BI Brain

Broaden Your Horizons

2011-01-02T12:17:00.001-07:00

For those of us that have been in the BI field for a while you start thinking just about the information that is tidily organized in your data warehouse. This can be a very limiting vision! My biggest passion in life is connecting people with the information that can help them realize their full potential in the work they do for their organization and to develop themselves personally. Nothing

Book Review: Business Intelligence Success Factors

2010-09-06T09:49:00.001-06:00

Just finished reading Business Intelligence Success Factors, Tools for Aligning your Business in the Global Economy by Olivia Parr Rud. I have to admit this was a hard read and took me longer than normal to get through. First of all, this is unlike any Business Intelligence book you have ever read. The focus here is on how the old organizational paradigms of command control will not work in

TDWI Conference – Day 3 Highlights

2010-08-18T17:35:00.001-06:00

Well, today marked the end of the BI Executive Summit at TDWI in San Diego. It was a jam packed 2 and 1/2 days, and I got a lot of value out of the sessions. As with any conference, not every session was outstanding, but by and large the majority of the sessions were very informative. Here are the final highlights from the summit: Semantic Intelligence is very important to understand the

TDWI Conference – Day 2 Highlights

2010-08-17T21:46:00.001-06:00

Another great day at the TDWI BI Executive Summit, covered a lot more ground today. Here is my list of highlights and “a ha” moments: Many Data Warehouses only get leveraged for standard reporting, it takes a leap to start leveraging this investment for true analytics. An assessment of who does reporting / BI and what systems they leverage is an essential step to understand the

TDWI Conference – Day 1 Highlights

2010-08-17T14:15:00.001-06:00

It was a long day at the TDWI BI Executive Summit yesterday, my head was spinning with everything that I heard. Here are the highlights or “a ha” moments that I captured: Lets change the term “data acquisition” to “data provisioning”. I work for a Telecommunications company and a big part of our business is provisioning customer equipment to turn on their services. Love the idea of us “

Arrived at the TDWI World Conference

2010-08-15T21:39:00.001-06:00

Just arrived in San Diego at the August 2010 TDWI World Conference. Really looking forward to a week spent opening my mind to what is going on in the industry. The overall theme for the conference is “Agile BI”. Pretty much every BI article I’ve seen over the past 6 months has something to do with Agile. Somebody must have heard me complaining about how we haven’t embraced Agile in BI! I

Level Up Your Leadership Style

2010-08-08T11:29:00.000-06:00

One of the better books about Business intelligence that I read recently was Cindi Howson’s “Successful Business Intelligence - Secrets to Making BI a Killer App”. One chapter focusing on the organization required for a BI program referred to the concept of Level 5 leadership. For those of you that have read “Good to Great” by Jim Collins, you are familiar with this concept, but in short Level

Sometimes You Can’t Make It On Your Own

2010-08-01T23:43:00.001-06:00

One of my favourite songs is “Sometimes You Can’t Make It On Your Own”, a signature U2-styled track. To change the song title up a bit when thinking of BI, the title becomes “You Can Never Make It On Your Own”. Business Intelligence is a discipline that spans many areas of IT and the business, and you need all stakeholders fully engaged in your BI program to be successful. Due to the nature of

What Target Are You Aiming At?

2010-07-14T21:21:00.001-06:00

I have been spending quite a bit of time on the KPI Library website lately. This site originally was setup as a library of common metrics categorized by industry. Over the past number of years this site has grown and changed to include interesting forums and expert blogs. I highly recommend signing up for this service (it’s free) and taking a look around. http://www.kpilibrary.com Too often

Don’t Follow the White Rabbit

2010-03-01T21:30:00.001-07:00

There is something special ingrained in the soul of a BI practitioner. We love to think of all the twists and turns that we can take to analyze the data we are working with. This comes in the form of dashboards with countless dials, traffic lights and indicators, graphs with multiple series, axis and dimensions, and grids and grids of good ol’ tabular data. All this stuff makes us very, very

BI Leadership Article

2009-07-06T17:56:00.001-06:00

It isn’t often you come across a good article that brings together developing a Business Intelligence vision and the behaviours BI leaders need to demonstrate to make this vision a reality. Well worth a read if you are a BI leader or are just trying to understand them…8) Creating Shared Responsibility for Success in Your Business Intelligence Team I’m glad to see we are already doing some of

The BI Experience: One Size Doesn’t Fit All

2009-04-14T21:35:00.001-06:00

The enemy of BI adoption is treating all your users the same. Each role and person in your organization will use your BI platform differently, so you must deliver a solution that fits each individuals needs. You should consider aspects such as tool complexity, usage of visualizations, navigation and accessibility. Executive Users will be best served with high level dashboards, mobile access,

