Intelligent Enterprise

Companies now have many options when it comes to the design and implementation of a data management strategy to support business intelligence initiatives. AberdeenGroup's hypothesis is that the predominant pressure driving companies to adopt new data management strategies for BI applications is the need to reduce time-to-information for end-users, but it's surveying end users to develop definitive answers…

Washington Post reporter Ellen Nakashima describes in a Monday, October 22 article, "From Casinos to Counterterrorism," how Las Vegas is a cutting-edge adopter of surveillance technology that has also found its way into U.S. security efforts. Las Vegas has "embraced the twin trends of data mining and high-tech surveillance, with arguably more cameras per square foot than any airport or sports arena in the country."

The casinos are applying facial-recognition, information-sharing, link-analysis, and sophisticated pattern-detection technologies to spot card counters, cheaters, and illegal collusion. Exhaustive tracking helps identify suspicious behavior and spot both high-rollers, who receive special treatment, and low- and middle-rollers, who are targeted for promotions. The casinos are even starting to use gaming chips with embedded RFID chips to track betting.

Have you seen "Greg the Architect" on YouTube? It just keeps getting funnier. The latest episode is "Off the Grid," which nicely skewers the analysts' Quadrant and Wave reports. Kudos to TIBCO. Enjoy!

CA, Day, Hummingbird and webMethods are out, and open-source and business process management-oriented alternatives are in. IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP and BEA remain in the top-right corner. These are just a few of the highlights in the latest Gartner Magic Quadrant for Horizontal Portal Products, released late last month and available here as a free download at Oracle's Web site. Most helpful for would-be portal buyers are the vendor-by-vendor notes on "strengths" and "cautions."

One indication that the customer data integration (CDI) space isn't a very mature is that there are only 11 vendors in Gartner's just-released Magic Quadrant for the technology. Another indication is that just two vendors, IBM and Oracle, are in the "leaders" quadrant, and they just barely make it into that top-right sector. Two other vendors, Initiate Systems and Siperian, are within striking distance in the "visionaries" quadrant, but most vendors are stuck down in that lower-left, "niche player" quadrant.

A just-released survey of 1,125 IT professionals worldwide reveals a link between slow delivery of IT projects and low business profitability. The study, conducted by The Economist Intelligence Unit on behalf of HP, revealed that among nearly half of companies surveyed, 25 percent or more of IT projects are delivered late. IT project hiccups can delay product launches and reduce anticipated revenues and cost savings, cutting overall company profitability.

Extract, transform and load (ETL) technology is still heavily used for data warehousing (DW) and business intelligence (BI) initiatives, but it's also being tapped to support complex challenges including real-time and near-real-time data integration. In fact, use of ETL sometimes overlaps with techniques such as enterprise information integration (a.k.a. data federation) and targeted source-data-access methods like change data capture.

How do the latest ETL products stack up for these broader integration needs? The Forrester Wave Report on Enterprise ETL, Q2 2007, evaluated leading vendors across 68 criteria and found that IBM and Informatica maintain leadership positions in ETL thanks to their "ability to scale and perform batch and operational data integration in complex environments." Other key findings include the following:

Long-time Intelligent Enterprise contributor Cindi Howson wants to understand why and how some companies are more successful with business intelligence than others. The results of the survey will be published in her upcoming book, Successful Business Intelligence: Secrets to Making BI A Killer App (to be published by McGraw Hill in November).

Companies that develop formal practice areas around process management (sometimes described as a "BPM Center of Excellence") are far more likely to succeed than those that don't. That's one of the important conclusions of BP Trends' recent "Survey of Business Process Initiatives."

"There is an undeniable correlation between BPM project success and the use of a dedicated process team or Establishment of a Center of Excellence," wrote report author Nathaniel Palmer of Transformation + Innovation, the research and consulting firm that conducted the survey. "BPM programs are not likely to succeed beyond the departmental level (if at all) without having in place an organized business process team of some kind."

Can't get enough insight on Oracle's planned acquisition of Hyperion? Ventana Research analysts Mark Smith, Robert Kugel and David Stodder - that's right, David Stodder - hold an analysts' roundtable discussion and Q&A; session on the planned Oracle/Hyperion deal, Tuesday, March 6 at 9 AM PT/12 PM ET.

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:

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."

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?

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.

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: