Do you have BI Performance Anxiety ?
BI is key to enabling companies to turn oceans of data into predictive models and actionable decisions. However, a survey of 353 executives in large companies, reported that their chief BI concern was the performance of various BI solutions.
Development, support and enhancement teams are typically deployed to address BI performance challenges with varied success. But most companies don’t have a dedicated focus on performance.
A BI Center of Excellence (BI CoE) measured by performance KPIs and service metrics is one solution to this problem. This is not an area that traditionally draws high-level attention or is featured in a dedicated CoE initiative, yet in the right circumstances it offers unique value. Read more 
Analytics-as-a-Service: Understanding how Amazon.com is changing the rules
“By 2014, 30% of analytic applications will use proactive, predictive and forecasting capabilities” Gartner Forecast
“More firms will adopt Amazon EC2 or EMR or Google App Engine platforms for data analytics. Put in a credit card, by an hour or months worth of compute and storage data. Charge for what you use. No sign up period or fee. Ability to fire up complex analytic systems. Can be a small or large player” Ravi Kalakota’s forecast
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Big data Analytics = Technologies and techniques for working productively with data, at any scale.
Analytics-as-a-Service is cloud based… Elastic and highly scalable, No upfront capital expense. Only pay for what you use, Available on-demand
The combination of the two is the emerging new trend. Why? Many organizations are starting to think about “analytics-as-a-service” as they struggle to cope with the problem of analyzing massive amounts of data to find patterns, extract signals from background noise and make predictions. In our discussions with CIOs and others, we are increasingly talking about leveraging the private or public cloud computing to build an analytics-as-a-service model.
Analytics-as-a-Service is an umbrella term I am using to encapsulate “Data-as-a-Service” and “Hadoop-as-a-Service” strategies. It is more sexy 🙂
The strategic goal is to harness data to drive insights and better decisions faster than competition as a core competency. Executing this goal requires developing state-of-the-art capabilities around three facets: algorithms, platform building blocks, and infrastructure.
Analytics is moving out of the IT function and into business — marketing, research and development, into strategy. As result of this shift, the focus is greater on speed-to-insight than on common or low-cost platforms. In most IT organizations it takes anywhere from 6 weeks to 6 months to procure and configure servers. Then another several months to load, configure and test software. Not very fast for a business user who needs to churn data and test hypothesis. Hence cloud-as-a-analytics alternative is gaining traction with business users.
Big Data, Analytics and KPIs in E-commerce and Retail Industry
- How to convert Lookers to Bookers…
- How to create unique and effective Digital Experiences that impact probability of purchase or likelihood of return.
- What offers might result in higher “take rates”
The change in consumer behavior and expectations that e-commerce, mobile and social media are causing is hugely significant – big data and predictive analytics will separate brand/retail winners from losers. This won’t happen overnight but the transformation is for real.
Retail Industry makes up a sizable part of the world economy (6-7%) and covers a large ecosystem – E-commerce, Apparel, Department Stores, Discount Drugstores, Discount Retailers, Electronics, Home Improvement, Specialty Grocery, Specialty Retailers and Consumer Product Goods suppliers.
Retail is increasingly is looking like a barbell – a brand oriented cluster at the high-end, a very thin middle, and a price sensitive cluster at the low end. The consumerization of technology is putting more downward pricing pressure in an already competitive “middle” retail environment. The squeeze is coming from e-commerce and new “point, scan and analyze” technologies that give shoppers decision making tools — powerful pricing, promotion and product information, often in real-time. Applications in iPhones and Droid, like Red Laser can scan barcodes and provide immediate price, product and cross-retailer comparisons. They can even point you to the nearest retailer who can give you free shipping (total cost of purchase optimization). This will lead to further margin erosion for retailers that compete based on price (a sizable chunk of the market in the U.S, Europe and Asia).
Data analytics is not new for retailers. Point of sale transactional data obtained from bar-codes first appeared in 1970s. A pack of Wrigley’s chewing gum was the first item scanned using Universal Product Code (UPC) in a Marsh Supermarket in Troy, Ohio in 1974. Since then, retailers have been applying analytics to get even smarter and speedup the entire industry value chain.
