BI Scorecard Blog

The 5 Myths of Self-Service BI

It’s pretty rare for me to do a vendor-sponsored white paper. I simply am too swamped with product reviews, blogs, articles, courses, and customer consulting.

So when Endeca first approached me about writing about self-service BI, I politely declined, suspecting they really wanted a funded product review. I had looked at their new product at a high level and liked what I saw. Their new product Endeca Latitude combines faceted search (if you’ve ever shopped at ebags, for example, you’ve experienced Endeca) with a dashboard interface. Earlier this month, they participated in my TDWI Dashboard bake off  along with IBM Cognos and Tableau (look for a new vendor line up at the Chicago conference).

Endeca assured me I didn’t need to mention their product at all. The paper could be what I wanted, a candid discussion of what I saw in companies struggling with self-service BI.  So you have my five myths of self-service BI:

1: Business users will create their own queries.

2. BI is so easy to use, even casual users will embrace BI.

3. Self-Service BI is only for internal users.

4. “I will have access to all my data.”

5. Once we have self-service BI, the business won’t need IT (and IT will be jobless).

The vision for self-service BI is an enticing one: provide business users with direct access to all the data they need to make critical business decisions. In theory, self-service BI closes the gap between the decision-maker and the person with access to the data.

And yet so much seems to go wrong in efforts to fulfill this vision, generating frustration for both BI teams and business users. I think a lot of the failures have more to do with unrealistic and mismanaged expectations rather than an unachievable vision. Let’s take that first myth, for example. The goal of self-service BI should not be to get mainstream business users to create their own queries.

At this point, you might be thinking “what?! Why not? Isn’t that why we just invested millions of dollars in our business /ad hoc query tool?”

Sadly, you might have been sold on that promise by someone – either your vendor painting an unrealistic picture or your CIO/IT Manager declaring IT has to get out of the reporting writing business. But it’s not realistic. At first blush, business query tools should let power users and business analysts create their own queries and reports, not the majority of prospective BI users. The empowerment for these mainstream users is in interacting with what a business-savvy power user has created as a starting point, and then if necessary, tweaking that content. Even for these power users, when you first move to a self-service BI environment, you don’t want to start them with a blank screen, forcing them to choose from a cryptic list of 1000s of data elements (read my TDWI Top 10 Mistakes from 2004!!).

So what to do when expectations are different from reality? For each of the myths, I’ve presented a reality checklist. You can access the white paper here, and I thank Endeca for sponsoring it.

Have you taken the 2011 Successful BI Survey yet? Take the survey here to tell us your reasons for BI success or failure. You could win $100!

Regards,

Cindi Howson, BI Scorecard

 

 

Has BI Finally Become Pervasive?

After years, decades even, of BI being adopted by only about 25% of employees and mainly power users, I’m predicting that one of the findings of this year’s Successful BI Survey is that BI adoption has increased. At last! It may not be mainstream yet, but it’s well on its way and gaining momentum.

I first ran the Successful BI Survey in 2007 as research for my ground-breaking book Successful Business Intelligence: Secrets to Making BI a Killer App. It confirmed some of what we already knew: you have to have executive level sponsorship, for example. The survey also held some surprizes: CIO’s often sponsor BI projects but bring less impactful BI than any other executive. The difference is in how well the CIO understands the business and is a member of the business team versus being simply the data gatekeeper.

In the 2009 survey, we learned that agile development and the role of the hybrid BI leader who understands both business and IT were critical to success (you can access free highlights here). While the world was reeling from a recession, the silver lining from a BI perspective is that the importance of business intelligence increased. Companies realized that it was not enough to have clean data and good BI tools; efforts had to be aligned to the goals of the business. The last few years continues to be evidence that it is the survival of the smartest. In our 2009 survey, we added some perspectives on which BI tools were used and how.  There was little surprise that IBM Cognos and SAP BusinessObjects were the predominant BI standards, but that SAS and MicroStrategy had the biggest contribution to business performance was an interesting finding.

