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8/4/2019 8011_30 Things You Need to Know About BI Software
1/12an IT Management eBook
30 Things You Need to
Know About BusinessIntelligence Software
8/4/2019 8011_30 Things You Need to Know About BI Software
2/12
2 10 Emerging Trends in Business Intelligence Sotware
4 10 Common Business Intelligence Sotware Mistakes
7 10 Leading Business Intelligence Sotware Solutions
10Is Business Intelligence Sotware Coming Up Short?
4
2
7
10
Contents
This content was adapted from Internet.coms Datamation Web site. Contributors: LarryMarion, Thor Olavsrud, and David Needle.
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30 Things You Need to Know AboutBusiness Intelligence Software
usiness Intelligence sotwares biggest
emerging technology over the next
year or two will be rom the smallest
devices. Smartphones like the iPhone and
the Android can access online data stores, analytical
applications, and other parts o the business intelligence
stack. This provides senior executives, eld sales teams,and retail clerks with real-time
access to sales trends, potential
inventory issues, or supply chain
glitches.
The CEO o the MolsonCoors
beer company, or example,
uses his iPhone to check on key
perormance indicators and
other business intelligence data,
according to Katrina Coyle,global inormation ocer at
MolsonCoors.
Her comments were one o
many examples o the rise
o mobile device access to
business intelligence sotware, data, and analytics tools,
and exemplied one o the emerging technologies
highlighted at the Gartner BI Summit, held in the spring
in Las Vegas.
In more than a dozen interviews over the three days o
the event, I did a act check on the emerging trends
noted by Kurt Schlegel, Gartner VP or research and one
o its top business intelligence seers. Some agreed with
his list, others had their own lists.
1. In-Memory Analytics
Appliances, buckets o DRAM, and sotware, oh my.
The technologies have been around or several years,
but are now a mainstream solution to the perormance
challenges posed by many existing business intelligence
implementations.
2. Columnar Databases
Just ocus on the columns, not the rows o data in yourstructured data stores. Vendors
like Vertica and others oer a
solution to the big data problem.
3. Cloud Computing
Ofoad the data created by your
business intelligence sotware
and spread out the storage and
processing burden. Not new, but
denitely gaining traction among
big companies, not just themedium-sized companies initially
signing up or cloud-based
business intelligence solutions.
4. Interactive Visualization
The right graphics deliver insight
aster and deeper than simple pie charts. But can the
ront line troops really understand a scatter plot?
5. Integrated Search
Forget SQL query, use the Google interace.
6. Mobile Business Intelligence
iPhone access to online data stores.
7. Analytical Master Data Management
Master data management combined with brains and
analytics can help solve the multiple version o truth
problem plaguing most companies. This is the solution to
10 Emerging Trends in Business Intelligence SotwareBy Larry Marion
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30 Things You Need to Know AboutBusiness Intelligence Software
the data quality morass, but it will take time.
8. Data Mash-Ups
Mixing internal structured data with external unstructured
data will increasingly be standard operating procedure
or companies that want to truly stay ahead o the
competition.
9. Scenario Modeling
What-i analysis on steroids. Combining internal and
external data with in-memory analytics gives product
planners, sales orecasters and other proessionals the
tools to spin out vast and complex prognostications.
10. Semantic Technologies
Automating the integration o data rom dierent
sources avoids the costly manual coding o metadata.
Ontologies, taxonomies, classication, and content
monitoring ltering and analytics help organizations
reconcile and normalize meaning.
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ter more than a decade o researching and
writing about business intelligence sotware,
data warehousing, and perormance
management implementations, Im
astonished that the same mistakes made in 1999 still
occur today. When I polled some distinguished experts
to list the biggest mistakes they see when implementingthese systems, they too say the same
things keep occurring.
Heres our list o the top 10 BI sotware
mistakes you should avoid, why and
how:
1. Lack o Executive Sponsorship and
Active Business Involvement
Everyone knows that any major IT eort
needs executive sponsorship, but in thecase o a business intelligence sotware
implementation the big mistake by
the CFO, the chie marketing ocer,
or other sponsor is to not be actively involved. It takes
requent injections o business process and strategy
savvy to guide the IT team and prevent scope or data
creep.
