THE SEVEN PILLARS OF BI SUCCESS

Business intelligence tools may be getting better, but technology is only part of the story. To succeed you must develop measures, set a strategy, manage effectively, ensure executive support, choose the right tools, standardize on a platform and align the BI strategy with business. Here’s how to make it happen.

By Cindi Howson

As business users, analysts and IT professionals pursue business intelligence nirvana, software tools get the most attention and excitement. After all, the BI tool is the face of BI, masking the data, technical infrastructure and information processes. Whether via a dashboard or other interface, the tool is the domain of IT’s most important constituents: the users. Yet for every successful BI project, you’ll find it was achieved with different BI tools. So, if it’s not the tool choice, what really makes–or breaks–BI? What do successful projects have in common? With business users’ high hopes putting BI pros under intense pressure to create competitive advantages, you can’t rely on technology alone to get you to the promised land. It takes more. In this article, we’ll discuss the seven “pillars,” or factors that support the best BI implementations. To determine these factors, we talked with three award-winning organizations. In addition, Intelligent Enterprise conducted a survey with ASK (Analytic Solutions Know-How). Finally, we’ll also look at what readers feel can help or hinder BI projects.

1. Measure Success

Companies struggle to measure BI success. Some measures, such as return on investment (ROI) show explicit, tangible benefits. Others point to “softer” advantages. These include whether users perceive the BI project as mission critical, how fully key stakeholders support the projects and the percentage of active users. Many organizations go with ROI. However, ROI gives you a precise number based on imprecise inputs. If revenue increases by 10 percent, how much of that is directly attributable to the BI project? Market conditions, employee training and other factors such as a competitor going out of business could be just as responsible. Cost savings offer a more precise input–and have given companies much to brag about when it comes to BI. Here are some examples:

•Allstate Insurance, since it began a data and BI tool consolidation project in 2002, has saved tens of millions of dollars by eliminating redundant reporting systems.

•ENECO Energie, the third largest provider of electric and gas utilities in the
Netherlands, saved $3 million in its customer contact center and billing department, raised conversion rates in campaigns and gained market share.

• 1-800 Contacts, a provider of direct mail contact lenses, estimates that its BI solution provides $50,000 per month in improved revenue, productivity and–most important–customer service.

Although it is generally difficult to calculate and apportion BI success using financial measures, organizations can tally the number of licensed and active users. Unfortunately, few companies do this–and BI vendors historically have not provided adequate tools to do so. However, high numbers of users tend to indicate success. In our reader poll, we found out that on average, only 24 percent of companies’ total employees have BI licenses. But companies that described their projects as “very successful” report a much higher ratio (42 percent) of licensed users. Differences in survey results highlight something interesting about expectations for how far BI can grow. Not surprisingly, nearly all the vendors will tell you that 100 percent of employees should have a BI license. However, The Data Warehouse Institute (TDWI), a leading industry association, reported in a recent survey that 41 percent of those whom respondents identified as “potential” BI users already have a license. This figure is nearly double what our ASK- Intelligent
Enterprise survey says; we classified “all employees” as potential BI users. Recent innovations discussed in Neil Raden’s “BI Megatrends,” BI vendors’ partnerships with Google and other search technology vendors–will extend the reach of BI. Ten years ago, few would have said that every worker (let alone every teenager) needed a cell phone. Similarly, differences in perception among industry analysts, market prognosticators and vendors tell us that a range of opinions exist about BI’s potential, and that many still do not view BI as part of the mainstream office tool portfolio.

2. Develop A Data Strategy

What’s the single most important pillar in any BI architecture? It’s obvious: the data. If you implement a BI tool on top of messy or irrelevant data, either the bad stuff proliferates throughout your organization or the BI tool quickly becomes shelfware. The overwhelming majority (78 percent) of respondents to our survey say that clean, relevant data is essential to BI deployment–a figure higher than any other factor. Too often, data warehouse teams aim immediately for greater breadth when they should start with one subject area, establish high data quality and then move on. Allstate, winner of the 2005 Business Objects Customer Award, established a strong executive advisory group in the early stages of its BI project. The group identified and resolved all discrepancies between Allstate’s old and new BI reporting environments. Business and BI managers together established guidelines for acceptable data quality. Source systems can change frequently over a company’s life. 1-800 Contacts found this to be a data-quality challenge. “We had to coerce the data into manageable sets,” says Jim Hill, data warehouse manager. “However, we were focused on achieving data quality and tying it out to past reports. We had to explain the differences [in data] and show them to the business users, so they would trust the new dashboard.” The company employs Microsoft SQL Server, Analysis Services, Reporting Services and tools from Dundas Software.Even tougher than managing quality is determining what data is most relevant. All three of the companies highlighted here said they felt the data that users accessed contributed heavily to company performance–but for different reasons. At ENECO, BI efforts focused on learning which customers provided value and were better to retain. At 1-800 Contacts, order size and customer service metrics that focus on driving repeat business are key elements of their dashboard. As the screen on the facing page shows, the company created dashboard metrics that tie directly to call center representatives’ performance bonuses. Early indicators allow representatives to take action and managers to provide additional coaching. Thus, as you establish your BI environment, evaluate whether you are building a solution to replace old reporting systems that may be based on outdated business and data requirements. Use your BI strategy to create something core to business performance and provide the right data to support the effort.

3. Manage The Program Well

Nobody sets out to do a bad job. But unfortunately, BI projects can run amok, even with talented people at the helm. Project managers want so badly to be responsive to the business that they answer all requests, no matter how unreasonable or impulsive. So, click your heels three times and repeat the project manager’s mantra: “There’s time, resources and scope.” Stakeholders want everything yesterday. So, if you want to succeed, don’t miss a deadline–not one. Budget upfront for required resources; this means you must be clear about what the business and IT sides must provide. And when requirements change, determine the impact on allotted time and resources. If requirements were ill-conceived from the beginning, scrap the deliverables and start over. Too often, requirements are not prioritized adequately; instead, they are a compilation of everyone’s wish lists. The scope keeps expanding to include more users, more subject areas and more capabilities. The BI team is setting itself up for failure–and setting up business users for disappointment. Establish data governance early so that data warehouse does not become synonymous with never-ending and expensive. 

