Wednesday 13 February 2013

Is your business intelligence 'active'?

Business Intelligence has been around for decades but it's role is constantly evolving.  At one time the production of a scorecard or set of traffic lights was enough to excite senior managers starved of data analytics.  Increasingly the scope of Business Intelligence has moved towards real-time delivery of fine-grained operational analytics where the production of newsworthy content has become embedded into the operational systems that serves the source data up.

The activity of taking data from multiple sources and building a new suite of 'data cubes' is gradually being overshadowed by BIG DATA possibilities to harvest data on the fly and provide much richer, much more useful insights because the content is fresher and users have more versatile and intuitive tools to ask the questions THEY want to ask - instead of being served up preset report views.

In the last few years we have seen SOCIAL BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE becoming vogue as senior managers seek to socialize performance analysis and reporting; and have more middle-managers, industry partners and members of staff benefit from business performance and activity insights.  This has been encouraged by mobile working and mobile devices that make business intelligence tools more accessible no-matter where people work.

There is another stage on the evolution of BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE that's emerging.  Business managers are coming to realize that 'knowing what you already know' and fashioning it into pretty dashboards isn't the greatest use of BI technology.  What really makes a difference is when managers can answer NEW QUESTIONS and even CREATE QUESTIONS.  But what good is that if you don't have the means to ACT on your learning?  All too frequently, the lessons learned from Business Intelligence result in more additions to the long-tail of demand for new or enhanced applications that can be used to support improved processes, or completely new methods, platforms and processes required to support growth initiatives.

This is where platforms like Encanvas, Spotfire, Jackbe and Outlooksoft really excel becuase they provide companies with federated BI together with the tools to build or improve information systems to meet changing requirements for information.  Few processes thrive without IT to support them these days - and that means no BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE system is complete without the wherewithal to ADAPT information systems as the result of the learning phase.

I think in the next decade we're going to see data visualization tools that are characterized as 'BI' becoming shelf-ware unless they start to embrace the capabilities of agile platforms to build and shape information systems in support of the long-tail of applications demand in the enterprise (and beyond it) without the frictional costs of IT that buyers have to live with today.

I.

Monday 4 February 2013

Does SaaS work as a commercial model?

I've thought for some time that SaaS is not a great model for software companies to adopt as a commercial model because it encourages the fragmentation of systems for customers, rarely provides a coherent IT software architecture as its outcome, and for the software provider, it makes it very easy for customers to switch off and move to the 'next thing' rather than developing a collegiate working relationship with the supplier.

This article covers some of the feedback from SaaS vendors on churn which makes an interesting read.

Article


Ian.