Business Intelligence 2

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Business Intelligenceseptember 2009 bridging the gap between information and intelligence

business intelligence

In 1995, when data warehousing was

just another emerging information

technology, most people—including

some at TDWI—thought it was just an-

other tech fad that would fade away in a

few short years like others before it (e.g.

artificial intelligence, computer-assisted

software engineering, object-relational

databases.) But data warehousing’s light

never dimmed, and it has evolved rap-

idly to become an indispensable man-

agement tool in well-run businesses.

(See figure 1.)

In the beginning…

In the early days, data warehous-

ing served a huge pent up need within

organizations for a single version of

corporate truth for strategic and tactical

decision-making and planning. It also

provided a much needed, dedicated

repository for reporting and analy-

sis that wouldn’t interfere with core

business systems, such as order entry

and fulfillment.

What few people understood then

was that data warehousing was the

perfect, analytical complement to the

transaction systems that dominated the

business landscape. While transaction

systems were great at “getting data in,”

data warehouses were great at “get-

ting data out” and doing something

productive with it, like analyzing his-

torical trends to optimize processes,

monitoring and managing performance,

and predicting the future. Transaction

systems could not (and still can’t) do

these vitally important tasks.

Phase Two:

Business Intelligence

As it turns out, data warehousing was

just the beginning. A data warehouse is

a repository of data that is structured to

conform to the way business users think

and how they want to ask questions of

data. (“I’d like to see sales by product,

region and month for the past three

years.”)

But without good tools to access,

manipulate, and analyze data, users

can’t drive much value from the data

warehouse. So organizations began

investing in easy-to-use reporting and

analysis tools that would empower busi-

ness users to ask questions of the data

warehouse in business terms and get

answers back right away without having

to ask the IT department to create a cus-

tom report. Empowering business users

to drive insight from data using self-ser-

vice reporting and analysis tools became

known as “business intelligence.”

Phase Three:

Performance Management

Today, organizations value insights

but they want results. Having an “intel-

ligent” business (via business intelli-

gence) doesn’t do much good if the in-

sights don’t help it achieve its strategic

objectives, such as growing revenues

or increasing profits. In other words,

organizations want to equip users with

proactive information to optimize per-

formance and achieve goals.

Accordingly, business intelligence is

now morphing into performance man-

agement where organizations harness

information to improve manageability,

accountability, and productivity. The

vehicles of choice here are dashboards

and scorecards that graphically depict

performance versus plan for companies,

divisions, departments, workgroups

and even individuals. In some cases, the

graphical “key performance indicators”

are updated hourly so employees have

the most timely and accurate informa-

tion with which to optimize the pro-

cesses for which they are responsible.

Organizations have discovered that

publishing performance among peer

groups engenders friendly competi-

tion that turbocharges productivity.

But more powerfully, these tools em-

power individuals and groups to work

proactively to fix problems and exploit

opportunities before it is too late. In this

way, performance management is ac-

tionable business intelligence built on

a single version of truth delivered by a

data warehousing environment.

The Future

As Timbuk3 once sung, “The future

looks so bright I have to wear shades.”

The same could be said of business in-

telligence as it increasingly becomes a

powerful tool for business executives

to measure, monitor, and manage the

health of their organizations and keep

them on track towards achieving stra-

tegic goals.

CONTENTS 2 From Data Warehousing to

Performance Management

3 Work Smart

4 ‘Good Enough’ is no longer

Good Enough

5 ‘No’ to Gut Feel

6 Dashboards and Scorecards

6 Making BI Easier and More Fun!

7 BI in the Cloud?!

7 Humpty Dumpty meets

Data Warehousing

8 Panel of Experts

BuSINESS INTEllIGENCE

Publisher: Paul Herron [email protected] 1 646 922 1407

Contributor: Rod Newing [email protected]

Design: Carrie Reagh [email protected]

Photos: ©iStockphoto.com

Printer: Washington Post

For more information about supplements in the daily press, please contact Kayvan Salmanpour, 1 646 922 1400 [email protected]

This section was written by Mediaplanet and did not involve The Washington Post News or Editorial Departments.

www.mediaplanet.com

TDWI WORLD CONFERENCE

Figure 1. As data warehousing has morphed into business intelligence and performance management, its purpose has evolved from historical reporting to self-service analysis to actionable insights. At each step along the way, its business value has increased.

