactory. The action point must then relay this fact to the librarian and discuss with him how the searching procedure or the query should be modified so as to improve the probability of getting relevant material.

In those cases where pertinent information has been discovered, the acceptance of the complete documents of such information will cause the updating of the action-point profile, as was the case in dissemination. The query pattern will be impressed on the profile as a matter of course, whether or not the inquiry has been satisfied, so that new documents relevant to the subject of the inquiry will be made known subsequently.

Detection of an action point having given characteristics

In the process of transacting business it is often desired to determine who concerns himself with a given subject. The usual type of question asked is: "Who does or knows a certain thing?" A function of the Business Intelligence System is to answer questions of this type.

The manner in which this function is performed by the system is similar to the information retrieval procedure. However, instead of simulating a document pattern, a profile pattern is developed which represents most closely the characteristics of an action point sought. This synthetic profile is then compared with those in the profile storage and when a given degree of similarity is discovered, the identification of the affected action point is transferred to the monitor, together with the identification of the inquirer point. Thereafter the identities are announced by the tape-printing device at the inquiring action point so that personal contacts may be made.

Document output

The functions described so far have concerned themselves with documents admitted or acquired by the system from the outside. The document-output phase deals with internally generated documents. This type of document is essentially the product of action points and may be addressed to other action points within the organization or to external points. An objective of the system is to facilitate selective dissemination and retrieval of such documents in substantially the same way as for outside documents.

When a document has been created at an action point, a copy is produced, preferably in machinable form. This copy is then dispatched for processing to the input point of the system and the original is sent to the addressee.

Since this type of document is an indication of the interest of the originating action point, the information pattern derived by the auto-encoding process is not only stored in document-pattern storage but also is impressed on the profile of its originator, thereby updating it.

In the dissemination process this internally created document is announced to other action points in the same fashion as were outside documents.

Miscellaneous functions of the system

The comprehensive system for the various functions so far described is illustrated by Fig. 1. A number of additional useful functions which may be derived from the system are briefly described here.

It might be desirable to check each new document for duplication by comparing it with all of the documents in storage. Similarly a list of related documents may be prepared to serve as references applying to a new document.

When retrieving information it might be found advantageous to compare a query first with all the queries stored, in order to discover whether similar queries have been submitted in the past. If a list of the documents retrieved is available, the process of retrieval may be greatly simplified. This method may also be used to bring together the respective inquirers to furnish an opportunity to discuss the problems which apparently brought about similar inquiries. Periodic analysis of the profiles may also furnish valuable information on trends and possible overlapping of activities or interests.

Since a history of the usage of the system is stored in the monitor, an analysis of its records will disclose the efficiency of system operation. The findings may serve to adjust the system for optimum efficiency.

There are many details which might have to be provided to adjust the general form of the system to specific applications. One such requirement might be classification, by an editor, of documents with regard to security, proprietary interests and proper utilization of information.

A plurality of systems may be organized in hierarchical fashion, in which a first system would serve a number of more specialized systems. In this case the specialized system would each assume the role of an action point in the mother system. It also appears quite feasible to share the system equipment among a number of organizations.

Prospects for establishing a Business Intelligence System

The system described here employs rather advanced design techniques and the question arises as to how far away such systems may be from realization. It may therefore be of interest to review the state of system and machine development.

The availability of documents in machine-readable form is a basic requirement of the system. Typewriters with paper-tape punching attachments are already used extensively in information processing and communication operations. Their use as standard equipment in the future would provide machine-readable records of new information. The transcription of old records would pose a problem, since in most cases it would be uneconomical to perform this job by hand. The mechanization of this operation will therefore have to wait until print-reading devices have been perfected.

The type of equipment required for processing information in accordance with the system is presently available as far as the functions are concerned. It is safe to assume that special equipment will eventually be required to optimize the operation.

