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Posted by Timo Elliott on Tuesday, June 18, 2013 · Leave a Comment 

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VELUX is a €2.3bn provider of roof windows and skylights, headquartered in Copenhagen in Denmark. The VELUX name is derived from “ventilation” and “lux” (light in Latin), and it is one of the strongest global brands in building materials.

Anders Reinhardt, head of global business intelligence for Velux recently gave a presentation explaining the company’s business intelligence strategy, at the Gurus of BI event in Oslo, Norway.

VELUX has been using business intelligence for over a decade. Like many other organizations, has been struggling to find the right model to provide better business intelligence services to internal departments, at lower cost and with fewer resources.

After a thorough investigation of fast-changing user and data needs, the company is implementing a plan to move from a centralized, report-based strategy to a more flexible, user-friendly self-service model, using SAP analytics technology.

VELUX 100% BI Strategy – 100% Technology – 100% Business Value

In his presentation, Reinhardt explained how the company started implementing a BI strategy in 2000, faced with many different “versions of the truth” across the organization. These efforts culminated in 2010 with a VELUX performance model that provided “one version of the truth.” The solution was anchored in the Finance function and used a centralized platform based on SAP Business Warehouse and BEx Analyzer.

In 2011, the team realized that although the BI strategy had met the original goals, technology possibilities and user expectations had been rapidly changing. They decided to take a step back and looked at business intelligence from a more holistic perspective.

In order to ensure that they remained aligned with the business goals of VELUX, they set out to challenge their assumptions, with a series of questions about user needs, management focus, and flexibility requirements:

• Did the team really understand the users and their needs?
• Was the reporting in the central system a true picture of overall reporting activity?
• Did VELUX management have an accurate overview of reporting activities?
• How should the team involve management in prioritizing and setting strategic directions?
• Was the team perceived as a help or a bottleneck?
• Where could the team really make a difference?
• What were the new requirements in terms of speed, flexibility, and simulation?

With the help of external consultants, the team compared the current reporting activities against a desired future state. The results were eye-opening for both the business intelligence team and management. Reinhardt noted:

“I can recommend this exercise. I know a lot of departments who work with BI think they know their users, what they’re doing, and what they’re needs are – but unless you’ve done a real investigation of this, I would challenge you that you will find stuff you didn’t know existed.”

The investigation immediately showed that there were immediate opportunities:

“We discovered that some of our subsidiaries had actually bought and were operating BI systems on their own. We didn’t know that, and management for sure didn’t know it! … A lot of decentralized costs were being spent on BI.”

The main findings included:

• A need for a wider variety of more user-friendly tools
• Users found the existing data too hard to understand, and more non-ERP data was required
• Standard reports had only limited value, and users wanted more flexibility to create their own reports
• Some business units had invested in their own systems, but preferred to be part of a global system.

There had also been massive changes to user patterns and behavior. A new generation of tech-savvy business users expected direct access to the data they needed to do their jobs. This meant that business intelligence solutions had to be suitable for every employee, not just financial controllers and analysts.

In common with many other IT organizations around the globe, there was also strong pressure to deliver more, faster, with fewer staff, even as data volumes and user demands were rising.

To address the challenges identified, VELUX has invested in SAP HANA and SAP BusinessObjects, to provide fast, self-service access to information.

Since the introduction of BusinessObjects two years ago, the company has seen a massive increase in the number of users. There are already more than on the previous system, and the company believes this will eventually expand to around 4,000 users, compared to just 800 on the old platform. The self-service nature of the tools has meant the team has not seen any significant increase in support requirements.

Reinhardt emphasized that it’s not enough just to focus on the more tools. His team realized that some of the users in the business were simply lacking analytical skills, making it harder to get the full benefits of the new reporting system. His team will be working with the user base on improving those skills in order to augment the business benefits.

“Doing visualization is really cool… but if you apply the wrong graphs to the data you will not get a very good result…. Some of my employees have had to actually take a course in visualization, just to be able to challenge the business.”

Mr. Reinhardt explained how the team built a business case for SAP HANA based on three main drivers:

• A new vision for financial planning
• Faster and cheaper data modeling
• Accelerated access to external data sources

A SAP HANA project has been initiated to strengthen the financial performance throughout the organization, replacing budgets with rolling estimates and simulation models. The future system, based on SAP Business Planning and Consolidation will make it possible to plan units and prices faster and on a much more granular level than today. Any adjustments in the model will be immediately reflected in the PL, and compared against targets and KPIs. All cost simulations are driver-based, using figures imported directly from SAP.  Feedback on the prototype system has been positive:

“Initial tests of the HANA effect on planning shows a significant performance increase. Planning without HANA would not be an option!”