Next year marks the 15th anniversary of The Data Warehousing Institute (TDWI), an associa-tion of data warehousing and business intelligence (BI) professionals that has grown nearly as fast as the industry it serves, which now tops $9 billion according to Forrester Research.

a very special thanks to...

1990’s 2000’s 2010

Data Warehousing

Historical Reporting

Business Intelligence

client/s

erver

Web

Web serv

ices

self-service Analysis

PerformanceManagement

Low

Actionable insights

By: WAyNE EckERSON DIREcTOR, TDWI RESEARcHFrom Data Warehousing

to Performance Management


news in brief

speed bumps on the corporate bi Roadmap

competitive opportunities such as ‘see-through-analytics’, the ‘business-of-

small’, and an ‘external-world-view’ are often overlooked by large corporations.

‘See-through-analytics’ drives holistic corporate planning. It occurs when

all data structures include master data so analyses can cross multiple orga-

nizational silos.

The ‘business-of-small’ is seldom done well. Even though small groups of

analytics experts generate significant value, they are often starved for re-

sources. This occurs even in organizations with mature methodologies for

large-scale application deployment and robust response to interruptions of

service.

The ability to have an ‘external-world-view’ is

often overlooked. Tagging databases with common

external elements like DMA regions, census tracts,

and industry standard codes allows companies

to integrate and report internal data

for comparison. Such integration

allows organizations to incorporate

geographic, governmental, or economic

data into predictive models.

Tim Pletcher is the director of applied

research at central Michigan University

Research corporation. [email protected];

www.cmurc.com/bi

TDWI WORLD CONFERENCE

From Data Warehousing to Performance Management

“In a rising market ‘good

enough’ will generally allow

you to get by,” says Richard

kellett, BI manager at SAS, an analyt-

ics software vendor. “However, in the

current global market, ‘good enough’

isn’t good enough anymore. you have

to get everything you can out of every

dollar spent. Just having some statisti-

cal reports and a bit of classic BI, with

multi-dimensional analysis of his-

torical information, is no longer good

enough.”

He says that organizations now use

predictive analytics as part of their BI

solution. This models what is likely to

happen and helps them to optimize

their business. It is used in areas like

pricing, marketing campaigns and

web site sales, to give them a compet-

itive advantage. “It is about optimize,

optimize, optimize,” he says.

Given that all businesses in a market

have access to similar data and analyti-

cal technology, competitive advan-

tage flows from better analysis. This

means being superior in extracting

insights from the data into areas like

trends and customer behavior, which

can be acted upon to increase sales.

kurt Schlegel, research vice president

at Gartner, the analyst, says that BI is

very good at identifying the weak sig-

nals of opportunities that are out there

and capitalising on them, as well as de-

fending against challenges.

“In the past, BI was about head-

quarter-based decisions,” says Ambuj

Goyal, general manager for IBM in-

formation management software. “It

should be called ‘intelligent business’,

which is about leveraging what we

know to create transactions that create

competitive advantage. Greg Todd,

global information management lead

at Accenture, says that many organiza-

tions are doing a second or third itera-

tion of their BI strategies as they move

BI towards widespread or broad-based

use of analytics.

“Everyone has information and

technology can only go so far,” he

says. “It is vital to understand how

information can provide insight into

markets and customer trends. What

makes the real difference is having the

human talent within the organization

to understand how to use information

for competitive advantage.”

Work Smart: Making better use of information than your competitors is key.Surviving in the recession has caused businesses that were already competing intensively to fight even harder for every sale—and we can be sure that they won’t ease off as the economy improves. Beating your competitors to a sale, while remaining profitable, is tough, but that is what BI has always been good at.


