Justifying the IT Budget: the Cost of Not Spending

“Competitive and ever-increasingly sophisticated in the marketplace[1]” describes a company positioned for long term business survival. Complacency takes the business nowhere but into irrelevance-land, which I think we can all agree is not where most business owners wish to end up… it makes selling the company slightly more challenging. Even in markets which were once firmly held to be localized are now open to new – and new kinds of – competitors, due in most part to advancements the development of information technology (IT) as well as how it is applied. These days, competition is globally facilitated rather than locally, and it’s becoming the standard approach. Welcome to the cloud.

Data Democracy vs. Data Anarchy: Governed Data Discovery

Successful business intelligence has always been about negotiating the right tradeoffs between the needs of individual business people and the needs of the organization as a whole. In 2001, Bernard Liautaud, founder of self-service BI pioneer BusinessObjects  wrote a book called eBusiness Intelligence: Turning Information Into Knowledge Into Profit that discussed these tradeoffs. He drew the analogy with systems…

What You Need to Know About Cloud Analytics

If you are an analytics professional, then cloud analytics is in your future — if you’re not already doing it.

I’ve talked to lots of companies that claim that cloud analytics isn’t for them. But they’re wrong, not least because their marketing department is almost certainly already using some form of cloud analytics today (to track ads or social sentiment).

What will tip people towards using more cloud analytics?

4 Rules of Thumb for Considering Cloud Applications in Business

With all the talk of cloud computing and Software-as-a-Service models, businesses are increasingly questioning their continued use of on-premises and “traditional” software implementations. Having heard that cloud applications are cheaper and better than locally installed solutions, some small business owners and IT managers are actively seeking alternatives to their current software selections. In too many…

Small NonProfits, Crummy Computers and the Cloud

There are many benefits included in the “value proposition” for cloud computing models, but there are some hidden gems in terms of how these outsourced IT models can specifically and directly address one of the biggest problems facing many smaller nonprofit organizations: they have to use old, outdated, and often just pretty crummy equipment. But now it’s OK, because even crummy old PCs can work just fine when the applications are hosted in the cloud.

Turning a Product or Service into a Solution: the Value Add of a Reseller

There is quite a bit of chatter on the web and among IT resellers about how opportunities to serve business customers are diminishing, yet business adoption of cloud computing, managed services, and mobile technologies is growing tremendously. It seems that use of technology is increasing, but the opportunity for “traditional” IT resellers and channel partners to make money by selling IT-related products and services is diminishing. This is not new, and is simply a finer form of the problem that has been revealing itself for years. In order to provide value, suppliers must provide businesses with solutions to business problems rather than just trying to sell them products and services with a hefty profit margin.

Discovering Julia

Super Bowl weekend was especially dreary in Chicagoland, the victim of a polar vortex winter for the ages. Between the Friday night/Saturday morning snowfall and the bitter cold that followed, my wife and I were pretty much confined to our suburban home for two days, canceling plans with friends in the city. But I resolved while snow-blowing that I wouldn’t let the elements win, that I’d at least have a productive, if unexciting, weekend. And so it was I decided to watch sports on TV throughout– college basketball all day Saturday and Sunday afternoon, climaxing in the Super Bowl Sunday evening – at the same time starting to learn some new analytics software on my computer.