With SAP HANA, new data flows can be implemented at approximately half the cost and effort of previous solutions. In addition, VELUX has initiated a proof of concept using HANA’s predictive analysis abilities to spot defect trends and calculate service efforts and guarantee provisions.  VELUX is also looking into using HANA for real-time and unstructured data that would have been a challenge in the past.

Mr. Reinhardt concluded his presentation with the challenges for the future, explaining: “we still have a long way to go.”

VELUX at BI2013

Later that week, Mr. Reinhardt went on to give another presentation at the SAPInsider BI 2013 Event in Amsterdam. SAP’s Thierry Audas took advantage of the opportunity to interview him about the VELUX projects:

Conclusion: A New BI Strategy, Now More Than Ever

In conclusion, VELUX had a lot in common with many other mature, BI-using organizations. If your organization is still primarily pursing a centralized, top-down BI strategy, it’s time to take a look at the new technology possibilities to get more data and control into the hands of business users, and pursue a “network of truth” BI strategy.

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Filed under All, Best practice, Featured · Tagged with BI, BI Strategy, Business Intelligence, BusinessObjects, HANA, SAP, SAPHANA, Strategy, users

Article source: http://timoelliott.com/blog/2013/06/velux-a-new-business-intelligence-strategy-to-meet-new-needs.html

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Posted by Timo Elliott on Wednesday, June 19, 2013 · Leave a Comment 

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“With great strength comes great responsibility”*.

Today, too many organizations using big data seem only to be limited by what they dare admit to the public.

Don’t follow their example. Legally, you may own the data, but you should behave as if it were owned by the people who generated it.

This means transparency, making it easy for people to see what data you hold about them, and what you’re doing with it. It means asking for permission before using their data in new ways. It means letting people control who else has access to that data.

Data privacy is becoming a competitive differentiator. Organizations that ignore these common-sense rules will (eventually!) pay the price.

Other suggested rules can be found at the User Data Manifesto site.

* Either Voltaire, or Uncle Ben in Spiderman

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Article source: http://timoelliott.com/blog/2013/06/big-data-is-a-powerful-weapon-use-it-wisely.html

RADNOR, Pa.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–

QlikTech,
(NASDAQ: QLIK)
a leader in Business Discovery – user-driven Business Intelligence (BI),
today announced that the company was honored as a “Learning! 100 Award”
Winner by Elearning! Media Group (EMG), publishers of Elearning! and
Government Elearning! Magazines, for its product certification program
designed to help its partners and customers differentiate themselves in
the growing market for Business Discovery.

The final Learning! 100 rankings will be revealed at the Awards Dinner
and Reception held at the Enterprise Learning! Conference Expo (ELCE),
on August 26 at the Marriott at the Convention Center, Anaheim, Calif.
For the full list of Learning! 100 winners, please visit: http://www.2elearning.com/www/news/latest-news/single-news-article/article/learning-100-award-winners-being-honored-at-enterprise-learning-conference-expo-2013.html.

About QlikTech

QlikTech (QLIK) is a leader in Business Discovery—user-driven
Business Intelligence (BI). Its QlikView Business Discovery solution
bridges the gap between traditional BI solutions and inadequate
spreadsheet applications. The in-memory associative search technology
QlikTech pioneered created the self-service BI category, allowing users
to explore information freely rather than being confined to a predefined
path of questions. Appropriate from SMB to the largest global
enterprise, QlikView’s self-service analysis can be deployed with data
governance in days or weeks. The QlikView Business Discovery platform’s
app-driven model works with existing BI solutions, offering an immersive
mobile and social, collaborative experience. Headquartered in Radnor,
Pennsylvania, QlikTech has offices around the world serving
approximately 28,000 customers in over 100 countries.

Qlik™, QlikView™, QlikTech™, and the QlikTech logo are trademarks of
QlikTech International AB which have been registered in multiple
countries. Other marks and logos mentioned are the trademarks of their
respective owners.

Article source: http://finance.yahoo.com/news/qliktech-receives-2013-learning-100-120000839.html

The breadth and scope of Halo 2013′s features place it on par with custom-built systems in the world’s largest enterprises, but at a price point and ease of use much more accessible to smaller organizations.