Business intelligence projects typically go way over
budget when a directionless IT sta isnt given enough
parameters about how much data is enough. They getinto the bragging rights trap my warehouse is bigger
than yours. Costs skyrocket, response times lag, results
are muddied and the entire project capsizes rom its own
weight.
Without continuous guidance rom the business side,
IT tries to stu everything into a warehouse to address
absolutely any question a user could conceivably ask,
notes Howard Dresner, a ormer Gartner analyst who
coined the phrase business intelligence and author o a
book on perormance management.
As a result, IT burns tons o cash, takes ar too long, and
creates inordinate complexity. Warehouses neednt be
big; they just need to be useul.
2. Inadequate Scrutiny over the Data
Just having the right extraction-
transorm-load tool doesnt make the
data correct and current. Poor quality
data can destroy the credibility and
utilization o data warehouses and
business intelligence systems.
This is not an IT challenge but a
business challenge. I the key business
sta arent involved in identiyingthe right data stores and solving the
inconsistencies (how many denitions
o customer are in your systems?) the
project will ail.
3. Not Easy to Use
Too many IT implementers orget that the biggest
benets o BI sotware solutions come rom widespread
deployment. This means the user prole will range rom
a doctorate in mathematics to an associate degree rom
the local community college.
The sotware user interace, graphics, and what-i query
capabilities have to be intuitive. I the ancy chi-squared
distributions are the most prominent tool, youll reak out
many users. Keep the heavy-duty tools easily available,
though the power users want everything.
4. Poor Perormance
User expectations about query response times will be
A
10 Common Business Intelligence Sotware MistakesBy Larry Marion
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much higher than you realize. I the data warehouse
has more than one terabyte or more than 100 heavy
users, consider more processor horsepower via a data
warehouse appliance. Develop more cubes or other ways
to optimize perormance now, not aterwards.
A related mistake is not recognizing the enthusiasm
actor. A successul system begets huge interest.
Some organizations are cursed with success and cant
seem to keep up with user demand, warns Wayne
Eckerson, director o research at The Data Warehousing
Institute (TDWI), the pre-eminent organization in the BI
eld or IT pros.
5. Too Many or Too Few BI Sotware Tools
Both Dresner and Eckerson warn that IT has to be careul
about how many tools are available. Too many tools lead
to a lot o conusion and soaring training costs. Too ew
tools rustrate the users.
Just relying on the tools provided by an ERP vendor may
not be the way to go, warns Dresner. Think strategically
about the toolset, he recommends.
6. Going It AloneTen years ago it was hard to nd a lot o business
intelligence expertise in specic markets. Now the
maturing o the eld and plentiul resources make it a
crime or any organization to launch a program without
thoroughly vetting the process, project, products, and
people. TDWI membership should be a prerequisite
beore moving ahead.
I youre in a big company, urge the CIO to develop a BI
Competency Center a core group o experts within
your organization who can become internal consultants tobusiness units. The competency center approach will help
avoid a huge number o mistakes and wasted money.
7. Allowing the Spreadmart Plague to Spread
Eckerson invented the term spreadmart in 2002 as a
label or the prolieration o mini-data warehouses and
business intelligence systems based on spreadsheets.
Typically a department would try to solve a business
problem by creating a spreadsheet with lots o macros
linked to transaction systems. These spreadmarts were
typically undocumented, impossible to audit, and
extremely ragile. But theyre easy to set up and use,
thanks to the ubiquity o Excel.
Today, spreadmarts are the bane o IT departments who
cant control their prolieration, and the nemesis o CEOs
who cant gain an accurate view o enterprise activity
because o them, notes Eckerson. In many respects,
spreadmarts are the corporate equivalent o terrorists
just as soon as you eliminate one, 10 more spreadmarts
pop up to take its place.
