8011_30 Things You Need to Know About BI Software

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


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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.

30 Things You Need to Know AboutBusiness Intelligence Software


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2 30 Things You Need to Know About Business Intelligence Software an Internet.com IT Management eBook. 2010, Internet.com, a division of QuinStreet, InBack to Contents


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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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

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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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11 30 Things Yo Need to Kno Abo t B siness Intelligence Soft are an Internet com IT Management eBook 2010 Internet com a di ision of Q inStreet InB k t C t t


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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8011_30 Things You Need to Know About BI Software