So what will the 2011 survey reveal? Share your successes and reasons for failure here. I am predicting that BI adoption will have finally increased. The reasons are multi-faceted. From a macro level, all the mega vendor acquisitions in 2007 and 2008 certainly raised awareness about the importance of BI. The recession forced people to think more analytically and operate more efficiently, supported by fact-based decision making. BI vendors have innovated to make BI more appealing and engaging to the masses. The simplicity of search makes BI accessible to novices. Mobile BI makes business intelligence more relevant for front-line workers. And those eye-catching dashboards have helped managers and executives rise above the noise and data deluge to focus on what matters most in the business.

That’s what I anticipate anyway. But maybe you’ll tell me that IT and the business hate each other more than ever or that lack of common business definitions means nobody trusts the data. Is impactful BI still more pipedream than reality? Have commercial tensions with your BI vendor sabotaged your best laid plans?

Look for a blog in a couple months and I’ll share the high level findings from this year’s survey.

Regards,

Cindi Howson, BI Scorecard 

 

 

The Ongoing Battle Between Excel and BI

I would have thought that by now business intelligence tools and Microsoft Excel would be happily coexisting.  In some cases they are, but  a larger number of Excel users, managers, and BI professionals simply seem battle weary.

Last week at TDWI in Washington, DC, I taught an updated course on "BI & Excel: Friends or Foes?” I last taught this course four years ago. I learned my first lesson about BI and spreadsheets the hard way back in the early 1990s. At the time I was the project manager for a reporting system based on a custom transaction system. Typical of many IT projects, I gathered business-user requirements, went away for a couple months (at least it wasn’t a year!), and we developed some parameterized reports on the mainframe. The final solution was flexible, interactive, and exactly what the business users asked for. We launched the new reporting app in a training class I had personally developed and was thrilled to be teaching.

We were only half an hour into the class, when the power user in the group, Frank, declared, “I don’t want any of this. I just want all my data in Excel.” Frank was the statistician in the group -- the trusted analyst. Normally, he and I were on the same side. We would swap notes on how to tweak Lotus macros or how to extract data from mainframe sources. But he basically just told me I had wasted months of effort and that what my team had built was crap.

The business managers in the room liked the reports, but they relied on Frank for all things data. Frank had planted a seed of doubt in their minds that our whole approach was wrong. Frank had become my foe. I tried not to get teary-eyed (hey, I was in my 20s!) and decided to cancel the rest of the class.

Frank felt fixed reports constrained him. He needed flexibility. For the managers in the group, who were not yet proficient in spreadsheets, the mainframe-based reporting system might have been fine. But Frank could make any data looking prettier in Excel, with better formatting, colors, charts, and so on.

Even though that lesson about the role of spreadsheets in BI was learned 20 years ago, BI leaders, managers, and Excel gurus continue to grapple with BI and Excel’s coexistence.

At the start of last week's TDWI class, about a third of the attendees agreed with the suggestion that Excel and BI are friends; Excel helps improve decision-making and fulfills the vision for business intelligence.  “I'm on the friend side because  I know if I treat Excel as a foe, I will lose," said one attendee.  "It's easier to embrace your enemy and gain trust and creditability.”

The remaining two thirds felt that BI and Excel are foes: too many spreadmarts (some in the hundreds of megabytes) and multiple versions of the truth undermine the BI team’s efforts to provide a single version of the truth.  One attendee who started the day thinking spreadsheets were the enemy later said  the class had changed her view.