San Diego, CA (PRWEB) June 18, 2013

Halo Business Intelligence (Halo BI) today announced Halo 2013 Business Intelligence and Analytics Platform, a significant update to its award-winning business analytics and visualization software suite. Included among the more than 40 new features are native connections to hundreds of new enterprise applications, databases and warehouses, integration with big data sources such as social media and sensor data, cloud-based deployment options, and high performance computing enhancements that boost the system’s speed by 20 times or more.

“Over the past few years there’s been a proliferation of specialized BI and visualization tools designed for a specific department or type of data analysis,” said Halo BI CEO Ray Major. “This has balkanized business information and created the very problems business intelligence was supposed to solve. Our goal with Halo 2013 is to deliver a business analytics platform that can combine all types of data — structured, unstructured, big, small, you name it — and provide a single source for information and analysis no matter what your department, role or location within the enterprise.”

In all Halo 2013 offers nearly four dozen new features and improvements. Chief among them:

•     Big Data Integration and Analysis — Halo 2013 can ingest data from extremely large, high volume and/or unstructured data sources such as social media, web and e-commerce logs, machine sensors, etc. and combine that information with that of mainstay corporate systems such as ERP, CRM, HR, Customer Service, accounting and so on. This provides everyone from marketing staff to the executive suite the ability to work with and make business decisions based the full scope of internal and external information
•     High Performance Data Extraction — Traditionally one of the most time-consuming aspects of business analytics and intelligence, extracting data to be analyzed from large applications and databases can often take hours or even days to perform. Halo 2013′s new Parallel Data Extraction allows it to maximize the full resources of the server — CPU, memory and discs — to work around software limits and accelerate the extraction cycle by twenty-fold or more. In some cases extracts that once took a full day can be cut to as little as half an hour.
•     Cloud-based Deployments Platform as a Service — In addition to standard on-premise configurations, Halo 2013 can be deployed in a hybrid or pure private cloud system as well as delivered in a 100% hardware-free Platform as a Service (PaaS) model. These options allow organizations greater flexibility to choose the business analytics model that suits their operation best.

Other new features included in Halo 2013 include advanced roll-based security, metadata enrichment and auto-geocoding, native support for all major relational databases, integrated data quality tools, self documenting analytics, enhanced reporting, alerting and integration with desktop tools such as Microsoft Excel, and numerous user interface enhancements for mobile devices such as tablets and smartphones.

“This is undoubtedly the most significant release we’ve had to date,” Major said. “The breadth and scope of Halo 2013′s features place it on par with custom-built systems in the world’s largest enterprises, but at a price point and ease of use much more accessible to smaller organizations. We’re very excited to bring it to market.”

Halo 2013 will begin rolling out to current Halo BI customers in early July. New deployments are expected to begin soon thereafter. For more information on the Halo 2013 Business Intelligence and Analytics Platform visit http://halobi.com/halo2013/.

About Halo Business Intelligence

Halo Business Intelligence is a global provider of information discovery, business intelligence and analytics systems tailored for small and mid-sized enterprises. Developed to leverage common business software systems, open technologies, and mobile devices like smartphones and tablets, Halo BI frees non-technical users to do their own data-mining, analysis and reporting without relying on IT staff or proprietary applications. Founded in 2008, the company has more than 300 customers in manufacturing, retail, construction, health care, hospitality and professional services worldwide. The company is headquartered in San Diego, California, and maintains corporate offices in North America, EMEA and the Asia-Pacific region. For more information, contact Halo BI at tel: +1 888 300-0219, email: info(at)halobi(dot)com, or on the web: http://www.halobi.com.

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Article source: http://www.prweb.com/releases/2013/6/prweb10843167.htm

Yellowfin: Making Business Intelligence easy

Yellowfin’s even breaking new territory with social and collaborative BI features – things other vendors are just now starting to discuss

(PRWEB) June 19, 2013

The agreement will see the Texas-headquartered consultancy make Yellowfin’s easy-to-use BI solution, and associated training and implementation services, available to its large customer base throughout the United States.

iOLAP CEO and Co-Founder, Doug Slemmer, said that making the decision to partner with Yellowfin was simple, because its BI solution addressed growing demand for flexible consumer-oriented reporting and analytics, with a unique pricing model.

“We see a new wave of technology companies entering the BI space offering better, faster and less expensive solutions,” said Slemmer. “Simplicity and pricing are being carefully balanced with power and features to help companies achieve more in shorter timeframes. Yellowfin BI fits that profile, providing cutting edge technology and features, with a revolutionary subscription-based pricing model, that makes BI shelfware – a large problem in the BI industry – a thing of the past. For us, the decision to partner with Yellowfin was easy.”

