Practical Business Intelligence

Post 2 in a series of 4, in which I share my thoughts on how our vendors did at the BI Tool Vendor Grudge Match last week, and on the details of their presentations. You might also check out my summary post earlier this week on PBI.

Company: SAP BusinessObjects
Presenter: Shawn Blevins, Global Group Director
At SAP: 5 years
In BI: 15 years
Gift selected: Capstone Hat

Using the banking system of late, Shawn said, “It’s not enough to provide volumous access to information, and expect good decision-making to happen as a result.” AMEN!!! This was the best statement made during the presentations made at the Grudge Match. I agree 10,000%.  I feel like SAP focused more on the solution of BI than on a product, and while that was a little off topic (per se) for a Tool Vendor Grudge Match, it still “made my heart happy.”

He says “Context” is what is missing from BI today, which is exactly in line with what we’ve talked about over and over: turning “data” into “actionable knowledge assets.” It takes more than just context and getting context takes a lot of people, process, policy, data, and technology, but he’s definitely on the right track … especially for a vendor presentation.

“The problem is not BI and it’s not the tools, it’s that we’re [backwards] in the way we think.”

Love the analogy to the airplane he uses. BI should provide automation in the way that most of the time the plane flies itself while the pilot reads. Only when something happens that the computer can’t deal with does the average pilot kick in with all his expertise. Also, he referred to the black box … full of information, but it’s a little late when you’re “fishing it out of the lake.” Great stuff. Analogies are your friend in helping lay people navigate the complexity in concept that is BI.

The “Excel drug” …  beautiful … Shawn claims that BusinessObjects will help get your business users into Excel rehab, so that they’re less likely to break off pieces of data and create new data sources, and more likely to use the system to get what they need from data that remains connected to the single source of truth in the enterprise data warehouse.

He claims that SAP is “other vendor neutral” … that it’ll work with whatever you have in house. This is a tall order. “Why go with the market leader?” he asks. “More support for a wider set of architectures, worldwide services and support, a bigger ecosystem, etc. We work with everybody.” His point is that BusinessObjects is designed to sit in front of any solid foundation of data in the backend. To an extent, of course, I agree with what he’s saying, but there are definitely pitfalls associated with the BusinessObjects product that he’s glossing over. It certainly does not support every complex query you could conceive of in the independent way he’s describing, for example. Also, BusinessObjects has a tendency to silo your data in universes. As long as the universe is truly universal (which it almost never is), then you’re fine. But end up with 100 universes, one for each department (a common destination for firms that build “bottom-up”, btw), and you’re in big trouble. Integrating those universes is definitely not the seamless fun that he’s making the product out to be.

So, not perfect by any means (what is?), but definitely a great presentation, exactly on target conceptually, and SAP does have a very powerful, very significant product.

Overall, I grade this presentation:  A

Part 1 of 2:

Part 2 of 2:

For the 702nd time today, I heard Business Intelligence referred to as the latest greatest new shiny answer to “reporting.”

It’s so common to imagine that if a company just purchases some expensive tool, they’ll get an awesome reporting solution. Or, the more mature companies think that if they get some processes in place, learn some best practices, add some responsibilities to a couple of their staff, and maybe buy a new tool, then they’ll have access to vital data in their new beautiful reports or dashboards. Closer.

Still more mature …  If we do everything company B is doing above AND we have a data warehouse in place that implements at least the basics of dimension modeling best practices, surely then we’ll be golden … right?

Well, I have to say: no. This is all good stuff I’m hearing, but my concern is the entirely wrong focus of all of it. The bottom line is that BI is not about reporting, it’s about intentionality.

The purpose of Business Intelligence is to put in place the discipline (synonym for intentionality) to convert an organization’s unique data into vital knowledge assets by which the leaders of that organization can make better decisions. What you build when you build BI is this discipline, not some reporting infrastructure … no matter how advanced. What you get when you build it is a set of lenses—reports, dashboards, scorecards, applications, widgets, portals, etc—through which you can make better decisions to advance the mission / goals of your business.