The auto-abstracting and auto-encoding systems are in their early stage of development and a great deal of research has yet to be done to perfect them. Perhaps the techniques which ultimately find greatest use will bear little resemblance to those now visualized, but some form of automation will ultimately provide an effective answer to business intelligence problems.

References

(1) Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary, G. & C. Merriarn Co., Springfield, Mass.

(2) H. P. Luhn. "The Automatic Creation of Literature Abstracts," IBM Journal of Research and Development, 2, No. 2, 159 (April 1958).

(3) H. P. Luhn, ‘*A Statistical Approach to Mechanized Encoding and Searching of Literary Information," IBM Journal of Research und Development, 1, No. 4, 309 (October 1957).

Received July I

1958 IBM JOURNAL . OCTOBER 1958

Posted by Timo Elliott at 11:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Thanks to Shane Schick of Canada's Globe and Mail, who today reported on "Business intelligence consolidation: friend or foe?" and quoted from this blog:

"Timo Elliott, who writes the BI Questions blog at timoelliott.com, went through many of the arguments against standalone BI after Oracle bought Hyperion, but concluded the focus and openness of niche firms were still worth the money. "BI is the final layer between business people and the millions of dollars you have invested in your information systems," he wrote. "A small difference in BI effectiveness can have a large effect on the overall return on IT investment."

If this is your first visit, Welcome! Here are some links to my most widely-read posts:

• The Five Ingredients of Good Decision-Making
• BI 2.0?
• The Five Fatal Flaws of BI
• Intestine-Based Decision Making

And don't hesitate to subscribe to the RSS feed...

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

Graphwise is BI 2.0 entrant similar to Swivel and ManyEyes, but with a twist. You enter a search term, and the site scours the web for content that contains tables linked to those terms, then proposes charts based on the data in those tables.

It's a great idea, and there's surely a great future for this technology. But there are currently some issues with relevance -- e.g. I put in the search term "productivity", and chose the first chart it offered me: the mean number of chickens in a flock, and the % of respondents?!...  

The other problem is that the site uses Adobe's SVG viewer to provide interactivity -- but Adobe is pulling support for the product at the end of this year...

Of course the site is still in Beta. I wish them all the best of luck, but can't help thinking that it's part of a solution rather than an end-goal in itself.

At some point, will Google hoover up the different BI 2.0 offerings, integrate them with their existing analytics tools and gapminder? The result would be a compelling consumer-oriented BI solution which could then be extended to enterprise users...

Posted by Timo Elliott at 10:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Business Objects turns Inxight into insight: following the purchase of text analytics leader Inxight, Business Objects launched two new products today: "Text Analysis" and "Intelligent Search"

Here's my take:

• The integration process has been excellent -- the new products are out just four months after the acquisition was announced.
• The products are integrated, not just rebadged. For example, existing WebIntelligence and Crystal Reports users will be able to access text analytics directly through their familiar interfaces.
• I'm biased, of course, but It's very cool technology:
  • Key concepts recognized "out of the box", such as dates, people, addresses, URLs, companies, etc.
  • Intelligent categorization based on taxonomies (a complaint is a complaint, even if it doesn't use the word)
  • Automatic document summaries that change automatically according to the user's interests
  • Automatic alerts if a new document matches an existing search, or whenever a document changes
  • etc...
• Here's a quick overview of the new technology, and click on the image below to get a demo.

Now the interesting question: Business Objects is making it as easy as possible for its customers to implement and use the new technology options -- are they ready?

Posted by Timo Elliott at 01:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Despite some people dismissing it as a myth, BI standardization is alive and well in organizations around the world. Here's a quick primer on what, why, and how.

What is BI Standardization?

The phrase "BI standardization" often gets a negative reaction, because people equate it with choosing only one tool to the exclusion of all others, and taking away existing products from happy business users.

My definition is this:

Pragmatically implementing BI standards to reduce overlapping tools, lower costs, and maximize the benefits of BI.