4. Ensure Executive Support

Everyone knows top-level support is vital. But how do you obtain it? One major BI analyst expressed his frustration that “without CXO edicts, political issues are showstoppers.” In his experience, it’s not easy to make sure that all levels of management buy into the enterprise BI vision, as individuals tend to lack the big picture. Rather than lead, managers react to what’s happening in their own environment. A BI project manager at a medical center related that “all the BI vendors come in and show the executives a bunch of eye candy. They make it sound easy when it’s not. We end up with no funding or resources for our project.” The moral is, don’t let BI vendors’ aggressive sales efforts set you up for failure. In our poll, INTELLIGENT ENTERPRISE readers told us that inadequate funding was a major obstacle to success.“Business executives often have no idea what it costs for their analysts to manually gather information–and how vulnerable they may be because they don’t know how their analysts get their numbers,” the BI project manager says. “Based on what they see, an executive wonders why it takes a BI project six months to get going when his staff could give him ‘answers’ within an hour.” In some cases, executive support is frankly a matter of luck. You can improve your chances if you can bring in a tech-savvy executive who has had BI success elsewhere. Usually, however, support has to be earned–and re-earned. Even a small project success will gain trust and support. Ton van den Dungen, manager of ENECO Energie’s BI Center of Excellence says that his company’s executives initially frowned on BI. “Their attitude was ‘we haven’t seen one successful BI project; it’s too expensive”. But, taking an entrepreneurial attitude, ENECO went ahead with a BI project in 2003 that involved manual extracts from source systems and Microsoft Excel pivot tables. Accounts receivable was the only subject area; the goals were to understand why receivables were high and identify opportunities to reduce them. The pilot, which cost only 350,000 euros, ended up saving ENECO 4 million euros (about $5 million). Success with the pilot project made it possible for the BI team to gain the support and funding it needed to develop a BI architecture that included a Microsoft SQL Server-based data warehouse and implementation of a suite of tools from Cognos. ENECO won the 2006 Cognos Customer Award. Demonstrating success is crucial, but don’t settle for less in garnering executive support. You should aim beyond BI, beyond IT and straight to the head of the boardroom. If the company’s executive committee doesn’t see IT as a strategic asset, BI will suffer from that perception as well. While our reader poll shows that CIOs are part of the business steering team in most companies (75 percent), other surveys report a far lower number. While some of these surveys may define such committees rather narrowly, we’ve seen numbers as low as 8 percent of CIOs serving on executive teams.

5. Choose Appropriate Tools

BI tools have gotten better, which means that selecting one is harder. Vendors now offer a broad spectrum of capabilities in one consolidated toolset. The differences are becoming less obvious. Thus, the key to success is to understand your users and recognize that different groups will have distinctly different needs. As “Which Users Need Which Tools?” shows, at left, the number of users is often inversely related to what you’re asking of the tool’s capabilities. Many companies might, for example, have millions of users who only need access to fixed reports–but just a handful of report authors who demand advanced design capabilities, a scripting language and a rich query engine.Ad hoc query tools have delivered the most success (see Listening Post, at right). These tools sometimes get a bad rap from industry pundits, who think that only power users need them. In reality, ad hoc query tools win out because of their flexibility and closeness to the business side. Today’s ad hoc report often becomes tomorrow’s fixed report, to be consumed by thousands (and fixed reports came in second in the poll at right). The difference is that a business user rather than an IT developer built the initial report; he or she tweaked it according to business requirements–and did it in a matter of hours, not days or months. “Our self-service approach has allowed us to teach our users how to fish rather than feeding them dinner,” says Anthony Abbattista, Allstate’s VP of Enterprise Technology Strategy and Planning.

6. Standardize On A Platform

Companies have multiple BI tools for a number of reasons. Before vendors started to offer suites, their customers were forced to buy different solutions from different vendors. For certain user segments and capabilities, this may still be necessary. Products from vendors that specialize in analytic applications (to handle campaign management or pricing, for example), visualization software and dashboards can be better than what you might get from a BI suite vendor. For the most part, having multiple tools with similar qualities, typically bought from competing vendors by individual business units creates a big BI mess. However, under pressure to meet business needs, unsatisfied users will continue to seek out their own solutions. Yet according to Intelligent Enterprise’s reader’s poll, of the readers who consider their BI projects very successful, 73% classify their BI deployment as enterprise-wide and only 27% describe them as independent business unit implementations.Standardization will put you on the road to BI success, but don’t expect an easy drive. What do you do with old reporting systems? Once Allstate standardized on Business Objects products (with a data warehouse running on Oracle), the company offered incentives to encourage users to migrate to the new environment. As soon as major stakeholders were comfortable with the quality of the information presented in the Business Objects tool suite, Allstate pulled the plug on old reports. Other companies prefer a more conservative approach and let the old systems die a slow death. Our feeling is that if you are aggressive like Allstate, you’ll focus resources on the new BI platform and eliminate multiple versions of data more quickly, saving money as Allstate did.

7. Align BI Strategy With Business

Too often, an “us versus them” mentality characterizes the relationship between business and IT sides. Rather than being the enabler, IT becomes simply the gatekeeper to data and technology. IT must change; it must understand what drives business performance. Is it revenue growth? Driving down costs? Providing better customer service? At a minimum, IT needs to be an active listener. Ideally, IT should be a valuable contributor that is involved in business strategy sessions. ENECO’s van den Dungen says, “We sit with the business so we know what’s going on with the business. If you see the business as a partner, versus IT telling them what they need, there will be more agreement and the business will get much more involved [in IT decisions].” BI is one of the hardest technologies to deploy because comparatively little of the challenge is about technology. The process demands a broader skill set and business focus than other aspects of IT. Note that of the seven success factors we’ve cited, only one relates exclusively to technology. As you embark on your BI project, get excited about the potential of the tools; they are the face of BI. But make sure you devote attention to the other factors, lest that BI beauty only be skin deep.

Debriefing

1-800 Contacts won the 2006 TDWI Best Practices Award. What’s behind your success?

