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

SAP BusinessObjects Explorer Gets Top Billing at Sapphire

If you’ve been following Business Objects’ innovations, you know Polestar is a combination search, exploration, and visualization tool. I have described it as an  iTunes- and Google-like approach to BI. It certainly makes my “cool” list and is a product the company has demoed as part of the Cool BI course I teach at TDWI.

This morning at SAP’s Sapphire conference in Orlando, Florida, the vendor announced “Explorer”, a combination Polestar running on the Business Warehouse Accelerator (BWA). BWA is SAP’s in-memory database and appliance (see the in-memory BI feature for more info). And don’t let the “Explorer” rebranding confuse you (as it did me!):  we aren’t talking about the former SAP BEx (aka Business Explorer).

There are a couple reasons why this is a big deal.  I recently wrote in my evaluation of SAP BusinessObjects XI 3.1 that the integration between BW and BusinessObjects XI was no better than any other BI vendors who rely on the BAPI interfaces to get to BW InfoCubes. The Explorer release greatly changes that with direct access to BWA. With BWA, the level of performance and data volumes that Explorer can navigate changes drastically. Polestar alone had limitations on data volumes; Explorer with BWA really doesn’t. As well, this combination pack also leverages the BWA indexes without requiring customers to first create a universe, as the standalone Explorer (former Polestar) would require.

So customers can be up and running fast. Super fast. Beta customer Molson Coors says they were up in 1 day, with Explorer navigating 10 BW Infocubes. The largest cube is over 300 million records, and still with speed-of-thought exploration. Katrina Coyle, global information manager at Molson Coors explains that the search-like interface and corresponding speed changes the whole way people use information. Simply entering key words such as “Coors Lite marketshare” means people can spend more time asking the right questions rather than trying to find the data.

The other headline is their announcement that BWA will support non SAP BW content in a second wave. That gives SAP BusinessObjects an in-memory approach to BI that’s good for non BW customers too, whether running SAP or not.

At first blush, this announcement may sound like more of the same, as Doug Henschen blogged. Well, I wasn’t at Sapphire last year, so can’t say how this keynote and announcement differs from last year. In truth, when the vendor requested a briefing about “Explorer/Polestar”, I initially declined, thinking I had already heard about that. The differences are there but under the covers. As Doug correctly points out, some competitors have in-memory, but here too, the difference is in how the in-memory is integrated into an existing BI deployment, whereas tools like TM1 and QlikView are deployed stand-alone.

Lastly, as a newcomer to the Sapphire world and one who tends to view everything through the BI lens, I was pleasantly surprised that BI here is getting top billing. As I advise clients and debated pros and cons in last week’s TDWI class on Developing a BI Tool Strategy, BI is now a bit part in these vendors’ total revenues. For context, check out much BI can drive sales for core product lines and how those core product lines are doing, matters.  When the going gets tough, making sure BI funding (whether in R&D and support) doesn’t get cut is an important strategic consideration for BI buyers.

So while Explorer accelerated version is cool and disruptive, the attention it is getting in all the key notes means my bigger take away is that BI matters a lot in the SAP world. The vendor is viewing information holistically, from process (source systems) to insight (BI).

Regards,

Cindi Howson, BI Scorecard

Fun BI Holiday Shopping App

It’s true – I love these viral marketing apps from BI vendors that are not only fun to test drive, but also, practical! So to celebrate the holiday season, visualization and analytic vendor TIBCO Spotfire has created this fun holiday gift finder (warning, unless you want the continuous jingle tune to draw the ire of co-workers, set your volume to low).

According to Spotfire, the data in the gift finder is based on data from Amazon and includes prices, popularity rankings, and ratings for a subset of product categories. As I wrote in the recent Intelligent Enterprise feature article, users can see the value of in-memory analytics in action here as you interact with data visually.

On the “Shop” tab, you can view a bar chart of products grouped by price and readily filter them by product rating and category. What I found interesting was the “Analyze tab” in which you can see what is most popular by price. So while there are some stereotypes about ladies being big spenders, I thought it was revealing that the most popular high-end gifts are the typical “male toys” – TVs! (Tip: lasso around the dots to see a list of products in the bottom pane that then link back to Amazon.).  And when I filter by rating, it’s not the Sony I got my husband a few years ago, it’s the Samsungs!

But as we are all tightening the budget this year, I was curious about the most popular jewelry items with a high rating but in the lower price end.  I stumbled across these nice earrings for $155 to discover they are now on sale for $59. Maybe this gift finder is more than a fun demo after all.

Merry Christmas!

Cindi

Founder, BIScorecard, a resource for in-depth BI product reviews

Author, Successful Business Intelligence: Secrets to Making BI a Killer App

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

BI Goes Green(er)!

While many tout BI as a way of boosting profits, BI is increasingly going green as a way to promote sustainability and good corporate citizenship.

Under full disclosure here, I am thrilled that green is gaining ground! I am green, very green. Admittedly, I was not always so passionate about these topics. However, living in Switzerland for eight years forever changed my view of garbage. Indeed the Swiss have “garbage” police who will check your trash to ensure you are recycling and fine you if you’re not recycling (I wish they’d visit NJ for a week!). As trash bags are expensive ($10 a bag, if I recall correctly), manufacturers package their consumer products frugally. You can buy milk and fabric softener in something like a ziploc bag, which creates less trash than big plastic cartons. For companies who don’t package their goods so wisely, shoppers unwrap things at the supermarket and let the store deal with the unwanted packaging.

There have been glimpses of a few BI vendors going green for several years now. Three years ago, Hyperion began offering employees a $5000 discount to buy fuel-efficient cars. While Oracle did not continue that program post acquisition, it has been recognized for some of its environmental efforts.

This past fall, at the Business Objects user conference, citing its vision to raise awareness of green issues, the vendor distributed refillable water bottles to attendees instead of the disposable ones usually provided during conference breaks.

(What a novel idea! I so much liked this idea that it inspired me to give family members these cool SIGG water bottles for Christmas, complete with an explanation of how we toss 38 billion empty bottles in the trash each year, not to mention the 462 million gallons of oil to ship the bottles).

That some BI vendors are trying to be good corporate citizens is one way to measure a vendor’s greenness. However, an emerging and more profound aspect is in how BI software can be used to implement and monitor sustainability efforts.

Prima Consulting in Australia is one of the first BI companies I’ve stumbled across to offer an ERP-agnostic scorecard to help customers manage their CO₂ emissions. Their solution, Sustainability SCO₂RECARD was released late last year and is built on Microsoft PerformancePoint and Microsoft BI. They initially developed the application to help Australian companies meet legislative requirements to reduce green house gas emissions, but customers are finding that reducing energy costs and eliminating waste can also improve profitability.

This week, SAS announced a new application, SAS for Sustainability Management. It uses the BI platform and performance management applications to provide companies with a way of measuring sustainability goals and performance against them. Leveraging the vendor’s predictive analytic capabilities, customers can also model changes in energy consumption or emissions to see how it affects sustainability goals. As a green BI vendor, SAS has been considering building a solar energy farms at its headquarters.

The green influence on BI is still in its early days with most of the activity seemingly focused on reducing data center energy consumption. As you partner with a BI vendor, consider how good a corporate citizen they are and whether they are providing solutions to help you with your company’s own efforts to go green.

As a way of raising everyone's awareness on the facets of green BI, I also encourage vendors to list their green policies and BI applications here.

Regards,

Cindi

Founder, BIScorecard, a web-site for in-depth BI product reviews

Author: Successful Business Intelligence: Secrets to Making BI a Killer App

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