Icing the BI Cake with User Experience

2009-03-16T18:02:00.001-06:00

The true power of BI is the ability to present actionable information to decision makers. All the data quality governance, ETL excellence, and dimensional analysis will mean nothing if the business can't intuitively interact with the information through their BI tools. You must ice the cake with an exceptional User Experience to drive the most value from your BI investments. A focus on

The Tactical Data Mart Advantage

2009-03-09T21:32:00.001-06:00

The capabilities of current BI tools allow us to drive down the costs to develop BI applications / data marts. This means that we can quickly develop tactical applications leveraging standard tools and methodologies to reduce development cycles. This enables the deployment of applications to support specific decision making problems that would normally not be supported by a quality BI

Data Integration and Your Organization

2009-03-02T19:50:00.005-07:00

Today we had John Schmidt, VP of Global Integration Services at Informatica come speak to our teams about best practices for setting up an Integration Competency Centre (ICC). John made an interesting point that your various Integration functions may be included in Competency Centres in different ways depending on the organization. If you have researched Business Intelligence Competency Centres

Keeping your BI environment clean

2009-02-23T21:07:00.001-07:00

Over the past year or so the "green" revolution has been sweeping IT as a way for organizations to reduce their environmental impact and to cut costs at the same time. This has driven the need for robust measurement systems to manage the transition to being a green organization. A number of the big BI vendors have come out with pre-packaged solutions to drive more "green" for organizations by

CIA: Collaboration in Action

2009-02-15T22:00:00.001-07:00

One of the greatest examples of effective collaboration is the partnership between 007 and Q in the James Bond movies. Q would design and build gadgets that seemed to be uniquely suited to the next round of challenges and daring escapes James would encounter on his upcoming mission. During each movie it appears that James just drops in to Q's lab after receiving his assignment to find

BI for BI

2009-02-09T21:30:00.002-07:00

One of the core disciplines within a Business Intelligence team or program is to develop internal metrics and performance management practices. The idea of "BI for BI" is to exploit your internal strengths and live the fact-based decision mantra.Business Intelligence is a core component of corporate performance management systems. Conversely, Business Intelligence can only deliver maximum value

The Agile Organization: Powered by Data

2009-02-01T18:04:00.003-07:00

One of the core characteristics of an analytical competitor is the ability to rapidly leverage the organization's data to make decisions faster than their competitors. Being first to market with a new idea, product or service will ensure success when the profit margins are high before the big new thing becomes a commodity.Here is an example of a business using analytics to gain market share:We

For What It's Worth - My 2009 Predictions

2009-01-26T21:18:00.001-07:00

I recognize that I am a little behind the ball on predictions for the BI space in 2009. We are technically not a full month into the new year, so I'll sneak this in. I have to admit that I have had the opportunity to read a number of other posts on this topic, so I have late bloomer advantage. I'll focus on areas that I think will have a large impact on us all. Drum roll... 2009 BI

Cut to the Truth: Answer a Business Question

2009-01-19T21:27:00.006-07:00

As the wealth of data available to consumers of Business Intelligence in your organization exponentially increases, so does the opportunity to expose all this data... Even when we shouldn't...What?? Don't leverage any and all information to analyze every aspect of the situation? Bite your tongue!When we have decision makers that need to make a call and move on to the next problem, they don't have

Keep Your KPIs Fresh

2009-01-12T21:11:00.002-07:00

One thing that has caught my attention over the past couple of months is the emphasis on new financial metrics in this depressed market. Employment statistics used to be mentioned in passing, and now we breathlessly await the monthly numbers. Clearly the global recession is an entirely new environment, and investors would be wise to not rely on old metrics and approaches to guide them.This

Leapfrogging the Competition

2009-01-04T16:32:00.001-07:00

These are unsettling times, every family and every organization is looking closely at what they spend their money on, and the value they get from these expenses. In order to do this effectively, it all comes down to making sound decisions with the best possible information you can obtain. You wouldn't decide to change anything in your household, such as trading in your SUV for a Volkswagen

BI 2.0 - Process Centric

2008-11-24T17:49:00.001-07:00

I was struck by the following quote when I was reading James Taylor's channel on the B-Eye network: use business intelligence to make more timely decisions, monitor and optimize daily business processes, and to deploy business intelligence to a broader user audience (http://www.b-eye-network.com/view/index.php?cid=9027) This is a great direction for what BI 2.0 could be. We must consider

Balancing your BI Strategy

2008-10-19T20:19:00.001-06:00

For those of you that lead Business Intelligence teams or programs, you likely have encountered a big dilemma... How can we move forward with a Business Intelligence strategy when there is such a big demand for information today? In most organizations the demand for information far outstrips the resources available. Information providers in an organization are consumed with resolving

Wordle of this Blog

2008-10-18T19:50:00.001-06:00

Check this out!