The definition explained:

• Pragmatically. It's not about architectural elegance, it's about business benefits
• Reduce overlapping tools -- it's about having a rational portfolio strategy, not a single product from a single vendor.
• Lower costs. This is the reason organizations start talking about standardization
• Maximize the benefits of BI: This is why reasons should be looking at implementing BI standards

Other terms that could be used include "BI rationalization," "BI consolidation," or "preferred BI vendors" -- whatever the language used, there are clear benefits.

Why BI Standardization?

Why do organizations implement BI standards?

• To save money. The first, clearest, and most obvious benefit of standardization is that you can save money in every area of implementing BI projects. You can avoid unnecessarily duplication of the costs of evaluating, purchasing, implementing, and maintaining multiple overlapping BI tools.
• To increase business insight and alignment. The more BI tools you have, the harder it is to get a full understanding of  the business. A single standard makes it easier to establish common definitions of your key performance indicators. You can spend less time arguing over the data, and more time arguing over what to do.
• To reduce risk and confusion. Implementing standards makes it easier to ensure that you're following data and compliance rules. Having the same tools for financial reporting, risk management, and budget tracking make it easier to spot anomalies.

For more detail, see my 2005 white paper on "Benefits of Business Intelligence Standardization".

How to Implement Standards?

All organizations have explicit or implicit tiers of IT standards, running the continuum from "we don't care" all the way through to "don't even think of using something else". As business intelligence has matured and become more widespread in organizations, it has slowly climbed the ladder.

BI standards are typically initiated by procurement teams. Noting that the organization is purchasing the same products across multiple departments, they step in to purchase in greater volume for the organization as a whole, driving down the average per-user purchase price.

Note that this only directly saves money on software license costs -- typically a tiny proportion of the overall costs of implementing BI. Getting the full benefits of standards requires a team that can persuade various different BI projects to work together for the greater good of all: a BI competency center (see "fixing the BI tragedy of the commons").

Note that most organizations will never reach their standard, because there are inevitable trade-offs between efficiency and local flexibility -- but heading for a standard is obviously better than accepting chaos.

For more information, see my 2005 white paper on "Implementing BI standards -- a Field Guide".

What's the Future of BI Standardization?

There will always be procurement benefits of buying products in greater volume, but the hard part is standardized metadata and semantics across the breadth of data sources that real-life users are interested in, including personal and non-structured data.

As the business intelligence industry adapts to a services-oriented world, there may be the potential for organizations to be able to mix-and-match different solutions and still retain a coordinated overview of the business as a whole. See "Will BI Sparql Thanks to the Semantic Web".

Posted by Timo Elliott at 09:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (1)

From Frank Buytendijk's blog, and Andries Bottema:

"BI is deploying information as a factor of production."

In other words, BI makes information the fifth factor of production, next to labor, capital, materials, and facilities.

Quite simply: Yes!  Information is the last great underdeveloped asset in today's organizations. And unlike other assets, it can be used by multiple people and processes, and it's also a natural by-product of production. These two characteristics lead to the "network effects" or "increasing returns" of better information.

I immediately wondered if such an apposite description had been used before, and turned to Google. The general opinion seems to be that the "new factor of production" is "intellectual capital", an umbrella term that includes information, but also "knowledge, collaboration, process-engagement, and time quality". 

So maybe the definition should be "BI is deploying intellectual capital as a factor of production"? Not quite as snappy, but it might be a better fit for BI 2.0 -- BI that is not only about "information", but also about knowledge management and collaboration?

In any case,  "BI is deploying information as a factor of production" strikes me as an excellent way for IT and BI organizations to explain the importance of their role to the organization, and I'm sure I'll use it in a presentation soon -- thanks Frank and Andries!

Finally, while looking at the articles, I dimly remembered a presentation by Dave Kellogg that had mentioned factors of production, and thanks to the wonders of the Windows Search Deskbar, I was able to find it buried deep in my PC. It was called "Future Shock: Crisis or Opportunity", presented in 1998, and it included the slide below, with information as the "bottom line"...