We aligned our first project with a call-center-incentive project. The BI team worked closely with call-center managers and used an agile software-development approach. There were some discrepancies between senior executives and call-center managers on how to show the numbers to agents. Executives didn’t want to just give performance numbers–they wanted to show agents their numbers versus those of other agents to create a competitive environment to drive higher performance. The first pass was good: We got the data. With the second pass, the senior executives wanted a kind of “horse race” to get creative ideas going and better present information, so the front-end dashboard changed a lot. Now, an agent gets a quick visualization of how they are performing against themselves as well as what percentile they are in versus other agents. The system has helped change agents’ behavior.

You worked closely with business users. How has that alignment influenced the BI project? A close working relationship with the business users has been critical to our BI initiatives. The relationship between the business and IT was not always this good. Some projects were floundering, and initially, the difficulties slowed down the business side’s interaction with IT. Business would shout, and IT would do a fire drill and throw something out there. Our new CIO established an agile software-development process with a much-improved governance model. We have much better communication, and business leaders are empowered to set and adjust priorities. The business side sees the data warehouse in a positive light, showing that IT can deliver something that gives business users immediate value and helps them make better decisions. We’ve also given analysts an OLAP data set that they can explore without IT involvement. This took pressure off IT to deliver individual reports.What is your next BI initiative?We are only beginning to leverage information in the marketing space with data mining and customer segmentation. We want to understand the effect of e-mail campaigns and are experimenting with different mining algorithms. Later in the year, we want to identify early or leading indicators and incorporate more monitoring and alerting.Cindi Howson is the president of ASK and the author of BIScorecard ® product reviews. Write to her at cindihowson@biscorecard.com.

FUENTE: http://www.intelligententerprise.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=192300046&pgno=1

¿RENACE LA INVERSIÓN JAPONESA EN COLOMBIA?

Después de 10 años de ausencia, llegó a Colombia una misión de más de 50 empresarios japoneses, dispuestos a conocer cómo está el país para invertir. Estuvieron reunidos en Bogotá, con empresarios nacionales y con miembros del gobierno.

En la mañana del pasado miércoles, se reunieron en Bogotá, más de 50 empresarios japoneses, con empresarios nacionales y presidentes de gremios como
la ANDI, para analizar en conjunto las posibilidades de traer inversión japonesa al país. Y de acuerdo con un asistente al evento, este encuentro significó “el renacer de la inversión japonesa en Colombia”. La reunión se llevó a cabo sin la presencia de medios de comunicación y en la mayor discreción, por solicitud de los empresarios japoneses quienes deseaban que el encuentro fuera totalmente privado. El encuentro fue el resultado de un trabajo que comenzó en 1989, cuando el entonces presidente de Colombia, Virgilio Barco, viajó a Japón con el objetivo de girar las relaciones comerciales de Colombia hacia el pacífico. Una año después de ese viaje, se creó el Comité Empresarial Japón- Colombia Keidanren, con miras a fortalecer la inversión y el comercio entre los dos países. Este comité se reunió nuevamente en los años 91, 95, 97 y 99. A partir de entonces, las relaciones se enfriaron y en esto tuvo mucho que ver la inseguridad en Colombia y hechos contundentes como el asesinato del entonces presidente de
la Mazda, ciudadano japonés. Las relaciones comenzaron nuevamente a estrecharse en abril de 2005, cuando el presidente Álvaro Uribe viajó a Japón con un grupo de empresarios. En ese momento, Uribe manifestó su interés porque la próxima reunión se realizara en Colombia. El miércoles, al clausurar el evento, el Presidente dijo que jamás había imaginado que el encuentro se realizara tan pronto. De acuerdo con varios asistentes al evento, entrevistados por Dinero.com, el encuentro fue positivo, pues los empresarios japoneses manifestaron su asombro por el buen desempeño de la economía colombiana, por el buen manejo macroeconómico y, sobre todo, por la estabilidad que se logró en corto tiempo.

Según explicó otro asistente, los empresarios japoneses se consultan entre ellos y deciden en conjunto dónde es bueno invertir y Colombia estaba catalogado por ellos, como un país que no era bueno para los negocios, y la reunión que se llevó a cabo en Bogotá, produjo un resultado totalmente contrario. De acuerdo con una fuente consultada por Dinero.com, el presidente de Mitsubishi, Yasua Yokota, quien estuvo en Colombia para participar en el evento, les dijo a los empresarios asistentes que en Japón tenían una impresión equivocada de Colombia y ahora los invitaba a hacer negocios en el país. De hecho, el presidente mundial de Mitsubishi es el presidente del capítulo de Japón al interior del Comité Empresarial, y
la Federación Nacional de Cafeteros, es el presidente del capítulo Colombia. Este comité está conformado también por
la ANDI y por Keidanren, que es la asociación de más de 1.300 compañías japonesas y cerca de 200 asociaciones de empleadores. En cuanto a la seguridad, según un empresario consultado, los asistentes quedaron complacidos con el “parte de seguridad” que les entregó el ministro de Defensa, Juan Manuel Santos. Los japoneses expresaron claramente su interés por invertir en Colombia y contaron que los banqueros de ese país están dispuestos a financiar actividades de los empresarios de su país en Colombia. Mostraron interés por invertir en infraestructura, tanto, que preguntaron por la seguridad en el campo colombiano, y el presidente de una firma nacional que construye en el país, les aseguró que ese no es un problema, que ellos construyen en todo el territorio nacional. El auditorio también quedó sorprendido con el ministro de Comercio, Luis Guillermo Plata, quien realizó su intervención en japonés.

FUENTE: http://www.dinero.com/wf_InfoArticulo.aspx?idArt=33592

BUSCAN FORMAS ALTERNAS DE PRODUCIR ETANOL

Los científicos están diseñando organismos microscópicos para extraer combustible de una diversidad de fuentes distintas al maíz, entre ellas las vías urinarias de los seres humanos, un hongo ruso y el agave, la planta de donde se extrae el tequila.

SAN FRANCISCO, California, EE.UU. (AP) _ La fiebre del etanol está ejerciendo presión sobre los suministros de maíz y provocando un alza en los precios de los alimentos.