Eckerson oers a number o tips on how to combat
the problem on the TDWI website. Essentially, IT has
to develop and support a superior solution. And the
CFO has to use Sarbanes-Oxley as a bulldozer to crush
as many spreadmarts as possible, especially maverick
systems that directly eed into the prot and loss
statement.
8. Inexible Business Sotware Design
Thanks to globalization, an extremely volatile economy,
and other actors, building a rigid data warehouse andbusiness intelligence system is a sure re route to misery.
Your business advisors should be probed or insights
about what strategies and tactics could change. They
should oer odds or likelihood that key parameters will
shit, and then IT should consider which parts o the
system are most likely to need updating or revision.
9. Ignoring External Data
The best business intelligence and perormance
management systems incorporate data rom externalsources. Weather orecasts are obviously an important
actor in determining optimum shipping routes, or
example.
Mark Graham Brown, a perormance management expert
and author, says that external actors such as economic,
political, regulatory, and consumer trends may need to
be considered and incorporated into a BI or perormance
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management system to make it truly eective and useul.
10. Wrong Customer Data
I customer satisaction is a key metric or your
organization and the IT department is asked to
implement a perormance management system to create
and track this, ignore urges to just use survey data.
As Brown notes, an annual survey wont be o much help
when you need weekly or monthly updates. And ew
organizations are surveying customers requently enough
to make a meaningul online metric. You need more
granularity. He recommends a customer aggravation
metric collect service call or help desk data, and then
score the inquiries based on severity.
Sad to say, there are other commonly made mistakes.
Too many Key Perormance Indicators (KPIs) in the
perormance management system is also a common
problem. Maybe we can prevent repeating the same
mistakes in the next decade o the technology.
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he business intelligence sotware market is
shaping up as a David vs. Goliath struggle.
Behemoths like Microsot, Oracle, and IBM
oer eature-rich BI suites along with their
many other enterprise sotware products. Meanwhile,
pure-play business intelligence sotware vendors such
as MicroStrategy and Tableau have avid ollowers
and are known or innovating around new eatures and
quickly adjusting to the shiting
marketplace.
Why is this important?
Because business intelligence
sotware is used to extract
data rom disparate sources
spreadsheets, databases,
and other sotware programs
inside companies and
then analyze that business
data to better understand a
rms internal and external
strengths and weaknesses. A
business relies heavily on this
data. Bottom line: Business
intelligence sotware enables
managers to better see the
relationship between dierent data or critical decision-
making particularly opportunities or innovation, cost
reduction and optimal resource deployment.
The list below includes 10 industry-leading BI solutions,
rom vendors large and not-so-large. I youre looking
or a birds eye view o this rapidly evolving market, the
ollowing condensed portraits should help.
This list is NOT ordered best to worst. The question o
what business intelligence sotware solution is best or a
given company depends on an entire matrix o actors.
This list is simply an overview o BI solutions, with the
debate about quality let to individual clients.
1. SAP Crystal Reports
Crystal Reports is par t o SAPs Business Objects
portolio o business intelligence sotware solutions. It
allows users to graphically design interactive reports
and connect them to virtually any data source, Microsot
Excel spreadsheets, Oracle databases, Business Objects
Enterprise business views, and
local le system inormation.
Reports can then be delivered
via Web, e-mail, Microsot Oce,
Adobe PDF, or embedded in
enterprise applications.
Crystal Reports provides
integration with Xcelsius, Adobe
Flex, and Adobe Flash. It includes
built-in barcode support,
multilingual reporting, and an
integrated Salesorce.com driver.
Microsot helped make Crystal
Reports the de acto standard
report writer when it bundled it
with Microsot Visual Studio.
2. SAS Enterprise BI Server
SASs fagship business intelligence sotware solution,
SAS Enterprise BI Server, combines SAS Analytics with
data integration and provides role-based, sel-service
interaces or all types o users within an IT governance
ramework and a centralized point o administration.
Components include: portals and dashboards, Web-
based report viewing, Web-based report building and
editing, and Web-based advanced data exploration with
the ability to push results back to report building and
viewing environments.