Posted by Timo Elliott at 09:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I've written before about the increasing importance of external data and benchmarking for the future of business intelligence. Business Objects today announced the launch of their information on demand store:

With an easy-on-the-eyes flex-based interface, the store is designed to sell information on line that can be used to supplement internal data. Along with the Thomson Financial and Dun & Bradstreet sources already announced, the store features information from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and... the eBay marketplace.

Courtesy of Advanced Economic Research Systems, inc., the eBay information is "accurate, up-to-date information based on over 6 billion consumer purchasing decisions from the over 240 million consumers that buy and sell on eBay's global platform." Models available in the new store include a Crystal Xcelsius model for state-to-state comparison of MP3 players by brand and a top 10 product comparison using Crystal Reports.

The rise of MP3 players is perhaps an apt analogy for the information on demand market. MP3 players had existed for quite a while before Apple came along with the easy-to-use iPod and unleashed the "everyday consumer" market. It achieved this by centralizing music from several different publishers and introducing revolutionary ease of use. And Apple managed it despite more obvious candidates, such as Walkman-pioneer Sony, because of misaligned incentives (Sony's music division saw MP3 players as a threat, not an opportunity).

Information on demand is a market whose time has come. Commercial information has been around a long time, but until now hasn't taken advantage of modern business intelligent infrastructures to make it easy for organizations to consume that information.

By providing an easy-to-use platform that centralizes information from different publishers, Business Objects is hoping to become the Apple iStore of information. With a large existing customer base, some level of success seems assured, but the real questions are how much new business can be generated, and how much of a head start Business Objects will be allowed before more competitors flood into the market.

The business market is never going to react as fast as consumer markets, but information on demand seems poised for explosive success if the right ingredients come together...

Posted by Timo Elliott at 01:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I'm a big believer in the future of on-demand BI, and yes, it's hot.  But a lot of the articles promoting on-demand BI don't always separate fact from self-interested fiction. Here's my attempt to redress the balance.

1. On-Demand = Subscription Pricing = Mid-Market

There are three different axes that are often discussed as if they overlapped:

• on-premise vs. on-demand
• perpetual license vs. subscription license
• enterprise vs. mid-market.

On-demand BI is typically subscription-based, aimed primarily at the mid-market, but it's far from being the only valid combination.  and on-demand BI can't

Perpetual licenses vs. subscription. On-demand BI isn't the same thing as subscription pricing. For example, SAS has always charged an annual fee for their on-premise software. Perpetual licenses for a hosted services are rare, but they do exist outside of BI -- e.g. lifetime fee offers for hosted web sites.

Enterprise vs mid-market. Mid-market organizations may well be attracted by on-demand options, but the BI vendors are all successfully selling mid-market on-premise packages. In addition, larger organizations are showing interest in hosted BI -- although the extra complexity around data sources and customization may mean that it takes a while longer to become popular.

2. On-Demand BI is Cheaper

First, what does "cheap" mean? I haven't yet found anybody who wanted to pay more for their BI software, but whatever the price there will be some people who can't afford it (this includes "free", since it always take effort to set up). According to Gartner, BI is the fastest-increasing investment priority for CIOs in 2007, indicating that BI is considered "cheap" by most organizations -- i.e. they see possible benefits that outweigh the price.

On-demand BI is clearly targeting price-sensitive, lower-functionality-requiring customers first. But there's nothing in the rule book that says that a hosted service has to be cheaper than an on-premise equivalent:

• A major cost component -- running the machines -- is provided by the vendor. This means that total cost of ownership could be lower, but it also means that vendors could ("should" in a perfectly competitive market) charge higher prices than for equivalent on-premise software.
• On-demand BI that charges subscription fees rather than a perpetual license can be cheaper initially -- but more expensive over the long run. And again, subscription pricing is available for on-premise BI.
• Equivalent functionality has to be taken into account -- hosted on-demand doesn't (yet) provide the same level of BI sophistication as on-premise BI, and so doesn't have the same top-level prices. There's also a huge market in cheap on-premise BI notably with Crystal Reports (Business Objects) and Microsoft.