Los mexicanos salieron a las calles el año pasado para protestar por un aumento en los precios de la tortilla. El costo del pollo y la carne en Estados Unidos se ha incrementado porque el alimento para animales es más caro. Aquí es donde entra a tallar la biotecnología. La búsqueda de fuentes alternativas de energía es más complicada que el mero hallazgo de un sustituto para el petróleo. Los científicos y un número creciente de compañías de biotecnología intentan retirar el maíz de la producción de etanol porque ha creado una enorme demanda del alimento básico mundial. “Existe un enorme potencial de crecimiento” para los combustibles alternativos, dijo Jens Riese, analista de McKinsey & Co. “Pero necesitamos ser más inteligentes y no sólo construir la próxima planta de producción de etanol a partir del maíz”.

Los investigadores se encuentran librando una carrera contra el tiempo. En Estados Unidos ya existen 114 biorrefinerías de etanol y hay 80 más en construcción. Los productores generaron casi 5.000 millones de galones (18.926 millones de litros) de etanol en el 2006, un incremento del 25% en comparación con el año anterior. Y casi todo fue hecho a partir de granos de maíz comestible. Esa es una buena noticia para los agricultores estadounidenses, pero los consumidores están sufriendo en las cajas de los supermercados porque los precios del maíz casi se han duplicado en los últimos dos años y seguirán subiendo.  Y como los agricultores están sembrando maíz a niveles sin precedentes, con frecuencia en lugar de otros cultivos, los precios de otros productos también podrían elevarse pronto. El maíz es un ingrediente fundamental de los alimentos estadounidenses y se encuentra en todo, desde las sodas hasta el jarabe para la tos. También es un alimento básico en toda Latinoamérica, donde sus habitantes serían los más afectados por el alza en los precios.

Quienes respaldan el uso de métodos alternativos de producción argumentan que se requiere un cambio tecnológico pronto, antes de que el etanol generado a base de maíz se generalice a tal grado que otros métodos de manufactura sean excluidos del mercado.  Es por ello que los ingenieros genéticos desde Berkeley hasta
la Florida trabajan a marchas forzadas para producir etanol sin necesidad de emplear maíz. Están estudiando el vientre de las termitas, las vías urinarias de los seres humanos y la savia de las palmeras en busca de microbios exóticos que puedan producir combustibles alternos. Por ejemplo, científicos en
la DuPont Co. han estado trabajando con el ADN de un insecto afecto al agave para producir etanol a partir del desecho del maíz, en lugar de hacerlo del grano. Trabajando con 19 millones de dólares de su propio dinero y la misma cantidad de una subvención del Departamento de Energía, la compañía de sustancias químicas espera tener una planta piloto en operación para el 2010.

La idea es diseñar genéticamente insectos microscópicos tales como bacterias y hongos que generen enzimas que convertirían casi cualquier cultivo imaginable en etanol. En teoría, esto daría cumplimiento a la iniciativa del presidente George W. Bush para promover los vehículos capaces de operar con distintos combustibles, los cuales puedan usar gasolina y mezclas de etanol, y disminuir el consumo de gasolina en 20% en diez años. Un número creciente de compañías de biotecnología, respaldadas política y financieramente por una extraña coalición de acérrimos defensores de la seguridad nacional, capitalistas aventureros y ambientalistas, se están reorganizando para producir etanol con el fin de obtener ganancias a partir de la fiebre por los combustibles alternativos. En febrero, el Departamento de Energía concedió 385 millones de dólares en una subvención durante cuatro años a seis proyectos dedicados a producir el llamado etanol celulósico, que evita el problema del alza de precios del maíz al producir combustible a partir de la paja y otros residuos agrícolas no combustibles. La celulosa es el material de la madera en las ramas y los tallos que le da su dureza a las plantas.

Desde hace 50 años se ha estudiado la forma de descomponer la celulosa en azúcar con el fin de convertir la paja en etanol. Pero los obstáculos tecnológicos y los costos _en especial el de diseñar genéticamente microbios exóticos para que produzcan enzimas_ han sido tan elevados que en lugar de ello la mayoría de los productores de etanol se apoyaron en los elevados subsidios gubernamentales para extraer el combustible a partir del maíz.
Ahora eso está cambiando. Los costos de las enzimas han descendido de aproximadamente cinco dólares el galón (3,7 litros) a menos de 20 centavos el galón. Los analistas dijeron que una vez que los precios de las enzimas se ubiquen por debajo de 10 centavos de dólar, el etanol celulósico será económicamente accesible. “Realmente tiene que haber una mejoría increíble en el costo de las enzimas”, dijo Kevin Baum, vicepresidente ejecutivo en Diversa Corp. “Esto no puede subestimarse”. El creciente número de compañías de biotecnología que están canalizando recursos para aprovechar la popularidad del etanol dicen estar más cerca de hacer redituable al etanol celulósico. “Ocupará una parte muy grande de lo que hacemos”, dijo Per Falholt, vicepresidente ejecutivo de Novozymes Inc., fabricante de enzimas y la mayor empresa de biotecnología industrial. “Tiene el potencial de transformar la compañía”. FUENTE: http://www.dinero.com/wf_InfoArticulo.aspx?IdArt=33644

DUNKIN’ DONUTS USES BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE IN WAR AGAINST STARBUCKS

Dunkin’ Donuts managers are using a dashboard-type software application to fend off advances by its nemesis. 

