BI Blogs

Un año más, ya esta disponible el estudio anual de la publicación más prestigiosa en Business Intelligence, TDWI. Se trata de un interesantísimo repaso de cerca de 70 páginas.

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Principales contenidos:

- El año de la calma después de la tormenta (fusiones, adquisiciones…)
- Previsiones para el año 2009.
- La economía y el BI (como afectará la crisis económica)
- Estrategias para saber manejar spreadmarts.
- 10 errores a evitar cuando se recogen requisitos en BI.
- Como el BI debe tratar con la naturaleza humana.
- BI con un presupuesto limitado.
- Eleccion clave: Una suite Business Intelligence o ‘lo mejor de cada casa’.
- Todos los contenidos son útiles, incluyendo los datos no estructurados.
- Se puede tener buenos rendimientos en queries web adhoc?
- Articulo sobre Open Source:

At the Boulder BI Brain Trust, we had a discussion with Chris Modzelewski of ChartSearch about their products and plans. See the complete blog here.

Here a few of the links that I thought were worthy of “tweeting” this week:

• Google PowerMeter - “If you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it.”
• Typealyzer - This week Keep it Simple moved from Scientist to Thinker.
• Buck Up and Save the Economy - Tough talk from Jigsaw!
• Gartner - Key to Business Intelligence is Talk, Not Tech
• The No Stats All Star - Who said BI can’t be sexy?
• UK Research - Is online social networking making us sick?
• Business Intelligence Gets Smarter - Good market overview by Doug Henschen.
• What Recession - It’s the best time to measure!
• Benioff - “At a time when capital is precious, big-ticket software purchases just don’t make sense.”
• LinkedIn - Enthusiastic endorsement for this social networking sales tool.

It’s the last day of February, the sun is shining and I’m wearing a goofy Hawaiin shirt. My recommendation - turn off the news and have a fantastic weekend!

So had a good update at the SUNZ 2009 conference today on 9.2.

So it looks like:

• Release 27th February, for limited numbers of customers
• General Release to be announced at SAS Forum on 22 March, but likely to be general availability on that day
• Install downlaods likely to be available in Apri
• Includes Enterprise Intelligence Platform (eDI and eBI), but not Enterprise Miner or Forecast Server
• Solutions released throughout the 2009 year, SOM likely in July and ABM near the end of the year
• First service pack/maintenance release for EIP in September

So will you be first?

This past week Marketo and Tippet held a webinar called, Buyer Behavior in a Recession. One of the conclusions was that in difficult economic times, organizations are investing in solutions that:

1. Decrease costs
2. Increase business agility
3. Increase revenues

The first and the third are obvious (and included in every software vendor’s sales pitch these days); the second was a bit of a surprise to me…at first. Then I started to think about it. By now most companies in most markets have taken the  Sequoia Good Times RIP advice and found ways to cut costs. But increasing revenues in today’s selling climate isn’t so easy, even if you act on the advice of Jigsaw’s Garth Moulton and, “work harder (and smarter), make more money for your company and yourself, and spend it!”

According to Wikipedia, business agility means, “the capability of rapidly and cost efficiently adapting to changes.” Sounds like something we could all use right now! It also sounds like a key benefit of business intelligence solutions. That’s probably why I’m seeing so many articles these days about the importance of business intelligence in a recession. Here are a few examples:

• Can BI be Recession-Proof?
• Will the Economic Crisis Actually be Positive for BI?
• Is BI recession-proof, or are we just bracing for the next shoe to drop?
• Recession fears put focus on business intelligence
• The Impact of a Recession on the BI Market

Clearly the BI pundits (and vendors) see the recession as a potential boon. According to Rick Sherman’s Business Intelligence & Data Warehouse (BI/DW) Index, so far “it has been performing better than the major indexes year-to-date (YTD).”

How important is increasing business agility to your company’s success in 2009? How is your business reacting to change? Is now the time to “double down” on business intelligence. And speaking of change, is your organization considering SaaS business intelligence solutions in order to get actionable information and insight to business users quickly and reduce the reliance on IT?

