Practical Business Intelligence

I recently had the chance to sit down with Shawn Blevins who presented for SAP BusinessObjects at the ITA BI Roundtable in September. We called it the BI Tool Vendor Grudge Match.

Here’s what we talked about, with my commentary added …

Background

Jeff: Tell me a little about yourself, your background.

Shawn: I started out by having my own consulting company called IntelliThought in Tennessee. We had a tremendous SQL install for Eastmen Chemical and moved them off of AIX over to DB2. From there, I went over to Accenture for about 18 months but then Microsoft came calling. I was at Microsoft for almost five years as a SQL Server technology specialist when I started. I left to go over to the management side and started the solutions specialist community which was designed to build solutions using SQL Server as well as the other Microsoft products. A lot of BI solutions, a lot of business decision support systems. Then I went to Oracle and ran the application server sales group. It was BI solution building work under global sale services. I talk a lot about build-based BI systems, because I think that’s the mindset of the world when you’ve grown up with Microsoft and Oracle.

When I came to SAP, I began working on the BusinessObjects acquisition. We [at SAP] realized they were a vendor that truly had an end-to-end, productized, standardized platform that matched SAP’s productized ERP solution. It became evident to us what we needed to do–to get out of the BI tool business and buy someone that could provide full top-to-bottom standardization, metadata, and master data … to have them consume the key metrics out of our ERP platform and make them available to our customers. We’re not trying to buy additional vendors. We believe in a complementary partner approach. We made the announcement so we weren’t going to disrupt BusinessObjects or force any SAP technology in there.

So, I’ve come full circle from building it to making money on building it as a consultant to selling the vision “if you buy these tools, learn them, and build a lot of complex pieces, then eventually you’ll have a data warehouse” to where I’m at now. I’ve evolved to a focus on business execution instead of having to wait for execution while you go down into the IT/technical weeds and build a bunch of software. Using a platform like BusinessObjects, you can depend on a robust, full-featured reporting solution delivered by a company that sells the solution and its configuration and discussion of what’s the best way to implement the solution, rather than a toolbox you have to invest a bunch of additional work into.

Jeff’s Commentary: Even from my first impressions of / interaction with Shawn, it was clear to me that he was A) very experienced, B) very knowledgeable, and C) very charismatic. He certainly livened up the Grudge Match, and clearly brings a lot of enthusiasm to whatever he does. Shawn’s brief introduction of his career demonstrates that this is not his first bar-b-que. He’s worked for a number of big shops, been exposed to several competing philosophies in the sale and delivery of BI tools. And he’s implemented solutions for large and small companies in lots of contexts. This makes him an ideal candidate to have an opinion on where BI is going and on how to appropriately approach complex BI initiatives. I was eager to get his thoughts in this brief interview. For more about Shawn’s background, check him out on LinkedIn.

Considerations Before Launching a BI Initiative

Jeff: What is the number-one thing companies should consider before launching a BI initiative?

Shawn: The first thing is you need to do some CSI forensics. Sometimes BI can be a little like Monty Python and the Holy Grail … a lot of crusades, but what really became of all of it? What separates a successful, game-changing BI project or a BI initiative from the 647 that happened before? In my experience it comes down to two or three things. First, it comes down to integrity–not just of the products or approach or planning, but the integrity of the people that hold themselves to a certain level of commitment and excellence. Once that integrity begins to change into taste or a favorite tool, product or vendor, you’ve lost your integrity, and your initiative will begin to slide. You need to think about your CFO standing in front of your shareholders or a bunch of financial analysts, or even worse, standing in court having to explain why he missed his forecast or why information got out from under the business or why there wasn’t governance that prevented the fraud or misuse of customer information. Those are the kinds of things that override taste or preference or religion or background.

Most BI project initiatives need to be thinking like a CFO or a board member with the end in mind from the very beginning … putting the right outcomes out there at the onset of the project. This is because BI projects, more than any other projects, really play in to IT’s need to be cool and IT’s need to craft and build complex things. The key is to move from being an engineer (building things) to being more a strategic business leader (driving value). Think of it in terms of instead of being a field commander or somebody who crafts villages, you need to think of it like a Macarthur or general who says, “Where are we trying to go? What market share are we trying to take? In what ways can I empower this business to grow and acquire and merge?” To build those kinds of thoughts is what makes a BI project truly strategic. It also improves careers. But if you take the other approach–the “build something really cool” approach–then you’re quickly down to the weeds comparing vendor A and B and it becomes a game of taste.

Jeff’s Commentary: First, I’m impressed about Shawn’s ability to weave a Python reference into the interview. Second, I couldn’t agree more with him on the content of his response. He uses words like “commitment” and “integrity” to describe the building blocks necessary for a successful BI initiative, where I use words like “intentionality” and “discipline.” At the end of the day, we’re talking about the same thing: It’s not necessarily about the product; it’s about the people, processes, policies, standards, data involved. All these things require integrity–Shawn’s word–if you’re going to be successful.