To fully appreciate Excel’s role in BI, start by understanding why users love their spreadsheets. Sometimes it may be personal and job security. Knowledge is power, and being the designated source of data is an enticing role.  Beyond job security, there are a number of valid reasons that Excel plays a powerful role in business intelligence, such as:

• Familiar user interface: Attendees acknowledged that Excel is the preferred interface for power users, but managers and front line workers prefer dashboards and easier- to- use tools (they were wowed by SAS’s Email integration).
• Ability to tweak a report, whether to sort, filter, pivot, or remove a column
• Extensive formula library
• Access to multiple data sources: Excel’s ability to combine data from multiple data sources is a must-have requirement for many types of analyses
• Ability to “massage” the data: few attendees said they use Excel for data cleansing, but several people spoke of changing group roll ups.
• Ideal prototyping environment where users themselves can build applications.

For any given requirement, assess whether Excel is the best solution or if the BI tool would be better. For example, newer version of BI software allow users to filter, sort, and interact with a report via a browser. Habits are sometimes hard to change, and if users don’t know about these capabilities, they will fall back to what they have done for years (click that Export button). 

The multiple-data-source issue is probably the biggest challenge. BI teams don’t like personal or departmental data to be accessed from a central business view and certainly not from within the data warehouse.  Excel is ideally suited for joining data from multiple data sources for a one-off analysis. The scalability improvements with the PowerPivot feature in Excel 2010 make it even more suitable. However, for recurring analyses that require joining data from disparate systems, multi-source becomes a problem for the entire  organization. The BI team has to recognize this or they risk being less relevant and  the cause of spreadsheet chaos. Don’t back business users into a corner.

Most BI platforms now offer an Excel add-in that supports data integrity while giving users their data in the familiar Excel interface. It surprized me, though, how few attendees were either aware of or using these add-ins.

Why aren't add-ins being used? In some cases, it’s performance and licensing problems. In other cases it seemed to be lack of awareness. There also seemed to be a degree of fear: BI teams shy away from Excel because they’ve been burned in the past.

My recommendation is to recognize Excel as part of the BI environment. Manage the spreadsheets, whether via SharePoint, a content management system, or the BI portal. Consider carefully when it’s appropriate to use Excel versus the BI tool; and in all cases, make available add-ins part of your BI tool portfolio.

By the end of the morning, attendees were more positive, with two thirds agreeing that Excel and BI can be friends when managed. The remaining third are still wary. Where do you stand? Have you successfully deployed these Add-Ins? I'd like to hear from you.

And if you followed my last blog about a few Washington, DC, mishaps, for this trip, the cherry blossoms were in full bloom. The view of the Jefferson Memorial, in 80 degree sunshine, was nothing short of spectacular ... and I didn't get kicked out of a single cab!

Regards,

Cindi Howson

 

 

 

 

 

Mainstream BI or Mainstream Predictive Analytics?

We talk about “mainstream BI” that continues to be more vision than reality, but how about mainstream analytics?  This week visualization and analytics vendor TIBCO Spotfire is one step closer to making that a reality with its 3.1 release.

Statistical analysis and predictive analytics requires expertise in both the data and statistical methods. Consuming the results of such analyses, however, does not. So imagine an expert who creates a model that optimizes which customer is most likely to respond to a marketing campaign. The process of determining which factors (such as age, gender, income, and customer tenure) most predict likelihood to respond is something the expert normally does. So the expert runs the model, refines the model for maximum response rates, and ultimately gives a list to the marketing department of which customers are their best targets.

In Spotfire 3.1, there are two new aspects that make predictive analytics more accessible to the final decision-makers (in this example, the marketing department). First, are parameters that allow a business user to select the variables that go into the model. So maybe, age really doesn’t provide the best likelihood to respond. Maybe, instead, it’s education level. Via a simple parameter drop down, a business user can choose which factors they’d like to use as input to the model.

Second, the business user can see the results of the model via an intuitive dashboard from within Spotifire. The R engine is still processing the model behind the scenes, but the results don’t stay off to the side as is often the case today.

A few vendors have tried at least to facilitate the consumption of the results of models, with varying ease and effectiveness. SAS in the way it can surface stored processes in Web Report Studio would be one example. MicroStrategy’s optional Data Mining Services would be another.  And yet, neither is particularly widely adopted, partly for complexity and partly for licensing reasons. A few weeks ago, SAS previewed a new product that would be a big enhancement to the concept of “mainstream predictive analytics,” but details are under NDA.