Finally, the ClickOnce version of Report Builder 2.0 is available with the CTP release of SQL Server 2008 SP1 (Community Technology Preview (CTP) for Service Pack 1 of SQL Server 2008).  The big changes that have been made now with this service pack are the following:

Report Builder 2.0 ClickOnce capability

Now the big question is will the support for infinite clickthrough exist?  First thing that we have to do is install SP1.  So I fired up my VPC and went through the process of updating my SQL Server 2008 CU2 release.  Here are some screenshots of the process:

th CTP SP1 for SQL Server 2008.  The main thing I wanted to check out now was the replacement of Report Builder 1.0 with 2.0 with the ClickOnce deployment.  It turns out that the Report Builder option in Report Manager still points to the 1.0 release, but you can access the 2.0 release through the following URL – http://<servername>/ReporServer/ReportBuilder/ReportBuilder_2_0_0_0.application.  If you want to change the settings for the Report Builder option in the toolbar you can go into the Site Settings and set Custom Report Builder launch URL to this path or you can also access this in the Advanced settings in the Report Server properties if you connect by using SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) – the property is called ReportBuilderLaunchURL under the Reports section.  Then the fun begins and here are some screenshots of the process:

Accessing the ClickOnce application with the URL address	Almost a 50 MB install (1.0 was like a 8 MB download)
The splash screen	And finally the application

e Adventure Works DW SSAS database report model and deployed the report, but unfortunately as of now there is no infinite clickthrough (Enterprise Edition feature) support like there is with Report Builder 1.0.  Plus there wasn’t any interactive sorting capability like with the Report Builder 1.0 reports out-of-the-box.  You can go into the properties though and setup the Interactive Sorting functionality.  Will clickthrough support be available at all with Report Builder 2.0?  Am I just missing something? That was a really nice feature, but maybe Microsoft has decided to stop support for this option.  I guess if you want to stay with that then you have to go with Report Builder 1.0 and stick to a single data region

For more information about Report Builder 2.0 configuration take a look at Teo’s blog posting here Report Builder 2.0 ClickOnce.  For more information about Report Builder 2.0 take a look at my posting Report Builder 2.0 RTM install and overview.

Yesterday IDC lowered its forecast (IDC Forecasts Worldwide IT Spending Growth of 0.5% in 2009) for IT spending from its November estimates based on the "continued erosion of the global economy."

A downward revision is certainly called for and should not be a surprise to anyone. However, the forecasts are not nearly as dire as one would expect but will adversely impact some sectors.

The US forecast for overall IT spending is 0.1% or essentially flat. That may surprise many of us who read or listen to the media where they are proclaiming the second Great Depression. Actual spending may not meet this forecast but IDC, even with all the bleak economic news pounding us 24×7, is still not projecting Armageddon.

However, the forecast is mixed for IT vendors with US-based forecasts that "hardware will experience a sharp decline in spending with –16% growth while software and IT services spending will grow by 4% and 3% respectively." This confirms our breakdown of winners and losers in the future technology-based rebound.

Software vendors have been fairing better than the overall NASDAQ year-to-date on a relative basis and should continue to do so according to these estimates. Hardware vendors will be encountering harder times wth IT groups postponing purchases, consolidating servers and delaying upgrades.

Also, expect virtualization to expand to enable these hardware trends. Software and IT services, on the other hand, are needed to operate many businesses and, if targeted properly, help identify where to reduce costs, improve productivity, manage performance and look for revenue/earnings growth opportunities.

On a worldwide basis, "The IDC Black Book now forecasts worldwide IT spending will grow by just 0.5% year over year in 2009." with hardware down -3.6% and software and IT services growing 3.4%.  However the forecast is in constant currency, so "If recent exchange rate trends continue, this will translate into a significant decline in revenues for U.S.-based IT suppliers."

The bottom line for IT is that although budgets have been cut and some spending may be frozen this quarter, overall businesses see the value or necessity of IT.

You say dayta and I say dahta. You say business intelligence—and now Colin White and Claudia Imhoff say “decision intelligence.” They may want you to say it, too, depending on what you mean.

Now or later—yesterday afternoon it didn’t sound clear just when—they’d like you to say “decision framework.” Perhaps that’s in addition to “decision intelligence” or instead of it. I’m not sure.