By Mary Hayes Weier  

Northeastern coffee connoisseurs fall into two camps: those that prefer Starbucks’ dark, rich blend or those that go for the milder, quaffable brew that comes in those retro Dunkin’ Donuts orange-and-pink cups. While Dunkin’ Donuts may be old school, it’s using modern technology to try and outsmart Starbucks for the best franchise operators and locations. The coffee war is playing out in such areas as Boston, New York, and other Northeast locales, where the bulk of Dunkin’ Donut’s 5,000
U.S. franchises are located, and where Starbucks is determinedly pushing in. Now the battle is going global under the direction of a private equity group that bought Dunkin’ Donuts last year and plans for 15,000 franchises worldwide. Its nemesis is Starbucks, which has 12,000 stores worldwide, including 8,800 in the
U.S., and plans to add another 2,400 globally this year. What ends up on the corner of your block — dark and rich, or mild and quaffable — could be determined by who gets there first. To help it win this race, Dunkin’ Donuts is using a new system that helps it more quickly close deals with “customers,” who in the franchising world are the people who apply to run a franchise, pay the franchise fee after the approval process, and then pay royalties. Salespeople and managers use the system to manage information about these customers, including the stage of each potential deal and how financing is going for them. This is particularly important in the competition against Starbucks, which doesn’t franchise, so its growth isn’t stalled by difficulty finding suitable and willing franchise operators and getting them signed up quickly. Dunkin’ Donuts managers use a dashboard-type software application to identify any problem areas so they can keep deals on track. The can get a geographic view of regions where deals are stalling, and then drill down into a specific account to determine what’s slowing down the process. They can identify potential deals in locales that are too close in proximity. They also can identify high-performing areas, and gather best practices from those regions’ salespeople to share with other areas. Key metrics they’re watching include the average cycle time for getting a franchise deal done, the size of deals, and average cycle time by what type of deal gets done. The system was developed within six weeks by business intelligence vendor Oco Inc. Dunkin Donuts CIO Dan Sheehan likens the system to a CRM application with a scorecard built on top. “It’s a huge win in terms of instant access to who and what is in the pipeline,” says Sheehan. “When you look at the a.m. market, we’ve been a leader in the Northeast. Now we’ll take that leadership and go across the country and the world.”

Such analysis isn’t possible without access to clean data. Oco extracted customer data from Dunkin Donut’s various systems and cleaned it up in a data warehouse, establishing standardized categories that make it possible for the dashboard application to slice and dice the data into meaningful information. Updated information is fed into the data warehouse daily. So what’ll it be, new-age Starbucks or your father’s Dunkin’ Donuts? CRM and business intelligence could make the difference in which franchise shows up next in your neck of the woods.

THE STATE OF BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE

(Good) BI, Cruel World? There’s a transformational change going on in business intelligence. Next-generation BI promises speedier, automated decision-making, thanks to affordable computing and storage platforms and advances in business activity monitoring. We assess the changes in the market. By David StodderLet the politicians debate ad nauseam whether isolationism works in the global arena. The argument’s been settled on the business-infrastructure front: No information system is an island, and he who depends on outdated data loses market share. Business intelligence vendors must release products that mesh with these realities if they expect to expand their empires. And the territory is certainly there for the grabbing: A poll released last month by our sister publication InformationWeek showed nearly half of the 500 IT professionals surveyed plan to increase spending on software for viewing and analyzing business information from 2006 levels). Forrester says BI platform revenues will reach $7.3 billion by 2008, and CIOs surveyed by Gartner identified BI as their No. 2 technology priority last year, up from No. 10 in 2004. Despite this, analysts have long puzzled over the relatively low penetration rate of BI tools, generally pegged at less than 20 percent of potential customers. Why the disconnect? After all, BI suites provide the platforms from which critical data is aggregated, searched, presented and analyzed. Sure, it’s a complex process. Data must be pulled from disparate sources, such as ERP, order entry and inventory management. But up-to-date information is the lifeblood of business. How can four out of five not be buying in?The answer may be that too many BI platforms are mired in historical analysis across siloed back ends. The action is in a new, more integrated world of dynamic, real-time information that’s emerging from Microsoft, Oracle and other BI vendors. These suites empower real users–not IT pros drafted into duty–and let them draw valuable data from processes, events and other sources beyond conventional data warehouses. Their vehicle for display? Real-time dashboards that process up-to-the minute information and present it for immediate use and analysis. But that level of integration carries risks: Data sharing within BI brings up serious security, compliance and privacy concerns. And then there are the turf wars, as departments, employees and business partners scramble to protect data–their prime intellectual asset–from internal and external competitors. Still, a new vision of real-time, networked intelligence is possible thanks to affordable computing and storage platforms. These, combined with advances in leveraging BAM (business activity monitoring) to track strategic business objectives and cost-effective data-warehousing appliances, should help vendors extend the use of BI throughout the business world. Now, will they rise to the challenge? And will IT buy in?United BI NationThe list of BI players is a veritable who’s who: Big application and systems providers–including IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP and most recently, Hewlett-Packard–are trumpeting BI, analytics and data warehousing and are challenging in markets once owned by pure-plays such as Business Objects, Cognos, Hyperion, Information Builders, MicroStrategy and SAS. In addition, systems integrators and resellers are clamoring for BI expertise to buff up their services. In mid-February SAP acquired Pilot Software, which helped define the term business intelligence and now specializes in performance-management applications based on its BI/analytics platform, PilotWorks. More recently, in early March, Oracle made an offer to buy Hyperion. If the deal goes through, Oracle will muscle up its portfolio with the addition of Hyperion’s Essbase OLAP server and BI tools. More importantly, however, Oracle will assume the market lead for performance management tools and financial applications. Market analysts predict more mergers and acquisitions to come.If these commercial packages are out of your league, open-source BI is becoming a player, as are new data-warehouse appliances that promise analytical power at an affordable price. JasperSoft and Pentaho, two of the better-funded open-source start-ups, help develop BIRTs (BI and Reporting Tools) for Eclipse, the popular open-source development environment. This is no flash in the pan: BI veterans Actuate, Business Objects and Cognos are also BIRT developers. Finally, BPM and rules-engine providers are in the hunt. BEA Systems with Fuego, as well as Fair Isaac, Savvion, TIBCO and WebMethods, all boast of activity monitoring, embedded analytics, decision management and business information integration in their products. These technologies will be critical to next-generation BI.Let The People BI Although BI tools are becoming somewhat easier to use, they remain a challenge for most nontechnical employees, especially if the suites require deep knowledge of underlying data models, schema and metadata. It takes some training before an end user will know how to drill down and discover why, for example, a BI dashboard is showing that labor costs are high in comparison with sales in a particular store. If BI is to enable quick, daily business decisions on issues such as allocating resources and inventory, users shouldn’t be forced to waste time sifting through irrelevant data for answers. They certainly can’t depend on IT to do their drilling.BI and analytic application vendors will take the user’s role and responsibilities into account. Business Objects, Microsoft, Oracle and others will further link BI into project lifecycle management systems to integrate a much more guided experience with established project methodologies. What these vendors often overlook, though, is that executives and managers have always had methods of gathering internal information and applying it to their decisions. Maybe they had IT develop a proprietary application that paves the way by automating existing measures, or they might become spreadsheet jockeys themselves. Some simply rely on instinct. Either way, old habits die hard. BI flourishes where executives, managers and business analysts are willing to challenge conventional wisdom, but not all organizations are that adventurous. From a strategic standpoint, BI vendors are discovering that the best way to overcome entrenched practices and increase their presence is to infiltrate the application, service and process environment that operational workers encounter every day. In this capacity, BI and performance-management dashboards serve as components of corporate portals or other interfaces. Eighteen months ago we reported that Microsoft Excel was an integral part of the enterprise business intelligence strategy–and with good reason. Excel is flexible, provides both numeric and visual representations of data, and can be scripted to provide bidirectional communication that enables write-backs for forecasting or corrections to existing data (see “One Suite To Serve them All“). Some BI vendors are still battling to pry users away from their spreadsheets, but most–including Microsoft–have accepted defeat gracefully and are working to bring BI’s benefits to those who prefer spreadsheets as their main tool and entry point. For more on Excel, see “Surrender the Spreadsheet“.Laws Of The LandInevitably, BI-generated aggregations and other intermediate analytical data stores house sensitive or proprietary information, meaning any BI implementation must address security and privacy concerns. Most BI vendors pay heed to database and network security best practices; however, newer systems are getting tougher, using guided analytics and role-based access to protect data sources. Master data management (sharing a master data set among disparate IT systems and groups) and other infrastructure-management capabilities are rapidly becoming enterprise BI product differentiators. Of course, the hammer that will really pound vendors into shape is regulatory compliance. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act, for example, outlines “need-to-know” access to data. For compliance with Basel II, HIPAA and other regulations, companies need better audit trails, better data quality and improved security. They also must be able to track what information and analysis contributed to a business decision. BI and data warehousing can help improve accountability and stewardship of information resources. However, BI and analytics activity will put database and application managers under added pressure to safeguard data sources from suspicious queries, aggregations, loading and other activity. Regulatory compliance is pushing some BI vendors specializing in performance management, such as Cognos and Hyperion, to expand their roles beyond passive, strategic business analysis. Through partnering with search technology providers, BI’s reach is broadening into unstructured data found in Office documents, e-mail, voicemail and other assets. Rather than focusing on discrete transactions, BI must be able to comprehend events amid a sea of data to address fraud detection, security surveillance, and new business activities such as RFID tracking and algorithmic trading in financial services. Previously, BI has kept its focus on the past, primarily on relational, transactional data. With help from search, XML and event processing technology, the blinders are starting to lift, and none too soon. The X Factor