“The BI systems installed

in most companies are

too internally focused to

be great macro-economic indicators,”

says kurt Schlegel, research vice presi-

dent on the business intelligence team

at Gartner, the analyst. “Unless you

were in the financial services industry

and your BI system was about looking

at mortgage-backed securities, not

even the best BI system could have

predicted the meltdown in the mort-

gage security industry and the freeze

in the credit markets.”

Nevertheless, BI systems have

played a part in helping organizations

to survive through the recession. Jim

Davis, chief marketing officer at SAS,

a business analytics software ven-

dor, says that it enables businesses in

multiple industries to improve opera-

tions, enhance customer relationships,

streamline supply chains, detect and

fight fraud, leverage growing volumes

of data and do more with less.

“BI is critical to cutting costs in a

downturn,” says “Schlegel. “you don’t

want to cut too close to the bone and

BI helps you trim as much fat as possi-

ble without cutting into the meat. you

don’t want to make cuts that could af-

fect your most profitable customers.”

BI also helps organizations to con-

tribute to economic growth by identi-

fying new opportunities and improv-

ing performance. Greg Todd, global

information management lead at Ac-

centure, finds that despite the reces-

sion and the economic conditions BI is

still ‘top of mind’ for most executives.

“Organizations that are looking

to do more and spend less need im-

proved BI to understand how they

are performing and how to spend

their money most efficiently,” he says.

“BI helps to define optimisation ap-

proaches and performance improve-

ments throughout an organization.”

A well designed BI strategy aligns

all employees behind the organiza-

tion’s overall objectives and measures,

monitors and rewards their behavior.

Ambuj Goyal, general manager for IBM

information management software,

says that every time an industry has

become more efficient, the economy

has expanded. BI systems are now

assisting individuals who deal with

customers to make correct micro-

decisions within the context of board-

level macro-decisions.

“Organizations doing micro-deci-

sions see an inflexion point of effi-

ciency that improves their margins,”

he says. “This efficiency creates eco-

nomic expansion.”

The biggest contributors to our

economic recovery is the government

stimulus package under the Recovery

Act, which requires recipients to report

on the expenditure of those funds.

chris Boorman, chief marketing officer

of Informatica, a data integration soft-

ware provider, says that transparency

and visibility on that funding is a big BI

exercise, to pull the data from all types

of IT environments and analyze it to

understand what it has been used for.

“It is critical that the government

demonstrates that the value that

people expect from this massive com-

mitment has been created from every

dollar of that has been pumped into

the economy,” he says. “It will also

help to understand how the markets

are recovering.” Goyal adds that once

we have this 100% transparency, effi-

ciencies will follow.

Alys Woodward, program manager

for BI at IDc, the analyst, concludes

that although BI is not the most impor-

tant factor in economic recovery, it has

an important role to play in support-

ing it. “Best practices in data manage-

ment and information sharing lead to

improved decision making, which will

benefit the entire economy, “she says.

“Individual organizations that make

better use of information than their

competitors have the best opportu-

nity to turn the recession and recovery

to their advantage.”

‘Good Enough’ is no Longer Good Enough survival and recovery require clever bi systems.Not even the keenest advocates of business intelligence argue that BI alone can bring the global economy out of recession. However, it clearly has a role in seeing organizations through the recession and helping them back to growth, hence contributing to US economic recovery. It can also show how effectively the in-jection of government funds has been spent. However, most systems would not have spotted the recession in advance.


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However, ‘competing Through

Business Analytics’, an Accen-

ture survey, found that 40% of

important business decisions are not

based on analytics. The reasons given

were sufficient data not available

(61%); no past data for the decisions

and innovation they are addressing

(61%); and relying on qualitative and

subjective factors (55%).

40% say one of the biggest chal-

lenges they have is lack of standard

processes across the company for ana-

lyzed business data and 57% said they

don’t have a beneficial, consistently

updated enterprise-wide analytical ca-

pability. 72% are working to increase

their company’s business analytics

usage.

