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The Intelligence Institute is dedicated to the propagation of Intelligence and Intelligence delivery to all forms of business to aid advanced decision making.

It incorporates traditional Business Intelligence philosophy, with data warehousing and delivery of advanced analytics. Together the combination delivers to an enterprise fast, efficient and practical decision making.

So what is Business Intelligence?

What is the market doing? What are your competitors up to? What is happening to the demand for certain products and services? What capacity is there to service those needs? The answers to those questions are found in business intelligence and business intelligence is all about having a competitive edge.

It adds value to your existing information to give you a market advantage. In a responsive environment, well managed business intelligence enables senior management to create the right company profile at the right time. Its value is seen in companies that position themselves to capture the lead, just as the market adjusts. In extreme cases, they may even create that market adjustment.

Imagine the value of ongoing, real-time profile development to your competitive position.
 

The Best of BI - TDWI

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Stephen Swoyer kicks off this issue with a review of recent major BI developments. “The Year of Living Dangerously” takes a look back at this year of upheaval, discussing gobbled-up BI and performance management pure-play vendors. He observes that 2007 was “the year in which the large, independent, publicly traded, best-of-breed BI and PM player all but ceased to exist (with a few exceptions).”

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The Evolution and Future of Business Intelligence

InfoManagement Direct, September 24, 2009

Rob Walker

Discussing the evolution of business intelligence can be confusing due to terminology and ambiguous buzz words. To avoid discussions around the much abused ‘2.0’ moniker, Roman numerals will be used to simply denote subsequent maturity levels of BI. It is left to the reader to decide where BI 2.0 fits in this progression. Also, to make this article less of a theoretical exercise and to be able to more credibly identify ROI opportunities, let’s map the BI maturity levels (there will be five) to a hypothetical company: a large mobile telecom provider that communicates with its customers across multiple channels in multiple areas (service, sales and marketing, retention, etc). This is not to say the capabilities described are not relevant to other industries and other business areas. The telco is just an example.

BI Gen I is about reporting, usually long after the fact. Its power has been in a technology (online analytical processing, or OLAP) that allows for very efficient slice-and-dice querying of data. With so much automation going on – just consider the massive customer relationship management system space – there’s ample data available (in data marts or warehouses) to manually hunt for and discover patterns, like underperforming departments, products, channels, or customer segments. Previously this wasn’t possible – certainly not at the speed of thought necessary for effective investigation and analysis – because data was stored (in normalized form) to support transactional systems, not analysis. Speed-of-thought analysis works much better on denormalized, dimensionally organized data that is easy to slice-and-dice. Another popular use of early BI is the so-called balanced scorecard, a dashboard that tracks key performance indicators. With a well-designed BI Gen I solution the hypothetical telco introduced above could readily answer questions about average age of the customers that leave, their lifetime value, in what channels are selling best and how that differs for age segment and geographical areas. Those questions wouldn’t take the IT department weeks of data collection, cleansing and querying, but could be answered in a brief session behind a PC (talking to a data warehouse)

The power of BI Gen I should not be underestimated, because for the first time in the history of information management it allowed business-oriented staff to play with data themselves, rather than waiting for IT to produce a more conventional, noninteractive report. Still, it offered intelligence derived from historic data, and any insight is, therefore, not nearly as actionable as it could be. That put pressure on BI to move to the next level.

BI Gen II is pretty much the same thing, yet this time it brings a real-time capability. This is not a feature to be easily dismissed because it implies that every step within the end-to-end process – from extraction, transformation, loading to the slicing and dicing end user tooling – needed to become at least somewhat real time, too. Suddenly, BI technology could display workflow issues in call centers, monitor point-of-sale data versus stock levels, or show as-it-happens transaction volumes on a geographical map. Now, our BI Gen II-enabled telco can track the acceptance rate of offers to customers in real time and narrow it down to specific customer segments, lines of business, channels or a combination of all three.

Of course, the added capability to obtain business insight from real-time processes adds to the frustration of the business community, because spotting problems is not the same as fixing them. The telco now has real-time dials and gauges, but no levers. If a proposition has a lower-than-expected accept rate, it will require traditional business and IT processes to make sure it won’t be offered in all channels (or will be offered differently). The revised strategy is likely to take some time to implement, time in which money is lost. It’s time for Gen III BI.

The next-generation BI essentially means that a report (or, more generally, insight) becomes actionable. For this to be a near real-time feature and to change a dashboard into a cockpit, our telco will require an underlying decisioning infrastructure based on analytics and rules. Let’s consider whether near real-time is actually worth having. After all, companies have survived with paper processes and email directives for a long time. What could possibly require an instant change of company direction? Despite the airplane analogy, a company, is not a fly-by-wire jet fighter – but should it be?
If analysis at the speed of thought is considered a BI breakthrough, shouldn’t actions at the speed of thought be valuable too? What good is a real-time radar screen without real-time air defense? Consider the value of an instant change to a failing marketing campaign (as evidenced by a BI Gen II dashboard). And what’s the value of an immediate response to a competitor’s discount action, rebranding, or product launch? How costly is it to persist with a credit risk strategy that is getting tired in light of new market dynamics? Or consider a Web site that isn’t generating the expected number of clickthroughs? Or an agent (or team of agents) who can’t handle certain types of products, certain types of customers or the combination? It seems that the fly-by-wire principle, by which a plane can swiftly be controlled through a joystick despite the obvious complexity of flying, has its commercial benefits.

