BI Scorecard Blog

Cool BI from TDWI

I’m just back from sunny, warm, Florida, venue for TDWI’s fall conference. The brightest spot from this  conference, is that it was one of the best attended of the year. I hope it is a sign of recovery, at least in the BI world!

I had the honor of delivering the key note on Monday, with new findings on secrets to successful BI (details to follow next week), but I first wanted to share some insights from my Cool BI Course.

It is a fun course for me to teach, something I compare to a wine tasting of eight new innovations (but without the hangover!), with mini demos performed by trail-blazing vendors and some by me. So fun, but, yes, stressful too! People are most excited about advanced visualization and dashboards, with Tableau demonstrating these capabilities (in May, search and rich reportlets were higher) . To be fair, some of the results may be slanted by how well either I or the vendor explained the innovation, the benefits, and the maturity.

While SaaS got few votes here, the demo by Birst certainly gets my vote for most leading edge. In some respects, the demo went so smoothly that I suspect the complexities of what was being demoed live weren’t apparent.  Just this week, Birst announced Live Access, a new ability in Birst 4 that allows the SaaS BI layer to reach into the on-premise data and present it with the hosted data. So CEO Brad Peters demoed loading data from a local spreadsheet to the cloud, combining it with SalesForce.com data, and finally in real-time, with data from an on-premise data mart, all in a matter of minutes (he quipped my timing requirements were rather demanding, but hey, we have a class schedule to keep!).  I’ve seen SaaS BI products do the first part, even the first two parts, but never all three together. It brings a new level of flexibility to SaaS BI, and takes away the argument against SaaS BI that companies are fearful of letting go of their data.

Let me know if you too think this is pretty leading edge, or if you’ve seen other products pull data from all three environments with such ease.

Regards,

Cindi Howson, BI Scorecard

 

 

Can BI Help Battle Swine Flu?

If you have school-bound children as I do, no doubt you are reading the headlines of swine flu wondering how you, your children,  your company will battle this year’s flu season now that school is back in session.  It’s the highly contagious, seemingly unavoidable aspect of swine flu that worries me. When you own your own company, there is no such thing as “paid sick days.”

Business intelligence is helping monitor swine flu in a number of ways. Emergency Medical Associates (EMA) operates hospital emergency rooms in northern New Jersey and New York metro area. They have a relatively unique ability to collect patient data across multiple hospitals, on a daily basis, and then analyze it with SAP BusinessObjects (see graph).  (The red line refers to 3 times standard deviation, yellow is 2 times.) I have previously written about EMA in my book Successful Business Intelligence, because of the unique ways they use BI to to improve patient care and manage costs. You can catch a glimpse of how they are now using BI to identify swine flu outbreaks in this video.

At the CDC, hospitals and other centers report data on a weekly basis so there is a lag in knowing when an outbreak is occurring. That New Jersey, my home, has one of the highest pediatric death rates is alarming. But that’s all I know, and yet, I have no doubt the data could tell us so much more.

Knowing an outbreak is occurring is helpful. However, identifying the patterns in who contracted it, where, when, and the severity, would be even more helpful. This is where advanced visualization tools fit in. While much of BI lets us answer questions that we know to ask (who, where, how many), advanced visualization tools allow for more exploratory type questions such as:

·         What characteristics do these people have in common?

·         Are they football players?

·         More boys than girls showing symptoms?

·         Does Mrs. Smith’s class have more unusual absences than Mrs. Kane’s?

I wish our town, our school, or even parents like myself could ask and answer these questions. In many cases, the data is there, but without the tools in place to explore the data, it’s not actionable.

For an evaluation framework of advanced visualization tools, you can download a new BI Scorecard template here (visitor login required).  Also, I highly recommend visualization expert Stephen Few’s latest book and this article by Seth Grimes.

So while much of the country awaits the release of the new flu vaccine, I’d like to see our schools and hospitals add BI to its arsenal of tools for battling an outbreak.

Regards,

Cindi Howson,

Founder, BI Scorecard

Move Over American Idol: It's the BI Bake Off!

Standard procedure in BI tool selections are bake offs. Customers will give vendors a list of oh, 100 to 200 requirements, and vendors must prove they can support those requirements.  Only a lucky few will make it to the final round of 2 to 3 vendors who move onto a proof of concept stage. It’s a grueling process for customers and vendors alike, as fraught with tension and subtleties as the Idol elimination process.

