Panorama Business Intelligence

Based on over  12 years of experience and hundreds of customers here is my list of the 10 best:

1. When CEO is using the BI system at least twice a day
2. When every strategic / decision based meeting starts with BI slides and analysis
3. When more than 15% of the enterprise are using BI
4. When you can answer the question of why on almost every answer?
5. When you can predict results before they happen
6. When internal discussions becomes shorter and much more efficient
7. When you and others can focus better on the relevant
8. When you stop asking others to provide you with reports
9. When your questions become even more challenging for your team
10. When your secretary/PA is doing office work and not providing you with reports

Lately it feels as if everybody in the BI world started blogging and writing about BI 2.0…. out of all the articles and blogs I read there is one that I liked in particular by Neil Raden – Business Intelligence 2.0: Simpler, More Accessible, Inevitable … I admit it might be the case because I felt for the first time someone was thinking about it the same way we do here at Panorama.

I know we promised this blog would not be about us and how we are better but the alignment is so nice that I wanted to open the floor for some discussion with the community and get some feedback about how we are thinking and building software around the concepts of BI 2.0.

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In her Post, Hannah Smalltree summarizes some of the highlights from Gartner’s BI summit.

I read through it and found some points I thought would be interesting to comment on:

The industry continues to move beyond basic reports and metrics toward “process and strategy-driven” BI, according to the study by the Stamford, Conn.-based analyst firm. Process-driven BI is the concept of embedding pertinent reports and analyses in daily workflow, while strategy-driven BI ties data to planning and corporate performance management (CPM) initiatives. With the convergence of BI and CPM well under way, Gartner now expects BI vendors to mingle more with business-process management companies. But other technological trends could change the landscape even more. 

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I just read this post from Mark Smith titled “Is SAP ready for BI”, Mark talks about the fact that SAP BW customers are unhappy and that SAP is not catching up on the BI front. As a relatively new partner to SAP and as a company that is building a solution that runs natively on BW I must disagree with Mark.

While the front end tools might not be the ultimate dream of information workers the platform is actually extremely powerful…. Not that it is the best BI platform overall but there is no doubt that it is the best BI platform for SAP’s business suites and SAP’s data. Relative to any other solution you can now easily bring the data you need in a useful way.  I’ve been in the BI business for many years now, the challenge is always around bringing the data to make it usable…. The apps are the easy part. SAP now offers the best platform to deal with its own data and no competitor can do it in a better way. The interesting thing is that BI companies such as BOBJ or Cognos are leveraging the fact that there is so much unhappiness with BW’s front end and making it sound as if they can solve these problems… by taking and building another platform layer that sits on top of SAP….Have you spoken to a customer that actually tried that route? You will find out very quickly that it is an even bigger challenge… now they have to support another layer of metadata, security, ETL, connectivity…. And eventually it appears that those information workers, for whom we do all of this, are still not using the tools that Cognos or BOBJ provide them.

Would love to hear your feedback

If a company thinks about Scorecarding as just a technology or a tool, they’re not seeing it as something they do. And it’s not just something they do once in a while – it’s something they do all the time, because it is a part of everything else they are already doing as part of their day-to-day work. In fact, if everything is perfect, BI & Scorecardng should be almost invisible – like the air you breathe.

Of course, BI isn’t perfect yet – far from it. With all this in mind, let’s look at how well Scorecarding does the job it should do: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly of Scorecarding.

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In a recent article on the subject Jon mentions the following on the high demand for SAP workers. 

“A shortage of skilled SAP workers is making it difficult for IT departments to fill open jobs and caused the average salary for certain high-level SAP professionals to rise 15.6% in the past year, according to Foote Partners, a consulting firm in Connecticut that studies IT workforce and compensation.” From a BI perspective this makes even more sense…. In the SAP world there is still a lot of dependency on the SAP experts when it comes to the creation of reports, analytics and so forth. 

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