BI Leadership Article

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 this in my current organization, but there are a number of areas discussed in this article that can be improved.  The fun never ends!

P.S. Apologies for the lack of updates to this blog, good weather calls!

The New Breed of Data Warehouse Appliance

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 offer software and hardware solutions bundled together (i.e. Teradata).  We have seen offerings in the past year and a half where storage only solutions are being sold, and in other cases just some software supercharging below the database level.  In these solutions, you keep your DBMS (Oracle, MS, etc) the same, the software integrates at a low level in the DBMS software architecture.  It is like dropping a V8 in your compact car, your controls stay the same, but your have a tad more power...8)

Follow up article to it Just Has to Work

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. Then BI does the rest. You then navigate the answers. Repeat with new information when ever you need to.

http://biforbusinesspeople.blogspot.com/2008/08/stitch-your-information-together.html

Ensuring BI Projects don't Fail

Presentation from Timo Elliott, Business Objects.  Great slides!

Why Business Intelligence Projects Fail -- And What To Do About It

Mark

Translating Back

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

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

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 where this would apply.

1. Data marts, if you build your data marts properly, they are much less costly to enhance than to replace.  Rather than spinning up another data mart to get the slice of data you are looking for, you could leverage an existing data mart and add the data required to it.  This may require some retooling of the front end reports / dashboards if the existing data structure changes, but this is much less costly than having to build, support and store another data mart.
2. Tools, if your toolset doesn't support your current requirements, don't lose heart and buy yet another tool.  Work with your senior technical folks to come up with a way to extend the platform, there may be exposed services that can be recombined into something new.  Also, reach out to your vendor, explain your requirements and you would be amazed at what they can dig up from other customers.  Lobby your vendor to include new functionality in their next release.  The whole idea of crowd-sourcing is picking up steam, so the majority of vendors are working hard to include customer requests in their products.

Do less with more!

Mark

Don't Let Budgets Hold You Back

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 at the problem from 3 perspectives (click to see article):

• Technology & Tools - How to leverage what you already have / expanding on existing vendor relationships.
• People - The typical roles required on a data warehousing project and how to combine them
• Project Selection - Steer around projects that require significant resources and have high complexity, instead go for the quick wins or low hanging fruits.

Good read for anyone in the field, we don't need a 10 pound sledgehammer to nail a picture to the wall!

Mark

BI's Place in the IT Portfolio

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

Links for May 11, 2008

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=7344

Heading to the Semantic Technology Conference on May 19th, should have some good posts from the road. Check out the website at:

http://www.semantic-conference.com

Mark