Senior BI Developer for iOLAP, Nikola Kostrencic, said that his team was pleasantly surprised by the breadth of world-class features offered by Yellowfin, particularly given preferential pricing when compared to other well-known BI solutions.

“Yellowfin really surprised us in terms of features and functionality,” said Kostrencic. “At the price point, we expected to just get the basics – simple reporting and dashboards. Pleasingly, we found an extremely complete platform, with all the bells and whistles offered by the older generation of BI tools. Mobile BI, location intelligence and multi-source data sets – it’s all there. Yellowfin’s even breaking new territory with social and collaborative BI features – things other vendors are just now starting to discuss.”

Speaking about the partnership, Head of Operations for Yellowfin North America, Justin Wright, said that iOLAP’s well-regarded reputation as a dedicated provider of Big Data and analytics solutions, would enhance Yellowfin’s standing in North America.

“Unlike other general-purpose IT firms, iOLAP has specialized in delivering Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing solutions for the past 14 years – so they do it exceptionally well,” said Wright. “We’re confident that iOLAP’s deep understanding of the BI marketplace will assist Yellowfin to meet growing demand for cost-effective, consumer-oriented BI.”

About iOLAP

iOLAP, Inc. is a strategic data consultancy specializing in Data Warehousing (DW) and Business Intelligence (BI) strategy and solutions. They are completely focused on these markets and bring a client-centric and business-focused perspective to all of their engagements. iOLAP has been in business since 1999 with in-depth expertise across all DW and BI technology areas, including the newest leading-edge Business Analytics and Big Data architectures. They serve some of the world’s largest companies across all major industries. While other consultants are still trying to figure it out, iOLAP has already delivered results, thanks to better people, strategy, delivery practices and methodology. Visit them online at http://www.iolap.com.

About Yellowfin

Yellowfin is a global Business Intelligence (BI) and Analytics software vendor passionate about making BI easy. Yellowfin is headquartered and developed in Melbourne, Australia, offering a highly intuitive 100 percent Web-based reporting and analytics solution. Founded in 2003 in response to the complexity and costs associated with implementing and using traditional BI tools, Yellowfin is a leader in mobile, collaborative and embeddable BI as well as Location Intelligence and data visualization. For more information, visit http://www.yellowfinbi.com.

For further media information, interviews, images or product demonstration, please contact:

Lachlan James, Yellowfin Communications Manager, on +61 03 8617 4954, 0431 835 658 (Australia) or lachlan.james(at)yellowfin(dot)bi

Steven Crofts, iOLAP Vice President of Marketing, (214) 618-5283 or scrofts(at)iolap(dot)com

For regular updates and news, follow Yellowfin on Twitter (@YellowfinBI), LinkedIn (Yellowfin Business Intelligence) or email pr(at)yellowfin(dot)bi to subscribe to Yellowfin’s free e-newsletter.

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Article source: http://www.prweb.com/releases/BI-Solution/dashboard/prweb10848485.htm

ATLANTA–(BUSINESS WIRE)–

iPartners,
the leading provider of Software as a Service (SaaS) business
intelligence and data warehousing solutions to the property casualty
(PC) insurance industry, today announced that it has again been named
as a ‘Leading Vendor’ by Celent in the recently published Insurance
Deal Trends 2013 report. This is the fifth consecutive year
iPartners has been recognized for its ‘leading’ status based on deal
flow with insurance carriers for iPartners’ business intelligence and
data warehousing solution.

“We congratulate iPartners on once again being named a leading vendor
for its continued strong deal volume. A continued investment in core
systems renewal was clearly reflected in the property and casualty deal
data,” says Mike Fitzgerald, senior analyst with Celent’s Insurance
group and coauthor of the report. “There was also an increase in data
mastery tools and PC carriers compete in pricing and risk analytics.
Once nice-to-haves, advanced analytics are becoming table stakes.”

“Our 2013 report shows that overall deal activity among PC insurers
continues to be slow. However, investments in core systems and data
analytics have buoyed sales for key vendors like iPartners,” says Karen
Monks, analyst with Celent’s Insurance group and coauthor of the report.

iPartners founder and CEO Robert Lasher commented on the recognition
saying, “We are thrilled with our fifth consecutive year of Celent
Deal Trends recognition and credit much of our consistent success to
our ongoing investment to deepen and broaden the capabilities of our BI
and data warehouse solution. As we’ve enhanced our offering, the
industry has also become more aware of the cost, time, dependability and
ongoing support benefits of SaaS platforms and Cloud delivery, resulting
in insurers better prepared to take advantage of what we have to offer –
not just in our data and analytics capabilities, but also in our
delivery model.”

iPartners’ insurance business intelligence solution is an easy to use
SaaS solution designed specifically for the PC industry. The suite is
built around an insurance specific data model and offers a complete
analytics solution including: a data warehouse, performance management
dashboards and scorecards, ad-hoc detailed analysis, production
reporting, and drill to detail.