To become a fly-by-wire company, many business decisions need to be automated. It’s outside the scope of this article to go into decision management, but very powerful decisioning solutions are available that can virtualize a company. Where it’s now common to see business processes defined in an agile way, not implicit or static like they used to be, it’s equally possible to express the intelligence (i.e., what a process should do) in an agile, business owned manner. Forward looking companies can modify decisions on the fly to adapt to circumstances or outmaneuver the competition.

The changing face of the business Intelligence Area

A great deal of change is happening in the Business Intelligence area. The move towards more decision intelligence is becoming more prevalent.

Once the relm od reporting the Business Intelligence professional must have a very good grasp of many areas of application

It is becoming difficult to anticipate, analyze, and interpret future trends and developments due to increasing complexity in the international environment. At the same time, states have a growing need to prepare against diffuse risks and threats and to exploit potential future opportunities. The concept of strategic foresight may be useful for preserving and enhancing strategic decision making and the capacity to act in a world that is becoming globalized and unpredictable.

Creating success is only half the story. For those organizations who want to survive and thrive in the long term sustaining success is the name of the game. Very few of the organizations who make the top 10 most successful businesses published each year in the United States, are still within that top 10 two years later. So what is the answer?

To develop the anticipation muscle, it is first important to understand your current performance: what is going well and why and where there is room for improvement and development. By understanding your strengths and weaknesses, and being honest about both, it is then possible to plan strategically to protect those strengths and to plug any gaps.
 

The ability to plan strategically is absolutely central to anticipation. These words are used widely, but often as I work with clients, it is evident that the word strategically is used loosely. For the purposes of this article I am using the following definition:

A strategy is a long term plan of action designed to achieve a particular goal, most often "winning". It should include alternatives, fall-back strategies, and the like.

The Future of Business Intelligence

By Bob Violino

Business intelligence software vendors continue to work to make the technology available to a broader range of users and increase the adoption rate within organizations. Here is a snapshot of some new uses.

Business intelligence software vendors continue to work to make the technology available to a broader range of users and increase the adoption rate within organizations. Here is a snapshot of some new uses:

Office Apps/Mobile Access

Cognos in 2005 introduced, as part of its new Cognos 8 business intelligence software, a feature called Go! Office, which lets organizations interact with content within commonly used Microsoft Office applications.

In September 2006, Cognos rolled out Go! Mobile, a mobile-client interface that lets employees use a handheld device to read and interact with Cognos 8 BI reports and metric information. Cognos and Research In Motion recently formed an alliance to deliver Cognos 8 Go! Mobile to BlackBerry users in early 2007.

Tools for Thin Clients

Information Builders in April launched WebFocus Power Painter, a feature that provides reporting and analytics in a thin-client environment. The first release of Power Painter is geared to "power users," the company says, but it's the beginning of a strategy to deliver a single tool addressing the needs of all thin-client users.

"Operational" Business Intelligence

In June, Business Objects introduced a product called BusinessObjects XI Built for Operational BI, designed to make the XI platform useful to more people in an organization. XI Built for Operational BI is part of a strategic initiative by the company to make BI more capable of real-time reporting.

Search Capabilities

Software vendors are linking their products to online search engines. In March, Cognos brought out Go! Search Service, a business intelligence search capability that enables employees to instantly find relevant information available through Cognos 8. The browser-based search application ranks results based on user priorities from reports, analyses and dashboards across an organization.

Information Builders around the same time unveiled WebFocus Intelligent Search, which combines its iWay integration technology with the Google Search Appliance and a Google front end. Enterprises can use Google with Information Builders BI products to more easily find corporate data stored in their data center.

Shortly after these search capabilities were introduced, SAS announced technology with Google that lets workers perform contextually relevant searches from SAS BI software using Google's search engine. The combination of the Google Search Appliance and the SAS Enterprise Intelligence Platform gives users more information than ordinary keyword searches would yield from an initial query, according to SAS.

Performance Measurement

Software vendors are providing applications that enable organizations to measure their performance in a variety of key business functions such as customer service, finance and supply chain management.

Cognos throughout 2005 and 2006 introduced performance applications that let companies analyze specific aspects of their business via ready-built reports and metrics. For example, Cognos' Sales Analysis application is designed to give organizations a better understanding of key sales transactions. The application can create profiles to help sales reps close larger deals faster; plan, deliver, and monitor programs and campaigns to help increase market share; ensure that sales processes and policies (such as shipping and billing) allow efficient delivery to customers; and evaluate the sales organization's performance to better streamline the cycle.

