Try the "Locker" approach

Most folks would probably recognize SAP as a corporate-level tool beyond the need or reach of small and medium-sized organizations. Well, Traxion Consulting Inc. has come up with a support mechanism  they feel may help bridge the gap. They call it "Digital Lockers". I asked their analyst, Juliana Bruno, if and how Lockers could help specifically SMOs, and she responded with the following reasons why the lockers would be an effective tool:

" 1. They provide employees with a user friendly and accessible way to build their skills and become more efficient with the systems they use daily. The Digital lockers are a cost effective way for your company to grant your employees access to a library of insightful media, training tools.

2. Giving your employees or business units access to our Digital Lockers helps ensure that your employees are using SAP comfortably and most effectively.

3. We do the leg work:

   - We subscribe to all of the major SAP newsletters, white papers, forums, blogs and RSS feeds, as well as independent blogs and training resources

   - We take the time to read and sort through all of the content that we gather to determine which SAP professionals would derive the most value from that content.

   - We transfer, and index that content into the appropriate "Digital Locker" and "Topic" within the locker so that our subscribers are constantly kept up to date with media concerning their respective SAP industry in the most organized fashion.

   - Subscribers simply log in to their locker from any web-enabled device and will find all of their content available for download broken down by topic and file type, as well as the most recently added material.

   - Subscribing to a Digital Locker means that you do not have to save large files and content onto your computer, it will always be in the cloud, and will always be universally accessible.

   - Our lockers are used by consultants and SAP professionals because they are an extremely cost effective resource for staying relevant, increasing their productivity, troubleshooting, solving performance issues, planning and executing more effectively, and building a personalized digital library of SAP learning tools that make you more valuable.

4. We can also create custom lockers for SMBs that wish to give employees access to specific company training materials or corporate documents. This way employees can have access to a resource for problem solving and skill building outside of working hours. "

If you have other questions regarding the value of Digital Lockers, Juliana would be pleased to answer them, and you can email her (not me, please) at: juliana.bruno@traxionconsulting.com

Is Open Source BI the way to go? More specifically, is ActuateOne the way to go for SMOs with little or no IT budget and staff?

Actuate thinks so, and presents this 5pp Business White Paper ("ISVs Accelerate Their Applications with BIRT and ActuateOne") to make its case for ActuateOne, built on BIRT. Actuate argues "an IT team may be able to fix, build and customize business intelligence (BI) tools with ease, but if you don’t have an IT team analytics applications may seem unattainable or daunting. While packaged BI seems like the best solution for organizations with a bogged down IT team or a non-existent IT team, the costs of boxed suites can be well out of the range of a normal budget. This white paper explains the benefits of open source BI (OSBI) systems and how companies without an available IT team are still utilizing OSBI." (Note that while BIRT may be "open", ActuateOne is a commercial offering and still probably requires java-capable staff).

Mass Gets It

KDnuggets carried an interesting report by the blog owner on the recent Massachusetts "Big Data Disruption Summit" hosted by the Mass Technology Leadership Council. The MTLC sees Big Data as a major market opportunity for the state, with, for example, companies like Kyruus vying to become the "Bloomberg" of the healthcare world. The author's conclusion is "The meeting had a lot of energy and showcased the depth of Big Data Industry in Massachusetts. New ideas will likely percolate to new start-ups!" Now, if only my state thought the same....

How does YOUR industry stand to gain from "Big Data"?

"Are you ready for the era of big data?" by Brad Brown, Michael Chui, and James Manyika (Oct 2011, registration required).
McKinsey Global Institute has come up with a graphic showing the ease of capturing big data's value and the magnitude of its potential across different industry sectors (below). Finance and insurance, and government, look poised to benefit the most. However, by classifying "industries", the exercise ignores size, maturity, and IT capabilities of individual firms, as well as glossing over the varying potential of different aspects within "big data" (analytics, linking internal with external datasets, mining, etc).

Seizing the potential of ‘big data’

McKinsey Quarterly's "Strategy in Practice" addresses how best to seize the potential of "Big Data". According to McK, too few leaders fully understand big data’s potential in their businesses, the data assets and liabilities of those businesses, or the strategic choices they must make to start exploiting big data. By focusing on these issues, senior executives can help their organizations build a data-driven competitive edge. McKinsey's team lay out four principles to help corporate leaders: (1) ID and size the opportunities and threats. (2) ID Big Data resources and gaps. (3) Align on strategic choices. (4) Understand the organizational implications.  (However, the example given is AstraZeneca's big data partnerships, so again the focus on a large global player leads to the question of how applicable this strategy is to small and medium-sized organizations -- ironically, the ones who stand to gain the most?)

This year's Magic Quadrant is out.

Gartner's "Magic Quadrant" report for BI platforms for 2012 is now out, and available free in summary form. For newbies, this much-anticipated annual review can be thought of as analogous to the J.D. Powers Report for autos. It contains the aforementioned quadrant, with its axes of "ability to execute" and "completeness of vision", inside which it locates some 21 BI platforms accordingly. For the record, Oracle, MicroStrategy and Tableau show the highest abilkity to execute, while IBM and SAP are the highest ranked on "completeness of vision". Gartner concludes that in 2011, business users continued to exert significant influence over BI decisions, often choosing data discovery products in addition to, or as alternatives to, traditional BI tools. The report also includes a valuable "vendor srtrengths and cautions" list for named companies. This report won't tell you what you should buy, though -- you still have to know your own organization's specific context and needs -- but you should not invest your organization's funds until after you have at least read Gartner's assessment!

