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Models Take the Danger Out of Prediction

Posted by Neil Raden
Wednesday, February 28, 2007
10:26 AM

Cindi Howson asked in a recent blog, "Given the perceived value of predictive analytics, why does it seem to have had such lack luster success to date? Like most things, I suspect the answer is part cultural and part technological."

I couldn't agree more. Predictive modeling isn't a crystal ball, and despite the efforts of Business Objects, Hyperion, Microstrategy and SAS to get predictive modeling into mainstream BI tools, there are a lot of other reasons for its lack of success. Knowledge Discovery is something that is best left to the experts, those with PhDs, years of experience or both.

Continue reading "Models Take the Danger Out of Prediction"

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Posted by Product Maven
Tuesday, February 27, 2007
3:28 PM

On-demand Web analytics service provider Omniture has launched Discover 2.0, a visual data exploration tool designed to uncover business opportunities, new customer acquisition strategies and ways to drive more revenue from online marketing campaigns. Complementing Omniture's SiteCatalyst Web analytics service, Discover 2.0 is said to support unlimited segmentation of online customers and site visitors.

Posted by Bruce Silver
Tuesday, February 27, 2007
9:32 AM

I'm not going to try to compete with Sandy Kemsley's wall-to-wall coverage of this event. Mine will be more impressionistic.

Simon Hayward keynote. Gartner likes to sell futures on technology. It's what they do. Simon has a chart of the value realization from BPM over time, with three curves. Today the "productivity" curve is highest. In 2012 (safely over the horizon) the "visibility" curve overtakes it. In 2017 (I'll be dead by then) the "innovation" curve reigns supreme. After that, I don't know, maybe global warming wipes out the earth. Does this kind of chart really advance the ball?

An interesting difference between the Gartner and Brainstorm BPM conference is that at Gartner the keynoters assume and universally assert that if you're not going through the whole model-design-deploy-execute-monitor-analyze-optimize thing you're not really doing BPM. At Brainstorm the keynoting class generally advances the notion that BPM ends with modeling and "process thinking"… although the vendors who sponsor the thing really wish they would stop saying that. I like the Gartner approach, but which one is addressing the "real" BPM marketplace?

Posted by The Brain Food Blogger
Tuesday, February 27, 2007
9:14 AM

What are the three most important priorities for IT organizations in 2007? GCR (formerly Gartner Custom Research) put this open-ended question to more than 1,000 IT professionals late last year and spotted the following concerns:

Posted by David Linthicum
Monday, February 26, 2007
11:13 AM

One of the selling points to management on software as a service (SaaS) is the assertion that it will eliminate internal support costs. A few companies I'm working with are finding that support costs don't always go away, and that's especially true for larger companies. I'll explain.

Truth told, the SaaS approach does avoid core expenses like hardware and software maintenance, but it still requires local support to be effective. Many SaaS players get into an organization by having management buy subscriptions on their credit cards, thus bypassing IT, but more formal and effective enterprise SaaS deployment programs require more internal support than many realize.

Here are three areas to consider.

Posted by Doug Henschen
Friday, February 23, 2007
12:25 PM

Do you think rich Internet apps (RIA) are just a concern for developers of consumer Web sites? Think again. RIAs will soon make their mark on the enterprise, making complex software such as ERP and BI systems more accessible and understandable to ordinary business users.

Posted by Cindi Howson
Thursday, February 22, 2007
1:35 PM

At this week's TDWI Executive Summit, CIOs and IT leaders cast their votes on what BI innovation would have the biggest business impact in the next few years. The most highly ranked item: predictive analytics.

Given the perceived value of predictive analytics, why does it seem to have had such lack luster success to date? Like most things, I suspect the answer is part cultural and part technological. Creating predictive models takes some sophisticated skill sets and software. Most companies have specialists doing such analyses, yet often, the results of the analyses stay largely in the hands of the specialists. Recent innovations are changing this.

Posted by Product Maven
Thursday, February 22, 2007
9:39 AM

Reusability is a key to successful services-oriented architecture deployments, but there are three requirements when attempting to find and reuse services. First, service owners must be able to know and inspect the policies inside each service he or she maintains. Second, service users must be able to discover services and understand just what they do in business terms. Finally, service developers need to respond quickly to change requests.

Posted by Alan Pelz-Sharpe
Wednesday, February 21, 2007
4:12 PM

Last week, IBM clarified its ECM intentions via a series of analyst briefings. In short the recently acquired FileNet P8 product will become Big Blue's main enterprise content management (ECM) offering, although legacy IBM products will remain supported for the foreseeable future. The latest version of P8 (version 4) is certainly a powerful solution for buyers of large-scale ECM systems and will benefit over time with the absorption of other IBM products, for example in enterprise search.

