Practical Business Intelligence

Post 4 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: IBM Cognos
Presenter: Paula Doyle, Account Executive
At IBM: Unknown
In BI: Unknown
Gift selected: Capstone Bag

Winner of the “Best Breakfast Award” at the roundtable!!!

IBM has only owned Cognos for a little over a year.

Paula rightly pointed out that as long as data is just sitting on a hard drive, it’s a liability. It has to be intentionally converted into knowledge assets that inform practical decision-making, which is what business intelligence is all about. Bravo!

IBM’s focus has been data management. Without Cognos, they had no presentation layer; hence the impetious for purchasing Cognos. However, Paula didn’t really elaborate on why Cognos specifically was chosen. That said, I would offer that Cognos is a fantastic tool for presenting data, if you know how to use it. It’s certainly not an “easy” tool to use. It falls squarely in the category of “powerful and complex,” in my opinion, and as with many such tools, the more powerful it is, the steeper the learning curve to truly master it and make it an effective choice for your enterprise.

Paula explicitly said that Cognos permits IBM to help users present their data as knowledge assets without requiring them to convert to an all-IBM infrastructure.

The speaker dodged technical slides repeatedly, which was uncomfortable and not what I’d hoped for in the grudge match. However, they did bring useful literature and the technical resource IBM brought with them did great in the panel discussion.

She also mentioned using BI to improve productivity and reduce headcount. Paula said that Cognos helps companies “improve productivity of workers using reporting, analysis and finance by 20% and … reduce asset levels by up to 15%.” Uh … okay. I’m inherently skeptical of numbers like these, but even if it’s true, that would leave me cold if I were the guy analyzing tools for my fledgling BI initiative. Of course, there are huge efficiencies to be gained with business intelligence, but I don’t think the strength of the principles and concepts of business intelligence are in a reduced cost of payroll. Rather, it’s in empowering your employees to work smarter not harder. BI allows businesses to do more with their staff; to allow them to be what and who the company needs them to be (and what they want to be), rather than spending all their time manually pushing data around in spreadsheets.

Paula very briefly mentions IBM’s “TM1 solution,” claiming that it helps increase ROI, but doesn’t elaborate at all. She’s referring to their in-memory OLAP cube solution which allows quick access to massive amounts of data. It increases performance and makes accessing large datastores more convenient, but I’m not sure it’s on my top-10 list of selling points for the business value of Cognos.

She also talked about the universal delivery platform that is Cognos. This is definitely a strength of the tool, allowing authors / creators of reports and other analytic tools to present valuable BI tools through a great many channels. But this is hardly “author once, deploy anywhere” as is suggested by the speaker. You have to keep lots of things in mind to deploy something on the web vs on your Blackberry.

Lastly, Paula referred to a single metadata layer as a strength of the Cognos tool. Although Cognos does a great job sitting on top of an enterprise data warehouse and presenting a semantic layer through report authoring tools, it’s the architecture and model of the data warehouse that will lead to a single source of the truth before the tool somehow magically gets that done for you.  As with many BI tools, if you use Cognos well, it is powerful and productive tool, but it doesn’t do the hard work of BI for you.

Overall, I grade this presentation: C

Unfortunately, IBM has requested that their video not be shared with a public audience. I’m working to get their permission to put it out here, but for now, nothing.

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.