BI

First Look – Oracle Real-Time Decisions 3.0

June 24, 2009

I got a chance to get an overview of the latest release of Oracle Real-Time Decisions, 3.0. This is the platform for real-time decisions on which various applications (for call center, web etc) are built and sold as part of the Oracle Applications suite.
The vision of this product is to optimize “return on attention” – [...]

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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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Everyone makes decisions – your systems should too

May 19, 2009

Syndicated from BeyeNetwork
Merv Adrian recently posted on Information Builders Prepares to Ramp It Up and this made me think of webFocus. Like Merv I recently spoke with Michael Corcoran and learned a little more about Information Builder’s attitude to decision making and information.
The webFocus page says “Because Everyone Makes Decisions” and pushing information access and [...]

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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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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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Do not underestimate the need for automation in decision making

April 20, 2009

Tom Davenport wrote a nice piece last year that recently showed up on my radar – 10 Principles of the New Business Intelligence – on HarvardBusiness.org. His first principle was particularly good:
Decisions are the unit of work to which BI initiatives should be applied.
Whether you are just looking to make your reporting and dashboards more [...]

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Business Analytics and IBM

April 15, 2009

Syndicated from BeyeNetwork
I participated in a panel at IBM’s launch of its new Business Analytics and Optimization service line this week. I wrote a quick post to go with the launch and having attended and heard the IBM folks talk about it and had a chance to talk with some of them I thought a [...]

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From Decision Support to Action Support

April 13, 2009

I often write about the difference between decision support systems and the kind of systems that result from applying decision management – decision management applications. For instance, this post on To Hell with Business Intelligence, try Decision Management and this interview with Dan Power. Last week I came across a great way to describe the [...]

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Another analyst firm (Ventana Research) gets it

April 6, 2009

Syndicated from BeyeNetwork
It can sometimes be lonely being a proponent of a big new idea like decision management. It is delightful, then, when you find out that you are less alone than you expected. Last week I came across a couple of white papers from Ventana Research – Extending BI to Support Operational Decision Management [...]

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Do We Really Need More Data?

April 4, 2009

Stephen Few had another of his great posts on his Visual Business Intelligence blog – Do We Really Need More Data?. Stephen’s posts are always worth readingg – I highly recommend the blog – and this one prompted me to comment and I thought I would reproduce the comment here.
I see this problem regularly, albeit [...]

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Here’s how to build on Business Analytics

March 31, 2009

As I blogged earlier, at the SAS Global Forum this week some SAS speakers drew a distinction between Business Intelligence – BI – and Business Analytics. I worry that this is a distinction without a difference and that it fell short of what SAS can offer its customers. Neil Raden, on his blog, dismissed the [...]

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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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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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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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DIALOG Agile IT Infrastructure

February 6, 2009

Another panel, this time on how business rules fits into an agile IT infrastructure. British Airways, PMI (mortgage related services), Swiss Medical (Argentinian health insurance) and Wyndham Group were represented. Panels are tough to blog so here’s a list of takeaways:

Start small and in a well known area to prove out the technology but have [...]

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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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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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