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Roadkill at the Corner of Search and BI

Posted by Seth Grimes
Wednesday, January 31, 2007
10:49 AM

The intersection of search and business intelligence has gained lots of attention in recent months. But are companies actually implementing search-BI solutions? Or is search-BI mostly talk, as yet unworthy of serious consideration by organizations with real-world problems to solve?

E-mail from a friend seeking advice suggested these questions.

Christine works for a prominent, expensive BI-DW consultancy. She's helping a client with information access problems. Her client regularly generates large numbers of reports that "sit within a data warehouse system, run off Business Objects/Cognos against one source or another, or more commonly are created manually by copying/pasting or rekeying data into a spreadsheet/Word doc/Powerpoint/Web site." The client envisions "something like the Amazon site that allows search, and when someone selects a report it lists other reports, noting 'people who looked at this report also looked at... and a way for users to rate the report, etc.'"

Yes, even folks who rekey data into spreadsheets are allowed to dream.

Continue reading "Roadkill at the Corner of Search and BI"

Comments

Posted by The Brain Food Blogger
Tuesday, January 30, 2007
4:49 PM

Whenever Gartner cranks out another of its famous Magic Quadrants, we inevitably see the vendors in that prized top-right quartile cranking out press releases announcing their success. Sometimes they even purchase reprint rights to the Quadrant itself, which gives us all a peek at the outcome.

Posted by Mark Smith
Tuesday, January 30, 2007
12:47 PM

In the last year, corporate management seems to have gained a better understanding of what business intelligence (BI) means to organizations. Executives finally are realizing that information about performance and the metrics that measure it are keys to improving their bottom line. Even so, they have invested far less in efforts to support BI than in other areas of information technology.

Posted by Tony Byrne
Monday, January 29, 2007
1:54 PM

It felt confessional to explain to a friend the other day that typically my greatest value as a consultant comes from helping enterprises avoid making a big mistake. Usually the looming mistake is selecting the wrong software for their needs. That just doesn't sound as triumphant as "restored them to profitability," or "instituted a fabulously successful publishing regimen."

Posted by Penny Crosman
Monday, January 29, 2007
11:26 AM

The business intelligence movement rolls on and one of its targets/benefactors is Wall Street. It's a good fit -- after all, what buy-side or sell-side asset manager wouldn't want the most insightful views of the right pieces of data? In my first full week in my new position at Wall Street & Technology, I was briefed on three new or recently updated data analysis tools: one for analyzing the blogosphere for stock and company tips and rumors, one for analyzing SEC Edgar data, and one for portfolio backtesting. Here's what I found interesting.

Posted by David Linthicum
Friday, January 26, 2007
4:42 PM

I was on a plane the other day, and I heard one salesman say to another (sounds like a bad joke, eh?), "I have that Salesforce.com." The other salesman said, "I have that Salesforce.com, too… a very fancy Website."

Website? Perhaps SaaS is much more than just a Web site pretending to be an enterprise application. Indeed, it's really another set of enterprise processes that are delivered in a different way, critical to the overall meta-processes that drive your business.

Posted by Bruce Silver
Thursday, January 25, 2007
3:24 PM

My recent posts on simulation analysis and BPMN naturally lead into simulation use case three, which deals with Activity Based Costing (ABC). A number of users have asked me if simulation provided activity based costing, and I always said yes, since I assumed it could. But it's not built into the tools at all. This turned out to be a really interesting part of the training to develop. All completely original, since the modeling tool vendors don't really talk about it (or at least correctly), and the ABC literature doesn't mention simulation, either.

Posted by Doug Henschen
Thursday, January 25, 2007
1:55 PM

I've had a number of conversations in recent days around the theme of linking analysis to action. There's lots of frustration out there, understandably, because managers and executives increasingly have plenty of tools that spot problems -- reports, alerts, dashboards, KPIs, scorecards, etc. -- but they're not connected to levers that enable them to take action.