Business Objects in September launched an expanded set of enterprise performance management applications that build on the planning and budgeting products it added with the company's acquisition of SRC Software in 2005. In addition to strategic and financial planning and operational budgeting, Business Objects EPM applications cover metrics management and scorecarding, data visualization and analytic applications.

Future BI trends - Must Know

BI (business intelligence) solutions will continue to multiply in 2010. Smaller, newer vendors will merge with or be acquired by larger software companies. And users will continue to try to figure out how best to leverage BI to turn their organization into truly intelligent, agile and more effective businesses. Below are some specific areas of focus and recommendations intended to help those users to achieve their goals.

Analysis

1. BI will become more pervasive and more visible – and more invisible.

CRM, SFA and other applications focused on sales, service and support will increasingly act as “feeders” into core BI applications and functions. This increasing integration offers the prospect more complete and comprehensive views of business operations, in part by hiding BI functions behind other applications and interfaces familiar to users.

What you should do: Ensure that all of your current and potential solutions for CRM, SFA, help-desk management, contact-center management and other business-critical functions can “talk” to your BI solutions and processes. Also, work to drive adoption of those “feeder” applications to as close to 100 percent as possible. This will help to ensure that, to paraphrase a recent U.S. president, no BI information is left behind.

2. BI functions will increasingly “live in the cloud(s).”

As more collaboration, CRM and sales/marketing automation functionality is delivered as cloud-based services, BI functions will follow suit. This should give you more options for expanding the reach and adoption of BI and related applications, in many cases more affordably and with lower management overhead than possible with previous alternatives.

What you should do: If you’re already using cloud-based solutions for CRM, SFA or related functions, work with your vendor(s) and/or reseller(s) to make sure those solutions interoperate with incumbent or planned BI solutions. If your organization is not yet in the cloud, educate yourself and your colleagues about what’s available; what works with what; and what makes the most sense given your organization’s specific needs, goals and resources.

3. BI and business collaboration will grow closer.

During 2010, numerous innovative collaboration-centric solutions will likely appear, built upon platforms such as Google’s Wave, Salesforce.com’s Chatter and SAP’s 12 Sprints/“Constellation” project, now in beta testing. SAP’s alternative is particularly interesting, given the company’s long leadership in ERP and BI. Also, early reports indicate that SAP plans at least some integration with Google Wave, and to support real-time collaboration with information aggregated from multiple sources, presumably including those within and outside of an organization. Given SAP’s legacy, the company will likely enable users to employ a hybrid approach combining cloud- and premises-based resources. All of these emerging platforms offer the promise of enhancing real-time collaboration with real-time and near-real-time BI and business analytics.

What you should do: Keep an eye on developments related to these and other such platforms. Pay specific attention to how and whether the providers of your most business-critical applications adopt and/or respond to those developments. And make sure those responsible for those business-critical applications at your organization sign up for access to the emerging platforms, so your organization has as much practical information as possible about potential specific BI-collaboration integrations.

4. BI will gain a larger “voice.”

The growing use of IP telephony creates new opportunities to gather and leverage information about who calls whom and what happens before, during and after each call. This information can be a very valuable addition to BI and analytics efforts – but only if a company’s phone system and that system’s vendor, reseller and/or integrator are sufficiently strategically focused on the company’s business needs and goals.

What you should do: Take a strategic approach to VoIP, and make sure that your chosen and candidate solutions – and their vendors – understand your business needs and goals. You want to make absolutely sure that all relevant information about voice traffic at your organization is as accessible to your BI- and analytics-related solutions and efforts as is information about e-mail and other data.

5. BI will continue to challenge business decision makers to take full advantage of its benefits.

While growing numbers of companies will achieve success with BI in 2010, many will find their efforts stymied. Impediments will include disjoint solutions, inconsistent integrations with other key applications and information sources, lack of complete solution adoption, lack of managerial support or some combination of these factors.

What you should do: Stay the course and remain focused on your business goals. Evangelize the business value of effective, comprehensive, enterprise-wide BI and analytics to all key constituencies at your organization, from senior management to sales and support teams. Strive to focus on solutions and vendors that support and encourage interoperability, ease of use and management, and effective integration. And keep at least one eye on technological and business developments among BI solution providers.

Conclusion

Business intelligence efforts can only result in a truly intelligent, agile business if they are driven by business goals; comprehensively deployed and adopted; and managed in ways that produce meaningful, measurable and credible results.

The trends and recommendations above can provide a foundation upon which you can build an effective approach to BI tailored to your organization’s unique needs and goals. In addition, resources such as Focus can help you to get and keep informed and up to date on relevant industry developments, the experiences of other users and advice from experts

.by Michael E. Dortch