3. On-Demand BI is Simpler and Easier to Use

This is a mantra of on-demand offerings, and it has to be true to some extent, or there would be little incentive to implement them, given the cultural misgivings about SAAS in general.

But there's a certain amount of deliberate confusion between "simple" on-demand solutions (because that's all that is available, or because the complexity is hidden by the vendor) and "complex" on-premise solutions (nothing says you have to every feature available, or implement it all yourself).

Ease of use: there's clearly nothing inherently easier about an on-demand interface rather than on-premise interface. In fact, since most of the vendors that currently sell on-premise solutions support both web and full-client access, there's greater choice (you can do analysis during that transatlantic flight), especially for power users. And two of the vendors that try the hardest to differentiate on ease of use and simplicity provide primarily full-client, on-premise products (Tableau and Qliktech). And Xcelsius, a full-client tool that produces online dashboards, also provides great ease-of-use.

Data integration and data quality: On-demand BI is not a magic wand, sadly. The data isn't going to integrate itself or spontaneously become error-free. Having an on-demand BI vendor do it for you, on their platform, can certainly make your life easier -- but so can a consulting company doing it on your machines. And having pre-built solutions for particular data sources and business uses can help with integration -- but that's also applicable to both on-demand and on-premise

Ease of installation. This is clearly an area where on-demand BI can claim to have an advantage -- but not as much as you might think, especially with the introduction of BI appliances and virtual appliances.

4. On-Demand BI is Less Secure

In case I'm accused of being too hard on on-demand BI, here's a misconception that clearly goes the other way. The perception of security is a cultural and trust issue, not a technological one. Do you keep your money under the mattress -- or is it stored "on-demand" in a bank?

There's no technology differences that accounts for why an organization should trust their funds to the international banking system but not their data to an on-demand BI provider.

Having trust, governance, compliance, or legal concerns is perfectly legitimate, but they are already dealt with on a daily basis with full outsourced IT deployments, so shouldn't be an issue with on-demand BI.

5. On-Demand BI is Only about Software

A key part of BI 2.0 will be "information on demand" -- the ability to easily augment internal data with external benchmarks, such as market share, economic predictions, etc. Note that the information on demand can easily be consumed by either on-demand and on-premise solutions.

6. On-Demand BI is The Future of BI

No, it's part of the future. It's not really a choice between on-demand and on-premise -- organizations want it all, just like we don't want to choose between the internet and our PCs (internet appliances were apparently one of the "eight biggest tech flops ever".)

Despite the silly "no software" slogan (OK, not so silly: it 'worked'), even Salesforce.com has had to provide offline versions of its products for sales people on the road, and companies can spend lots of time connecting it to their internal systems.

Organizations ultimately want a solution that can be installed on-premise, used on-demand, or any combination in between. With service-oriented architectures, the boundaries between on-demand and on-premise solutions will become increasingly vague. Tomorrow's BI users will be accessing a seamless combination of web services that are executed on systems inside their organization and systems that are outside their firewalls.

Other resources/articles that illustrate or deal with the points above...

• On-Demand Business Intelligence Solution Lowers Total Cost of Ownership and Risk (does it solve world hunger, too?)
• On-Demand Vendor Strategy
• Business Objects' on-demand BI
• On-Demand Business Intelligence
• Fear Factor: Business Intelligence as a Hosted Service
• Five Primary Drivers of BI On Demand
• Oracle’s misconceived SaaS strategy

Posted by Timo Elliott at 09:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Your business is up over 25% -- great news!  Or is it?

If the economy is also growing at 25%, you're just keeping pace. And if your nearest competitor is up 50%, you're losing market share...