You might argue that BI requirements are much more objective than music performances, where taste in music is very subjective. In some cases this is true. For example, support for Linux is a clear yes/no. However, support for “multiple data sources” is open to interpretation, with all vendors responding “yes”, but no two supporting it in precisely the same way.  Ensuring a consistent understanding of requirements among all key stake holders is key to ensuring a successful selection process. So as part of the course I teach at TDWI, we start first with those definitions. Only after this discussion do we launch into the bake off in the afternoon.

Beyond consistent definitions, scoring vendors is particularly important for those requirements that are either subjective (ease of use and interface appeal , for example) or where definitions are subject to misinterpretation.  Getting those scores immediately following a demo is critical in ensuring users don’t forget what they saw, or worse, mix up vendors and products. 

New for the next class (August 4th in San Diego if you can make it!) is a really nifty voting tool from Poll Everywhere.  So just as Idol fans can text their favorite contestant, course attendees will be able to text which vendor best fulfilled a particular requirement. What’s really cool is that the results are dynamically displayed as the votes come in. You can try a preview here :  so just for fun, text in your favorite summer drink (lemonade, icedtea, beer, wine, marg for margarita) to 99503. (Note: if you are trying this from outside the U.S., you may only be able to vote via the web, a limitation of my account, not the software).

I suspect the voting will be an enlightening addition to the class for attendees and vendors alike! It could also be a good complement to the traditional paper voting process we’ve used with customers. I’d welcome your experience on how you have captured scores and feedback during your own bake offs!

Regards,

Cindi Howson, BI Scorecard

 

 

The Answer to Pervasive BI: The Fed?

“Mainstream BI”, “pervasive BI” and “BI for for the masses”  have been the rallying cry for BI vendors for nearly a decade now.  Some thought Microsoft could do it with an Excel interface. Others think Google will be part of the answer.  I am looking to the Fed.

No, it’s not that I am on the bandwagon for the stimulus being the answer to all the world’s woes. However, when President Obama first mentioned a website (recovery.gov) as a way of ensuring full disclosure for stimulus spending, I got as excited as anyone can amid this economic crisis.

My vision for recovery.gov is that it will showcase the best of BI. It will be engaging, simple, and insightful. I’m hoping for a Google-like interface where I can start with a search request such as “education spending in NJ”.  An appealing chart (rather than a dense page of numbers) will show me how the money has been spent. It will give me the necessary context, relative to other states, and to prior years. And of course I can drill down to my individual county.

My envisioned recovery.gov will not only provide the monitoring capabilities, but also facilitate insight to action by giving me contact details for whom to appeal to when I think the spending looks unfair, wasteful, or just plain wrong.

Am I visioning too much? Maybe. But I hope the best BI tool vendors and consultancies are aggressively vying for this opportunity. Many eyes will be on recovery.gov, and I can well imagine the marketing bang a “Powered by BI Vendor X” could bring if this site and application are well designed. Of course, if it’s boring, static, and a flop, then the Fed will be in the same situation as many organizations struggling with BI adoption.

Back to the present: I head to Las Vegas this weekend for TDWI’s Winter Conference. The “BI Bake Off” course I facilitate includes Microsoft, SAP BusinessObjects, and MicroStrategy in this round. I expect to get glimpses of some of their latest versions as well as chance to pose the tough questions, “how much of recent downsizing is in the BI business? ... What does Microsoft's change of strategy on performance management mean to BI and to other vendors? ...” The upside to this down economy is that my airfare is an all time low of only $250, 1/3 of the normal price. With travel costs so low, I hope you are taking the opportunity to fulfill your New Year’s resolutions of “investing in you!”

Regards,

Cindi Howson

Cool BI from TDWI in New Orleans

TDWI hosted their first conference in New Orleans, post Hurricane Katrina, last week. I admit, I was both worried and curious about the location, still reading regularly about how certain parts of the city have never recovered. And yet, after walking along Bourbon Street, with its diversity, old French buildings, and intricate beads galore, I can see why people are passionate about rebuilding and why TDWI picked it as a conference location.

 

But back to BI! I taught a new course, the themes of which is highlighted in this week’s Intelligent Enterprise feature article: Cool BI: Rating the Innovations. Those who know me know that I am anything but cool. Conservative, yes. Serious, yes. Cool, no. So I was catching some flack about the course title from colleagues, and well, my very cool kids. Trying to get into the spirit of things, I kicked the course off donning a cool 70s dress with Cold Play blasting in the background (guess who picked that music!).

 

New courses are anxiety inducing. You never know if anyone will be that interested and if the weeks of research will have been wasted. Add to the mix, that my fellow instructors thought I was crazy to be trying to do 8 mini demos – some myself and some by guest vendors. Fortunately, the demo gods were with us and the course was full, fun, and educational.