About iPartners

As the industry leading provider of ‘on demand’ PC insurance business
analytics solutions, iPartners enables insurance executives to make
higher quality and more timely decisions — the true measure of an
insurance executive’s productivity – by delivering accurate, up-to-date,
easy-to-use and relevant data via a suite of customized dashboards,
scorecards, and a library of PC specific KPIs (key performance
indicators). Delivered via Software as a Service (SaaS), iPartners
currently services over 45 customers and processes over 25 million
policies representing over $18 billion in premiums. For additional
information visit www.iPartners.net
or call 888.618.8360 ext 230.

PR Contact:
Solomark Associates
Susan Douglas, 847.895.2634
susan@solomark.com

Article source: http://finance.yahoo.com/news/ipartners-earns-leading-vendor-status-120000012.html

NEW YORK, NY–(Marketwired – Jun 17, 2013) – Information Builders, a leader in business intelligence (BI) and analytics, information integrity, and integration solutions, today announced that the company is working with Amtex Solutions Limited to provide the UK public sector with cost efficient BI-as-a-service. The solution, WebFOCUS Cloud Express, is part of the government’s G-Cloud Framework and allows public sector entities to leverage advanced BI and analytics capabilities at a low cost.

BARC, Gartner, Ventana, and other research firms recognize Information Builders’ WebFOCUS platform as one of the leading business analytics, business intelligence, and data integration platforms. With WebFOCUS Cloud Express, this trusted toolset is now available to the G-Cloud Framework, providing a secure turnkey solution for analytics, BI, data discovery, data visualization, and enterprise reporting. Offered in a software-as-a-service (SaaS) delivery model, it features an embedded data warehouse based on Microsoft SQL Server 2012. Its wizard-based data integration automatically uploads data and generates dashboards and reports that are delivered to e-mail clients, mobile devices, and web browsers. The agreement with Amtex Solutions Limited ensures that the public sector can realize these benefits and enjoy lower costs, reduced procurement times, a simpler tendering process, and a genuinely open and competitive marketplace.

“Information Builders formed our partnership with Amtex Solutions with a clear focus in mind to deliver on the expectations of the public sector for business analytics, offering a uniquely responsive, flexible, and dynamic platform for all the public sector’s business intelligence requirements,” said Peter Walker, UK and Ireland country manager, Information Builders UK Ltd.

“Information Builders has prepared an Express version of WebFOCUS, our flagship product, that is both very easy to use and yet extensible to handle full production applications,” said Gerald Cohen, president and CEO of Information Builders. “We are delighted to bring this product to the UK market with the G-Cloud program.”

The WebFOCUS platform is used by UK public sector organizations, including Central North West London NHS Trust, Greater Manchester Police, Debt Management Office, and the Northern Ireland Civil Service.

WebFOCUS Cloud Express allows public sector entities to leverage high-performance, full-featured BI capabilities, such as:

• 100 percent web-based deployment — no additional client hardware or software to install or maintain
• A single web-based environment for accessing and using all reporting, dashboards, and analysis capabilities
• Wizard-style interfaces that lower the barrier to entry, simplifying all phases of the data definition and reporting process
• User-friendly development tools that eliminate the need for SQL coding or object-oriented development expertise
• Access to all the data across the organization via more than 26 pre-built data adapters
• Distribution of reports and dashboards to users across all mobile platforms (Android and iOS) and web browsers in support of New Ways of Working initiatives
• E-mail reports and dashboards to individuals or workgroups
• Open APIs supporting REST, XML, and JSON for external system and content integration
• IL2-compliant cloud infrastructure (IL3 later in year) deployment
• ISO 9001- and ISO 27001-certified operations
• 99.995 percent up-time guarantee
• Highly secure IL2 environment for your data with virus protection, advanced router-level firewalling, denial of service (DoS) protection, regular security vulnerability assessment, and scanning

About Information Builders
Information Builders helps organizations transform data into business value. Our software solutions for business intelligence and analytics, integration, and data integrity empower people to make smarter decisions, strengthen customer relationships, and drive growth. Our dedication to customer success is unmatched in the industry. That’s why tens of thousands of leading organizations rely on Information Builders to be their trusted partner. Founded in 1975, Information Builders is headquartered in New York, NY, with offices around the world, and remains one of the largest independent, privately held companies in the industry. Visit us at informationbuilders.com, follow us on Twitter at @infobldrs, like us on Facebook, and visit our LinkedIn page.