Posted by Tony Byrne
Wednesday, January 24, 2007
10:55 AM

Someone tell the vendors. Two fine blog entries point out that search vendors miss the point when they reposition themselves as business intelligence or business processing suppliers. Gilbane's Lynda Moulton finds vendors attempting to "stave off their own boredom" with enterprise search. MarkLogic CEO Dave Kellogg sees search vendors as "distracted with a strategic vision."

Posted by David Linthicum
Tuesday, January 23, 2007
8:32 AM

I'm working with a few mainstream enterprise application companies that have seen the writing on the wall and are looking to SaaS-enable their applications. However, moving to the platform of the Web is much harder than it appears, as they are finding out.

What's important to enterprise customers is that they understand this pain, even though they may not be going through it directly. It's not a matter of remarketing and hosting that will get their current enterprise application vendors to SaaS. It's much more involved and complex than the application vendors, and customer, assume it to be. That's important to recognize whether you're a vendor or an end user.

Posted by The Brain Food Blogger
Monday, January 22, 2007
12:16 PM

A new study shows that at least 40 percent of execs aren't happy with their firms' decision-making abilities, yet most aren't taking steps to improve the process. In fact, the decision-making process may be one of the least-understood and poorly defined processes in the enterprise, seldom analyzed and almost never the target of best practices.

The DecisionROI Institute, a group created by the Business Performance Management (BPM) Forum, launched the "Business Traction From Better Decision Action" initiative in Q2 2006 to explore the state of decision-making and come up with suggestions for best practices. Based on interviews with more than 300 executives and funded by Cognos, the institute's "Business Traction" report found that:

Posted by Bruce Silver
Monday, January 22, 2007
9:16 AM

Continuing my recent post re simulation analysis and BPMN… In Use case 2, the problem is usually framed in terms of "bottlenecks." Usually static analysis gives you a rough idea of the staffing requirement even without simulation. For example, if over the workday you create 100 instances an hour, and Task A takes 1 hour, you need around 100 people to perform Task A to keep up. But what if instead of creating 100 instances an hour, you are getting 800 instances overnight and your resource for Task A also is responsible for Task B? Then simulation gives answers you can't get from static analysis

Posted by Cindi Howson
Friday, January 19, 2007
1:28 PM

Dashboards are the face of BI for a very important user constituency: managers and executives. Given the importance of this aspect of a total BI solution, it came as little surprise to me that Cognos nabbed Celequest, a small player with a powerful dashboard solution.

Until now, Cognos' own dashboard solution has been limited to that of a single Report Studio document. While Cognos 8 brought some improved visualizations embedded in Report Studio documents, it misses the mark for one essential dashboard requirement: multiple data sources. While it's possible to address multiple data sources at a higher level in Cognos 8 Framework Manager (the business meta data layer), this approach makes the current dashboard solution less nimble and forces the Framework Manager model to be more complex.

Posted by Doug Henschen
Thursday, January 18, 2007
5:33 PM

Everyone agrees that Cognos' purchase of Celequest, announced yesterday, will broaden the BI vendor’s footprint. But the true value of the deal will hinge on how transferable and how integrated Celequest's real-time technology and appliance/SaaS model will be with the Cognos 8 BI platform.

Yes, Celequest gives Cognos a real-time, operational BI/performance management play it lacked, and that's important (see trend six in "Seven Trends for 2007.") Celequest's Lava appliance is designed to monitor transactional systems (as well as data warehouses) and instantly display key metrics within user-customizable dashboards. That will bring Cognos into operational settings -- in financial services, risk management, manufacturing and supply chains -- in which insight is only of value if it's immediate, delivered through real-time dashboards and alerts.

