4 Tips on Creating Effective BI Teams

Thanks to software vendors investing heavily in making their applications easier-to-use, accessible via the Web and more affordable, Business intelligence (BI) software is now a viable option for employees in sales, marketing, operations, and other departments to utilize.

But with the proliferation of these tools, business leaders will have to rethink how they address business intelligence governance, or the roles, responsibilities and guidelines it provides its users to ensure BI tools are utilized correctly and appropriately. When it comes to setting up these new BI teams for success, leaders should consider these three steps.

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Making Certain You Get the Most from Deployments

It has been said that it is very difficult to determine ROI for Business Intelligence software. In a blog entry on B-Eye-Network by Wayne Eckerson, How to Measure BI Success, he mentions many types of measurements. It is always important to measure the performance of your Business Intelligence software to make sure that there is continuous value. What about those organizations who avoid a BI software purchase due to cost concerns and the expectation that the software will not fulfill its promises.

Why not try before you buy?

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Baking and Computers, a Surprising History of Analytics Pioneers

Perhaps surprisingly, bakers have a history of being analytics pioneers, from the first business application ever to the latest in-memory technology.

In 1951, the J. Lyons company, famous for their tea-shops throughout the UK, built and used the LEO “Lyons Electronic Organizer” computer they had built to run the very first business application ever: bakery valuations.

[And], it wasn’t just the first business application, it was also the first example of actionable, computer-powered analytics and business intelligence.

How’d that happen?

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3 BI Lessons that Made Cheezburger a More Intelligent Business

I recently had the opportunity to chat with Loren Bast, Director of Business Intelligence at online humor network Cheezburger. Cheezburger invested in a new BI tool because it was unable to keep up with the amount of data it was producing across its popular humor websites such as I Can Has Cheezburger and FAIL Blog.

I asked Bast how he would have managed the project differently if he could start again. He said in an ideal world, he would have focused more on the following three things:

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EPM View: An Interview with John O’Rourke, Vice President of Product Marketing, Oracle Corporation

John O’Rourke, one of the most seasoned veterans of the EPM industry, offers his perspective in this candid interview with Susan Serven. John shares his views on the future of EPM, the merger of Hyperion and Oracle, the most common misconceptions of EPM, his advice for a company just starting to consider implementing a performance management system, why Balanced Scorecard may have fallen out of favor, and many other insights.

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Big Data Isn’t Like Every Other IT Project

Indeed, “a big data project can’t be treated like a conventional, large IT project, with its defined outcomes, required tasks, and detailed plans for carrying them out … Commissioned to address a problem or opportunity that someone has sensed, such a project frames questions to which data might provide answers, develops hypotheses, and then iteratively experiments to gain knowledge and understanding.”

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arcplan Makes Chaos Comprehensible

arcplan makes its living on the chaos of its customers, is how Dwight deVera, senior vice president, describes the firm’s business.

Financial services firms are a favorite target since they always seem to be acquiring new businesses, meaning they have systems that don’t talk to each other, even if they come from the same vendor. When Bank of America acquired Merrill Lynch, both were running SAP.

“But you can’t consolidate across them. Just because they run the same software doesn’t mean that any of their requirements match. They have thousands of discrete requirements, and some requirements contradict others.” They could try to harmonize the two systems, said deVera, but they would never get the job done.

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What Frustrates Me About the EPM Industry and How It Can Be Made Better

(This is the first of 7 articles discussing frustrations with the EPM industry. To be sure you don’t miss out on any articles of interest, please sign up for our weekly newsletter at http://www.epmchannel.com/register-for-our-weekly-digests/.)

I recently read an article on entrepreneurship that featured Richard Branson. In the article, Branson was quoted as saying that the “real opportunity in business is the ability to identify the frustrations in a particular area and have real solutions to remedy those frustrations.”

That started me thinking about the common frustrations that I have seen while working in the Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) industry for the last 15 years. Here are seven common frustrations that I see frequently along with some recommended solutions.

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