XML is alive and well, and popular for content management as well as providing the basis for industry standards such as XBRL (Extensible Business Reporting Language). This is presenting data-management challenges that ultimately will impact the BI establishment. XML data comes into systems and is shared primarily through documents and forms. Should the data be “shredded” into relational rows and columns? Or is it necessary to retain the document context?

IBM, Microsoft and Oracle, and new vendors such as Ipedo, Ixiasoft and Mark Logic are marketing “pure” XML database technology that retains context. These vendors, plus middleware providers such as Progress Software’s DataDirect, support the emerging XQuery standard, which will serve a role similar to that of SQL. This will allow querying, manipulation and processing of XML data as easily as an Oracle or SQL Server database is queried today. Most BI tools arrived on the scene to replace manual SQL coding. Query engines will have to upgrade to accommodate XQuery and XML, or use partner technologies from DataDirect or other middleware providers to work with XML-based sources. Data warehouses that bring in XML data and content also will have to adjust to new usage patterns that will differ from what designers anticipated with traditionally structured data. XML database technology, whether integrated with the big vendors’ relational systems or offered by pure-play providers, will be important to broadening BI into the XML realm.Time Is The EssenceWhen people first started talking about real-time BI, skeptics didn’t hesitate to chime in. Do sales managers, or even most executives, really need up-to-the-second numbers? Or are vendors just trying to sell us more expensive stuff? BI applications in a variety of areas, such as pricing, manufacturing, yield management, fraud detection, supply chain planning and call-center management, can help decrease the latency between data capture and when it’s available for analysis. That can only be good for business. This demand for real-time processing hit the data warehousing community where it hurt. Call it collateral damage: As data volumes have grown, so has the difficulty involved in loading massive, sometimes multiterabyte, extracts into enterprise data warehouses. Most systems need to go offline for periods of time before the updated state is finished and BI tools can have at the data. Moreover, data warehouses have been gradually moving from monthly to weekly update schedules. More than one daily update is currently considered “right-time” in many shops–that is, close enough to real-time. The result? As BI plays a more operational role, downtime leaves businesses vulnerable. To speed up the process, companies are turning to active data-warehouse approaches that include trickle feeding the system smaller updates rather than updating in one big lump. Others are changing their architectures to include middle-tier servers that function much like an application or transaction server to manage data feeds and play query traffic cop. Enterprise data warehouse specialist Teradata, now in the process of splitting off from parent company NCR, cites customers such as Continental Airlines and Harrah’s Entertainment that use active concepts with centralized warehouses to drive real-time customer intelligence, letting them make offers or knowledgeably respond to customers’ behavior when they’re on the line or playing at one of its gaming establishments. Cost pressures are also driving interest in data-warehousing appliances from DATAllegro, HP, Netezza and Sun Microsystems’ Greenplum. Teradata and Oracle, too, are close to marketing data-warehousing appliances–generally hardware, software and (in Netezza’s case) storage bundles that commoditize massively parallel, shared-nothing computing. Shared-nothing computing is a distributed computing architecture whereby data and processing are located on multiple machines with no centrally located data store or processor. This leads to easily scalable systems that have, in theory, no single point of failure. Gigabit Ethernet, InfiniBand and proprietary interconnects let nodes communicate and distribute the work. The appliances also feature chip-level optimization and specialized disk I/O–long BI and data warehousing’s chief performance bottleneck–so the machines can focus solely on the kind of I/O associated with data warehousing and analytics. Feel the wind in your spreadsheets. Parallel, shared-nothing architectures have forever been considered more scalable and faster for analytics and data warehousing, but only Teradata has had true success with it in the market–and Teradata is expensive. Data-warehousing appliances are bringing the architecture into the mainstream, putting price pressure on Teradata and offering an alternative to the standard, shared memory or disk approaches offered by Oracle and Microsoft. IBM stakes out the middle ground by offering some database systems with parallel, shared-nothing architectures. As packages, these systems avoid saddling administrators with tuning the entire stack to meet time-sensitive pressures and ever-growing data quantities. However, there are downsides. The appliances are customized for a specific purpose; they are not meant for mixed workloads, such as OLTP plus complex data querying, or even analytical workloads that require specific tuning to meet unusual objectives. This could be a showstopper if “unusual” means an innovation that adds up to a major competitive business advantage. However, they may be just right for high-performance data marts–that is, data warehouses or analytic engines built specifically for one department or purpose, such as tracking online customer shopping. Attracted by their potential affordability and easier maintenance, midmarket firms might also jump on the data-warehousing appliance bandwagon. Just as data-warehousing appliances could clean up the gathering and preparing of data, BI appliances hold promise in simplifying the “downstream” OLAP for use in exception reporting, alerting and other operational BI chores. Celequest, acquired in January by Cognos, made a name for itself by offering tools for BAM, which focuses on detecting patterns in processes, events and other activities. In late 2006, the company began to market an