 

Most enlightening to me was attendees' reactions to some of what was demoed, one loudly declaring “now that’s cool!” after seeing Tableau’s Show Me feature that automatically chooses the most effective visual representation based on the data set being analyzed. After reviewing 8 innovations, some of which are discussed in depth in this article, I asked IT and business people to pair up to pick their top 3 investments for the year. The dialogue between the two perspectives is always interesting. While there was some varying priorities, dashboards and advanced visualization generally bubbled to the top, although users would like to see dashboards, advanced visualization, rich reportlets and in-memory analytics converge.

 

The surprises to me were social networking and mashups. For social networking, a younger attendee, an active Facebook user, made a strong case in her group for why this aspect of Web 2.0 is so integral to the way information is accessed and decisions are made. She managed to convince her work group it should make the top 3 list. For mashups, I think of them mainly as a way of speeding application development, and yet in using the MVP (maturity, value, pervasive) concepts, people ranked this has having high value to for facilitating insights and making BI more engaging for new segments of users.

 

Of course, the validity of these rankings will depend very much on the existing BI environment and what people understood and saw in a 20 minute discussion. I’d like to know your impression: which innovations would your company most like to evaluate or invest in. Choose your top interest in this poll here.

Regards,

Cindi Howson

Founder, BIScorecard

TDWI In Las Vegas - Bigger Than Ever

This week’s TDWI conference turned out to be one of the biggest, with over 1000 attendees and another 200 executives at the BI summit.

A highlight from the Executive Summit was hearing Michael Masciandaro, BI Director at Rohm and Haas, provide practical tips on where to start with BI. He presented all the lofty goals often discussed at this conference – great data quality, robust architecture – and advocated not to start there. Instead, start with something “embarrassingly small” with a subject area or application that has no competition.

The BI 2.0 discussion gave credibility to the importance of “eye candy” in making BI appealing and improving adoption among skeptical users.  The use of Flash in MicroStrategy Enterprise Dashboards and Crystal Reports 2008 seemed to dazzle IT and business executives alike.  Mark Madsen’s demonstration of mashups was nothing short of cool. He contrasted statically displayed crime data – the normal display for most police departments – with such data more effectively integrated with Google Maps. The town spent big bucks on the less usable display whereas the mashup was put together by a passionate programmer in his spare time.

At the “BI Bake Off” course, I was once again surprised at how many attendees are doing a first time BI suite selection, roughly 40% of the 100 who took this course. Companies trying to rationalize the number of tools also take this course. Despite the reality of companies having multiple tools from multiple vendors, I was still staggered when a banking person revealed his institution had 23 different products (not multiple modules from 1 vendor, but products!).

A final question from an attendee to the vendor panel (Business Objects, Microsoft, Oracle) took me by surprise. “Given Cindi just told us where your products are weak and gave some red and yellow scores for each of you, what do you think your weak points really are?” There was a pregnant pause. I laughed, suggesting he would not get such an honest answer in a public forum. To my surprise, each vendor did respond, for the most part somewhat candidly (offline, I normally hear those red scores are ALL wrong J!). But of course, a recurring theme to the answers was “everything is fixed in the next release!”

So I leave Las Vegas , with my now smoke-scented clothes (hey, if Paris can ban smoking, why not Las Vegas ?!?!), thinking BI is not at all a mature market. Innovation continues to come from vendors big and small, and if conference attendance is any indication, the BI market remains strong.

Regards,

Cindi

On BI Bake Offs and Vaporware

Posted by Cindi Howson
Wednesday, May 23, 2007
10:06 AM

I really shouldn't call it a "BI Bake Off," because the demos are tightly scripted to maximize educational value and enable everyone to win. At TDWI in Boston last week, attendees of the course Evaluating BI Toolsets got to see Business Objects, MicroStrategy, and Oracle demo head-to-head, using the same data set and on topics attendees consider the most important buying criteria. (If you want to see Cognos, Microsoft, and SAS head-to-head, come to TDWI in San Diego in August).

It's an unnerving process (for the vendors and for me) as the class is made up of BI buyers and the occasional competitor. Throughout each mini demo, I point out product strengths as well as where I think a vendor is glossing over a deficiency. No smoke and mirrors allowed! To ensure a fair session, vendors are allotted a fixed amount of time, buzzer and all - much like in the presidential debates.