Posted by Mark Smith
Wednesday, February 21, 2007
8:46 AM

The market for BI has never been more vibrant, or the interest at midsized and large organizations in adopting BI greater. Yet in the face of this opportunity, I continue to hear reports of unrest on the part of companies using SAP for BI – reports about its lack of enterprise capabilities and the usability of the technology.

Posted by Dave Stodder
Tuesday, February 20, 2007
5:33 PM

After a period of upheaval, I'm ready to resume contributing to the IE blog. My thoughts, however, are clouded by news of the apparent disappearance of Jim Gray, founder and head of Microsoft's Bay Area Research Center (BARC). My heart goes out to his family as well as his immense circle of friends, students and colleagues.

Posted by Bruce Silver
Tuesday, February 20, 2007
10:40 AM

While I've been shouting from the rooftops that process modeling (in BPMN, ARIS or whatever) is not that hard, Lombardi Software has been hearing from its customers that it's not that easy, either. The tools are complex, expensive, and only a small fraction of their features are used. Collaborating on models - while they're being developed - is near impossible. Making the models understandable to executives or business users means reducing them to a simple Powerpoint diagram or Visio flowchart. So process modeling - step #1 in the process of BPM - is already a barrier.

Posted by Seth Grimes
Friday, February 16, 2007
2:10 PM

Observations I drew from this week's LinuxWorld OpenSolutions Summit are that (1) location does matter, in both physical and market space and (2) some people have a strange notion of what constititues an IT solution. Regarding market space – namely how to go about creating some – the interesting news at the summit was the annoucement of a new Open Solutions Alliance. But I'll get to that after first explaining my point on strange notions.

Posted by David Linthicum
Thursday, February 15, 2007
3:00 PM

In a recent blog, Nicholas Carr writes that "large companies appear to be jumping en masse onto the software-as-a-service bandwagon, according to a new survey of CIOs by management consultants McKinsey & Company. The survey found that 61 percent of North American companies with sales over $1 billion plan to adopt one or more SaaS applications over the next year, a dramatic increase from the 38 percent who were planning to install SaaS apps in 2005."

Posted by Seth Grimes
Wednesday, February 14, 2007
9:01 AM

I agree with Gartner's assessment that "SAS offers the most comprehensive BI platform in the industry" with unmatched advanced analytics. It has been twenty years since I first programmed with SAS. I've invested thousands of hours in the company's products. I want the company to do well. And fortunately my experience over the years and my on-going monitoring of the broad BI market has rewarded my confidence.

Yet Gartner also reports that SAS BI software is perceived as lacking usability. I agree with that assessment, too, and I've welcomed SAS efforts to counter it. It has been a chronic limitation that SAS functions are incompletely exposed through the graphical interfaces and that the variety of powerful analytical and presentation modules are not well integrated. I'd like to know that those situations have changed.

Posted by Product Maven
Tuesday, February 13, 2007
9:30 AM

It's notoriously hard to get real-time process data out of the black box of SAP, yet such measures are crucial to improving any process dependent upon the ERP system. webMethods Optimize for SAP, a business activity monitoring (BAM) module introduced February 12, is designed to provide instant access to in-process performance indicators and decision criteria locked in SAP.

Posted by Doug Henschen
Monday, February 12, 2007
2:50 PM

Business process management suite vendors are embracing the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model with not one but two announcements today around on-demand BPM. Lombardi, for one, introduced Blueprint, a SaaS tool intended to bring process modeling to the masses. I knew about that one weeks in advance thanks in part to Derek Miers' in-depth Put-to-the-Test review of Lombardi Teamworks, posted this morning. Then Appian announced an ambitious (though not-yet-ready-for-prime-time) plan to deliver its entire BPM suite on demand.

Posted by Cindi Howson
Monday, February 12, 2007
11:37 AM

One thing is clear: When you have four Intelligent Enterprise bloggers blogging on a similar topic, it's important! My fear though, in looking at Web site logs, is that we're not yet grabbing your attention on just how important this topic is.

"Search and BI" sounds boring. "Structured and unstructured content" is too conceptual to get you excited. Will the "Googlization of BI" grab your attention? "Seven feet of snow coming your way!"? (Okay, NJ is getting only a puny 12 inches, just enough to make me dread flying tomorrow.)

Posted by David Linthicum
Friday, February 9, 2007
9:56 AM

With the release of Windows Vista, I'm reminded of the release of Windows 95 more than ten years ago. The hype was huge, I had a beta copy, and many felt the world would change forever… It did not.

At the end of the day, operating system upgrades have a diminishing effect over time. I mean, most users don't exploit features of an OS, or understand the advantages of upgrading; they're happy as long as they can get e-mail, surf the Web, drive a spreadsheet and write a letter. To this point, operating system vendors, such as Microsoft, are finding it harder and harder to make new releases compelling. Windows Vista, however, could be a bit different when considering software as a service (SaaS).