So while “mainstream BI” may still be more of a vision, this release of Spotfire brings “mainstream predictive analytics” one step closer to reality.

Sincerely,

Cindi Howson, BI Scorecard

Predicting 2010 Highlights for BI

Did anyone watch the Packers vs Cardinals game Sunday night?

Well I was at a swim meet, so I didn’t quite watch it, but I got real time texts from my husband and son (as well as updates from fellow Green Bay fans, also dressed appropriately in green at the meet).

The seeming assuredness of the Packer’s loss at the beginning, followed by their incredible comeback, and the volatile overtime, made me think of the competitiveness of the BI landscape and the difficulty in predicting what 2010 will really bring.

I hope I'm better at predicting BI events than football outcomes. Here are my thoughts on where the excitement and let downs in 2010 will be.

In-memory will be a key theme this year as Microsoft will ship Gemini, SAP opens up BW Accelerator, IBM Cognos increasingly leverages TM1, and MicroStrategy 9 OLAP Services gains traction. In-memory approaches are not only key to BI platforms but also to any analysis that involves both speed and analytic complexity (Spotfire, SAS JMP, QlikView). The winners in this are the customers; the losers will be the vendors who have no strategy in this space or where in-memory is their only differentiator.

Cloud computing and SaaS will become less niche as both BI heavy weights and vertically-focused vendors recognize that the infrastructure side of BI offers little competitive advantage; instead, it’s the time to value and agility. IT owners who don’t want to give up any control are in for a bruising.

SMBs will embrace BI but, faced with a myriad of good BI tool choices, these customers will choose  products from vendors who offer better service, clarity of value, a partnership mentality, and at the least cost.

The enterprise vs. departmental BI debate will continue but will be tempered with the reality of “best” and “right” doesn’t matter if you get outsourced, laid off, or go bankrupt. Those burned by over spending on software will look for IT to offer some enterprise restraint. Those who suffered from analysis-paralysis of over standardizing, over engineering, and over consensus building will look enviously at the more nimble departments to deliver better solutions, faster. The wiser of the industry will find an ideal balance of having an enterprise focus on those items that bring economies of scale and synergies, while departmentalizing those aspects in which differentiation and time to value matter more.

Got dashboards? This category of tools only keeps getting better. Dashboards will become as common place as reporting and ad hoc query capabilities, but in 2010, they will be more animated, better integrated, packing more effective insights, on whatever device users prefer (including the iPhone and Droid).

Good data, bad decisions remain BI’s biggest problem. I’d like to be optimistic and think that we will rid the BI industry of all that ails it, but the world economy, corruption in politics, epidemic of overweight people while others starve – you name it – tell me that human nature will continue to sabotage even the best of BI deployments. As Neil Raden blogged this week, even when presented with good data, people make mistakes in decision-making (see this timeless HBS article for some of the classics). So as Tom Davenport suggests, it will be the companies with both the smart people, and those who truly work in an aligned way that make the best of BI. This “prediction” shouldn’t be a downer; instead, it should be just another voice reminding you that the culture has to be right for BI to really have a positive impact.

Social networking and sentiment analysis get on everyone’s radar. Now that it seems every company has a Facebook presence (maybe for marketing, maybe for customer support) the need for sentiment analysis grows. So all those tweets, blogs, and social network updates only add to the data explosion and sense of information overload.

For many individuals, I know that 2009 was a tumultuous year. Jobs came and went--if not yours, then your spouse’s, your colleagues’, your friends’. Change can leave us on edge, waiting for the next calamity. But still, if you are in BI, it means you are in a flourishing industry. I couldn’t think of a more exciting field to work in.

Happy New Year!

Cindi Howson, BI Scorecard

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