From the category archives:

BI

First Look – SPSS Statistics 17

July 15, 2008

Version 17? Yes, SPSS has been at this a while. Today they announced version 17 of their Statistics package. While this has some new features to handle more data and some improved asset management (an analytic repository), the big features are really about bringing more business users into the analytic fold. One feature in this [...]

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What’s the difference between Enterprise Decision Management and Corporate Performance Management?

July 10, 2008

I really like getting and answering questions and a reader of the book asked me a good one today
What do you see as the difference between Enterprise Decision Management and Corporate Performance Management? I don’t see you really using them interchangeably, but I sense that you see them as more or less the same thing [...]

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First Look – Cogito

July 2, 2008

Neil and I caught up with Expert System, a Semantic Intelligence company, last week to discuss their Cogito product. Expert System is based in Italy, has 145 employees and originally worked on spell checkers for Microsoft. While they have a lot of business in Europe they are now growing in the US. Their core pitch [...]

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Event processing and decisioning are complementary

June 25, 2008

My old friend Paul Vincent had an interesting post on Complex Event Processing – Aberdeen on Predictive Analytics & BI => CEP – in which he talked about some of the drivers for BI sounding a lot like complex event processing drivers/scenarios.
There is certainly event correlation in these examples but there is also a need [...]

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Tibco becomes the first company with BPM, visualization, rules and data mining

June 20, 2008

Just saw the announcement that Tibco is buying Insightful. Insightful has a range of data mining tools build on the open source R algorithms as well as some proprietary pieces. This means that Tibco now has a BPM environment, a rules/event processing one, Spotfire for visualization and data mining/predictive analytics development and deployment. In theory [...]

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First Look – Jaspersoft v3

June 18, 2008

In keeping with the open source theme this week (given I am at Intalio’s user conference), a quick note about Jaspersoft who just released version 3. This version puts a nice web 2.0 interface on a browser-based product. There’s a nice dashboard with some mashup capabilities and input controls that can be dragged and dropped [...]

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First (second really) Look – LucidEra Update

June 16, 2008

LucidEra is an on-demand analytics company that seems to be growing fast, not least due to its integration with Salesforce.com through Appexchange. They sell mostly to mid size businesses with some departments at larger organizations. They emphasize simplicity, focused analytic applications and leveraging the CRM platforms companies already have.
I blogged about their first product before [...]

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Ostriches, BI and EDM

June 4, 2008

What, you may ask, do Ostriches have to do with Enterprise Decision Management (EDM) or, indeed, with SAS? Well I saw an ad for SAS on the back of DM Review this month with an Ostrich. I forget the punch line but the reason for the Ostrich was that its eyes are bigger than its [...]

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BI eclipsed? Perhaps but not just by search

June 3, 2008

Tom Hudock had an interesting post – BI eclipsed by another technology – in which he linked to one of Neil’s great BI 2.0 articles. Tom argued that BI is being eclipsed by search-like interfaces and other more consumer-centric technologies. Like Tom I think that BI has come to mean, rightly or wrongly, reporting and [...]

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Searching structured data and the finding the voice of the customer

June 2, 2008

A couple of companies I follow had interesting announcements today. First Attensity announced its new “Market Voice” product designed to allow automatic analysis of blogs, forums, reviews and other kinds of customer-generated content. The idea is to bring this information into the same environment as internal unstructured information so it can be analyzed as part [...]

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When is a cockpit not a cockpit?

May 30, 2008

When it’s a dashboard.
I often hear people talk about fighter pilots as a model for the future of business users. For instance, Ade McCormack did in his book on the IT value stack. Indeed this is such a good mental image that many companies use it – either to promote their products or to talk [...]

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Information as a Service

May 23, 2008

Mike Gilpin and Noel Yuhanna gave a presentation on how informaton-as-a-service can help your projects and applications. Many SOA implementations were focused on transactional solutions but Forrester found that many used the same service infrastructure to expose information – e.g. a customer update service which exposes the current address also. Theme: Information-as-a-service (IaaS) offers to [...]

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Bringing IT from the Back Office to the Boardroom

May 21, 2008

Marta Foster from Proctor and Gamble gave this presentation. Marta has been at P&G for 30 years and is now in charge of their IT operations. P&G is well known and is the largest consumer products company in the world with over $80B in sales. They have 138,000 employees, 200 brands in 160 countries and [...]

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The Future of Enterprise Applications

May 20, 2008

I had to blog the last two sessions on paper – there are no power sockets in the hotel (the Palazzo at the Venetian in Las Vegas, conference planners please note) and my battery eventually gave up. So, back in the hotel now, here’s a summary of the notes I took.
Sharyn Leaver presented on the [...]

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The New Enterprise Data Center (IBM)

May 20, 2008

Rich Lechner of IBM came next, talking about the new enterprise and it’s new enterprise data center. Supporting business innovation is impacted, he said, by three things:

Globalization
The change from an exporter to a multi-country set of counties to a truly globally integrated enterprise – tapping into new talent pools around the world.
Rising tide of information
More [...]

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Banks, analytics and customers

May 12, 2008

Having just written a post about how vague the word analytics is, I see Ann All’s post Banks Using Analytics to Boost Customer Retention. What’s interesting about Ann’s post is not that she makes it clear what kind of analytics she is discussing but that almost any of the various kinds of analytics can [...]

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The most important thing I know about Analytics is that no-one agrees what it means

May 12, 2008

Tony Rose over on Decision Support Analytics had this post where he asked for submissions in a particular format – the one used in the title.
I will post a couple of others this week as I have time. Here goes then with the first one:
The most important thing I know about Analytics is that no-one [...]

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Your chance to blog and win!

May 8, 2008

Tony, over on the Decision Support Analytics blog, is running an interesting competition and the prizes have just improved – Neil and I offered a signed copy of our book to add to his list of potential prizes. You can check out the details here. I plan to write a couple of entries soon and [...]

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Gartner, BI and Smart (Enough) Systems

May 5, 2008

Two of Gartner’s smartest analysts – Kurt Schlegel and Gareth Herschel (shameless plug) – just published an excellent little paper called “Business Intelligence and Decision Making“. This paper was one of Gartner’s Strategic Planning Assumptions and the (free) summary says:
A subset of organizations that seek a competitive advantage will evolve the primary role of their [...]

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Decision Management, Operations Research and BI

May 5, 2008

I spoke to Seth Grimes last week about an article he was writing that just published on Intelligent Enterprise -What BI Practitioners Can Learn From Operations Research. As I was reading the article I also noticed a response over on Michael Trick’s OR blog -Business Intelligence and Operations Research. Both Seth’s article and Michael’s response [...]

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