During this last course, attendees also threw the vendors a wild card in which they got to vote for a new demo topic. The vendors only learned what that topic would be during the lunch break. Top of the list: predictive analytics (beating out other hot topics such as performance management, production reporting, and BI search). Kudos to each of the vendors for speaking about - and for some, demoing - these capabilities literally at the last minute!

Some of the questions from attendees during the course made me think of vaporware. Vendors love to put out press releases well in advance of product release dates. This is smart marketing as whenever there is a major innovation, it takes time to build awareness, let alone demand. Yet in some cases, confusion on dates seems purposeful to me, leading buyers to think it's all vaporware.

Some specific points of confusion:

• "Microsoft Performance Point will ship this summer." No, actually Bill Baker, GM of Office Business Applications, made it quite clear that the code is on track to be finalized late this summer (and he jokingly added, Northern Hemisphere summer), but that the way the software distribution works, it will be end 2007 before it reaches customers.

• When I gave Excel solutions from certain vendors a higher score than others, a TDWI attendee countered, "Cognos users can analyze data directly from Excel," and so you would think from this article. But if you read the fine print of Cognos's press release, this capability has been announced and previewed but will only ship in the second half of 2007.

• BI & Search is clearly a hot topic and vendors want to be the first to jump on this new wave. So when one vendor complained that I did not credit them for early innovation, I explained it was because the product only shipped this month, whereas others began shipping last year. He himself had drunk his own KoolAid, thinking that since they issued a press release on the subject last year, it meant they also had the capabilities last year.

My take on all of this is that some vendors' solutions are vaporware and buyers must beware. However, some vendors do make shipping dates more clear, and the media glosses over the details. Customers should welcome early promotion of capabilities. It takes a while to understand the value of new capabilities and to plan for these projects internally. But IT doesn't need another black eye for delivering capabilities later than promised. When the media and certain vendors purposely confuse the market on release dates, it only sets IT up for failure and for customers to wonder what's real and what's vaporware.

Sincerely,

Cindi Howson
Founder, BIScorecard

Microsoft and Business Intelligence for Everyone

Posted by Cindi Howson
Wednesday, May 9, 2007
2:49 PM

If a user conference is a barometer for market leadership, then Microsoft's first ever BI conference clearly shows they are in the top tier. More than 2,500 attendees have gathered here in Seattle to learn and share tips on Microsoft BI as a data warehouse platform, provider of BI front-end tools, and soon, performance management (due late summer).

Microsoft's rallying cry is "BI for Everyone." While "BI for the masses" borders on cliché (and I'm glad they wordsmithed their mantra), Microsoft most differs from other BI vendors on two points. First, is removing price as a barrier for wider adoption. As a case in point, the price of once independent ProClarity has been slashed from $800 to $200 per user under Microsoft's ownership. Even with price cuts, Microsoft says revenues for this product line has increased.

The other key difference is in how much Excel plays a roll in bringing BI to everyone. As I've written in the free BIScorecard report on spreadsheet integration, Excel has historically undermined much of BI in that disconnected, unmanaged spreadsheets have led to data chaos. What's changed with Excel 2007 (and with newest add-ins from many BI vendors), is that BI data can now be accessed and analyzed within the familiar interface of Excel, while the data remains safely stored in the central data warehouse. Users can refresh queries directly from Excel--it's not a one-time, static export.

The analysis and data mining capabilities in Excel 2007 are excellent. However, it has been optimized to access only OLAP data stored in MS Analysis Services and not relational data, a point downplayed in Microsoft demos and one where BI competitors are better. As a way of shoring up their relational capabilities and further leveraging the Office interface, Microsoft announced the acquisition of technology from SoftArtisans. SoftArtisans' OfficeWriter product allows users to access and design Reporting Services reports (so relational data) from within Word and Excel. (Tip: if you're an Oracle user, take a look at BI Publisher).

While all of this bodes well for Microsoft's success in the BI space, what I did not hear was a clear understanding of another key barrier to broad BI adoption: simplicity. Front-line workers and middle managers express exasperation at the state of many BI tools. Can't someone make it look like Google? Or iPod? Give me a gadget on my Blackberry? On these points, Microsoft has a longer way to go than its competitors, and yet, owning the whole stack from operating system, database, to BI front ends makes them a formidable force to change the BI landscape for both competitors and users.