“With the amount of information

that is available, you want the orga-

nization to be working towards fact-

based decisions, but unfortunately

people revert back,” says Greg Todd,

global information management lead

at Accenture. “Improving the quality of

business decisions has a direct impact

on costs and revenue and 71% said

that BI helps them with their opera-

tional performance, which is a strong

indicator that the trust and value in BI

is there.” It plays a role in pricing strat-

egies (55%), asset management (54%),

customer retention (52%) and talent

management (33%).

“The complexity of most existing BI

tools often prevents users from access-

ing the data they need,” says kristina

kerr, lead BI product manager at Mi-

crosoft. “They require more than just

numbers, so a natural step in the deci-

sion-making process is to collaborate

with people to ensure that expertise,

insight and stakeholder opinions are

factored into each decision.”

kurt Schlegel, research vice presi-

dent at Gartner, the analyst, says that

whereas most BI deployments empha-

size information delivery and analysis

to support fact-based decision-mak-

ing, they fail to link them to the deci-

sion itself, to the outcome, to decision-

making best practices or to the related

collaboration and decision inputs. This

reduces the quality and transparency

of resulting decisions.

“Organizations must improve their

decision management capabilities by

capturing knowledge of how deci-

sions are made and their outcomes,”

says Alys Woodward, program man-

ager for business analytics at IDc, the

analyst. “They need to be able access

both structured data and unstructured

data to analyze and collaboratively

and automate repeatable, tactical

decisions,” she says. “However, the

key market growth in the BI space will

come from users moving away from

spreadsheet-based infrastructures,

built and maintained by business users

rather than IT.”

‘No’ to Gut FeelDecision-making must be based on collaboration and a wider range of data sources.Decisions are supposed to be based on facts, but are often made on the basis of experience and ‘gut feel’. Sadly, these take years to develop, may never be ac-quired and are subject to bias. The role of BI is to provide facts and insight to support better decisions.

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■ Analyze the past ■ Monitor in real time ■ Predict the futureinformationbuilders.com/go/wapo

Can your business intelligence software:

Whereas a dashboard is fairly

simple to implement, a

scorecard is a far more sci-

entific and structured way at looking

at the state of the company, although

it can be reported as part of a dash-

board. The balanced scorecard was

devised by kaplan & Norton to view

an organization’s overall performance

to ensure sustained profitability. It

integrates financial measures; cus-

tomer perspectives; internal business

processes; and organizational growth,

learning and innovation.

“The complexity of managing an

organization today requires managers

to view performance in several areas

simultaneously,” say kaplan & Nor-

ton. “By forcing them to consider all

the important operational measures

together, the balanced scorecard can

let them see whether improvement in

one area may be achieved at the ex-

pense of another.”

It involves developing a cascading

series of kPI’s which are used to trans-

late the overall strategy into different

operational measures relevant to each

level that will contribute to the top

level.

“Most organizations have turned re-

ports into dashboards over the last few

years, which is easy,” says kurt Schlegel,

research vice president at Gartner, the

analyst. “Scorecards are much more

difficult to build and are much less

widely adopted. However, organiza-

tions that have tied dashboards to a

broader performance management

initiative have experienced success.

Tying BI to performance management

makes it more strategic, which has

been the single biggest factor in run-

ning a successful BI program over the

last few years.”

As we see in the foreword, the data

warehouse sits at the heart of an en-

tire BI architecture within the organi-

zation, providing a source of accurate,

complete and timely information. “Ul-

timately, BI about being able to access

data from a variety of places, integrate

it and make it trusted,” says chris Boor-

man, chief marketing officer of Infor-

matica, a data integration software

provider. “you can’t do BI without

trusted valuable data.”

The data warehouse is usually ac-

cessed direct by marketing and analy-

sis experts for complex applications,

like data mining. For most users, sum-

marized data is transferred into a se-

ries of smaller ‘data marts’ that provide

management information at corporate

and departmental level. Users access

these through a range of easy-to-use

software tools that allow then to work

interactively with the data.