Despite the millions invested in corporate information systems, what executives really care about isn't the internal numbers, but how they compare to external benchmarks. They want to keep track of financial numbers (revenue, stock price, or return on capital), standard industry metrics (revenue per square foot of retail space), and, increasingly, non-financial metrics such as healthcare outcomes, customer satisfaction, and carbon footprints.

Gathering this benchmark data is a big industry, with major players such as Dun & Bradstreet for credit information, Hoovers for business reports, and Thomson for financial, healthcare, legal, and scientific information. And the rise of the "deep web" means that there are vast stores of information that could be used to benchmark almost every conceivable economic activity (imagine the benchmark potential of aggregate data from Amazon, Google, or eBay)

Comparing this information with internal data has been difficult. But data standards such as XBRL, web-services, and new information providers are transforming the possibilities.

External Information at Your Fingertips

New information providers focused on the BI market include eCompetitors, with data from 9,000 non-overlapping, strategically relevant industries. The "industries" are narrowly-defined, to allow real, business-relevant comparisons (for example, in the eCompetitor database, HP competes in 221 industries, Microsoft in 173). The goal is to allow organizations to "instantly generate customer-specific reports on their: competitors, business partners, business customers, and vendors, as well as a wide array of reports covering the global economy".

Business Objects is also introducing a new site to make it easy to produce and consume benchmark data, called Information on Demand. The site uses Crystal Xcelsius technology to provide downloadable dashboards that make it easy to compare live information with just a few clicks. It features data from various providers, including the major players mentioned above, and lets organizations easily benchmark their performance against economic indicators, or against their direct competitors.

Images: examples of Downloadable Information on Demand Dashboards -- Click to see interactive versions

How are you integrating external information into your BI 2.0 infrastructure?

Posted by Timo Elliott at 03:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1)

UPS minimizes left-turns. Advanced route planning minimizes fuel consumption and accidents. An old story, but given new life with a recent InformationWeek interview with UPS CIO Dave Barnes (and a good example of delivering effectively on a strategic multi-year IT project).

Facebook's community app platform. As BI vendors try to web-2.0 themselves, they will need to create communities -- will they start turning to new platforms, such as Facebook's? From the look at the applications available so far, no -- but over 25s are their fastest-growing segment, and there's at least some interest in the enterprise space: "interesting... harder to build than consumer... maybe ability to better integrate applications some down the line". Disclosure: I only signed up two weeks ago...

MySQL going public? How much is open-source worth in the BI space? This will presumably be eagerly watched by open-source BI vendors such as Pentaho. I'm a big fan of iStockPhoto for cheap, royalty-free images for presentations, and it turns out that they use Pentaho and MySQL.

SAP's Performance Management Blog. Nenshad Bardoliwalla was at Hyperion before joining SAP. His blog gives insight into how the acquisition of Outlooksoft fits into SAP's strategy (with link to SAP's CPM presentation in May), and talks about Pilot's web 2.0 approach to strategy (see previous posting.)  And some inevitable Oracle/Hyperion bashing.

Microsoft PerformancePoint a tough sell? Stephen Sawyer writes that Office, Excel and confusion shaping up as PerformancePoint Server’s biggest competition.

Posted by Timo Elliott at 01:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

The Tech Sanity Check blog has a great ZDNet interview with Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the worldwide web, on the standards underlying the "semantic web".

As I've noted on this blog before, I'm not a fan of using the phrase BI 2.0 to simply cover a laundry list of features that enterprise BI vendors were already planning to implement.

If BI 2.0 means anything, it should be about how BI will adapt to a web 2.0 world and unlock the value stored across the web as a whole, not just corporate databases. Personal or consumer BI will flourish in a web 2.0 world, and this will in turn impact how organizations deal with the same issues. Given this definition, the semantic web is clearly a big part of BI 2.0.

I've paraphrased below some of the key parts of the interview (it's hard to speak in perfectly coherent sentences when you're accosted by a journalist in a hallway on your way to receive a lifetime achievement award -- I've tried to keep the meaning the same).

