Practical Business Intelligence

… unless it’s continually balanced with short-term immediate value.

Balance. Much of life is about balance. Not only in BI, but on myriad fronts, you’re going to have a hard time being successful until you learn the art of balancing long-term and short-term gain. In both our business and personal lives, it’s a basic human tendency to forgo delayed gratification for immediate, hear and now returns. Forget saving, let’s buy on credit. And forget the long-term vision, we’ve gotta deliver on this quarter’s numbers.

I view these philosophies as imbalanced to the near-term and subsequently dangerous. But in the execution of Business Intelligence in most organizations (or the failing attempt thereof), I notice just the opposite trend …  Plans and roadmaps that are long on strategy but very short on immediate return.

Let’s face it, you’re never going to get the opportunity to deliver on your long-term, three-year strategic vision unless you justify / demonstrate some serious returns long before that. The fact is that nobody is going to fund an initiative for that long (if at all) that is packed with theory and promise, but doesn’t return on the investment.

If BI is to be successful, we have to knock out quick wins along the way to continue to justify the existence and perpetuation (read: funding) of the initiative. So, here’s my tip of the day:

For every year in your strategic BI roadmap, define and execute three short-term wins with the following characteristics:

1. Choose tasks that can be implemented in 30 days or less with no complex dependencies
2. Clear, return on the investment in these tasks can be measured / demonstrated (ideally quantitatively) 30 days after that
3. Target tasks at the pain of key players in your organization who are skeptical about BI’s capacity to help

In so doing, you’ll take a huge step forward in justifying your initiative and proving its value in the short-run as a vital stepping stone toward your no-doubt awe-inspiring vision for BI.

BI Tool Vendor Grudge Match

Yesterday’s ITA BI Roundtable was designed to be a face off … cage match … smackdown … between popular BI tool vendors. According to those who observed the carnage first hand, it was a great session. Gene Gladell, a regular participant at roundtable sessions, said that “this totally exceeded my expectations.” That’s good enough for me.

IBM, Microsoft, Pentaho (popular open source BI solution), and SAP were invited to attend. As roundtable chairman, I organized the event on behalf of the ITA and Capstone Consulting.

Thought I’d toss out a bit of a summary of the event. I charged participating vendors with …

Vendor Presentations

Make a brief presentation to the group addressing the question, “Why does your tool yield a greater ROI than the other tools represented?”  We limited them to 12 minutes each, and each laid out their case for being the best business value to their customers. We video taped the whole thing, and I’ll get it posted soon, along with summaries of their most salient points. In the meantime, if you attended the session, you should take my poll on LinkedIn and let me know whom you feel “won the debate.” I gotta say I’m curious what you think. Also, stay tuned for much more info.

Presenters where (in order of their presentations; which was randomly selected before the session):

• From Microsoft, Dan Vandercar, Technical Pre-Sales
• From SAP BusinessObjects: Shawn Blevins, Global Group Director
• From Pentaho: Lance Walter, VP Marketing
• From IBM Cognos: Paula Doyle, Account Executive

Best Breakfast Award

Bring breakfast. Everyone brought eats, and I had attendees vote on who got it right. IBM walked away with the “Breakfast Best Practices” award for the day. Hats off to the IBM Cognos marketing team!

Book Giveaway

Bring books to give away. To the members who brought the most new folks to the meeting (sounds like a 12-step program when I say it that way, doesn’t it? – sigh!), we gave out prizes. Good prizes, in fact. Four attendees walked away with brand-spankin’ new books on implementing BI solutions with each vendor’s stack.  Congratulations to …

• Tim Strudeman got first pick, he selected the Microsoft Data Warehouse Toolkit
• Jordan Martz scored Pentaho Solutions: BI / DW in Pentaho and MySQL
• Our very own Louis Giokis ended up with an IOU from SAP for a book to be named later — gotta work on those guys
• And Joan Matz made off with the IBM Cognos 8 BI Official Guide

Panel Discussion and Comparative Product Matrix

Answer questions from the group. Participants (both before the session and during) submitted a whole heap of questions targeted at our participating BI vendors. Capstone distilled these down to 36 solid questions. We asked 9 of these in a one-hour panel discussion in our session yesterday after vendor presentations. Each vendor was given 60 seconds to respond. They’ve all also committed to answering in writing. Once completed, I’ll be publishing this tomb for reference to the BI community. I think this will be a valuable tool; can’t wait to get it done.

Another Session Required?

There was so much interest and participation in this session that we’re considering doing another one. MicroStrategy, Information Builders, and InfoBright have all already expressed interest, and I think Oracle should be involved at some point. Besides, the only thing better than a comparative matrix of four BI tools is a comparative matrix of eight BI tools, right?  What do you think?  Good idea to rinse and repeat with new vendors? Maybe in the Spring?

Feedback Welcome

If you attended this session, you should post your comments. I’d love to hear your feedback on the Grudge Match, and suggestions on how we could improve it.