Article source: http://finance.yahoo.com/news/webfocus-cloud-express-provides-uk-213544216.html

DETROIT, June 18, 2013 /PRNewswire/ – Qstride, a leading force in the business intelligence and analytics world, today announced that it will begin offering $50,000 of no-cost software licenses of MicroStrategy, a Gartner leading magic quadrant business intelligence technology, to its client companies as part of its new “Got BI?” public awareness initiative. This offering will allow qualifying companies to experience the benefits of integrated business intelligence and analytics technology without the initial software costs and with very little financial risk.  MicroStrategy is positioned in the Leaders Quadrant by Gartner.

(Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20130306/CL72697LOGO )

The “Got BI?” initiative is designed to highlight and promote how having a business intelligence strategy can help companies increase overall revenue, make better business decisions faster, and gain a competitive advantage. 

Qstride specializes in providing customized business intelligence and analytics solutions that include mobile, social, and cloud offerings designed to complement the way companies do business today. Combined with the elite lineup of MicroStrategy Business Intelligence software, premium research, and in-depth information resources, Qstride’s integrated solutions will offer added value and ROI in the competitive marketplace.

Qstride’s lineup of business intelligence offerings includes some of the most cutting-edge and relevant technology and services available anywhere, including the following:

• Mobile intelligence products designed to create measurable results in this expanding commercial marketplace
• Data warehousing and cloud computing solutions for maximum access to data and added control over marketing strategies in the field
• Social intelligence that delivers added commerce and marketing features for client companies in the social media environment
• Integrated business intelligence solutions that create added visibility and increased efficiency for sales and marketing, data management and access operations within the corporate environment

The launch of the new “Got BI?” campaign will further cement Qstride’s leading position in the business intelligence community. MicroStrategy’s Business Intelligence products and services are a good fit for Qstride’s integrated approach and can provide added value for companies in the Qstride client family.

About Qstride:

As a leading force for innovation in the Business Intelligence industry, Qstride offers exceptional end to end BI solutions for clients in measuring and tracking company performance, increasing delivery throughput, and decreasing delivery risk via its robust technology stack and professional services.

Article source: http://finance.yahoo.com/news/qstride-announces-got-bi-marketing-115800007.html

Employees have long had the ability to process and analyse small data sets themselves, thanks mainly to Microsoft Excel.

But when it came to anything that exceeded Excel’s maximum row limit (65,000 in Excel 2007), they were dependent on the reports and dashboards that the IT department had built using the enterprise standard business intelligence tools.

Recent years, however, have seen not only a staggering uptick in the volume of data produced and collected by businesses, but also a steady increase in the awareness of the power of data analytics.

The combined effect is that users are increasingly dissatisfied with the prescriptive reports and dashboards that are handed down to them from IT. In particular, the time it takes for new reports to be issued cannot keep pace with employees’ need to answer questions as they arise.

It is little wonder, then, that there is high demand for ‘self-service BI’.

In a 2011 white paper, analysts Claudia Imhoff and Colin White defined self-service BI as “the facilities within the BI environment that enable BI users to become more self-reliant and less dependent on the IT organisation”.

And according to the Wisdom of Crowds report, an annual survey of business intelligence users by BI guru Howard Dresner, self-service BI has been among the top technology priorities for two years running.

At first glance, it seems like a straightforward idea. But on reflection it quickly emerges that there are many different ways to approach self-service BI – in particular, how much autonomy is extended to users.

When it comes to enterprise-wide self-service BI programmes, IT organisations are still finding their way. But the growth of providers selling easy-to-use and easy-to-deploy BI software reveals that users are helping themselves, with or without the IT department’s aid.

Here is yet another field of technology where the IT department must find a way to offer users the tools they want while simultaneously applying the data governance and security controls that the organisation needs.

Self-service BI in practice

One organisation working towards self-service business intelligence is sportswear-maker Nike. According to Jimmy Lee, an expert architect at the company, it is doing so in response to the constantly changing needs of business users.

“Every time the IT department builds a new report, our users say, ‘We have more questions that we need answered,’” says Lee.