Typical applications include que-

rying, modelling, planning/budget-

ing/forecasting, reporting, financial

consolidation, activity-based costing/

management, scorecards, dashboards,

portals, analysis, tax planning, treasury

planning and risk management.

kurt Schlegel, research vice presi-

dent at Gartner, the analyst, sees BI

software continuing to increase its

breadth of capabilities. Interactive vi-

sualization will make BI more fun and

easy by giving end users a wide variety

of interactive and intuitive graphics.

He also says that the big vendors are

investing heavily in integrated search.

This will make BI content accessible to

non-traditional BI users by indexing

structured and unstructured content

with a search engine.

“BI technologies empower end-us-

ers to make better, faster and more in-

telligent decisions,” says kristina kerr,

lead BI product manager at Microsoft.

“It helps users get better business in-

sight, while reducing dependence on

their IT departments. This eliminates

time spent on ad-hoc BI requests, en-

abling both IT professionals and users

to provide greater strategic value to

the business.”

Dashboards and Scorecards Scorecards are difficult, but bring success.A BI dashboard is a computer screen that is designed to provide an instant picture of what is going on in the organization, its markets and its business envi-ronment. Each is designed for a specific person or role to show at a glance what is most important to the user. It may show yesterday’s sales orders and manufacturing output, a news stream, industry news, to six best selling products, ten cost centers most over budget, this week’s key performance in-dicators (kPIs), etc. The user can click on any item to get more detail.

Making BI Easier and More Fun!bi requires a complete infrastructure.

The traditional focus on tools has limited the business intelligence indus-

try’s impact: Most non-technical users find them hard to learn. They need

the right information at the point of decision-making, which means widely

deployed BI applications—integrated into their day-to-day responsibili-

ties—must increase in importance relative to slice-and-dice tooling.

- Jake Freivald, CMO Information Builders.

the complexity of managing

an organization today requires

managers to view performance in several areas

simultaneously...

...helps users get better business insight, while

reducing depen-dence on their it

departments.


BI software is operated by a ser-

vice provider on its own high

performance computing in-

frastructure. It is shared by a number

of different user organizations who

access the service over the internet

and pay on the basis of usage. It elimi-

nates the up-front costs of software

and hardware, is more reliable, more

flexible and offers powerful new ap-

plications.

“People find it much easier to bring

data inside than moving it outside,”

says Ambuj Goyal, general manager

at IBM information management soft-

ware. “However, time after time, we

are seeing that if organizations can

access a secure legally-private envi-

ronment, they do not want to build

their own analytical database. They

want somebody else to process their

data and send back the results of the

analysis.”

Many organizations are already

using business software hosted by

providers like NetSuite and Salesforce.

com, so it is very natural to extend to

use their integrated BI functionality.

It is also an attractive proposition for

mid-sized organizations that don’t

have in-house analysis skills.

Richard kellett, BI manager at SAS,

a business analytics software vendor,

says that putting an entire BI infra-

structure into the cloud can be dif-

ficult, with links to lots of operational

systems. However, individual BI ap-

plications work well in the cloud, es-

pecially if they are embedded into a

business application.

“BI in the cloud is good news,” con-

cludes Alys Woodward, business ana-

lytics program manager at IDc, the

analyst. “It will help one-off analytics

projects, existing systems struggling

to calculate quickly enough or new

user organizations that want to move

up to a more mature implementation.

It is not a panacea for all BI ills, but it

will remove some implementation ob-

stacles, reducing the significant chal-

lenge of succeeding with BI.”

Thousands of industry leaders rely on MicroStrategy business intelligence software for detailed insights into their businesses.

www.microstrategy.com

BI in the Cloud?!there is a solid reality behind this nebulous concept.The terms ‘business intelligence’ and ‘the cloud’ are much loved by marketing departments, are both meaningless and both distract from a very solid business reality. Gartner defines cloud computing as ‘a style of computing in which scalable and elastic IT-enabled capabilities are delivered as a service to external customers using internet technologies’. A

data warehouse reflects the

organization—the more frac-

tured and disintegrated the

organization, the harder it is to create

a robust, highly functional data ware-

house. These data repositories really

are a tool to reintegrate a fractured

enterprise and provide a holistic and

consistent view where none exists.