On the meaning of the "semantic web":

It's a rather overcomplicated word for the data web. We have documents on the web, we don't have data yet. The data standards are now in place so that you can get the data that is currently locked in silos by application out there so you can get data from one application and another application, and then pull into a spreadsheet, graph, or map, and analyze it together. It's now taking off, and it's very exciting.

On where we are today:

We started off with the RDF data standard and the OWL schema/ontology standard. We didn't have a query langage. Today, it's as if we have a web-based relational database system, it's like taking databases and spreading them out and connecting them together across the web. It was like relational databases without SQL, without a standard query language. Now we have an equivalent for querying web databases, a web protocol called Sparql, and it's just being polished off. And we're just starting on a rules language. But because we have the data standard, ontology standard, and sparql, we've crossed the chasm, and you can now start to create large applications, and we're starting to see this taking off.

On the first implementations:

There's a lot of buzz about link data. i.e. you pull in some data, create a graph and each item has a URI associated with it, and you can click on the relationship to pull in new data about that item. It's like the web, but pulling in data instead of documents: it could be a relationship (a person, the company they work for...), a product, a competing product... and you can bring that information in and compare it, etc. it involves real data processing. There's a lot of excitement about public data sources.

The prototypes have been done by academics, but there are some semantic web products out there, or companies are attaching semantic web capabilities to existing products, because of course a lot of the applications which exist out there at the moment use data, so all you have to do is import/export standard RDF to enable them to interoperate with other things.

On how it compares to mashups:

The mashup folks have understood the value of bringing together interesting data sources, either by reverse engineering sites or using APIs. But you have to do it separately for every application. With the semantic web, somebody does a one-time mashup to turn it into RDF, and then that acts as a bus connecting to everything else. Nobody else has to do the back-end part of the mashup. So you can pull in data from completely different data sources and compare it and put it together. Mashups are taking two specific stove pipes and putting them together. Semantic web is about connecting everything, using a single standard. So you can just query data, graph it, explore it, swim through it.

The role of open standards:

We must keep the same openness that we have before -- common and royalty-free. The excitement is not about competing technologies, it's about what you can do with them.

Does connecting information across application stovepipes sound familiar? So what does the semantic web mean for business intelligence?

The question isn't new -- for example Neil Raden wrote about semantics for Intelligent Enteprise back in 2005 "Start Making Sense: Get From Data to Semantic Integration" -- but it hasn't received a lot of attention in the BI community, despite the obvious overlaps.

Now that the sparql standard is being finished off, and applications start emerging, the links between semantic web and BI may be starting to come to the fore.

Where we are today is covered well in an W3.org talk by Ivan Herman on the "State of the Semantic Web". Particularly interesting (for me at least) are the sections on how sparql may be a unifying point, and that "some of the messenging on semantic web has gone horribly wrong" -- i.e. that it's been made to sound a lot more complicated than it really is, and so adoption has suffered. Ivan makes the prediction that the semantic web is poised for growth, at level 4 on a 5 point scale towards the same type of adoption as the worldwide web itself, and that the next step is "adoption by big business".

Ivan points out that Gartner now includes the "corporate semantic web" on their emerging technology hype cycle. As you can see from the graphic, it's a long way from the "plateau of productivity", but far enough advanced to be making a real impact on corporate data access.

Gartner's emerging technology hype cycle, 2006, as reported in ZDNet.

So what do you think? The semantic web is clearly an extension of BI's existing vision statements (especially now that unstructured data is coming into the picture).

Will BI vendors be the ones to take the semantic web into prime time? Will they be able to deliver?

More on "Sparql: A Query Platform for Web 2.0 and the Semantic Web"

Posted by Timo Elliott at 01:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Business Objects just announced its intention to purchase Cartesis, a leading finance and performance management company. The purchase had been a rumored for some time.

