Posts tagged as:

BI

To Hell with Business Intelligence, try Decision Management.

February 11, 2009

Syndicated from b-eye network
Well that headline probably got your attention. It came from an article on CIO Magazine:To Hell with Business Intelligence: 40 Percent of Execs Trust Gut.
According to recent research from Accenture, nearly half (40 percent) of major corporate decisions are based on the good ‘ole gut.
Interesting. But why?
61 percent said it was because [...]

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A Decision is a prerequisite for success with predictive analytics

January 28, 2009

Eric Siegel is blogging in the build up to Predictive Analytics World (at which I am speaking and teaching a workshop). He posted Predictive analytics FAQ #1: Prerequisites for success.I liked his list but personally I would have added another:

Know the decision(s) you want to influence

Unless you have a decision or decisions in mind when you start it is all to easy to generate insight without any understanding of how you will make it stick – how it will make a difference. Starting with the decision in mind helps focus the analytic effort on improving that decision. If it is a strategic decision, it focuses the project on helping an executive. If it is an operational one, it means thinking about how the results could be deployed into production.

I would also add something to his point about “General understanding and buy-in of a predictive analytics initiative by stakeholders across business functions”. For many predictive analytics projects this needs to include the IT department and the folks working on BI/DW projects and all too often predictive analytics projects include neither.

Note that I am now blogging new posts here on b-eye-network.com and focusing only only BI and analytic topics. You can find my full feed on my personal blog JT on EDM. You can subscribe to the feed too – feeds2.feedburner.com/jtonedm.

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Predictions for 2009

December 18, 2008

I just went back to check and found no predictions on the blog for 2008 (so I get a 100% accuracy rating with no errors) so I thought I would make some for 2009. In no particular order then:

Cloud computing will impact decision management.
There are already at least two decision management vendors offering decisions in [...]

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Nice article on EDM

December 9, 2008

Joe McKendrick wrote a nice article on how EDM give companies a competitive edge for the Teradata Magazine this month. Joe did a nice job, as usual, of bringing out some key points and quoting me. My two favorite quotes were:
In addition, it’s inherently difficult to build actionable intelligence into most existing applications. “Enterprise applications [...]

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The future of Data Warehouses

December 9, 2008

An article caught my eye in the Teradata Magazine this month – Steve Brobst, CTO of Teradata, outlined 4 areas he thinks will drive data warehousing: Sensor Technology Pervasive BI In Database AnalyticsNon-Traditional Data Types I don’t disagree with Steve…

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Intelligent OLAP: Data Mining and OLAP

December 3, 2008

Marty Gubar presented on Deliver Depper Insight by Combining Data Mining and OLAP. Marty presented on Oracle’s analytic spectrum and how OLAP and Data Mining fit and can be combined. OLAP and data mining are embedded in the Oracle database and share security, the partitioning, ETL etc. All can be accessed using PL/SQL so cubes [...]

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From Data Warehousing to Strategic Data Assets

December 2, 2008

Usama Fayyad, previously Chief Data Officer of Yahoo, presented a keynote on From Data Warehousing to Strategic Data Assets – Case Studies on the Web: Social Networking, Direct-Response Marketing and Understanding Customer Behavior.
The number of users on the web continues to grow rapidly, approaching 1Bn. The data created as these users move around the web [...]

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Critical Success Factors for successful BI and analytic implementations

December 2, 2008

A panel of the keynote presenters discussed critical success factors for BI and analytics. Panels are tricky to blog so this is just going to be a list of thoughts generated by the panelists with no attempt to assign them to the individuals. Critical success factors, then, include:

You must understand what drives high performance for [...]

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Powering Next-Generation Predictive Applications with Oracle Data Mining (ODM)

December 2, 2008

Charlie Berger of Oracle presented on Powering Next-Generation Predictive Applications with Oracle Data Mining (ODM). Charlie joined Oracle from Thinking Machines about a decade ago and have been putting machine learning algorithms into the Oracle kernel. Data Mining, in database or otherwise, sifts through data to find hidden patterns, discover new insights and make predictions. [...]

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Decision Management, Tom Davenport and the New BI

December 2, 2008

Tom wrote an interesting post this week on 10 Principles of the New Business Intelligence and made a couple of really good points:
1. Decisions are the unit of work to which BI initiatives should be applied.
2. Providing access to data and tools isn’t enough if you want to ensure that decisions are actually improved.
I like [...]

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EDM Summit – Emerging Trends Panel

November 2, 2008

Not really live this post as I am working from notes I took – after all I was on the panel and it’s hard to participate and blog at the same time. Joining me on the panel were Don Baisley of Microsoft, Ron Ross and Jim Sinur (of Gartner) – Neil had to leave. We [...]

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Making BI more decision-centric

October 8, 2008

My friend Kurt Schlegel at Gartner has just released a new report – Deliver Business Value With a BICC (BI Competency Center) Focused on Decision Making. In it he “identifies the steps required to evolve business intelligence (BI) beyond reporting measures, to making great decisions”. Like Kurt I believe that “Tying BI to the decision [...]

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More support for PMML

September 15, 2008

Nice to see support for PMML (Predictive Model Markup Language) continuing to expand with the recent announcement of support from Pentaho. Support for standards like this is important in decision management as a number of products will typically need to be used in combination to build decision management solutions.

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Using decision management to deliver intelligent business performance

August 5, 2008

Steve Cranford of PwC wrote an interesting piece called Bringing Order to Chaos (brought to my attention by Alan over at Tibco) that made me think. Steve’s focus is on the next software suite for enterprises (something he calls an Intelligent Business Performance Platform) consisting of business intelligence, business process and business rules. Reading this [...]

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Ask an Expert – a Video Blog

July 24, 2008

The folks over at b-eye network have a video blog with answers to questions submitted by readers – the Ask an Expert Video Blog. This looks like a fun way to get an answer to any BI, data or analytic decision making question you might have. If you have something you want to discuss, go [...]

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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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First Look – Visual Numerics

June 27, 2008

Visual Numerics is a 100 person, privately held company that’s been around for a while – nearly 40 years – and yet is largely under the radar thanks to the size of other “analytics” companies. As the business world moves from BI to analytics it is sometimes finding that BI tools are really focused on [...]

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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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