It also oers integration with Microsot Oce, guided
10 Leading Business Intelligence Sotware Solutions
By Thor Olavsrud
T
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analysis and access to SAS Analytics, query and analysis
as a pervasive part o all interaces and centralized
metadata, and a single point o management. SAS has
committed itsel to continuing to push the envelope. O
its $2.26 billion 2009 revenue, SAS reinvested a robust 23
percent into R&D.
3. Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition Plus
Oracles Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition Plus
is a suite o business intelligence sotware solutions
that leverage Oracle BI Server as a common platorm,
providing a level o integration among the tools. The
integration provides a common service-oriented
architecture, data access services, analytic and calculation
inrastructure, metadata management services, semantic
business model, security model and user preerences and
administration tools.
The suite includes Oracles BI Server, BI Answers, BI
Interactive Dashboards, BI Delivers, BI Disconnected
Analytics, BI Publisher, and Oracle BI Brieng Books.
Additionally, it oers Hyperion Interactive Reporting,
Hyperion SQR Production Reporting, Hyperion Financial
Reporting, and Hyperion Web Analysis. Oracles oering
has the advantage o integrating with Oracles manyother enterprise middleware, database, and business
application solutions.
4. IBM Cognos 8 Business Intelligence
IBMs Cognos 8 BI oering is an inclusive suite eaturing
a range o BI capabilities including reporting, analysis,
dashboarding, and scorecards on a single, service-
oriented architecture (SOA). The suite includes Report
Studio, Query Studio, Analysis Studio, Metric Studio,
Metric Designer, Event Studio, Framework Manager, and
PowerPlay Studio.
IBM has declared business analytics as one o the most
critical parts o its overall strategy. It has spent heavily
on business intelligence and business analytics R&D,
investing more than $12 billion in the last ve years. That
includes the $1.2 billion acquisition o SPSS in 2009, which
added a predictive analytics element to its portolio.
5. Microsot PowerPivot
Two applications, Microsots PowerPivot or Excel and
PowerPivot or SharePoint, both leverage Oce 2010,
SharePoint 2010, and SQL Server 2008 R2 in an oering
that uses the ubiquity o Microsots applications to
provide BI tools to the knowledge worker masses rather
than BI experts.
PowerPivot or Excel uses the Excel eatures users are
already amiliar with to provide interactive data analysis
tools. PowerPivot or SharePoint provides the ability to
share and collaborate on user-generated data analysis
in Excel and in the browser. By leveraging technology
already ound in many companies and comortable to
most workers, Microsot hopes to capture a much larger
slice o the BI pie.
6. MicroStrategy Reporting Suite
MicroStrategy Reporting Suite is a ree, commercial
reporting tool composed o server sotware or core
analytical processing and job management, an end-user
Web interace, Web-based reporting sotware, desktop
reporting sotware, and a data architecting product. It
outputs reports in HTML, PDF, Microsot Excel, and text.
It can present data in tabular grid reports, graphs, andcharts; and combination grid-and-graph displays. It is
available or Windows, Unix, Linux, Solaris, HP-UX, AIX,
and any data source (including SAP BW and Microsot
Analysis Services).
MicroStrategy Sotware is oten layered over massive data
warehouses, and it boasts the ability to support large-
scale, demanding BI environments.
7. Salesorce CRM
Salesorce.com is the worlds rst billion-dollar cloudcomputing company. Its Salesorce CRM is a hosted
Sotware-as-a-Service (SaaS) oering that consists o
several modules: Sales, Service & Support, Partner
Relationship Management, Marketing, Content, Ideas,
Analytics, and the Chatter collaboration platorm. While
Salesorce CRM oers a number o analytics tools, many
business intelligence sotware vendors oer products
that integrate with the platorm, allowing it to serve
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continued
as a primary data-gathering tool or a variety o BI
applications.