The New Breed of Data Warehouse Appliance

2008-09-25T22:43:00.001-06:00

Saw a story from Wednesday on an announcement made at Oracle Open World this week on the new HP / Oracle Data Warehouse Appliance offerings: http://www.cio.com/article/451166/Ellison_Pitches_High_Speed_Data_Warehouse_Server We are starting to see more of these hybrid models coming out, where the definition of the Data Warehouse Appliance is blurring. Traditionally, vendors in this space

How can BI get agile?

2008-09-23T21:47:00.002-06:00

We are hearing a lot about how Agile software development techniques deliver more value quicker to the end user. The market and competition is changing faster every day, software development must be able to change with it. In our world today, we can't afford to wait for results from a traditional waterfall approach, when what we deliver will not meet current requirements.Anyone that has been

Follow up article to it Just Has to Work

2008-09-01T22:15:00.001-06:00

I was catching up on my reading, and ran across the below article that had a similar view as my post on "It Just Has to Work". Tom Hudock at Business Intelligence for Business People has a great post about a similar concept. Now imagine what BI would be like if you could simply stitch your information together? Pull your customers. Drag sales volumes. Drop products into an information pot.

It Just Has to Work

2008-08-29T18:24:00.002-06:00

Have you ever had the experience where you are hunting within your favourite BI portal for how to do such a simple thing like sending a link to a report to your business analyst? Have you ever wanted to scream at your monitor that "It shouldn't be this hard!!!"? Welcome to the lack of attention to design that blights many BI portal implementations!If we take a lesson from Google, we see the

The Community Rules

2008-08-19T22:39:00.002-06:00

I get a lot of value from reading other's blogs / articles and posting my thoughts to this blog. I would jump at the opportunity to give back to the virtual BI community on topics that interest you folks. If you have any topics / questions you would like me to address, please let me know by commenting on this post. Mark

Where the Business meets BI

2008-08-19T12:19:00.002-06:00

My education and early professional career was deeply rooted in the IT world. We worried about how to keep the database running efficiently, and the best way to build a reporting portal (in the old days we built ASP pages for every single report we developed). As my career matured over the years it became apparent to me that I had to understand the business side of the equation to be truly

Will the BI portal last?

2008-07-01T21:56:00.002-06:00

Almost all vendors have been moving to a consolidated web portal to expose BI assets to end users. I have to question the validity of making our users come to a portal when they clearly need to integrate intelligence into other aspects of their computer use. Is there a need to change the paradigm of "come and get" it BI?I think to some extent there is a need to change how we think about

The Next Step in a BI Vision

2008-07-01T14:51:00.001-06:00

In my post on Creating a Positive Future, I discussed the importance of understanding Business Intelligence requirements from the perspective of your end users. Once you understand the user experience you need to provide, you are able to ensure that your delivery on this vision meets expectations. Ok, so now you know what your users are looking for. Great! Let's jump in and start building

I Dream of Data

2008-06-30T22:39:00.001-06:00

For those of you that aren't certified "data geeks", you would probably not understand dreaming of data. For some of us this love affair is new, and for some of us this has been a long standing obsession. I clearly remember the first time I got the data bug. It was an entry level database programming course and the lab assignment was to build and execute SQL scripts (inserts, deletes,

Ensuring BI Projects don't Fail

2008-06-15T22:05:00.001-06:00

Presentation from Timo Elliott, Business Objects. Great slides! Why Business Intelligence Projects Fail -- And What To Do About It Mark

Translating Back

2008-06-14T18:06:00.001-06:00

Interesting article on how BI applications have to be traced back through the Systems Development Life Cycle to become business information again. Here is a diagram from the article: http://www.b-eye-network.com/view/index.php?cid=7566 Mark

Article on Pushing the BI Limits

2008-06-07T12:35:00.001-06:00

This is a link to a great presentation by Timo Elliot a Senior Director with Business Objects. This is one of the best presentations I have seen on pushing BI to the limit! http://www.timoelliott.com/blog/2008/06/delivering_results_with_busine.html Mark

Squeezing the value out of what you have

2008-06-01T14:45:00.001-06:00

Ran across this interesting post about how you can replace just the pieces of your mainframe application that require the most change, and doing it with an external business rules management system (BRMS). http://smartenoughsystems.com/wp/2008/05/28/making-meals-from-your-mainframe-leftovers/ If you think about this, you can apply it to the BI spaces as well. I can think of a couple places