BI thought for the day...

"After Eisenhower, you couldn't win an election without radio. After JFK, you couldn't win an election without television. After Obama, you couldn't win an election without social networking. I predict that in 2012, you won't be able to win an election without big data." - O'Reilly Radar's Big Data columnist, Alistair Croll, quoted in Gregory Piatetsky's KDnuggetts newsletter (2/15/2012).

"And she's buying a stairway to..."

Agile BI: Three Steps to Analytic Heaven, a free White Paper by David White of the Aberdeen Group. White discusses how organizations can make their BI implementation more agile so managers can easily find the information they need. Gives examples of market leader practices, using data collected from 170 organizations using BI in February and March 2011.

Wayne's World....

In his Dec 2011 report, In-Memory Analysis: Delivering Insights at the Speed of Thought, Wayne Eckerson, Director of Research for Business Applications and Architecture at TechTarget, profiles the capabilities of next-generation BI tools with emphasis on visual analysis and in-memory processing. He examines the types of BI users and capabilities they need, including casual users, power users and IT administrators. It also examines BI architectures — how front-end tools interact with back-end servers and databases — to deliver those capabilities. The research is based on his knowledge of the BI market, interviews with BI practitioners, briefings with sponsors of this report, and a survey of 240 BI professionals (including yours truly).

10 Business intelligence trends for 2012 (by Jorgen Heisenburg, CapGemini).
Jorgen thinks increased focus of the market on cost reduction and customer profitability has forced IT to return to its core while business is driving future developments. This transformation is further fueled by technology innovations.

10 Key Elements of Your Data Strategy (by Mike Schiff, TDWI).
Ten key details for your data strategy, and how to begin formulating one.

Four performance management trends to watch in 2012 (Craig Schiff of BPM, on TDWI).
Craig notes performance management started with a focus on consolidating information from multiple general ledgers and then moved on to providing a real system alternative to spreadsheet budgeting. Today it encompasses those areas plus financial reporting, operational analytics, governance, risk, compliance, strategy management, and profitability optimization. As the technological advances and business benefits have grown, so, too, have the implementation challenges. The future will bring new capabilities and provide ways to reduce the complexity and enable more organizations to come closer to realizing the full benefits of performance management.

Where does your organization fall on the BI maturity model? (TDWI).
Take the TDWI survey to assess the maturity of your BI/DW initiative and compare it to those at other companies in an objective way. When you finish the survey, you will receive a score indicating the maturity of your BI/DW program based on TDWI's Business Intelligence Maturity Model. An interactive chart will enable you to visually compare your scores in eight categories to others who have taken the survey. You will be able to filter the results by various variables such as industry, company size, and BI/DW budget. You will also be able to download a PDF of the results and a Benchmark Guide to help you interpret the results.                           

The current state of business anlaytics: where do we go from here? (Bloomberg Businessweek Research Services, 2011)
A survey of 930 respondents from across the globe on the current state of business analytics within organizations. Finds companies driving effective "analytics cultures" are reaping the rewards of business analytics. So, "get your analytics on!"
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Big data: harnessing a game-changing asset (Economist Intellience Unit, Sept. 2011).
A global survey of 586 senior executives, sponsored by SAS, to look at the state of big data, along with the organisational characteristics of companies that are adept at extracting value from data. Finds there is a strong link between effective data management strategy and financial performance.

Fundamentals of Business Intelligence for the Small and Midsize Enterprise (a TDWI checklist report, June 2011).
Aspects of BI that can help small and midsize enterprises achieve scalability by revealing new business opportunities, enabling rapid response to emerging issues, and continuously monitoring business success.

Competing through data: three experts offer their game plans, (Michael Chui and Frank Gomes, McKinsey, orig. Oct 2011, vid and text at this link).
MIT professor Erik Brynjolfsson, Cloudera cofounder Jeff Hammerbacher, and Butler University men’s basketball coach Brad Stevens reflect on the power of data.
Stevens remarks that: 
   "The data’s always been an important part of my job. I’ve always looked at it through that lens, even when I was a young assistant. This is how I work best. For me, it’s incredibly interesting. There are complexities that you can really study using numbers. We don’t have access to the highest end—we’re not sitting here with NBA money to invest in a numbers-and-research department. But I think you can speak to your team with numbers and give your players pretty clear-cut and defined examples of what they need to do to get better."
Hope for SMOs everywhere!

McKinsey's Global Survey results
In the business consulting giant's 6th annual technology survey executives say their companies are boosting IT spending and adopting new technology platforms to support innovation.

Big Data - Big Money Says it is a Paradigm-Buster (Forbes, 1/6/2012).
Venture capital gets interested in Big Data. Gartner predicts data will grow 800% over the next five years and 80% of the data will be unstructured, requiring new ways of thinking, new tools, and distributed analytics.

New e-guide: Game-changing business analytics trends for 2012 and beyond (from SearchDataManagement, UK).  Explores new and emerging business analytics trends and technologies that authors believe have the potential to give companies the competitive advantage.