Panorama Business Intelligence

Where should SAP customers spend their BI budget?

Some BI vendors today are telling SAP customers – “solve your problems by using my platform on top of BW”:

“We’re working [to] encapsulate [reporting and analytics] by putting [them] in a platform that offers better performance and is more cost-effective than SAP BW,” says Piet Loubser, senior vice-president and director of market intelligence with Business Objects. “It leverages the ETL connectivity we got with Acta, and the Acta Rapid Marts are now bundled on to the appliance, so you’ve got the database preconfigured, you’ve got the ETL preconfigured, you’ve got the models preconfigured, and you have this certified connectivity into SAP and BW.”

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Appliances are truly a great way to accelerate and simplify deployments of different software solutions. Basically you buy a box that has everything you need on it and is ready to roll….BI is joining this wave by putting data warehouse solutions on appliances and even some reporting capabilities.

What I find even more interesting than hardware appliances is VIRTUAL APPLIANCES….. which are basically software appliances such as VMware & MS Virtual Server. These things are amazing. We just shipped our full suite of products pre-configured and pre installed on a Virtual appliance and people around the world are downloading and using BI in minutes!!! In just a few days we shipped hundreds of those and we can barely supply the demand.

Law enforcement organizations around the world are starting to realize the value of Business Intelligence for helping fight crime.

Now the success is official, at Gartner’s 2007 BI summit the Richmond Virginia Police Department won the BI Excellence award….

I’ve seen this in action, a police department defines their goals for fighting crime, stay focused, measure themselves, analyze trends and get predictions all in close to real time!

Check out this story as well.

Great summary of Gareth’s presentation.  Whatever you want to call it, process-driven BI, operational BI or BI 2.0; integrating BI with business process creates a much needed closed-loop process between making a decision and taking action.  BI is evolving. We’re moving from just accessing and utilizing the vast amount of information stored within our companies, to enabling the information worker to better focus their time and attention on the truly outstanding and exceptional.

This new focus allows decision makers at all levels to better contribute to the overall success of the business.  BI is no longer just about seeing deeper into data, it is about using BI and analysis as catalysts to initiate and event automate certain processes inside an organization and guide people to the right decision.  In this new generation of BI people maybe finding the right answers, but does traditional BI help them to ask the right questions? And more importantly are people spending time where they have the most impact?

 

I read a post today by John Parkinson who speaks about how BI can be used to automate the routine.

I believe routine business decisions should be as automated as possible. After all, when a decision is routine and you understand the rules well enough, that decision can be made by software—using a decision engine—acting on those rules in a consistent, unbiased and auditable fashion. We’ve seen a lot of examples of this over the past few years, such as program trading in securities, granting consumer credit, mortgage origination, inventory management, and support-desk escalation processes. But there are many more opportunities: markdown-pricing decisions—in fact any pricing decision—merchandise-mix planning, resource scheduling.

I find this topic fascinating and truly believe this is the direction BI will take over time. as opposed of being a user centric solution it will become the ”brain” or the “nerve system” of the organization orchestrating and routing complex business processes. 

IF you find this topic interesting you might be interested in this whitepaper as well -  Proactive Business Intelligence Whitepaper (download)

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