Business intelligence
Analysis of companies, products, and user strategies in the area of business intelligence. Related subjects include:
- Data warehousing
- Business Objects
- Cognos
- QlikTech
- (in Text Technologies) Text mining
- (in Text Technologies) Text analytics/business intelligence integration
- (in The Monash Report) Strategic issues in business intelligence
- (in Software Memories) Historical notes on business intelligence
Some interesting links
In no particular order: Read more
| Categories: Business intelligence, EnterpriseDB and Postgres Plus, Fun stuff, Hadoop, Humor, In-memory DBMS, MapReduce, Memory-centric data management, Open source, Oracle, SAP AG | 2 Comments |
What matters in mobile business intelligence
Michael Fitzgerald of Computerworld offers an article to the effect that mobile business intelligence is hot. He cites just about every vendor except Microstrategy as seeing or indeed pushing this trend — and that probably just means Microstrategy didn’t return his call quickly enough, as they’re betting heavily on the mobile BI trend themselves.
In essence, mobile BI seems to be about small, portable dashboards. Now, I’ve been critical of dashboard technology for years, because of myriad ways in which it fails to live up to the potential of decision support. Some (not all) of those criticisms are being addressed by more recent dashboard technology developments. But with one exception, those criticisms are of little direct relevance to the mobile case.
What’s going on in mobile BI is not so much general decision support as it is quick information retrieval and navigation. Read more
| Categories: Business intelligence | 4 Comments |
How I’m planning to package user services
On the Monash Research business website right now, you could find multiple pages explaining and extolling our vendor consulting services. We even have posted standard contracts that:
- Are concise.
- Are priced in terms units of work, yet do not require me to meter services at precise hourly or daily rates.
- Have a minimum scope that allows me to feel comfortable I’m spending enough time with a client to do good work.
- Extend over time, mimicking the subscription model of analyst services.*
- Do not contain any concept of “work for hire,” transfer of intellectual property, or “we own your brain.”
- Don’t have any other features that are stunningly inappropriate for our business.
By way of contrast, the user services portion of our site is only a few lines long, and that’s beginning to hurt. Read more
| Categories: About this blog, Analytic technologies, Business intelligence, Data warehousing | 6 Comments |
My talk this morning
Netezza’s Enzee Universe conference is now almost over, and I still haven’t figured out what my gig as “conference blogger” entails. More precisely, I’m operating from our unspoken fallback plan, namely “If all else fails, do what you’d do anyway, but do more of it.” For me to live up to that, all Netezza had to do was find interesting things to write about — and as far as I’m concerned, they already did that last Thursday in spades; the five interesting meetings they set up for with users and partners on Tuesday were just gravy.
Another part of the deal was that I’d give a talk this morning at 9:30 am. And when I give talks, I like to put up posts that cover whatever material I haven’t written up before, while also offering the talk’s listeners convenient links to materials I have already covered previously at length.
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Business intelligence, Data warehousing, Netezza, Presentations | 3 Comments |
The underlying technology of QlikView
QlikTech* finally decided both to become a client and, surely not coincidentally, to give me more technical detail about QlikView than it had when last we talked a couple of years ago. Indeed, I got to spend a couple of hours on the phone not just with Anthony Deighton, but also with QlikTech’s Hakan Wolge, who wrote 70-80% of the code in QlikView 1.0, and remains in effect QlikTech’s chief architect to this day.
*Or, as it now appears to be called, Qlik Technologies.
Let’s start with some quick reminders:
- QlikTech makes QlikView, a widely popular business intelligence (BI) tool suite.
- QlikView is distinguished by the flexibility of navigation through its user interface.
- To support this flexibility, QlikView preloads all data you might want to query into memory.
Let’s also dispose of one confusion right up front, namely QlikTech’s use of the word associative: Read more
| Categories: Business intelligence, Database compression, Memory-centric data management, QlikTech and QlikView | 36 Comments |
Various quick notes
As you might imagine, there are a lot of blog posts I’d like to write I never seem to get around to, or things I’d like to comment on that I don’t want to bother ever writing a full post about. In some cases I just tweet a comment or link and leave it at that.
And it’s not going to get any better. Next week = the oft-postponed elder care trip. Then I’m back for a short week. Then I’m off on my quarterly visit to the SF area. Soon thereafter I’ve have a lot to do in connection with Enzee Universe. And at that point another month will have gone by.
Anyhow: Read more
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Business intelligence, Data warehousing, Exadata, GIS and geospatial, Google, IBM and DB2, Netezza, Oracle, Parallelization, SAP AG, SAS Institute | 3 Comments |
Stakeholder-facing analytics
There’s a point I keep making in speeches, and used to keep making in white papers, yet have almost never spelled out in this blog. Let me now (somewhat) correct the oversight.
Analytic technology isn’t only for you. It’s also for your customers, citizens, and other stakeholders.
I am not referring here to what is well understood to be an important, fast-growing activity — providing data and its analysis to customers as your primary or only business — nor to the related business of taking people’s data, crunching it for them, and giving them results. That combined sector — which I am pretty alone in aggregating into one and calling data mart outsourcing — is one of the top several vertical markets for a lot of the analytic DBMS vendors I write about. Rather, I’m talking about enterprises that gather data for some primary purpose, and have discovered that a good secondary use of the data is to reflect it back to stakeholders, often the same ones who provided or created it in the first place.
For now I’ll call this category stakeholder-facing analytics, as the shorter phrase “stakeholder analytics” would be ambiguous.* I first picked up the idea early this decade from Information Builders, for whom it had become something of a specialty. I’ve been asking analytics vendors for examples of stakeholder-facing analytics ever since, and a number have been able to comply. But the whole thing is in its early days even so; almost any sufficiently large enterprise should be more active in stakeholder-facing analytics than it currently is.
Read more
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Business intelligence, Data mart outsourcing, Fox and MySpace, PostgreSQL | 4 Comments |
Further quick SAP/Sybase reactions
Raj Nathan of Sybase has been calling around to chat quickly about the SAP/Sybase deal and related matters. Talking with Raj didn’t change any of my initial reactions to SAP’s acquisition of Sybase. I also didn’t bother Raj with too many hard questions, as he was clearly in call-and-reassure mode, reaching out to customers and influencers alike.
That said, Read more
Quick reactions to SAP acquiring Sybase
SAP is acquiring Sybase. On the conference call SAP said Sybase would be run as a separate division of SAP (no surprise). Most of the focus was on Sybase’s mobile technology, which is forecast at >$400 million in 2010 revenues (which would be 30%ish of the total). My quick reactions include: Read more
8 not very technical problems with analytic technology
In a couple of talks, including last Thursday’s, I’ve rattled off a list of eight serious problems with analytic technology, all of them human or organizational much more than purely technical. At best, these problems stand in the way of analytic success, and at least one is a lot worse than that.
The bulleted list in my notes is:
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Individual-human
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Expense of expertise
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Limited numeracy
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Organizational
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Limited budgets
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Legacy systems
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General inertia
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Political
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Obsolete systems
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Clueless lawmakers
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Obsolete legal framework
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I shall explain. Read more