BI

Live from DAMA – What do they mean, BUSINESS Metadata?

March 18, 2008

Next up was a session from some folks at ASG talking about business metadata. They started by discussing the metadata audience and how it is changing as the syntactic and semantic richness of metadata increases. Initially there was a focus on consistent definitions for, say, COBOL copy books. Gradually expanded out to DBAs, Data Architects [...]

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Live from DAMA – Yin and Yang of Process and Data

March 18, 2008

Neil and I are attending the DAMA conference this week and I will be blogging from some sessions. First one (after a fairly long set of announcements) is the Tuesday morning keynote, Michael Blechar of Gartner on The Yin & Yang of Process and Data: Which Will Be King of the Next Generation of Applications? [...]

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Cognos, SPSS and Predictive Analytics

March 13, 2008

SPSS and IBM’s Cognos group recently made an announcement of a partnership to integrate their products. I don’t have any more details than the press release but take this announcement as an indication that IBM/Cognos reached the logical conclusion that Predictive Analytics is distinctly and uniquely different from Business Intelligence/Performance Management and that customers want/need [...]

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Has Business Intelligence Outlived its Usefulness?

March 3, 2008

I saw a post with the title “Has Business Intelligence Outlived its Usefulness?” on Colin White’s blog and my first reaction was one of shock. On reading it, however, I see that Colin is taking aim not at BI in general but at the use of the phrase – a narrower and easier target!
I do [...]

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Live from DIALOG – Scott Klososky Keynote: Do You Have Velocity Leadership?

February 25, 2008

Next up was Scott Klososky on Do You Have Velocity Leadership? Scott talks to organizations about how technology impacts different businesses and has a book coming out soon (though I could not find a link for it). He uses a quote to show his attitude to technology:
A rock pile ceases to be a [...]

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LucidEra and SaaS analytics

February 20, 2008

Had a briefing today from the folks at LucidEra about their new product releases (press releases here and here). I met them through their blog and I think this whole area of AaaS (Analytics as a Service, though that’s not the best acronym) is an interesting one. After all, if you think improving operational decisions [...]

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Some thoughts on Operational BI from TDWI

February 13, 2008

This morning I watched and listen to two old friends of mine – Wayne Eckerson of TDWI and Dan Graham of Teradata as they gave a webinar on “Approaches to operational BI” (PDF of slides, Webinar Recording). Wayne and Dan did a nice tag team discussing the principles involved and giving some Teradata-specific examples.
Wayne [...]

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BI’s New Frontiers – “not your father’s BI”

February 1, 2008

James Kobielus of Forrester posted on BI’s New Frontiers In 2008 And Beyond. While James made some interesting points I think that he missed perhaps the most interesting one – whether what we call “BI” today will be able to evolve into what we need in the future or whether these new frontiers will require [...]

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Using EDM to manage call center (and other) costs

January 18, 2008

While the primary focus of applying EDM to customer service should not be cost containment or reduction, there is still a role for EDM in managing costs. For instance:

With 25% churn and complex IT systems, training costs are a huge problem for call centers.
By automating decisions EDM can reduce the complexity and thus cost of [...]

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Using business rules and analytics together

January 7, 2008

Using business rules and analytics together is one of the defining characteristics of an enterprise decision management approach. Dan Selman had an interesting post over on the ILOG blog today – Integrating Business Objects and JRules using SOA. The post discusses a well-written “lab” white paper that walks through the process of this integration in [...]

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A different take on BI trends

December 13, 2007

Ron Shevlin had a great post today – Four BS BI Trends (And One Good One) – in which he took exception to some BI trends reported in CIO Magazine (Five Key Business Intelligence Trends You Need to Know
). Like Ron I have some comments about these trends.

Trend No. 1: There’s so much data, but [...]

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A curious reader asks…

December 7, 2007

One of my favorite things to do on my blog is respond to questions from readers. To make it easy to find these going forward I have added a new category – Reader Questions. Email me (james at smartenoughsystems.com) if you have a question you’d like me to answer on the blog. Anyway, this week [...]

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Empowering executives in 2008

November 21, 2007

Timo Elliott of the BI questions blog had a “prediction” about 2008 this month – 2008: From Business Automation to Business Optimization?. Timo makes some great points and I agree with his premise that past is about automating business processes and the future is going to be about optimizing the business, in part by ensuring [...]

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Some thoughts from the Enterprise Search Summit

November 8, 2007

I got a chance to attend some of Enterprise Search Summit West yesterday (thanks to my friends at Semantra). I attended a couple of sessions and browsed the exhibit hall.
The first session was entitled “What is Semantic Search“. Seth Earley gave a rapid 30 minute overview of semantic search. He touched on explicit and implicit [...]

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The future of intelligent businesses may not be BI

October 29, 2007

Several posts caught my eye last week while I was at the Business Rules Forum on the topic of Business Intelligence (BI) and made me wonder if “BI” is the best way to build an intelligent business. Claudia Imhoff started me off with an article on Operational Business Intelligence – A Prescription for Operational Success in which [...]

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Live from Business Rules Forum – Turbocharging Business Rules Engines with BI 2.0

October 23, 2007

Charles Nicholls of SeeWhy was up next, talking about Turbocharging business rules with BI 2.0. Charles wrote a nice little eBook called In Search of Insight (it’s free and you can download it here). I have also blogged about SeeWhy a couple of times – here and here.
Charles defined BI 2.0 as a business [...]

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Live from Business Rules Forum – Business Process Management with Business Rules and Business Intelligence

October 23, 2007

Sandy is my fellow blogger- she blogs at column2 but I met here when we both blogged over on ebizQ (my blog is here). She presented on “Business Process Management with Business Rules and Business Intelligence” and started by pointing out that she has long felt that business rules are essential for business process management [...]

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Complex Event Processing is not about BI

October 19, 2007

John Trigg over on the Apama blog had a post today – The Opportunity for Business Intelligence: Is it Evolution or Revolution? – that made me think about Complex Event Processing(CEP) and Decision Mangement.
Many of the posts I see about CEP, like John’s, are trying to compare CEP with BI and so-called Operational BI in [...]

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