They’re both veterans of technology wars, fads, shifts, realignments and convergences. Both are among the most eminent of BI thought leaders. They’ve given their suggestion a lot of thought.

You may ask why? For one thing, they explain, business intelligence has become too closely associated with analytics and data warehousing. They decided it would be easier to offer a new term than try to straighten out the old one. What will keep the same thing from happening to the new term? A fair question.

A second reason for the new term: they’d like to get your attention.

They hope to have the attention of several hundred attendees tomorrow morning at 8 a.m. at TDWI World Conference in Las Vegas. They’ll explain in detail during their keynote. The hot breakfast, restored by popular demand since last August, won’t hurt.

I ran into one of my first and best TDWI friends this morning. Even after all this time, he cannot yet be named publicly and, perhaps because of that, is free with musings on the industry and other things. We’ve tentatively code-named him Tiberius, after a meeting room at Caesar’s Palace.

This morning he’s thinking of a New Yorker cartoon. Two men at a bar are talking, and one says, “Are you just pissing and moaning, or can you verify what you’re saying with data?”

Our conversations are not always fact based, but we do our best. This morning we did it over coffee and, in his case, a crepe, and in my case a yogurt parfait.

Oh, please, he says of the Republican response to Obama’s fine speech last night. Oh, please, “let’s get the stupid out of the discourse.” Bobby Jindal complained of research money for honeybees, as if the rationale for it were not fact based. Honeybees sound silly, and he relishes a teenage-like snicker, with no mention of the peril to agriculture. Let him eat stupidity.

“People do things differently,” Tiberius sighs. “Even this,” he says holding up a USA Today, “is probably too complicated for [the Republicans].”

Finally, it’s the season for rational problem solving, something faith-based Republicans have forgotten about. Too bad they’ve left so much wreckage.

Our shared fascination with con artistry came to mind. That may seem to explain our tolerance for Vegas, but it does not. We actually like the camp—for a few days. We’re both going home today.

I created a report for my user in Reporting Services 2005. The report was a very simple matrix, but the problem I had with its header could have just as easily existed in a table. Having a lot of rows and columns in the matrix meant though that when my user would scroll through the matrix, he couldn't see the headers for the columns and rows. So obviously I had forgotten something… I went into the matrix properties and went to its Groups tab: I entered each and every one of the groups and defined…(read more)

TDWI: Day 2, Night 3

Second full day at TDWI and activities were in full swing. Though I was looking forward to attending Evan Levy’s class “Beyond the Data Warehouse”, briefings and interesting ad hoc discussions kept pulling me away. Even though it can be frustrating when I get double booked with activities (meetings, classes, meals…), TDWI continues to be a great place to network, share ideas or just plain learn new things.

Yesterday, I had three “official” briefings and a reception (no colored dots to give out, thank goodness…) and today I had three more briefings, a podcast and our game show themed hospitality event. Even though there were a few common questions like “How is this economy impacting SAS?”, there were many interesting discussions that included SAS’ BAF (Business Analytics Framework), the upcoming 9.2 release, the upcoming SAS Global Forum, Data Quality, the Unity Project, current industry and economic factors, and “Ken’s Vision of the Future”.

In one discussion with Jim Ericson of Information Management, I had a chance to discuss one of my areas of interest, which is around managing the quality of data outside of your control, specifically web data. In a roundtable discussion at a previous TDWI, I asked the question: “Given the increasing focus on data governance, what are you doing to validate and manage the web data your users are downloading for presentations, reports, analytics, etc.?” The answers at the time included jaw drops and the general feeling that this was an area they were not ready to take on. My thoughts at the time were around creating a DQ rating system that could vet websites according to a set of governance requirements, ultimately giving DQ grades (“A”, “B”, “C”, etc.). The point being that even though specific data might not be validated, the source website could be. A year later, in having this discussion with Jim Ericson, he raised the point that today it’s much more common for there to be folks frustrated with IT’s inability to deliver reports when they want them, so they create their own mash-ups on the fly, avoiding IT altogether. Of course, the same governance/validation issues arise in addition to the creation of information silos of “questionable” trustworthiness. The ability to allow resourcefulness and creativity must be tied to rewards for “big picture” thinking. You might be successful as a “rogue report developer” or you might not if it turns out the data you used was bad. If, however, you reward people for creating new and innovative reports AND also for validating the content to make it “enterprise ready,” you’re taking a step in the right direction. There is still the issue of silos, but we already know about solving the problem around silos.