His point about alignment between the Business and IT is also crucial. The days of business guys being ignorant to technology and having it work like magic are over. So are the days when the IT guys didn’t need to understand and speak the language of the business. Successful BI requires a close partnership between business and technology leaders, including technologists who can imagine themselves in the shoes of the CFO in Shawn’s proverbial board meeting.

Most Common Mistake

Jeff: What is the most common mistake you encounter in a company’s thinking when approaching BI?

Shawn: It’s the idea that we’re one interface away from greatness, or that we’re one data schema away from greatness, or that we’re going to build something amazing that’s going to achieve greatness. Or, perhaps thinking that your company has very unique needs. This betrays that you don’t really understand business, especially the competition, works.

The fact is if you go into anyone’s kitchen and you open the utensil drawer there’s going to be a knife, a fork, a spoon, etc, because that’s what we all eat with. Maybe there’s a chopstick in a few of them, but the key is that you can use common tools and eat just about any kind of food. So people need to standardize tools and then they can think about what kinds of food their customer eats. Whether you’re buying your food at the market or growing it yourself, regardless of sourcing, you need to think about the delivery. The same is true of technology. You need a standardized way of delivering data, because it’s the standardization that drives adoption and use. It’s not how cool you are or how in depth or complex the data models need to be.

The reason Excel is everywhere is because people know how to use it. Even though there may be a million sources behind it people dump it all in a spreadsheet and manipulate it themselves. The way you stop that is … you don’t stop that. You give them better and richer tools and make them more independent and self-servicing so they can continue to do what they were doing but in a way that doesn’t break or isn’t stringently tied to standardized data models or data schemas. You have to empower them, but empower them in a standardized, easy to use way. If you miss that, or if you think you’re going to create or craft something new and unique, then what you’ve effectively done at that point is cut off the end user’s ability to act. They have to learn what’s in your mind and how you built the data model or how you built the system. So use a knife or fork and spoon and concentrate on a consistent, standardized way to deliver it.

Jeff’s Commentary: This section is also basically focused on not getting the cart before the horse. BI is not a technology, it’s a disciplined approach to data. I love his “one interface away from greatness.” There are lots of companies out there that believe they’re one tech purchase away from perfect efficiency and data-driven clairvoyance. That’s a lie, plain and simple, and I love that Shawn calls it out.

I would also add to Shawn’s call for standardization – a call for simplicity. Enter one of my mantras: If your BI report or dashboard is not mind-numbingly intuitive, then it will not reach its potential.

Future of Business Intelligence

Jeff: What’s the big thing to look out for in the BI space in the next 5 years?

Shawn: The first thing is that you should be thinking about inter-business BI. This is a whole new market. What I mean is that you have tools in your company for reporting and forecasting and I have tools in my company for reporting and forecasting, but we need to think more like Microsoft and Wal-Mart. For example, the Wal-Mart model is: “I (Wal-Mart) will guarantee that I’ll buy these widgets from you (mom-and-pop widget manufacturer) at a nickel a piece, but you have to: a) make five million of them, and b) you have to have them here by Tuesday. If you do all that, I’ll buy them for a nickel a piece.”

Imagine if that model went across all business and we all agreed to that you’ll ship these in 2.5 days and you’ll do it in less than six minutes to pack and ship. If there was some way to sit in the middle and have a reporting tool and a forecasting tool that managed SLAs to contracts and agreements between companies, it would be amazingly valuable. You’re going to see a standardization in that SLA-type KPI reporting between multiple business entities. The first vendor who can say from the perspective of the cloud that the two companies have these expectations and are performing these KPI’s against a set of inter-company SLAs, will rule the field. That’s where you’re going to see the BI industry going.

Jeff’s Commentary: I think Shawn’s insight here is very good. I’m also seeing calls for truly federated data warehouse models, and these are far less standardized or vetted than traditional models. Data governance, master data strategies, data warehouse architectures, and much more will ultimately have to evolve to support multiple, distributed businesses working together.

Closing Statements

Jeff: Would you like to make any kind of closing statement?

Shawn: I want everyone to know I am incredibly impressed with both the people involved at Capstone and folks from the ITA. I’m impressed with the focus and intensity you guys put toward this. This is the right pursuit, this is the right conversation because IT itself is changing. There’s a great movie called Tucker and it has Jeff Bridges in it, where he’s a guy in a garage who built a Tucker automobile. Now you cut to the big three automakers but they are now struggling because Toyota and Honda are killing them. They’re not struggling because they don’t make good cars but the perception is if you want standardized, reliable quality, you want a Toyota or a Lexus. They’re struggling because of the perception of complexity and the risk of not knowing what you’re doing. Similarly, there’s a shift happening in IT quality. The people in the room that are asking hard questions are focused on that shift and what’s the right thing to do for their company.

Jeff’s Commentary: Thank you so much to Shawn for his kind words and for being willing to chat with me on the record. I appreciated his passion and insight both at the Grudge Match and afterwards in this interview.

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:

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.