Don't Let Budgets Hold You Back

2008-05-25T13:15:00.001-06:00

Just read an article from the Data Warehousing Institute on how to move forward with data warehousing / business intelligence initiatives when you have limited funding and resources available to you. The idea is to use these techniques to provide visible business wins that should translate into additional funding being available for your BI program. This is actually a 3 part article that looks

BI's Place in the IT Portfolio

2008-05-25T10:02:00.001-06:00

Good morning, ran across an interesting article on where Business Intelligence fits within an overall IT portfolio. The below is an interesting picture of this: Nice to see this on top of the chain isn't it? 8) Here is the link: http://www.b-eye-network.com/view/index.php?cid=7498

Creating a Positive Future

2008-05-23T20:03:00.001-06:00

If you have spent any time on the Internet researching a topic like Business Intelligence / Knowledge Management, it can be very overwhelming when you consider all the pieces that need to be implemented to have your organization on the leading edge in this field. This is not just a technology evolution, you also must consider the people and process components to implement a successful Business

Turning Data into Information is Just the Beginning

2008-05-21T23:15:00.000-06:00

Final day for me at the Semantic Technology conference in San Jose. I ended this trip with a renewed appreciation for the bigger picture of knowledge management to create and leverage true Intelligence for an organization. In some organizations we are so focused on turning raw data into usable information, we sometimes lose sight of how we can continue to add value to our information assets to

Ontologies Applied to Business Intelligence

2008-05-20T20:45:00.000-06:00

After a full day of seminars at the Semantic Technology conference, I ran into an interesting tool that is "new to me". This tool is called Ontology.An ontology is a formal representation of a set of concepts within a domain and the relationships between those concepts.OK, I have to admit this is a pretty high level and cerebral topic, lets put this in the context of an example to make it real.

Comments Opened

2008-05-20T13:16:00.000-06:00

Just a quick note to let you know that I have removed the requirement for users to be signed in to post comments to hopefully encourage more participation in this blog. You will have to do one of those pesky words embedded within images thought...8)

Semantic Technology Conference 2008 - Questions

2008-05-20T00:22:00.001-06:00

Well, I’m in sunny San Jose now, and am preparing for my first day at the Semantic Technology Conference. Before I dive into the seminars, I think it is important to step back and understand what specific questions I am trying to answer by attending this conference.Here we go:· How can we bridge the gap between information and human understanding to make information actionable?· How do we build a

Foundational Concept for Performance Management and Data Quality

2008-05-12T21:16:00.002-06:00

I was going through my reading, and ran across this article on the B-Eye-Network that talks about the foundational concepts that need to ground a Data Quality program. Part of this article discussed the Deming Cycle (PDSA Cycle). The PDSA acronym stands for the following:Plan - Plan for the future desired stateDo - Execute actions to get to future stateStudy - Check the results against desired

Links for May 11, 2008

2008-05-11T13:32:00.001-06:00

An interesting article that questions the need for a data warehouse for every Business Intelligence project. This parallel's the move to Web 2.0 in BI technology as this data is not likely to be stored in the data warehouse.http://www.b-eye-network.com/view/index.php?cid=7344Heading to the Semantic Technology Conference on May 19th, should have some good posts from the road. Check out the

Dealing with Culture

2008-05-02T23:20:00.000-06:00

How does the culture of the organization impact the adoption of Business Intelligence?This is a great question we need to ask ourselves as we move the vision of Business Intelligence forward in our organizations. Depending on the organization, your BI program will be successful based on how the program aligns to the culture of the company.For example, lets envision a culture where finding cost

Don't Forget About the Competency Centre!

2008-04-23T19:36:00.001-06:00

Ok, I have to admit it, I've been spending a lot of my research time looking into trends in Business Intelligence technology and have not been focusing on the organizational structures necessary to support all these cool technologies and capabilities. *sigh* The danger of letting the technologist in me rule the day!Thankfully with all the feeds I have coming into my news reader I have diversified

Back to Basics

2008-04-20T16:14:00.000-06:00

Ran across this article on the B-Eye Network that takes some time to revisit the definition of Business Intelligence and how Business Analytics realizes value for investments in other Business Intelligence competencies (Data Integration, Reporting, Infrastructure, etc).http://www.b-eye-network.com/view/index.php?cid=7133I recommend taking the time to read this article, it really helps to bring