Closing thoughts for today are around the many economy related discussions I’ve had over the past few days. In my briefings, many of the discussions would start off with: “Your competitors have been saying that this awful economy has been great for their business. How has it affected SAS?” I find this line of thinking very disappointing. Companies certainly look for gains in efficiency and better intelligence when times are tough, but when I begin to start thinking that way, I remember that our customers, and our competitors, are not only companies, but people. In many cases, they are people that I worked alongside of at one or more points in my career and that now, unfortunately, are people in many cases looking for work. Hopefully, through our offerings, as an industry, we can help support new initiatives and create new job opportunities. And maybe… through the use of better predictive business analytics… we can help lessen or prevent the next down economic period.

Good night from Las Vegas! - Ken

On Monday Microsoft announced "SQL Server Fast Track", a set of reference architectures for data warehousing with SQL Server. This has all been blogged very well by others, so if you’re interested in finding out more I suggest you read Peter Koller:
http://peterkol.spaces.live.com/Blog/cns!68755AEAC31F9A6C!1022.entry
and Curt Monash:
http://www.dbms2.com/2009/02/23/microsoft-sql-server-fast-track/

A couple of accompanying white papers have also been released, though, and I was reading this one:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd458815.aspx
When I noticed the following statement:
Project code name "Madison" is the upcoming Microsoft scale-out solution for very large data warehouses (VLDW). Madison is based on the MPP technology developed by DATAllegro and the proven SQL Server 2008 database. Madison expands the DATAllegro hub-and-spoke solution to include not only MPP appliances but also standard symmetric multi-processing (SMP) instances of SQL Server 2008 and SQL Server Analysis Services, (SSAS), allowing either to be viewed as nodes within a grid.

and also:
With the upcoming release of Madison, MPP scalability and grid connectivity can be taken to a new level. Madison expands the DATAllegro hub-and-spoke solution to include not only MPP appliances but also standard SMP instances of SQL Server 2008 and SSAS to be viewed as nodes within a grid. A grid of SMP databases and MPP appliances can be used as the basis for any large-scale data warehouse environment or architecture. However, it is particularly suitable for a hub-and-spoke architecture.

So Analysis Services is clearly going to be supported as part of Madison somehow, as a ‘node within a grid’. What does this mean exactly? I’m not really sure. The focus of the paper is the ‘Hub and Spoke’ architecture and how Madison will enable this through its ability to transfer large amounts of data quickly via ‘high speed, parallel transfers’ over its grid. The following DATAllegro white paper offers some more detail on this:
http://www.datallegro.com/grid/faq_datallegro_grid.pdfMaybe I’m reading too much into the specific references to SSAS above, but it does seem like something is afoot with Madison and SSAS even if it is just that we’ll get a quick way of moving SSAS databases around. I suppose we’ll find out soon enough…

Do you want to be a transformational leader? Do you want to make significant changes in your organization that will really matter to your company? Do you want to make changes that will leave a lasting legacy of efficiency and effectiveness? Do you want to leave a professional trail and a personal footprint that will be long remembered after you are gone?

If these are your aspirations, it is absolutely essential that you make a positive and decisive start. How can you as a manager, supervisor, or leader of an organization – regardless of size – accomplish such a positive fresh start?

In our current economic climate job changes are taking place at a rapid pace. Perhaps you’ve found yourself inheriting a new group of people. Perhaps because of downsizing or reorganization you’ve moved to a new division. Maybe you’ve joined an entirely different company. For whatever reason, you may now find yourself in the middle of a job change, and responsible for an entirely different group of employees. Perhaps you are a supervisor and you’ve been thinking that something is not quite right in your organization and you believe you need to do a mid-course correction of sorts for yourself and for your employees. Maybe it’s a good time for a plan – a 100-day plan toward becoming a skilled transformational leader.

