BI

First Look – Lyza

June 10, 2009

I got a chance to see Lyzasoft‘s new product in action recently. Lyzasoft aims to provide a desktop product for business people to do analysis that can seamlessly scale up, unlike (say) spreadsheet based analysis. The product is based around a column store.
Workbooks are the core metaphor and these are used to assemble flows. Data [...]

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Users don’t have analytic skills? Try decision management

June 9, 2009

Syndicated from BeyeNetwork
Last week I posted Use decision management to make systems smarter and I got two interesting comments. Ronald made an excellent point first:
I don’t think the lack of deep analytic tools is the prime reason for BI not being intelligent. In my opinion it’s the lack of education and skills concerning analytical methods [...]

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Use decision management to make systems smarter

June 5, 2009

Syndicated from BeyeNetwork
Michael Vizard had an interesting post (via @merv) – Making Business Intelligence Applications Smarter in which he began with the great phrase:
One perplexing oxymoron of IT industry is the simple fact that most business intelligence applications are not all that smart
In Smart (Enough) Systems Neil and I argued that the way to make [...]

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Beyond Predictive BI

May 15, 2009

Syndicated from ebizQ
David Linthicum‘s recent blog post Approaching Predictive BI made me want to reiterate some of my thinking around BI (on which I have a whole category) on my blog. I often talk about going “beyond BI” with decision management. I distinguish between BI and Decision Management because BI helps you understand your business [...]

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Leverging BPM and BI to create agile business processes

May 6, 2009

A crossover session combining WebSphere BPM and Cognos BI.  Linking BI and BPM allows you to leverage insight from your information across multiple applications and processes. You can extend process execution data to BI users, you can improve decision points within your process using BI and you can enhance business activity monitoring with BI. The [...]

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Final keynotes on SmartSOA and more

May 6, 2009

Gerry Mooney – IBM’s point man for fiscal stimulus and economic recovery. He feels that the Smarter Planet initiative and the current economy/stimulus are closely linked, at least potentially. Stimulus money could be focused on managing the current crisis more effectively but it could also be used to build a 21st Century infrastructure. In addition, [...]

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Dashboards should do more than raise your blood pressure

April 24, 2009

Syndicated from BeyeNetwork
This headline came from a briefing I got from LucidEra about their spring release and was so good I just had to use it. Think about it – if all a dashboard does is stress you out and raise your blood pressure by telling you what’s wrong without giving you any help as [...]

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Some Thoughts on Pushing BI Beyond Business Managers

April 10, 2009

Syndicated from BeyeNetwork
TDWI had an interview with Michael Corcoran of Information Builders recently – Q&A: Pushing BI Beyond Business Managers: TDWI in which he had a great phrase:
“Information can have a dramatic, positive behavioral effect when it is directly available”
I am not familiar with the WebFOCUS platform – if anyone from Information Builders wants to [...]

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Here’s a couple of skills developers will need in the years ahead

April 9, 2009

Syndicated from ebizQ
I saw this list of 10 skills developers will need in the next five years – developers not programmers you notice – and I was struck by several things.
First and foremost it still assumed that application developers would be programming – not assembling applications from components, not specifying the behavior of a system [...]

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First Look – SPSS Predictive Analytic Software 13

April 6, 2009

Today SPSS Inc. announced new product releases and new naming for its product families. Predictive Analytics Software (PASW) is the new umbrella and the four families are layered below this. The four families are Data Collection, Statistics, Modeling, and Deployment. This week’s enhancements are to the modeling family. In addition, Clementine becomes PASW Modeler 13 [...]

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Facts not fears, confidence not certainty, critical thinking not wishful thinking

March 26, 2009

Syndicated from BeyeNetwork
Madeline Albright gave a great presentation at the SAS Global Forum in Washington DC this week. Several of her bon-mots are in the title but there were many others, some of which are below. Each of them struck me as relevant to readers of this blog:

Facts not Fears
Businesses all too often do things [...]

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Business Intelligence or Business Analytics?

March 25, 2009

Syndicated from ebizQ
At the SAS Global Forum this week some SAS speakers drew a distinction between Business Intelligence – BI – and Business Analytics. This distinction between Business Intelligence (what everyone else does) and Business Analytics (what SAS does) struck me as a distinction without a difference, as a friend of mine used to say.
As [...]

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Accuracy not just confidence – some thoughts after attending SAS Global Forum 2009

March 24, 2009

Syndicated from BeyeNetwork
I spent a couple of days with thousands of SAS users this week at the SAS Global Forum 2009. There were some great sessions and, as usual with SAS, some terrific customer stories and I suspect I will write a couple of posts. This post, though, is about the theme – Leading with [...]

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Warranty Management – New rules to apply

March 11, 2009

Rob Pritchard of Infosys presented on the power of business rules in warranty. His focus is on agility – most warranty systems are inflexible and hard to change. Organizations cannot make changes to warranty policy to respond to competitors, can’t create what-if scenarios, can’t tighten claims control or pre-valid claims or repairs. These problems come [...]

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Harnessing and Coordinating Warranty Best Practices in a Global Enterprise

March 11, 2009

Terry Adams of Ingersoll Rand, the parent company of Trane, presented on harnessing and coordinating warranty best practices. IR includes Trance, Thermo King, Schlage, Steelcraft and others for about $17B worldwide. All these acquisitions have experience and systems so Ingersoll Rand has a vision of a Business Operating System to drive common [...]

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When the customer knocks you need decision management not operational BI

March 10, 2009

Syndicated from ebizQ
A friend passed on an article titled “When the customer knocks” in which Scott Arnett of Pitney Bowes discussed the power of data to improve customer interactions. Nothing there to cause me to blog you would think. Except that Scott, like too many in the Business Intelligence community, fails to acknowledge that using [...]

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First Look – Truviso

March 3, 2009

I got a second chance to chat with the folks at Truviso recently. Truviso was founded after a Professor and his PhD student, at Berkeley went back to the fundamentals of data management and predicated that in a world of highly interconnected objects it would be necessary to eliminate the batch-centric database process of “store [...]

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First Look – KXEN

February 17, 2009

I got my first chance to really see KXEN’s product a little while ago and, as I am off to Predictive Analytics World tomorrow, I thought I would blog about it. KXEN was founded in 1998. The product is designed to deliver automated data mining and predictive analytics at a function level – the user [...]

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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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