More recent use cases of retail analytics include: Read more
Mobile BI – Business KPIs and Dashboards “on-the-go”
Who doesn’t want to achieve faster “time-to-information” and shorter “time-to-decision” for executives and managers with mobile BI? Who doesn’t want to disseminate insights or KPIs to front-line employees, such as field sales representatives, line of business managers, and field service employees?
The question is not whether Mobile BI is a good idea but how to execute this program in a low-cost way? How to design and deploy eye-popping “wow” apps? How to support, maintain and enhance these apps which are constantly changing? What technology and infrastructure to put in for a national or global deployment? Who is going to fund all this plumbing – corporate, LoB or IT?
Business Analytics solutions for “always-on” 3/4G enabled mobile devices – iPads, iPhones, tablets, smart phones – are becoming prevalent as the form factor becomes appropriate for BI. We are increasingly seeing firms build state-of-the-art dashboard solutions for iPads. The “post-desktop” apps provide senior management with intuitive interactive access to the company’s most important business KPIs and dealing with data overload.
Tablets, 4G Wireless and next gen displays (+gesture based, verbal interfaces) have enabled new productivity improvements and better ways to consume information, perform ad-hoc querying and scenario planning. Dashboard, heatmaps and scorecards on the iPad, iPhones and Androids are intuitive, attractive, powerful, available at any time and any place: a perfect mix for top managers, sales teams and even customers.
BI (and Information Management) is a natural fit for mobile devices. Managers, blue and white workers spend a majority of their time away from their desks. Most are traveling, walking about or driving from site to site. And it’s these mobile workers who need the most up-to-date information. They need mobile BI to retrieve data to make on-the-spot decisions, monitor operational processes and review KPI, and work-in-process dashboards.
The Vendor Landscape of BI and Analytics
The “Raw Data -> Aggregated Data -> Intelligence -> Insights -> Decisions” is a differentiating causal chain in business today. To service this “data->decision” chain a very large industry is emerging.
The Business Intelligence, Performance Management and Data Analytics is a large confusing software category with multiple sub-categories — mega-vendors (full stack, niche vendors, data discovery, visualization, data appliances, Open Source, Cloud – SaaS, Data Integration, Data Quality, Mobile BI, Services and Custom Analytics).
But the interest in BI and analytics is surging. Arnab Gupta, CEO of Opera states why analytics are taking center stage, “We live in a world where computers, not people, are in the driver’s seat. In banking, virtually 100% of the credit decisions are made by machines. In marketing, advanced algorithms determine messages, sales channels, and products for each consumer. Online, more and more volume is spurred by sophisticated recommender engines. At Amazon.com, 40% of business comes from its “other people like you bought…” program.” (Businessweek, September 29, 2009).
Here is a list of vendors who participate in this marketspace:
Game changer or Incremental – SAP BusinessObjects 4.0 (and EPM 10)
SAP AG recently released a new 4.0 version of its BI (business intelligence) and EIM (enterprise information management) solutions. They also released Enterprise Performance Management (EPM 10).
We think this will be a big deal for current customers who are struggling to build a robust enterprise foundation for BI for the diverse business initiatives. Having multiple BI projects with each on a slightly different data hubs leads to chaos and insights where people are unsure about what the numbers mean as they could be interpreted differently along the information chain.
We expect a significant upgrade cycle looming for the SAP community.
BusinessObjects 4.0 is a major release after the merger of SAP and BusinessObjects in 2007 and SAP and Sybase in 2010. It incorporates a significant capability enhancement that business users and CIOs are demanding around analytics – more real-time, better in-memory computing; BI for the masses – powerful BI in users hands, mobile BI capabilities across a wide spectrum of devices; combining structured and unstructured information and providing the tools to govern the information and finally dealing with the growing avalanche of social media data. Also a common “look and feel” and better data visualization provides a better overall User Experience.
Shirish Netke
Ravi Kalakota
Business Analytics 3.0 