The problem is that the IT department’s workload is such that it can no longer keep up with those changing demands. “We’ve tried things like Agile but no matter what, if a user comes to us with a new requirement, we’re at least going to take a day to provide it, and probably six weeks.”

Meanwhile, the complexity of the analysis that the business needs is growing too. “We’re having to do more complicated work – more data types, deeper questions – in a shorter amount of time.”

Allowing business users to build their own reports seems like a happy compromise. In fact, Lee says, Nike’s business users already have self-service BI in a sense – they have access to the data warehouse, and they are happy to slice and dice the data in Microsoft Excel if possible.

But this does not support the information and data governance processes that the IT department demands. “We want them to do it with more governance.”

There are a number of reasons why Lee believes that now is the time for Nike to implement self-service business intelligence.

Firstly, its core BI infrastructure is up to the job. “All the data from SAP is in our Teradata data warehouse and it’s enhanced with other data feeds; we’ve got data quality tools in place; and the terms in our semantic layers are all aligned,” Lee explains. “We’re in a pretty good place.”

Secondly, there is clear evidence of demand. “Business teams are starting to hire their own data scientists and statisticians, and are buying their own BI tools,” Lee says. “The demand signals are there.”

And thirdly, technology is now available that allows non-expert users to conduct complex analyses themselves, such as Tableau and QlikView.

“Now is the time to act,” says Lee. “If our technology organisation doesn’t get in front of this, we’ll have business groups doing it on their own and end up with lots of point solutions across the organisation.”

To gauge what kind of self-service BI functions it should be building, Nike’s IT department has interviewed various stakeholders on how they use analytics today, and how they plan to in the future. This process has identified three end-user personas within the organisation.

There are what Lee calls ‘front-line users’. “They don’t want to make their reports, they just want pre-built reports with the parameters that they need,” he says.

Then there are conventional analysts, who want to perform OLAP reports on defined data sets. And then there are the ‘data scientists’, who want access to as much data as possible to perform ‘exploratory’ analysis.

“We need to support all three groups at an appropriate level,” says Lee.

Another interesting finding from the interviews was that when asked, “Do we have enough BI tools?”, a number of business users replied, “We have too many!”

“That was surprising because we only have [IBM's BI platform] Cognos,” Lee says. “But to fill the gaps, they’d bought their own tools, and now they have too many.”

Software selection is just one of the challenges facing self-service BI initiatives. As Lee found, there is also the thorny issue of democratising access to information.

“We ran a proof of concept using Tableau, and the project got stalled for a week because the team couldn’t get access to the data they needed,” Lee explains. It turned out that the project team was using the wrong process to apply for access to the data, and was being blocked on security grounds.

“I met with our security guys and said, if a financial analyst wants this data, shouldn’t he be able to access it? They replied, that would be really complex for us to do. My response was, yes, it is complex, but we’re currently pushing the complexity onto the users.”

The lesson? “We need global support for this strategy or it won’t work,” Lee says.

As for paying for the self-service BI initiative, Lee’s plan is to tie investments to existing initiatives in each of the departments. “If the supply chain team has some initiative under way to improve their performance, and I can tie the self-service BI strategy to that initiative, they will support it, and I won’t need to work out some complicated return-on-investment case that probably won’t deliver anyway.”

The aim is roll out self-service business intelligence in 2014, Lee says. The implementation will start by identifying potential early adopters. “We’ll focus on the areas with more interest first,” he explains.

The first project will be a reference implantation – a “stake in the ground”, Lee says –that will be used as the template for all future projects.

Another company putting business intelligence in the hands of its employees is Barclays.

Lee Mooney is visual analytics manager at the bank’s innovation and customer experience team. The unit is tasked with finding ways to improve customer engagement through technology, Mooney says, and it uses business intelligence to provide insight into what Barclays customers want.

In the past, there was not one easily accessible repository for customer data, however. “Barclays is really old and really big, and its data landscape is the same,” says Mooney.

The team therefore constructed its own BI infrastructure. It built a data warehouse using Teradata technology, and chose Tableau’s visual BI tool as the user interface. “I think of Teradata as the engine and Tableau as the vehicle.”

The system has had some remarkable benefits, Mooney says. It has revealed some fundamental truths about Barclays’ customers that were not previously known, for example.

“It showed us that 2 million of our customers only have a savings account,” says Mooney. “No-one knew that before.”