Posted by Alan Pelz-Sharpe
Wednesday, January 17, 2007
2:04 PM

1. You are running your enterprise content management (ECM) system on old hardware and operating systems that need upgrading

2. The average size of electronic documents has grown to a point where current network bandwidth is insufficient to deliver documents to the user in a sensible time frame

3. You are delivering native format files to end users rather than making use of rendering functionality

4. You have allowed your users to dump content into your repository without concern for process, rules or structure, and now it's a humungous mess

5. You are running a centralized system but really should have a distributed one

Posted by David Linthicum
Tuesday, January 16, 2007
4:42 PM

We are moving toward a day when most of our enterprise applications may be delivered as services, and thus provide a more economical way to approach information technology management. This is also the great equalizer since businesses, large and small, will have access to the same number and quality of services, much as they do with Web sites today. Shared services will create many opportunities, including better agility and the ability to operate a business with fewer IT resources.

All you have to do is to look around you. With the advent of Software as a Service (SaaS), firms like Salesforce.com and NetSuite are cleaning up with soaring subscriptions. Moreover, the Web is getting the right interface with rich client technologies, such as Ajax, emerging to provide a much better, dynamic user experience. Let's face it; the Web has grown from a simple information delivery platform to a grouping of many valuable exposed services with rich dynamic user interfaces. It's really the global services-oriented architecture (SOA), and those who learn to leverage it now will be well ahead of those who ignore the trend.

Posted by Seth Grimes
Monday, January 15, 2007
4:47 PM

Andy Astor, CEO of EnterpriseDB, stated in November, "Our offering is
unique among open source databases." That's blatant, open deception; a cynical attempt to exploit the open-source label. Even Microsoft's shared source is closer to open than EnterpriseDB's licensing terms!

How does EnterpriseDB see it? CEO Astor, in an April 2006 interview, said that "the extensions that we've done [to the open source PostgreSQL that EnterpriseDB is based on] -- the Oracle compatibility for example -- is code that we share with customers who subscribe to our service." Paying customers -- and only paying customers -- can see and modify the code but "just can't redistribute it." That's open source?!

Posted by Doug Henschen
Friday, January 12, 2007
1:24 PM

In the heady, pre-dot-bomb buzz of early 2000, I edited a feature by my long-time colleague Penny (Lunt) Crosman on “21 ASPs and What They Can Do For You.” They were called "application service providers" back then, but that term was displaced, first by “hosted,” then by “on-demand” and most recently by "Software as a Service" (SaaS).

The focus of Penny’s article was document management, a topic I revisit in today’s story on SaaS as a Stepping Stone to Conventional Software. I was surprised when a quick Web tour turned up only about a third of these vendors still very visibly in the hosted/on-demand document management business.

Posted by Penny Crosman
Friday, January 12, 2007
10:06 AM

What are the pros and cons of using a data warehouse appliance versus a more traditional data warehouse? We asked John Devolites, general manager, communications and entertainment solutions at Teoco, to share with us his experiences with three data warehouse appliances. The bottom line: he's very happy with the price and his new, fast query rates, but don't call these appliances -- they're a far cry from the simple, plug-and-play boxes that the word "appliance" conjures up.

Posted by Bruce Silver
Thursday, January 11, 2007
10:47 PM

A couple months ago I wrote about the deficient simulation capabilities of most process modeling tools. More recently I’ve been working with ITP Commerce -- the tool provider for my upcoming BPMN training -- on enhancing its simulation features to address the use cases that figure most prominently in process analysis. I’ve come up with three, and I’m building my BPMN training around the particular modeling and simulation patterns associated with each one. Use case 1, which I think is the most important, focuses on the general type of “process improvement” expected from scrutiny of the modeled as-is process (whether using simulation or not).

Posted by Seth Grimes
Wednesday, January 10, 2007
4:19 PM

The January 10 New York Times ran an intriguing article, "Computers Join Actors in Hybrids On Screen". It describes a new James Cameron film, "Avatar." The movie's alien characters will be designed by computer but played by human actors.

The Times reports that "their bodies will be filmed using the latest evolution of motion-capture technology -- markers placed on the actor and tracked by a camera -- while the facial expressions will be tracked by tiny cameras on headsets that will record their performances to insert them into a virtual world."