Sincerely,

Cindi Howson
Founder, BIScorecard product evaluations

Should BI & Performance Management Be a Single Platform - Part II

Posted by Cindi Howson
Wednesday, May 2, 2007
3:22 PM

Whenever I disagree with someone smart, I automatically assume I must be wrong and seek to understand why. So it really bothered me that Doug Henschen was so certain that customers are driving demand for BI/PM convergence in this blog. It also doesn't sit too well with me that the vendors are clearly pursuing this strategy, while I'm saying I'm only seeing a handful of customers buying into it.

Let me clarify though:

A BI solution that delivers measurable business benefit and thus improves business performance is the goal for most BI deployments. I strongly disagree with Applix's CEO Plummer's comment "BI has always offered a historical perspective, but the insight hasn't been actionable." As one customer recently explained to me, "we saw an immediate lift in sales the week we deployed our BI solution." Why? Because the BI team went to great lengths to understand the business drivers and to deliver information that allowed all front-line workers to affect those drivers. Note: Applix is not the only vendor to try to pidgeon-hole BI as backward-looking and inactionable.

Improving performance with better access to information has always been a theme to BI. (This is not the type of "convergence" I'm disagreeing with.)

Where I most take issue is with claims that customers are demanding that BI and Performance Management tools (budgeting, planning, and balanced scorecards) come from the same vendor. My customer base doesn't show this, this site's reader poll didn't show it, nor do preliminary successful BI survey results indicate it.

Thinking my view must be skewed, I asked Nigel Pendse (who publishes the extensive OLAP survey) if he had any better data on this convergence.

Nigel's response (edited):

"I've always believed that the BI/PM distinction was artificial, but ... I fully agree that buyers don't see any compelling reason to buy their PM and BI products from the same vendors. This is again a vendor-driven idea, with little or no supporting evidence from the marketplace. So, yes, I entirely agree that CFOs and CIOs have different agendas and vendor allegiances… I'm very much in the best-of-breed camp, and The OLAP Surveys also support the value of this approach."

My bottom line on this convergence topic:

• Part of the key to success with either BI and PM technologies is to be thinking about how they improve the performance, operations, and decision-making processes of the business.
• Even when you buy the same BI and PM tools from the same vendor, don't expect them to be integrated under the covers. (You can check out some BIScorecard scores and evals for who is furthest along in integration). For most vendors, integration is a work in progress.
• Whether or not you treat BI and PM as one initiative within your company depends a lot on the power of and relationships between the CFO/Finance group and the CIO/IT group.
• While I believe vendors may be driving this convergence (and not necessarily customers), that doesn't mean it's not ultimately good for customers, as vendors are trying to stay ahead of the demand curve. After all, business users never explicitly asked for things like Blackberries!

Sincerely,

Cindi Howson
Founder, BIScorecard product evaluations

P.S. As another data point in just how much convergence is or is not
happening: just look at the continued success of companies that have decided to focus on just one market segment such as MicrosStrategy and IBI (focusing mainly on core BI) and OutlookSoft (focusing on Performance Management).

Face Off: Business Objects vs. Oracle (and Microsoft)

Posted by Cindi Howson
Monday, April 23, 2007
11:41 AM

When Business Objects first acquired SRC software in Q3 2005, some industry and financial experts wondered, "why SRC, a little known budgeting, planning, and financial consolidation vendor … why not a stronger performance management player such as Cartesis or OutlookSoft?"

Fast forward 18 months and Business Objects did exactly that, announcing late Sunday night its intent to acquire Cartesis.

What changed in these last 18 months? Did Business Objects discover something lacking in its current performance management offerings? Or perhaps the move follows on the heels of Oracle, which completed the acquisition of leading performance management vendor Hyperion last week. And then there is Microsoft, which plans to release Performance Point in the near future.

In many respects, Business Objects appears to be buying market share in the performance management space, where Cartesis has a stronger position than Business Objects' current offering. There is definitely overlap in the two companies' product lines. While CEO John Schwarz said that the planning modules of both vendors serve distinct needs (SRC/Business Objects Planning for departments and Cartesis Planning for the enterprise), the company's official presentation doesn't even mention Business Objects current financial consolidation and reporting capabilities. One area where Cartesis brings a unique strength is in its compliance capabilities.

What Business Objects brings to Cartesis customers is best-of-breed BI capabilities, where Cartesis had no products and did not compete. As the BI and performance management markets converge (a strategy the industry is clearly pursuing but one that customers are slower to pursue), the acquisition makes strategic sense.

How much is Performance Management (PM) and Business Intelligence (BI) converging at your company? Take this quick poll and I'll share the results in a future blog.

Cindi Howson
Founder, BIScorecard product evaluations, author of Business Objects XI R2: The Complete Reference, and TDWI instructor