It has also dramatically accelerated the speed of analysis at the bank. “By using this capability, our team of three data scientists can outperform hundreds of staff,” Mooney claims. “One executive was pretty jumping for joy after seeing what we could do.”

Now, the Teradata/Tableau platform is available for anyone in the organisation to use. “If you want it, you can have it,” Mooney says.

That means that front-line customer service staff are now building dashboards to track complaints, for example.

“Even our internal auditors are using Tableau now,” Mooney explains. “We showed it to one auditor, who had no background in business intelligence, and he had built his own dashboard in ten minutes.”

Industry impact

Looking at the recent financial performances of some of the BI software vendors, it certainly seems as though a significant change is afoot.

Tableau Software, for example, saw sales double in 2012 to $128 million. The company raised in the region of $250 million in its recent initial public offering (IPO).

CEO Christian Chabot recently told Information Age that Tableau owes it success to the fact that people of any skill level can use the software. This breaks the hegemony of BI experts over analysis.

“I think we’ll look back at the analytics industry like we currently look back at typing pools,” he said. “We live in that age now when it comes to data – anyone who has a question is reliant on a high priesthood of specialists in the back room.”

Another company riding high in the BI software market is Sweden’s QlikTech, which in April reported 22% revenue growth year-on-year for its first quarter of the financial year, up to $96.5 million.

QlikTech CEO Lars Bjork says that, like Tableau, usability by non-BI experts has been the key to its success.

“We are driving consumerisation of enterprise software in our space,” he says. “We always focused on the use. You want the user to be able to make changes to the application, add an extra data source, build a different chart on their own.

“Because if it doesn’t have that element of self-service, the tool is going to be abandoned.”

More established BI vendors have not fared as well. For example, MicroStrategy, the largest remaining independent BI software supplier, reported a 6% decline in sales to $130 million in its most recent quarter. Behind that figure lay a 24% fall in licence sales.

The company rejects the suggestion that this is due to the rise of Tableau and QlikView. According to Nick Barth, the company’s UK sales engineering manager, the company recently launched a number of new, non-BI applications, and its sales force has yet to adapt.

“Whenever you add a bunch of new products to your kit bag, sometimes you’re going to see your sales team stumble,” he says.

But the company has introduced self-service functionality to its BI platform. This includes the ability for users to upload their own datasets – i.e. not from the enterprise data warehouse – and an in-memory visual analytics tool.

Barth is candid about the inspiration for this last feature. “We have customers who are coming to us saying, “We’ve got these 20 users who all want to use Tableau.’”

That is proof enough that there has been a fundamental shift in the way that BI systems are being procured and used. The challenge for IT departments is to enable that shift while keeping data under control. 

Article source: http://www.information-age.com/technology/information-management/123457131/self-service-business-intelligence

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I presented a session on “Analytics Like Never Before” last week at the Gurus of BI conference in Oslo, Norway.

The fast-paced, 40 minute presentation covers a wide range of analytics topics including:

• Why new “signal” data means we no longer have to manage business by looking out of the rear-view mirror
• Why big changes to analytics technology are ripping up existing best practices
• Why you shouldn’t let anybody tell you that in-memory technology is too expensive
• Why many of the traditional barriers to analytics success — such as the integration of unstructured data and predictive analytics — are rapidly falling
• Why the forty-year-old separation between operational and analytic systems is rapidly disappearing, thanks to in-memory technology
• How organizations can respond to higher user expectations with analytics new interfaces, including mobile and cloud
• Why the “network of truth” is a better model than the “single version of truth” that has been the holy grail of analytics for many years
• Real-life examples of organizations — including startups that have no other connection with SAP or BusinessObjects — that are changing the way they do business thanks to SAP Analytics technology

You can watch the presentation below, and download the presentation in slide format (pptx) or as a document (pdf)

Please contact me if you would like any more information about the themes covered in the presentation, and don’t hesitate to contact me if you need a presenter for your next internal or external event.

The conference also featured keynotes from other key industry analysts including Cindi Howson of BIScorecard.com (skip to 13″20 if you don’t speak Norwegian!):

And analytics author Wayne Eckerson of BI Leader Consulting:

And a fun discussion panel between various analytics vendors including SAP, IBM, Microsoft, Tableau, and Qlikview:

Share and Enjoy

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Filed under All, Featured · Tagged with #bigdata, Analytics, BI, Big Data, Business Intelligence, BusinessObjects, Dashboards, Futures, gobi2013, gurusofbi, Reporting, SAP, Trends

Article source: http://timoelliott.com/blog/2013/06/analytics-like-never-before.html