Most organizations are like Humpty

Dumpty teetering and tottering on

top of a big wall. With the slightest

gust of wind, Humpty crashes and

breaks into dozens of pieces. And data

warehousing teams are “all the king’s

horses and all the king’s men” who

are charged with putting Humpty

Dumpty back together again.

Today, most companies have frag-

mented into dozens or hundreds of

largely unconnected business units,

departments, and workgroups, each

with their own strategies, policies,

processes, applications, systems, IT

staffs, and data. It’s the job of the cEO

to bring order to this chaos. If the cEO

provides the business with a clear, co-

herent strategy, integrated processes

and systems, and standard definitions

and rules governing those processes,

then there is almost no need for a

data warehouse.

The king’s horses and men didn’t

cause Humpty Dumpty to fall, but

they often get blamed if they can’t

glue him back together again. Per-

haps poor Humpty Dumpty is cracked

beyond repair so that even the best

and brightest of the king’s men can’t

rehabilitate him.

The good news is that unlike our

fairy tale metaphor, many BI teams

do succeed in gluing their companies

back together, at least for awhile until

the next merger, acquisition, or other

organizational upheaval blasts every-

thing apart. But while it lasts, these

unsung heroes should be congratu-

lated and honored; not outsourced,

off shored, or reassigned to the IT-

equivalent of a Siberian gulag.

The moral of the story is this: don’t

blame the data warehousing team if

it can’t deliver a successful data ware-

house; blame the cEO. The data ware-

house is merely a messenger, a reflec-

tion of the state of organizational

dysfunction.

Humpty Dumpty meets Data Warehousing

There is a dirty, little secret about data warehouses: we wouldn’t need them if top executives ran their organizations properly.

By: WAyNE EckERSON, DIREcTOR TDWI RESEARcH

...many bi teams do succeed in

gluing their companies back together, at least for awhile until

the next merger, acquisition, or other organiza-tional upheaval

blasts everything apart.


Panel of Experts:

BI can play a huge role in

stimulating the global econ-

omy back to form. Organiza-

tions have invested billions of

dollars in operational business

systems, which are great for

running business processes,

but not for decision support.

BI pulls together detailed data

from multiple systems to give

managers the ability to capi-

talise on these investments by

quickly identifying problems

and opportunities.

It might only be used ten

minutes a day, but it will be crit-

ical in driving the business. It

quickly shows the user what is

going on and where the prob-

lems and the opportunities lie.

The rest of the day is spent act-

ing on the insight gathered.

Traditionally BI has been

used by large corporations,

but it must be democratised to

make it suitable for mid-sized

organizations. Packaged solu-

tions that run in the cloud allow

smaller companies to benefit

without a multi-million dollar

investment. Each organization

must navigate its own way out

of the slump, but effective use

of BI can chart the way.

Ben Taub, chief executive of

Dataspace, a BI software and

consulting firm.

This economic disaster was

largely caused by a catastrophic

lack of information about fi-

nancial instruments. Subse-

quent lack of information has

prolonged the downturn, as

people continue to fear the un-

known and simply wait. Organi-

zations that do not have timely

and accurate information will

continue to remain frozen.

BI eliminates unknowns and

is playing a pivotal role in re-

storing confidence by illumi-

nating the broader economic

landscape. Users understand

their business and have the

confidence to make invest-

ments, re-start operations and

expand their markets.

Information is the largest re-

newable economic resource in

the world and remains largely

untapped because of its sheer

size. The uses of information,

like the uses of electricity, are

limitless, driven by imagina-

tion and inventiveness. Mod-

ern enterprises must build the

information power plants and

power grids that will unleash

the inventiveness of their em-

ployees. knowledge is the key

to confidence, and confidence

is the key to economic recovery.

Michael Saylor, chief executive

officer at MicroStrategy, a BI soft-

ware vendor.

Business analysts’ desire to

put more and more data in

the warehouse is accelerating

in the current economic situ-

ation, as US organizations use

BI to cut costs. With BI data-

bases growing and managers

wanting more sophisticated

analysis, BI is getting harder.

Most database administrators

are either in pain or can see it

coming.