in-memory, behind-the-firewall appliance for operational BI and performance management, with SAP installations as a target market. It will be interesting to watch how Cognos, already prominent in performance management, plays its hand with the Celequest technology–and how competitors, including application providers Oracle and SAP, will respond. Whether appliances or not, BI tools and analytic applications are racing to exploit 64-bit processing platforms that can support big, in-memory and data-intensive applications. These platforms will let users rely less on IT and perform more extensive and complex queries without having to retrieve data from disk. Appian and QlikTech are the most prominent specialized vendors in this realm, while SAS, long known for its deep analytics, leads the pack of established BI platform providers.Paradise By The DashboardIf empowering business users to measure, monitor and manage business performance is the end game for BI, then performance management is an area where vendors must excel. Not surprisingly then, performance management dashboard development has been the rage in BI, in some cases letting organizations dust off shelfware and finally apply the tools effectively. A dashboard, frequently in tandem with business-scorecard applications, presents information in a visually powerful way, often with gauges, metrics and graphs. The interface draws on more comprehensive performance-management engines that link into underlying applications, BI systems, data warehouses and other sources. Performance management has established a foothold in the CFO’s office, where it aids in planning, budgeting, forecasting and consolidation. All major BI and ERP players, plus specialists such as OutlookSoft and Spotfire, are chasing this market. However, none has achieved breakout success in making performance management essential to operational activities beyond finance. Some BI vendors are focusing on making performance management part of robust analytical applications specialized for certain industries or functions. However, as Cognos’ Celequest acquisition shows, BI vendors realize it will take more than what they have in their traditional technology bases to succeed. Operational dashboards must tap timely information drawn directly from processes and event streams to be fully relevant. And for that, we need BAM.Up A Real-time NotchBPM (business process management) vendors such as BEA with Fuego, IBM with Filenet, MetaStorm, Oracle and Savvion have long provided BAM functionality as a way of enabling continuous improvement of processes, often to meet Six Sigma or other best-practices requirements. As automated processes proliferate, it takes BAM and BI functionality to help companies stay ahead of the complexity they’re busily creating and be able to monitor and measure whether their processes are fulfilling strategic business objectives. Many organizations would love to bring together real-time BAM capabilities with their enterprise BI platform’s facilities for long-range planning and analysis. It’s the best of both worlds: Processes could be optimized continuously, with input coming from throughout the enterprise through operational BI systems. Linked more tightly with processes, conventional BI analysis and reporting won’t lag so far behind–a situation that prevents companies from recognizing trends and patterns indicating problems in customer processes or supply chains until it’s too late. Through dashboards and mobile devices, alerts and BAM notification systems can enable key personnel and systems to take action.With BI and BPM more closely aligned, organizations can apply predictive analytics to anticipate problems, even use rules engines from the likes of Fair Isaac, ILOG and Pegasystems to automate remedial decision-making. There’s also room at this intersection for innovative start-ups. In February, Altosoft launched Insight, which uses adapters to pull data from processes and other sources, perform predictive analysis and then use simulations to show the potential effect of changes to processes. This BI-process synergy fits with larger organizational objectives to drive BI implementation through business models. In other words, rather than start with the data requirements, a model-driven approach looks first at what needs to be accomplished in sales, finance, product design or other business areas. Business modeling requires a richer metadata and semantic integration layer than most data warehouses currently have. However, with the adoption of XML-based schemas, business process modeling languages, such as BPEL, and service-oriented architectures could accelerate the evolution of information integration to support model-driven BI.     FUENTE: http://www.intelligententerprise.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=198701576&pgno=1

LINKS “CURIOSOS”…mapa 3d actividad económica mundial, origen de los nombres de las empresas más reconocídas..

Este post tal vez les parezca algo absurdo, que no tiene mucha relación con los temas de este blog sin embargo, he decidido mostrar algunos links “curiosos”. Disfrútenlos

Les interesa saber de donde salieron los nombres de Empresas tan reconocidas a nivel mundial como Google, Hotmail, Hewlett Packard, Apple, Cisco, Xerox, Sony, etc.
http://www.forofriki.com/?p=1041

Puedes analizar tu nombre, en donde recibirás una completa descripción de tu persona, es bueno porque habla de tus cualidades (un poco en el entorno empresarial), en lo personal fue muy acertada.
http://www.paulsadowski.com/Numbers.asp

Tendrás la posibilidad de analizar tu fecha de nacimiento, y obtener mucha información personal entretenida como el día de tu concepción, tu numerología, tu fecha de nacimiento según el calendario Hebreo y mucho más.
http://www.paulsadowski.com/BirthDay.asp

Las 10 ideas más estupidas pero más rentables. ¿Tienes una idea pero no te atreves a hacerlo porque piensas que es demasiado estúpida? Piénsalo bien porque puedes estar perdiéndote tu oportunidad.
http://www.forofriki.com/?p=2210

Mapa 3D de la actividad económica mundial. La universidad de Yale se ha currado un mapa en 3D de que representa la actividad económica de cada región del planeta, es curioso, pero tarda un rato en cargar, sean pacientes.
http://gecon.yale.edu/world_big.swf

HERRAMIENTAS WEB 2 PARA GENTE DE NEGOCIOS.

