BI 2010

A story about the power of rules to improve analytic decisions

March 2, 2010

I was traveling in South Africa last week (keynoting BI 2010) and my favorite online payment system demonstrated not once but twice, why business rules are so valuable in analytic decision making. First their analytics triggered a fraud alert – presumably based on patterns of problems from South African IP addresses. As I was trying [...]

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BI 2010 – Optimizing revenue collection

February 24, 2010

Eugene from SARS, the South African Revenue Service, presented next on how SARS is using BI in revenue collection. He began by pointing out that there is a difference in how public sector organizations use BI – a focus on service delivery not profits, on taxpayers not customers, enforcement campaigns not marketing campaigns and so [...]

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BI 2010 – BI Competency Centers

February 24, 2010

Two presenters (Saroj from Standard Bank and Angela from Investec) discussed Business Intelligence Competency Centers to start day 2.
A BICC is a centralized team that captures knowledge, addresses technology, helps manage organizational change and defines common processes for BI across the organization. Repeatability is critical – not having to re-invent things for each new project. [...]

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BI 2010 – Some thoughts on data quality and governance

February 23, 2010

Several sessions this afternoon on data quality and governance. Rather than blogging these separately, here are some thoughts:

Great illustration of data quality problem having a business impact – bad data led a Telco to prepare a large CapEx project to add bandwidth capacity but a physical inspection showed plenty of actual capacity. Bad data had [...]

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BI 2010 – Successfully incorporating geospatial data

February 23, 2010

Melanie du Plessis from the electoral commission was next. The IEC focuses on ensuring that elections are free and fair. One of the key elements of this is a focus on a single national register of voters that everyone appears on once and only once. Divided up the country into voting districts, to one of [...]

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BI 2010 – BI and Performance Management

February 23, 2010

Continuing at BI 2010, Jon Hill spoke on the combination of BI and Performance Management. Jon reiterated the constantly changing environment and the tendency of companies to spend large amounts of money on data infrastructure without thinking through the way this investment will make a difference. In one extreme example he had seen one company [...]

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BI 2010 – Making BI more strategic

February 23, 2010

I have just opened ITWeb’s BI 2010 in Johannesburg talking about decisions and importance of decision making in making BI matter (I will post my slides later). Great audience, nearly 200 people with a strong showing from end user customers (75%) and, very interestingly, nearly half considered themselves business / IT straddlers which is a [...]

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