Great Overview of Web 2.0 and Business Intelligence

2008-04-15T08:40:00.000-06:00

Here is the first of a four part series from the B-Eye Network on how Web 2.0 applies to Business Intelligence. I heartily recommend you read them all!http://www.b-eye-network.co.uk/view-articles/5913Mark

SAP / Business Objects

2008-04-07T21:51:00.000-06:00

Must read article for all you Business Objects customers wondering what is going to happen with the SAP acquisition of Business Objects. A good discussion on their strategy to integrate BI into their ERP applications.http://www.cio.com/article/327564/SAP_s_BI_Chief_Juggles_Independence_Integration/1Mark

Outstanding KPI Resource

2008-04-07T20:34:00.001-06:00

Good evening,I was reading Claudia Imhoff's blog tonight (http://www.b-eye-network.com/blogs/imhoff) and she has posted a link to an outstanding KPI resource. This website has 100's of defined Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that you can browse by industry / discipline to find ideas for KPIs. The IT metrics are very comprehensive.I recommend you register and take a browse... Mark

Event Based Marketing

2008-04-01T08:33:00.001-06:00

Very interesting article on switching to event based marketing from the more traditional channel based system. Interesting feature we should start looking for from campaign management vendors. http://www.google.com/gwt/n?u=http%3A%2F%2Ffeeds.feedburner.com%2F%7Er%2FEnterpriseDecisionManagementWeblog%2F%7E3%2F261641128%2Fright-here-righ.html Mark

Predictive Analytics - There is a time and a place

2008-03-30T14:25:00.000-06:00

Predictive analytics have been touted as the holy grail of Business Intelligence for quite some time now. However, how many organizations are actually using predictive analytics? In a recent survey conducted by TDWI only 21% of organizations have a full or partial predictive analytics deployment, while another 19% are in the process of developing it.http://www.tdwi.org/News/display.aspx?id=

SOA & Rules - Great Blogs

2008-03-28T18:13:00.000-06:00

Increasingly as I look at where Business Intelligence is heading, we talk about integrating BI into business processes and pushing BI to the front lines. Ran across the following blogs that discuss harnessing a Service Oriented Architecture and rule engines to integrate operational decision making into applications.Smart Enough Systems: http://smartenoughsystems.com/wp/Enterprise Decision

Enterprise Search - Foundation for integrating Information & Context

2008-03-17T21:27:00.000-06:00

For a Business Intelligence guy it is a little strange dipping my toe into the world of Enterprise Search, but for some strange reason it keeps surfacing to the top of my search queries on Google. I'm starting to think that the typical web browsing session will closely mirror how information workers should be able to access corporate data.It really should be that simple, open up your browser,

Dashboards by Example

2008-03-16T22:08:00.000-06:00

I love this site! Nothing like looking at lots of sample dashboards!http://www.enterprise-dashboard.com/

Operational Reporting Meets Business Intelligence

2008-03-15T11:00:00.000-06:00

One of the interesting debates we have had over the past couple years is the difference between true Business Intelligence and Operational Reporting. This discussion started around who within the IT organization was accountable for developing "reporting" for applications. We have come from a place where Business Intelligence and reporting were considered synonymous, and all reporting requirements

Costco - Operational BI in Action

2008-03-12T08:03:00.000-06:00

We were recently at our neighbourhood Costco on our bi-weekly expedition to buy bulk and ran into a situation where a very simple application of operational Business Intelligence was successful with me and my wife.We were standing in line at the checkout when a Costco employee came up to upsell us their Executive membership. Normally we aren't interested in paying more for a membership,

Business Intelligence 2.0 - Overview

2008-03-10T20:37:00.000-06:00

After doing some initial research on the Internet it became readily apparent that a good deal of the concepts I had in my mind were captured under the heading of "BI 2.0". This seems to be taking the Web 2.0 social networking concepts and bringing it into the Business Intelligence world. Business Intelligence really is the perfect implementation of the Web 2.0 technologies, the core business

The Journey Begins

2008-03-08T17:07:00.000-07:00

It is pretty embarassing when you come back to a blog and the last posting was in November of 2005. Well given the new Web 2.0 world it must be time to start collaborating and sharing knowledge rather than being a scrooge and keeping it all in your head.After about 7 years working in the field of Business Intelligence it is a scary prospect to stand up on your hind legs and sniff out what is

Single Version of the Truth

2005-11-13T19:16:00.000-07:00

How many times when we have been working with multiple business stakeholders have we run into multiple definitions of the same measure? Or worse yet when the same word(s) for a business definition are used when they are in fact different business definitions? Just read a good article on how this quest to find a conformed measure, or a "Single Version of the Truth" can be difficult to achieve.