8. TIBCO Spotfre Analytics
TIBCO Spotre Analytics combines business process
management (BPM), complex event processing (CEP),
predictive analytics (PA), and visual data mining (DM)
sotware. It handles everything rom real-time data
capture and streaming to data analysis, orecasting and
interactive reporting on a single platorm.
9. Inormation Builders WebFOCUS
Inormation Builders fagship WebFOCUS BI platorm
uses a purely Web-based architecture with no plug-
ins. The company describes its approach as ocused
on BI applications and embedded BI rather than tools,
noting that BI applications are much simpler to use than
tools. WebFOCUS has been implemented at more than
12,000 customer sites and is used to build Web-based BI
applications.
10. Tableau Business Intelligence Sotware
A pure-play BI sotware vendor, Tableau reers to its
oering as rapid re BI. It boasts drag-and-drop
eatures that allow users without IT expertise to visualize
inormation rom any structured ormat. It claims to be
the only provider o data visualization and business
intelligence sotware that can be installed and used by
anyone while also adhering to IT standards.
Its oering is comprised o Tableau Desktop and Tableau
Server. Tableau Desktop is a tool or graphically analyzing
virtually any structured data to produce charts, graphs,
dashboards, and reports. Tableau Server adds enterprise-
class security and perormance to support large
deployments.
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Is Business Intelligence Sotware Coming Up Short?
By David Needle
they just realized matter in the moment.
As one example, Sonderegger said a BI system can
provide important inormation like the act that warranty
claims on a companys most popular product were up 40
percent in the past month.
The report answered the question
it was designed to answer, but now
what? Do the warranty claims vary
across packaging? Across retailers?
Sonderegger said. There isnt a
pre-baked report or these kinds o
questions, which requires diving into
data thats probably sitting on dierent
servers or parts suppliers, contracts,
and product liecycle management,
and gure out what changed.
Complicating matters is that the
user who typically asks these sorts o
questions isnt involved in IT decision-making: Theyre
usually on the business side.
They need a sel-service discovery solution because they
need a quick answer, Sonderegger added.
The report concludes there is an extensive backlog o BI
requests that requires knowledge workers to continually
look or alternatives or getting the inormation they
need. O those surveyed, 51 percent indicated that BI
requests stack up in their organization, while 66 percent
cited too many requests on the IT list as the main reason
or the backlog.
Also, knowledge workers seek IT help or BI requests on
average 46 percent o the time.
usiness intelligence sotware can play a vital
role in helping IT and knowledge workers get
a handle on increasingly huge warehouses o
customer data and other inormation critical
to their sales and overall business. But does that go ar
enough?
In many cases, the answer is no.
Thats according to a Forrester
Consulting survey o 226 business
and IT proessionals, which was
commissioned by enterprise search
vendor Endeca, a provider o search
applications designed to complement
and augment BI sotware.
The report said that in spite o the
millions invested by BI sotware
developers and on customers using
their products, today typical BI
solutions struggle to keep up with the increasing volume
and complexity o data even when those solutions
are customized. The pain is particularly acute when it
comes to decisions that need to be made quickly and are
based on changing demands that might not conorm to
predetermined report structures.
Were moving to the next stage o people in a business
saying, I I can get the reports, why cant I slice the data
a dierent way and see it in the context o blog postings
about our products, and sort and lter that inormation
urther? Paul Sonderegger, chie strategist at Endeca,
told InternetNews.com.
Traditional reports and dashboards answer questions
the company knew to ask, Sonderegger said. But those
will have to be complemented with next-generation
discovery environments where people can ask questions
B
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Companies need BI tools and applications that combine
the simplicity, and resulting zero training, o a search-like
UI on top o reporting, querying, and analysis to make BI
pervasive throughout the knowledge worker community,
the report said.
Sonderegger acknowledged the big BI providers have
come out with new products to address the need or
easier access to less standard or structured inormation
sources.
The challenge they ace is that they have to depart rom
a lot o the assumptions in the traditional data world that
dont handle jagged data well, because its not coming
rom traditional rectangular sources o columns and
rows, he said.
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