What Is Business Intelligence Please ???

[The Editor]

All,

Wikipedia (the new bible) defines Business Intelligence as:

Business intelligence (BI) is a business management term, which refers to applications and technologies that are used to gather, provide access to, and analyze data and information about company operations. Business intelligence systems can help companies have a more comprehensive knowledge of the factors affecting their business, such as metrics on sales, production, and internal operations, and they can help companies to make better business decisions. Business Intelligence should not be confused with competitive intelligence, which is a separate management concept.

Can someone please explain why some companies are allowed to change their name from things like 'Application Support' or 'The maintenance department' to the 'Business Intelligence' department overnight

Perhaps this could be the first role of the BIG ... Actively police those people lying about what they do...

Does anyone else feel the same way ???

[Steve Bennett]

I get where you are coming from jmayers. I was once given the task of defining business intelligence for a research firm and as soon as I did, all hell broke lose! Everyone from 'knowledge management' to 'database design' came down on me, all claiming the same research 'space'. My response: who cares? Not the humble user trying to make sense of vendor offerings.

Well at least I got a reaction, but to the general public it is all too confusing.

How do you stop organisations claiming to be in the BI space? Well I find that you can't stop them, but it is pretty easy to blow them out of the water and make them disappear as they simply don't understand the subject. I consider them a minor irritant in my job as a BI Manager.

Is the CORTEX to be a 'name and shame' location??

[admin]

'Right in the middle of difficulty lies opportunity’

22 Jun 2009 by: Nathan Dukes

Last week I sat down with SAP ANZ Business Objects Division General Manager, Rajeev Mitroo, to talk about BI industry figures released by Gartner earlier this month.

We discussed the reasons why the BI indutry has succeed in tough economic times, industry consolidation, and predictions for 2009. Below is an excerpt from the interview.

ND: The business intelligence market grew an amazing 22% in 2008. Can you pinpoint a reason why?

RM: I think it’s fair to say that organisations in general want to equip their sales force or their management teams with ability to make better decisions.

And the challenge has been, as the organisation grows, you get disparate aggregation of content and people start to keep spreadsheets on their notebooks, and they don’t rely on their I.T. to develop these reports because I.T. has got a big bottleneck. Everybody has their own version of the truth.
You’ve probably sat in meetings where somebody puts up one set of figures and somebody will turn around and say ‘well actually, no, my figures tell me it’s more up to date- I crunched those numbers this morning’, and effectively what ends up happening; decision makers within organisations end up making important decisions based on their gut feel, rather than based on accurate timely information.

ND: Which they can get though business intelligence?

RM: Correct. That’s been the overall premise of business intelligence. We shouldn’t shy away from the fact that they were a set of tools that were designed to deliver that. They deliver that information either in the form of reports, in the form of dashboards, in the form of query analysis tools, and all of these have been highly successful because they work in a heterogeneous environment.

Last September the world changed. With the macro economic situation, and pressures being borne on the financial community with the credit dilution, and the impact that had in terms of credit being dried up for business, organisations, being in a heavy amount of debt, needed to suddenly consolidate that debt and decide how best they put forward the limited dollars they had, or in some cases, no dollars they had.
In order to do that, the same premise for wanting to utilise business intelligence previously became even more relevant, because you had senior management needing to make very important decisions about the direction they take their organisation.

They’re not going to accept that I.T. says ‘sorry we’ve got a bottleneck of other projects, it’ll be a month before we can get you the information you need’. Organisations are saying ‘to hell with that- get me what I need’. What do you need? Do you need more people? Do you need better toolsets? What is it that you need? SAP Business Objects is in a position to provide them with those solutions, specific to the types of needs of the users.

ND: Do you see that as the reason why Business Objects has excelled in the marketplace?

RM: If you focus on the BI piece (of Business Objects), I think in times of difficulty you fall back on those organisations that have a level of confidence with, and if you look at SAP’s footprint within Australia NZ, 2008 for SAP was a benchmark year. It was the best year the organisation has ever had in terms of the number of large deals, the number of incremental deals, and obviously the total volume of revenue. Effectively, that’s built upon a level of credibility within our install base and within the market place. In times of need, organisations are going to go back to those vendors they have that type of relationship with.