I attended the presentation of Crispin Read, Cartesis' CMO and a former (and now future) colleague, at the Gartner BI Conference in London earlier this year. The talk was entitled "From BI to Performance Management", and focused on the premise that BI has not delivered on the promise of financial performance management because "it's like having traffic lights without color." In other words, there's no point in measurement unless the correct targets have been defined using a robust, financially-focused performance management system.

For me, the highlights of the aquisition are the industrial-strength financial consolidation and intercompany reconciliation tools that will boost Business Objects' position with CFOs of large organizations, and Cartesis' leadership role in XBRL publishing and benchmarking.

XBRL is a open format for reporting financial information. A key part of BI 2.0 will be the ability to easily augment internal analysis with outside figures, and Cartesis provides their customers with:

"a unique solution to benchmark their own actual and financial forecast figures with competitive and peer-group data for externally focused business performance management."

According to research commissioned by Cartesis last year, 84% of companies recognize the importance of benchmarking financial performance, but only 31% do so. Cartesis has a partnership with Edgar Online, which provides information from US company reports using XBRL, to make it easy to "mashup" internal and external financial data.

Culturally, the companies should be a good fit. Cartesis is also a "transnational organization", headquartered in Paris but with a mix of European and US values. The CEO, Didier Benchimol, is French with extensive experience of the international software market, and many of the sales and marketing staff are former employees of Business Objects.

Posted by Timo Elliott at 09:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In an Information Week article called "Google Lays Out Its Mobile User Experience Strategy", Stephen Wellman writes about Google's latest steps in their mission to "Organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful":

...Google breaks down mobile users into three behavior groups:

A. "Repetitive now"
B. "Bored now"
C. "Urgent now"

The "repetitive now" user is someone checking for the same piece of information over and over again, like checking the same stock quotes or weather. Google uses cookies to help cater to mobile users who check and recheck the same data points.

The "bored now" are users who have time on their hands. People on trains or waiting in airports or sitting in cafes. Mobile users in this behavior group look a lot more like casual Web surfers, but mobile phones don't offer the robust user input of a desktop, so the applications have to be tailored.

The "urgent now" is a request to find something specific fast, like the location of a bakery or directions to the airport. Since a lot of these questions are location-aware, Google tries to build location into the mobile versions of these queries.

The categories work well for corporate use of BI. "Repetitive now" is clearly equivalent to production reporting and dashboards. "Urgent now" describes a power user responding to an executive request. "Bored now" doesn't quite translate, but it could be considered the equivalent of an analyst digging for trends when not busy responding to urgent requests.

Just as personal search has ushered in new interest and investment in corporate search and text analytics, I believe that personal and mobile BI trends will have a great influence on corporate BI in the future.

Posted by Timo Elliott at 11:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

More on how Web 2.0 companies are helping people collect, analyze, and share structured information -- i.e. providing some of the functionality now associated with business intelligence vendors.

• Information display: Google makes it easier to show data on their maps.
  
• Data cleansing: Google submits a patent for "online data verification of listing data". According to Intelligent Enterprise:

"The application describes a system for verifying listing information submitted by users, such as a merchant might enter when providing data to the Google Local Business Center about his or her business."

• Information feeds: InformationWeek talks about how Twitter can be used to provide real-time information feeds:

"Twitter users send and read messages using a variety of channels: The Web, SMS, instant messaging, and RSS. The service also has an API for building third-party applications, which are springing up like weeds. These include applications to provide weather reports, tell the status of various lines on the London Underground, and provide earthquake information for Silicon Valley."

• Data storage and linking: Freebase's contributors are:

"collecting data from all over the internet to build a massive, collaboratively-edited database of cross-linked data."

• Collaboration: Trampoline Systems aims to:

"analyse data from enterprise information systems such as email servers and instant messenger tools to map social networks, information flows and collaborations throughout the enterprise."

[more from vecosys]

Posted by Timo Elliott at 07:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Did I forget any buzzwords? You can download a powerpoint version