Intelligent Economy

Who's the fairest of them all? That's what Nucleus Research set out to find out when it interviewed 30 executives that had deployed BI solutions from various vendors. Among the companies it looked at and rated on the "ROI potential" of their products: Business Objects, Cognos, Hyperion, Microsoft, MicroStrategy, and SAS.

Several issues, according to a piece in Optimize Magazine, rose to the top as customers weighed their experiences with various vendors.

One was "comfort." Once companies have evaluated the technical capabilities of various products, they begin to look at "the people behind the technology," explains Kathy Quirk, research manager, Nucleus Research. "How easy are they to work with? What support options do they provide? How do they speak of their competitors? In one case, a company found two products that would suit its technical requirements, but went with the higher-priced tool because the vendor of that product had a better understanding of the company's business. In addition, the company tired of all the competitive bad-mouthing from the other vendor."

She also points to "vertical expertise," as a key decision criterion: "Industry-specific knowledge and guidance provide a faster path to ROI." Finally, she says vendors were assessed on their ability to weigh the competing demands of their clients. "In order to cater to two distinct sets of users, companies must strike a balance between experienced users' need for speed and the easy access and rich graphical features that will let new users join the BI nation," she concludes.

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Employees in finance, sales, marketing, and customer support are the leading users of business intelligence applications, according to a new study by Ventana Research. The study suggests that customer-focused initiatives and operations are a key driver of today's analytical investments.

The research, sponsored by CMP Publications and Siebel Systems, was based on the responses of 437 executives -- 73% of whom were in IT organizations while 27% had line-of-business roles. "The main features respondents look for in BI solutions are simplified integration of data and metadata across multiple BI applications and central management of metadata," states Eric Rogge is VP and research director at Ventana Research in Optimize Magazine. "Stovepiped BI applications aren't acceptable. Companies stitch various BI applications together to weave larger information fabrics, creating a seamless, consistent view of the customer and other key business entities."

Further, he pointed to a growing interest in Operational BI. " It's not designed to support strategic planning, but to gather and analyze operational BI and deliver this actionable information to front-line workers," he explains. "Operational BI enhances corporate performance by improving day-to-day, minute-by-minute decision making and the performance of critical business processes."

The trouble is that that too many Operational BI applications are "addressed with a task-specific application to support a defined set of decisions. Unlike general-purpose BI tools used by business analysts, these point-solutions historically were created one at a time by in-house development teams, which often can't keep up with the organization's burgeoning need for information."

The demand is attracting vendors, of course. They promise to put together more comprehensive packaged applications -- some of which are already being deployed. Unfortunately, not everyone's happy with their deployment experiences. "Areas for improvement cited by study participants include shorter time to deploy, more interactivity, faster query performance, better data integration from multiple sources, and more complete customer views," noted Rogge. "Deployment times varied: About half of the respondents say it took longer than a year to deploy vendor-developed BI applications. A third said the deployments were available in less than one year."

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Performance scorecards and dashboards have the potential to make actionable intelligence available throughout the enterprise -- at both executive and operational levels. Rather than lining up for reports produced by IT analysts, performanace management solutions of this kind make the insights and analysis available on-demand, according to Wayne Eckerson, director of Research and Services for the Data Warehousing Institute and the author of Performance Dashboards: Measuring, Monitoring, and Managing Your Business.

"Dashboards and scorecards can help transform underperforming organizations into high fliers," he writes in Intelligent Enterprise. "They help you focus on the key objectives and provide timely alerts so you can fix problems or exploit opportunities before it's too late. As the name suggests, dashboards provide controls that executives can use to change the direction of an organization and get everyone headed in the same direction. "

Eckerson sees multiple layers in a performance management system:

Monitoring layer -- uses dashboards, scorecards or alerts to notify users of material changes in the performance of processes and activities.
Analysis layer -- lets users drill down into exception conditions and explore a problem's root cause using multidimensional analysis.
Reporting layer -- provides users with detailed operational data (such as a list of defective parts and the customers who received them) so they can take prompt action.
Planning layer -- lets managers employ the output of their analyses to create plans, models and scenarios, which are then fed back into the monitoring layer and encoded as targets and thresholds.

Eckerson warns us that there are "pseudo performance dashboards" on the market today. The key weaknesses to watch out for: too flat (inadequate data or analytic capabilities); too manual (requiring too much manual data collection and massaging); and too isolated (misaligned with the strategic objectives of the enterprise).

As he concludes, "Performance dashboards and scorecards are part of a layered set of analytical applications running on a common set of BI services; they let users measure, monitor and manage the processes and activities for which they are accountable. Don't forget that the system is dependent on a robust data management architecture that delivers actionable information to users on demand. Dashboards and scorecards should translate the organization's strategy into objectives, metrics, initiatives and tasks customized to each group and individual in the organization."

Read the whole piece here.

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