report

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 (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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Ostriches, BI and EDM

June 4, 2008

What, you may ask, do Ostriches have to do with Enterprise Decision Management (EDM) or, indeed, with SAS? Well I saw an ad for SAS on the back of DM Review this month with an Ostrich. I forget the punch line but the reason for the Ostrich was that its eyes are bigger than its [...]

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Searching structured data and the finding the voice of the customer

June 2, 2008

A couple of companies I follow had interesting announcements today. First Attensity announced its new “Market Voice” product designed to allow automatic analysis of blogs, forums, reviews and other kinds of customer-generated content. The idea is to bring this information into the same environment as internal unstructured information so it can be analyzed as part [...]

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When is a cockpit not a cockpit?

May 30, 2008

When it’s a dashboard.
I often hear people talk about fighter pilots as a model for the future of business users. For instance, Ade McCormack did in his book on the IT value stack. Indeed this is such a good mental image that many companies use it – either to promote their products or to talk [...]

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Age of Dynamic Business Applications

May 21, 2008

Dean Hager from Lawson came on to follow-up on the dynamic business applications story. Dynamic means “continuous change, activity, or progress” and Enterprise Applications “suck at this” to use his words. But this is a problem as the world is changing – people change, events cause change, the business climate changes and more. He asked [...]

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The most important thing I know about Analytics is that no-one agrees what it means

May 12, 2008

Tony Rose over on Decision Support Analytics had this post where he asked for submissions in a particular format – the one used in the title.
I will post a couple of others this week as I have time. Here goes then with the first one:
The most important thing I know about Analytics is that no-one [...]

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Live from DAMA – Impact of Service Oriented Architecture on Data Modeling: A Case Study

March 20, 2008

First session today was some folks from Allstate Financial talking about the Impact of Service Oriented Architecture on Data Modeling: A Case Study. AllState Financial has the large number of data sources typical of a large corporation. Each line of business has its own administrative systems and mergers and acquisitions also create new data sources. [...]

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Why ARE you still generating reports?

December 18, 2007

Mike Kavitz asked this question – Why are you still generating reports? – on his blog today and it made me think. Why ARE you still generating reports? Not just in the way Mike means the question (why is IT generating reports instead of empowering users with information). I mean this in a broader way [...]

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