Hace algún tiempo me encontré en
la Web algo muy interesante, no es algo nuevo, pero tal vez no le damos la importancia que merece, hablo de la “Web 2” enfocada a la empresa, tal vez muchos se preguntan ¿Qué es
la Web 2? Pues es la transición que se ha dado de aplicaciones tradicionales hacia aplicaciones que funcionan a través del Web enfocadas al usuario final.   Se trata de aplicaciones que generen colaboración y de servicios que reemplacen las aplicaciones de escritorio, personalmente me gusta decir que con
la Web 2 yo digitalizo y personalizo mi vida; pero bueno es mi punto de vista, nada técnico y seguramente erróneo.   Los ejecutivos deben seguirle el paso al avance de la tecnología, es inconcebible que un CIO no se pueda adaptar a las nuevas herramientas tecnológicas, no solo un CIO sino toda aquella persona que este relacionada con el mundo de los negocio, en el cual es indispensable estar informado, conectado con el mundo y siguiéndole los pasos a la globalización, es por esto que Forrester publicó los resultados de su encuesta a 119 CIOs (Chief Technology Officers), concluyendo que
la Web 2.0 se está llevando al mundo de la empresa a gran velocidad. El 89% de los CIOs encuestados aseguraron haber adoptado al menos una de las aplicaciones Web 2.0 más importantes - blogs, wikis, podcasts, RSS, social networking, y tagging - y un 35% aseguraron estar usando todas ellas. Esta es una lista más o menos completa de aplicaciones Web2.0 que pueden utilizarse a nivel empresarial para ganar en productividad y comunicación, y poder conseguir que los empleados hagan cada vez menos tareas repetitivas y se dediquen más a las interacciones tácitas, que son las que aportan valor a la empresa de la nueva economía.  Espero les sean útiles. BLOGS Y GESTIÓN DE CONTENIDOS

• WordPress
• Blurb
• Logahead
• Loudblog
• Lyceum
• pMachine
• Six Apart
• Textpattern

WIKI DE EMPRESA/BLOG

• Atlassian
• CustomerVision
• iUpload
• Socialtext
• Stellent
• Traction

COLABORACIÓN:

• Google Docs and Spreadsheets
• Foopad
• iFolder
• Jotspot
• Joyent
• SeedWiki
• ServerSideWiki
• Socialtext
• StikiPad
• SynchroEdit
• Thumbstacks
• Web Collaborator
• Wikispaces
• Writeboard
• Zingee

GESTIÓN DE PROYECTOS

• BaseCamp
• Backpack
• CentralDesktop
• iOutliner
• voo2do
• Ta-da Lists
• TimeTracker
• dotProject
• Quickbase
• Harvest - gestión de tiempo dedicado a proyectos

VOTACIONES, FAVORITOS Y TAGS

•  
  • Ambedo
  • BlinkList
  • BloxOr
  • Boxxet
  • CoComment
  • Digg
  • Del.icio.us
  • Dogear (IBM)
  • StumbleUpon
  • Furl
  • Joyent
  • Kaboodle
  • ListMixer
  • OnlyWire
  • RawSugar
  • 30DayTags
  • StockDigg
  • Rrove
  • TagCloud
  • Tagyu
  • Tags.App
  • Tendango
  • Socialmarks
  • Simpy
  • Spurl
  • Yoono

WIDGETS Y MASHUPS

•  
  • Ning
  • Orangoo Spell Check

HERRAMIENTAS DE PRODUCTIVIDAD (OFFICE 2.0)

•  
  • 37signals
  • ajaxXLS
  • AjaxWrite
  • CentralDesktop
  • Foldera
  • Gliffy
  • Google Calendar
  • HipCal PIM
  • iRows
  • Joyent
  • Kiko
  • Numbler
  • Num Sum
  • ThinkFree
  • 30Boxes

Trumba PÁGINAS WEB Y PORTALES

•  
  • Goowy
  • Google Pages
  • Netvibes
  • Pageflakes
  • Protopage SiteKreator

CALENDARIOS Y EVENTOS

•  
  • Eventful
  • Skobee
  • Mosuki
  • CalendarHub

CONTACTOS

•  
  • Plaxo
  • Jigsaw
  • LinkedIn

APLICACIONES EMPRESARIALES

•  
  • 24SevenOffice
  • Workday
  • HelpSpot

E-MAIL Y MENSAJERÍA

•  
  • Meebo
  • eMessenger
  • Zimbra
  • RoundCube
  • Joyent

FEEDS

•  
  • Chuquet
  • InstantFeed
  • Feedburner
  • Feedmarker
  • FeedoStyle
  • FrankenFeed
  • FeedCraft
  • FeedYes
  • Gregarius
  • Joyent
  • Megite
  • Memeorandum
  • NativeText
  • NetVibes
  • Newsgator
  • Odiogo
  • Pluck
  • PubSub
  • Rojo
  • Simplefeed
  • Tailrank
  • Yahoo pipes

CLASIFICADOS

•  
  • Edgeio
  • LicketyTrip
  • Cooqy
  • Zaptix
  • ListSomething
  • Zillow
  • Listable
  • Jobazaar

MONITORIZACIÓN DE SERVIDORES

•  
  • mon.itor.us

MONITORIZACIÓN DE COMPETIDORES

•  
  • Compete
  • Competitious

ESTADÍSTICAS

•  
  • Blogbeat
  • ClickTracks
  • Coremetrics
  • FeedBurner
  • Fireclick
  • HitBoxPro
  • Hitslink
  • Mint
  • MyBlogLog
  • Omniture
  • Performancing Metrics
  • Pheedo
  • Sitemeter
  • WebTrends
  • VisitorVille

BUSCADORES (CONSULTAR TAMBIÉN “LOS BUSCADORES QUE VIENEN“:

•  
  • Technorati
  • Clusty
  • Gravee
  • Kratia <