Last year SAP Integrated Business Objects fully into SAP, and our solution portfolio has expanded to include those. When our sales reps are sitting down with these organisations, and they’re seeing and hearing these challenges they have, we’re able to talk about a much broader base of solutions

I think it’s a combination of the credibility of SAP, and the need within the marketplace to actively make timely and accurate decisions. When you combine those two, I think it’s helped drive the need for business intelligence.

ND: Gartner’s report said that in 2007 the top 4 organisations held 1/5th of the BI industry, and in 2008 those companies held 2/3rds. SAP played a huge part in this with the acquisition of Business Objects.

RM: Business Objects had been around, prior to acquisition, for 15 plus years, and was the market leader is business intelligence. SAP formally acquired Business Objects in Q1 2008, and at the time there was a lot of consolidation taking place. Oracle acquired Hyperion, SAP acquired Business Objects, and IBM acquired Cognos. Effectively what you saw was three organisations, arguably playing in the same space in business intelligence, suddenly be consolidated into each of those vendors. I think it’s history repeating itself in terms of the IT industry.

With regards to the case of SAP, whether [organisations] are in the area of manufacturing, mining, the public sector, etc, [Business Objects] brought efficiencies to those organisations from that back end, process centric view. The acquisition of Business Objects allows SAP to have a business user focus to that organisation, such that we can have an impact on how the strategies are executed based on the transactional efficiencies SAP has traditionally provided.

I think the other aspect that SAP found valuable in Business Objects was that Business Objects operates within a heterogeneous environment. So we don’t particularly care if it’s a SAP back end or an Oracle back end, or a Microsoft. Now, obviously being fully integrated, there’s a very strong message for the SAP install base, and based on the success that I spoke about in Australia.

If you look at the utilities space in Australia, SAP dominates that industry. The message we take there is a very integrated message, and there’s a growing footprint in banking, and the public sector.

Having said that we’re winning business, and we probably cant talk about them at the moment, but there’s a number of deals that we’ve won this quarter where there is no SAP back end. We’ve gone in and competed against Microsoft and Cognos and the others, just as Business Objects would have done prior to the acquisition, and the solution set, stand alone, irrespective of that back end linkage to the transactional efficiencies that SAP classic provides, is still holding true.

ND: Do you see growth being at the same rate in 2009 as it was in 2008?

RM: Somebody asked me that question in February this year, and I think my response was, there’s cautious optimism, but I don’t think we’re forecasting the same level of growth. Having said that, my favorite saying is ‘right in the middle of difficulty lies opportunity’. I think that’s a classic saying for customers today. A lot of organisations are finding themselves in difficulty, and the opportunity that has arisen is with the business intelligence solution set that we have. How that translates to growth - it will be interesting to see how the year pans out. I do think we’ll have a reasonable amount of growth this year. Will it be reflective of 2008? To be honest I think I’ll know better towards the later part of the year. I think it’s a quarter by quarter proposition.

We’re starting to hear about green shoots in the US, but I read a great article [which said] those green shots are actually weeds. The ripples of this contagion, in some cases have hit the shore. They’re forecasting in the US unemployment to be well above 11%, Australia has potentially avoided a recession by 0.4 of a percent, but effectively we’re in a recession. We expect unemployment here to go up to 10%. What does that do for business in terms of their aspirations? If you asked any other business in this climate ‘are they looking to expand?’ You’re going to find the vast majority say ‘no, were looking to maintain, or we’re looking to contract and consolidate’. If our customers are looking to do that, what’s the opportunity for us?
We’re in a unique position, where organisations typically aren’t going to pull out and replace their back end plumbing in terms of there ERP systems, but there going to look in terms of gaining these efficiencies around making more timely and accurate decisions. That places us in a very strong position to say, ‘we have the solution for you’, and in the midst of difficulty that you’re finding, it may well present an opportunity for us.

It’s difficult to quantify that opportunity. To say well, yeah we think were going to do ‘x’% in 2008. The reason I say that is the two fiscal years, the climate were working within, and the drivers for that are so dramatically different. It’s tough to draw a comparison between the two.