I’ve found myself in this identical position numerous times during my professional career. In fact, I’ve moved around in my career so often that I once wrote a small book about it! More specifically, I wrote an entire book about how to assure your success by doing some very important things during the first 100 days in a new position!

What is so special about the first 100 days? Why are those days so critical? Just what is it one needs to do to get off to a good start with a new group of employees during those first and most critical 100 days?

Continue reading “Your first 100 days as a transformational leader”

Long before Scott Davis made the self-service ETL tool he calls Lyza, he tried to find out how analysts really work. He remembers in particular the woman in a focus group who said, “I want to stay close to the data.”

He didn’t understand at first. The data was right in front of her, neatly summarized. But she meant all of the data, every little bit of it. She wanted to snap open a zillion-row-long window that she could scroll down to see the figures flip by. (Yes, you can; I saw it yesterday.) She wouldn’t try to read them, she’d only see their shapes. She could say, for example, “Hmm, I see that just two thirds are under 1000.” Davis calls that visualization with browse—as legitimate a use of “visualization” as any I’ve heard of.

He also thought about how people use Excel. In fact, it helps explain’s Excel’s popularity. They have the data, and the they have the formulas, and you can reveal either one. If a number shows up that doesn’t look right—say it’s six figures instead of five—you just look at the formula. You say, “Oh, that’s the annual figure. I forgot to divide by twelve.”

Something similar goes on at all levels of analysis: a rapid back and forth from question to answer, back to a rephrased question, and back to an adjusted answer.

Forget the flow charts. Forget the “data train,” a metaphor I admit to having used. Analysis is more like what my labrador does when she knows there’s something good nearby. She sniffs in what looks like a random pattern until you realize she’s narrowing the range.

What drives analysts crazy about working with IT, he says, is that the data’s taken away. The conversation goes like this: the IT guy asks what the analyst wants; the analytst describes her best guess; the IT guy goes away and does it. But that may not be what the analyst really needed, and the anallyst may not realize it until the first data’s tried and proves inadequate or suggests yet another path.

I can relate, because it’s like writing. I do a lot of scribbling and writing over, and I don’t have time to explain it. If I had to tell a typist what to write, I’d write much less.

Visualize the bumper stickers: “free the analysts” but also “free IT.”

Now, Larissa T. Moss has her doubts. Perhaps she’ll sit for a demo. I’d like to hear what she says.

We announced today that we’ve raised another $5.1M as an addendum to our Series B.

Institutional Venture Partners (IVP) led this addendum to bring our total Series B raise to $17.1M. IVP is very clearly the best later-stage VC firm in Silicon Valley, and it is great to have them on our side as we continue to grow our company. IVP has backed such enterprises as Netflix, WebEx, MySQL, Data Domain, Juniper Networks, and Akamai.

Steve Harrick, Partner at IVP, led this investment for IVP. Steve has a great understanding of the technology infrastructure companies poised to lead their markets. He has led IVP’s investments at WebEx and MySQL and was recently recognized by Forbes Magazine’s 2009 Midas List as one of the leading venture investors in the US.

We had met Steve during our rounds of Series B meetings in Q4 2008 and had really liked and respected each other. At that point, we didn’t have space for two venture firms - having decided to raise $12M; we decided to separate, promising to keep in touch for the future.

In Q1 2009, as the economy grew more uncertain, we re-visited our decision and realized that it would be more prudent to pro-actively build a bigger cash reserve to ensure that we did not stumble in our growth, even as the market deteriorates, and a recovery continues to inch away.

Steve was happy to step in and participate in Aster at the same terms as our Series B. We were delighted to have a person of Steve’s caliber participate whole-heartedly in our growth.

Finally, there has to be some weird co-incidence in the manner in which all of our Series A and Series B venture capital firm participants (Sequoia Capital, JAFCO Ventures, and now IVP) have been investors in database companies that have had successful returns (Netezza, Datallegro, MySQL).

Hola esto es una entrada plagio, perdón inspirada en la de Josep Curto que es quien se ha currado el segundo evento, solo me he permitido añadir alguna cosa en rojo, que si quereis saber quien es se lo debes preguntar a Josep en el debate en su post

A modo de resumen como en el anterior evento. Estos son los números del mismo.