This will make it essential to

build a ‘shared nothing’ envi-

ronment, consisting of a large

number of cheap servers that

can be easily expanded as the

data grows. The data ware-

house must then store data in

columns, not rows, which is far

more efficient. It reads just the

columns it needs, where tra-

ditional systems have to read

every column in every row. It

is many times faster, simpler,

doesn’t store lots of header in-

formation, is easier to compress

and uses cache more efficiently.

This approach will com-

pletely take over the data ware-

house market within a decade.

This will help the US economy

through smarter BI and better

decisions.

Michael Stonebraker, founder

and chief technical officer at

Vertica, has pioneered database

technology research for more

than a quarter of a century.

In today’s global economy,

the record pace of change

leads to the need for quick de-

cisions on where to invest and

how to run the business that

impacts organizational success

or failure. BI provides organiza-

tions with the insight to make

timely decisions that are most

likely to provide the desired

outcomes.

The data that fuels the BI sys-

tems comes from a variety of

internal and external sources,

often very disparate and global.

BI takes this data and trans-

forms it into information that

is accurate, timely, and action-

able; often through hundreds

of processes including extrac-

tion, cleaning, transformation,

integration, loading, analysis,

etc. With its multitude of con-

nectors, global control, and

alerting, it is the role of enter-

prise scheduling to manage the

complex flow of data from var-

ied sources into the BI system

and ultimately deliver it out as

information to the appropriate

end users. In the hands of the

right leaders, this information is

what drives the success of the

enterprise.

Derek Evan solutions architect

for advanced services at Tidal

Software, a Cisco company that

provides application scheduling

and performance management

software.

Organizations that have de-

ployed BI successfully are not

only surviving the downturn,

but thriving. It has helped them

to manage inventories, cut

costs, better target promotions,

increase equipment utilization

and identify their most loyal

customers and their prefer-

ences. They have moved BI from

the back-office to the front line.

They no longer run the busi-

ness on gut-feel, but use fact-

based decision making.

Jack Welch once said that

when times are good you grow

and when times are bad you

build. Our most visionary clients

are investing in BI for the long-

haul. Although their IT budgets

have been cut, they know that

understanding their business

from both an operational and

strategic perspective could

mean the difference between

fast-follower and market leader.

We have seen them use

analytics to introduce new

products and services ahead

of their competitors, segment

their customers differently

and launch smart marketing

campaigns that have increased

overall revenues. They reap the

true benefits of BI by using it as

a strategic differentiator.

Jill Dyché is a partner with

Baseline Consulting, which pro-

vides business intelligence, data

governance and technology de-

livery services.

BEN TAUBcEO Dataspace

MIcHAEl SAylORchief Executive OfficerMicroStrategy

The web and BI are the most

important developments in

the global economy. The web

brings new opportunities

for organizations to interact

with their customers, but only

through an explosion of data.

Organizations that succeed

at the end of the recovery will

have harnessed the power of

the web and made sense of the

data to drive up revenue and

profitability of their customer

relationships.

The trend in BI is towards

lower costs and quicker wins,

causing resurgence in inde-

pendent data marts. These are

subject specific and fed directly

from operational systems,

rather than from an underly-

ing enterprise data warehouse.

They tend to contain sum-

marized data, making them

smaller and faster.

They are very specific to the

business manager’s problem

and give them access to the

data that matters to them most.

They are a lower cost, lower risk

way to get value out of the data

more quickly, speaking directly

to business managers who

need to increase revenue and

profits.

Bruce Armstrong, CEO and

Chairman of the Board brings 25

years of technology-specific de-

velopment, marketing and sales

experience to the his position at

Kickfire.

BRUcE ARMSTRONGchairman of the Boardand chief Executive Officerkickfire

MIcHAEl STONEBRAkERFounder and chief Technical OfficerVertica

DEREk EVANSolutions Architect for Advanced ServicesTidal Software

JIll DycHéPartnerBaseline consulting

How has business intelligence played a vital role into stimulating the global economy back to form?

Documents

Business Intelligence 2