Posted by Seth Grimes
Thursday, February 8, 2007
10:37 AM

I’ve been writing and speaking and consulting on text analytics for years. This work led to a recent call from Philip Russom, an analyst at the Data Warehousing Institute, late of Forrester, Giga, Hurwitz, and Intelligent Enterprise. Philip invited me to contribute an expert comment – my take on “text analytics” in six sentences or fewer – for a forthcoming TDWI report on BI search and text analytics.

I failed. I took eight sentences – we’ll see if Philip cuts them down – and I thought I’d share the lot with you.

Posted by Tony Byrne
Wednesday, February 7, 2007
3:31 PM

Google's recent announcement that it upgraded the "Mini" version of its Search Appliance ("GSA") inspires me to share some useful links that have been accumulating:

Posted by The Brain Food Blogger
Wednesday, February 7, 2007
1:35 PM

As explained last week, when a third-party report makes a vendor look good, they tend to share it with as many people as possible. That's why Business Objects and SAS are offering downloads of the latest Garner BI Magic Quadrant through their sites. This week, Microstrategy is circulating The OLAP Survey 6, a customer-satisfaction-oriented report conducted annually by Nigel Pendse and Survey.com. This year's survey involved 1,679 organizations across 87 countries and it's billed (by the publishers) as "the most comprehensive independent survey of the on-line analytical processing and business intelligence market."

Posted by David Linthicum
Tuesday, February 6, 2007
2:52 PM

SAP, in the light of weakening demand for its software, has announced plans to expand faster into the on-demand market, focusing on mass selling versus the slow-to-go enterprise sales that made the company so large in the last 20 years.

Posted by Cindi Howson
Monday, February 5, 2007
5:31 PM

At first blush, Business Objects' midmarket announcement seemed to me more of the same strategy they've been talking about for the last few years: to pursue both the enterprise BI segment as well as the SMB segment. The difference is in the details, though, and this latest announcement shows a much higher degree of activity and focus.

In the enterprise BI space, it's a bit of a cat fight for market share, with Business Objects, Cognos, Hyperion and MicroStrategy continuing to claw at each other. In the SMB space, the market is much more fragmented. While Microsoft certainly wins for brand recognition, there are dozens of other niche players including QlikTech, Celequest (acquired by Cognos last month), and Dimensional Insight to name a few. Business Objects officials concede the biggest competitor in the SMB space is limited BI awareness. Rarely will you see BI discussed in SMB-focused magazines (Inc, Entrepreneur, Fortune Small Business). Many SMBs still think that reports – any reports – out of accounting systems are just fine.

Posted by The Brain Food Blogger
Friday, February 2, 2007
8:24 PM

Use BI to check out these reports on the receiving, defense, rushing and passing stats of this year's Super Bowl contenders. Information Builders has employed its WebFocus Active Reports technology to enable you to dynamically resort, filter and chart the stats on the Bears and Colts. Did your favorite players earn their mammoth salaries?

Posted by Bruce Silver
Friday, February 2, 2007
11:32 AM

SOA analyst Beth Gold-Bernstein of ebizQ posts about her quest for a BPMN tool to support her effort, together with Brenda Michelson, to create a "service design method."

Our goal is to take a pragmatic, business-driven approach to incremental (i.e., project driven) SOA design and implementation. We plan to use standard modeling techniques and tools where ever feasible. The status of this project is that we have now defined the process and design artifacts, and our next task is to model out a case study and see if it holds water and to find the holes…. I argued that it was time for business and IT to start speaking the same language, and we should start off with BPMN right from the start.

Posted by Doug Henschen
Friday, February 2, 2007
10:52 AM

Not all combinations of search and BI technology are created equal, but most do have one thing in common -- they're not ready yet. We've been pining for an interview with an end user with first-hand experience with the combination, but Business Objects, Cognos, IBI and others couldn't point us to anyone. I'm told such customers exist, but I'm guessing they're finding it's really hard to use search-style queries to uncover structured information that's on target.

Most of the Google/BI integrations announced last year will deliver what IDC search expert Sue Feldman calls "Beginner BI." "What they're doing is using search to pull specific information out of databases into the Google interface," she says. "That requires a certain amount of work for each query"

Posted by Cindi Howson
Friday, February 2, 2007
9:20 AM

It might seem odd that a technology analyst and evaluator like myself does not whole-heartedly embrace all the latest technical innovations. In some respects, I'm a laggard. As an example, let's take the recent decision by CMP to cease the print version of Intelligent Enterprise. In many respects, I like the online experience of Intelligent Enterprise: I can readily search for reviews, articles and the like, as opposed to saving every last issue for the past five years (okay, I do that too -- packrat and laggard is a bad combination). I can also readily see how often someone reads one of my articles and clicks through to BIScorecard, something not possible with the print magazine and a capability every writer and advertiser wants.