Also discussed were the plans for SAP Netweaver and incorporating MDM (A2i acquisition) into it as Netweaver MDM, one of the only MDM products with ‘writeback’. Also, a lot of focus was on BO Accelerator - which I’ve blogged about before - to speed up BW performance. One gets the impression it’s supposed to be more than a luxury item for BW. Of course, Crystal Reports remains a focus (BEX moving to Crystal) and Xcelsius was mentioned as their dashboard. I’m a fan of Xcelsius, but it takes a knock here and there for being more of a desktop, than an enterprise, tool.

Technorati tags: Business Intelligence, Independent Analyst Platform, Business Objects

My fellow attendees were Alec Sharp, Barry Devlin, Beth Gold-Bernstein, Bill Inmon, Claudia Imhoff, Clive Finkelstein, David Loshin, David McGoveran, Gwen Thomas, Jan Henderyckx, John Ladley, John Zachman, Jos van Dongen, Ram Krishnan, Lyndsay Wise, Mark Madsen, Mike Ferguson, Nancy Williams, Peter Aiken, Richard Hackathorn, Rick van der Lans, Shawn Rogers and Stan Locke.

The international flavor of the attendees was evident, as was the strong pedigree of knowledge. I owe a great deal to many of them. Thanks especially to Rick van der Lans for organizing this compact, minimal-fluff education event.

For the speakers, please forgive us for our incessant short-attention span behavior as we typed away while you spoke. It was mostly note taking. There was some detail gathering and cross-checking on the internet and chatting on same in real-time. There were lots of questions and challenges of the speakers, which made for a lively event. (Note to self: forgive this behavior in your classes!)

Some of the questions were about the gap between the vendor’s products and successful implementations of information management, which naturally incorporate stewardship, data quality, governance, metadata, architecture, methodology, process, etc. Vendors are not to be faulted for the lack of such things in their products. These are mostly best practices that people have to add to the product implementations. Vendors can be faulted however if their products are incompatible with these practices and, as is more common, if the products are sold downplaying the need (i.e., as the “silver bullet”).

I think it is somewhat interesting the vendors who chose to attend and present to us. It indicates a confidence in their product sets technically and an eagerness to get the word out. I won’t repeat their marketing messages. I’ve hyperlinked the vendor names below and, at their websites, you can find a lot of that information. I will break out my observations of the vendors into other blog entries.

Vendors: BusinessObjects/SAP, Information Builders, Composite Software, Serena Software, Informatica, Progress, Microsoft, Teradata, Datallegro, Corizon, Lumigent, Kalido, Hewlett-Packard, Pervasive Software, Dataupia and Ingres Corporation.

Technorati tags: Business Intelligence, Independent Analyst Platform

First, to levelset, SAAS refers to those set of solutions that are ‘housed’ offsite at the location of the vendor who actually developed the application. If a vendor is hosting all or most of a company’s software, well beyond those applications which the vendor built, that is really an outsourcing relationship and falls under different rules. These 2 approaches are seldom compatible since the cost of applications to an outsourcing relationship is usually additive and efficiences are gained from having more applications at the outsourcer.

Back to SAAS, the 3 hallmarks or selling points are (1) no IT involvement, (2) pay-as-you-go with little upfront cost and (3) the vendor takes all responsibility for infrastructure and upgrades – those invasive and non-value-added activities. The perception of SAAS is lower costs, speed to market and no IT. Interest is growing across a range of applications at my clients and much of SAAS is designed to fit within a departmental budget.

Here are some rules of thumb for the consideration of SAAS solutions, BI or otherwise:

1. Check the value proposition of the application.

Of course, this applies to any application, SAAS or otherwise. However, it’s worth mentioning that there should be some bottom-line business benefit at some level to actually doing the application in the first place.

Today’s ERP environments are well aware of the real-time and up-to-date need for information and facilitate much of the analysis needed in three ways:
• By providing the analysis within the ERP system
• By flexibly allowing for data warehouse feeds
• By enabling enterprise application integration (EAI) and enterprise information integration (EII) for interchange with other operational systems and cross-system queries

I completely agree, but I also feel it's a matter of maturity, and mature BI environments can get there. I also believe it's a best practice to measure and that it has a high correlation to overall "success", whether success is defined by the numbers or otherwise.

Following are some focuses, in order from healthiest to unhealthiest, that business intelligence programs fall into. As we progress through the focuses, you will notice the focus gets further and further away from the user.

Business Focus #1: Return on Investment
ROI is the holy grail of focus for business intelligence. Those teams that focus on achieving it have learned what business intelligence is all about. Studies have shown that driving toward ROI highly correlates to self-reported program success scores. The focus on ROI just seems to encourage the development team to work backwards to doing the right things day in and day out for the ultimate arbiter of success - the bottom line. Ultimately, to claim this focus, a team must have a great handle on the succeeding focuses well.

Business Focus #2: Data Usage
Those programs that don't measure ROI or are too removed from business processes that drive ROI but still want a business-focused BI program focus on the usage of the data. The objective here is increasing numbers and complexity of usage. With this focus, user statistics such as logins and query bands are tracked; however, little is understood about what the users ultimately do with the results.

Business Focus #3: Data Gathering and Availability