Posted by Doug Henschen
Tuesday, January 9, 2007
9:24 PM

Monday’s announcement by NCR that it will spin off its Teradata Data Warehousing business comes as the latter faces increased competition from the likes of IBM, Oracle and SAS Institute at the high end. Meanwhile, upstarts such as Netezza and DATAAllegro are picking off data-mart and focused-data-warehouse implementations with their low-cost, high-performance appliances. Hewlett-Packard is also joining the fray with its emerging Neoview portfolio.

Posted by Cindi Howson
Tuesday, January 9, 2007
12:02 PM

The Internet has raised the bar for BI expectations. We want to click a report and get an answer now. Complex query? Millions of records? Full table scan? Those are details that users really don’t care about. Gone are the days of users being thankful for a weekly print out (conveniently scheduled during non peak processing periods). Gone, too, are the days when users were willing to click on a report only to stare at an hour glass for more than a few seconds, let alone minutes or hours.

It’s clear why user expectations continue to rise: people can view stock prices in near-real time, voting results, sport scores, even traffic. So it would seem perfectly reasonable that corporate data access should be equally instantaneous.

Posted by Penny Crosman
Friday, January 5, 2007
4:40 PM

It's Friday evening -- a perfect time for a cold pint of Guinness. Did you know that 10 million pints of Guinness are drunk around the world every day, four million of them in the U.S.?

Getting all that alcohol shipped from the Dublin brewery to North American warehouses is a supply chain challenge. There are about five hundred different possible combinations of routes, shippers, ships, shipping lines Diageo (maker of Guinness) can use. This complexity in the past has made it hard to obtain visibility into shipping service levels and to start improving them. Real-time business intelligence from SeeWhy, used on shipping data from an SAP system, is providing the much-needed visibility and has helped Diageo improve on-time delivery by 30 percent.

Posted by Tony Byrne
Thursday, January 4, 2007
8:01 PM

When I talk to software vendors about customer projects that were seriously delayed or that failed outright, the response is almost invariably: "implementation problem." That's code-speak for the customer or integrator (or both) screwing up. Sometimes this rings true, though I suspect more commonly implementation troubles result from a poor product fit.

In a world in which vendors dominate marketplace conversations -- by underwriting conferences, the trade press, Webinars, white papers and trade associations -- assigning blame to others for our industry's ridiculously low success rate is weaseling out.

Posted by Bruce Silver
Thursday, January 4, 2007
9:33 AM

webMethods, which at the beginning of 2006 couldn’t even break into the BPM analysts’ magic circle/wave/whatever, ended the year taking top honors in the Forrester Wave for Integration-Centric BPM. For you non-subscribers, you can get the report from the webMethods Web site. webMethods has put a lot into its new version of the offering, part of the Fabric 7.0 suite.

Posted by Doug Henschen
Wednesday, January 3, 2007
12:25 PM

Way back in the mid 1990s, I had the pleasure of hearing Louis Rossetto, co-founder and then editor of Wired Magazine, speak in New York about the future of the Internet and its impact on more-established media. The Internet, he said, would not kill older media, just as radio had not brought an end to newspapers nor television the demise of radio or cinema. The Internet would, however, have an indelible impact, he reasoned, freeing each form of media to evolve to exploit its natural strengths.

Here we are ten years later with divisive talk radio dominating the air waves, Crime Scene Investigation (CSI) and American Idol dominating the TV ratings and YouTube and MySpace taking mind share on the Internet. Okay, so Rossetto was talking about an evolution, not a renaissance, but somehow I don’t think he expected us to be slouching toward mediocrity on all fronts.

Posted by Dave Stodder
Tuesday, January 2, 2007
8:23 PM

It's that time when everyone reveals their predictions, from the staid to the outlandish. Economists polled by The Wall Street Journal can't decide whether inflation is a threat, but a psychic interviewed on "Coast to Coast" is certain that radio personality Dr. Laura Schlessinger will discover that she's a remarkable singer.