• 3 bloggers
• 3 no bloggers
• 1 comercial vendiendo servicios y repartiendo tarjetas
• 1 pinta de Guiness
• 11 pintas de rubia
• 2 horas y media de agradable conversación.

(mas de un 50% de crecimiento si contamos los 15 minutos del repartidor de tarjetas)

¿Quienes fueron?

Los bloggers:

• Chema Arce de Business Intelligence Blog.
• Josep Curto de Information Management.
• Salvador Ramos de SQL Server Si!

Y: Álvaro Galán, Rafael Rojo y María Nilley.

¿De que se habló?

En un entorno hostil (lleno de hooligans del Liverpool preparándose seriamente para el partido), nos explicamos batallas de guerra. Criticamos la poca profesionalidad del sector. De la poca visión. De lo centrados en los colores y efectos y no en lo importante: analizar. Y en lo más importante aún: el modelo.Y nos repetimos: la basura sólo genera basura (garbage in, garbage out). No hablamos ahora de la siguiente convocatoria (pero no os preocupéis habrá más). Ni tampoco de muchachada nui. También se comento que “lo que fue escrito vuelve a serlo” está presente en los artículos de muchos blogs actuales.

En fin, justo lo que queríamos que fuera, una reunión de amiguetes tomando unas cervezas y hablando de Business Intelligence.

A

Ahead of next week’s Sales 2.0 Conference in San Francisco, this month’s LucidInsights Newsletter featured some of the top articles we’ve read recently read on the topic. Here are a few excerpts:

Sales 2.0: How Will it Improve Your Business

“Easy-to-use analytics helps users understand what they need to do to improve their sales performance without increasing sales costs.”

Sales 2.0: Why the Recession is Making it Imperative to Change the Way We Sell

“Sales 2.0 mindset includes recognizing that sales is not just an art – it can be a measurable, predictable “scientific” business function when the right processes are implemented that focus on what our customers need to achieve by buying our products.”

The Wrong Definition of Sales 2.0

“Sales 2.0 is about about new approaches to getting sales results.“

Sales 2.0 Results and Rewards

“Sales leaders who use Sales 2.0 process and metrics to manage their sales teams have better performance results than those who do not.”

Is Sales 2.0 Real?

“What good are analytics if a company doesn’t have a documented and fully-complied with sales process?”

So the question is, “R U Sales 2.0?” Got some more articles to share? I hope to see in San Francisco next week.

ILOG, que ahora pertenece a IBM, anunció ayer el lanzamiento de su última solución de visualización gráfica para la creación de Aplicaciones Ricas de Internet (Rich Internet Applications, RIAs) para las plataformas Adobe Flex 3 y Adobe: IBM Elixir 2.0.

Lo importante es que posibilita hacer ciertos análisis OLAP, que mejoran los proporcionados por Flex.
La nueva versión se apoya Elixir 1.0 y añade cuatro nuevas pantallas avanzadas de datos: (calendario, mapas de calor, gráficos Gantt de tareas y de Procesamiento Analítico Online (OLAP) y gráficos de ejes o pivot charts) para construir rápida y fácilmente aplicaciones ricas avanzadas y atractivas tanto para el navegador como para el escritorio, tales como cuadros de mando contables y de fabricación, interfaces de gestión de recursos humanos, pantallas de análisis de datos e inteligencia de negocio (BI), y aplicaciones de planificación y programación de recursos.

Ver demos

El nuevo IBM ILOG Elixir 2.0 ofrece cuatro módulos para reducir el tiempo de desarrollo y facilitar el despliegue. Además, los gráficos OLAP y de ejes son bloques esenciales para la construcción de pantallas de BI y de análisis de datos que permitan visualizar grandes conjuntos, tendencias y desviaciones mediante agrupación y navegación (drill down) por los mismos.

Lo dicho, parece que ILOG va en la buena linea de visualización.

Principales elementos visuales
3D charts
Gauges and dials
Map displays
Gantt resource chart
Organization charts
Treemap chart
Radar charts
Gantt task charts
Heat maps
OLAP and pivot charts
Calendar displays