Despite Business Intelligence becoming an increasingly widespread practice, there appears to be relatively little to choose from in terms of good quality news and information resources. From monitoring several discussions on LinkedIn, we saw the same names tended to crop up over and over again.

1. TDWI.org

Perhaps the most widely recognized for BI content was TDWI.org. The Data Warehousing Institute™ provides education, training, certification, news, and research for executives and IT professionals across the world. Founded 15 years ago, TDWI is the premier educational institute for business intelligence and data warehousing. Home to Wayne’s World Blog, written by Wayne W. Eckerson, the director of research and services, it provides readers with anything from online conferences, to whitepaper downloads, to industry reports.

2. Information-management.com

Frequently cited by several LinkedIn members, Information Management was another popular resource people turned to for BI news. It claims to be “the educated reader’s choice for the latest news, commentary and feature content serving the information technology and business community”, and with its relaunch last year, it offers original reporting, online radio programming, informative Web seminar programming, white paper resources and online education to professionals in the field of IT. Providing daily informative newsletters on a variety of content, it is understandable why info-mgmt.com has carved a strong position in the BI domain.

3. B-Eye-Network.com

The BeyeNETWORK™ provides global coverage of the BI ecosystem. It supplies industry coverage and resources on business intelligence, performance management, data warehousing, data integration and data quality. B-Eye-Network also includes BeyeUNIVERSITY, a comprehensive curriculum covering all areas of the business intelligence ecosystem. These certificate programs are taught by experts who are nationally and internationally recognized as leaders in their respective fields, and best of all, are completely free!

4. Ralf Kimball

The name Ralph Kimball cropped up on more than one occasion, although perhaps not soley in reference to BI. He is known worldwide as an innovator, writer, educator, speaker and consultant in the field of data warehousing. He has maintained his long-term conviction that data warehouses must be designed to be understandable and fast. His books on dimensional design techniques have become best sellers in data warehousing. To date Ralph has written more than 100 articles and columns for Intelligent Enterprise and its predecessors, winning the Readers’ Choice Award five years in a row. Some of his books include “The Kimball Group Reader: Relentlessly Practical Tools for Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence” and “The Data Warehouse ETL Toolkit: Practical Techniques for Extracting, Cleaning, Conforming, and Delivering Data”.

5. Bill Inmon

Similarly to Ralph Kimball, Bill Inmon was another name that graced discussions quite regularly. Inmon, a world-renowned expert, speaker and author on data warehousing, is widely recognized as the “Father of Data Warehousing”. In addition to authoring more than 50 books and 650 articles, Bill has been a monthly columnist with the Business Intelligence Network, EIM Institute and Data Management Review. In 2007, Bill was named by Computerworld as one of the “Ten IT People Who Mattered in the Last 40 Years” of the computer profession.

6. Howard Dresner

Howard Dresner is an industry acclaimed expert, noted author, thought leader and lecturer for Business Intelligence, and Enterprise Performance Management. He spent 13 years at Gartner, where he served as lead analyst for Business Intelligence. Today as President and Founder of Dresner Advisory Services, he focuses his energy on creating and sharing thought leadership for Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) and Business Intelligence (BI) and speaks at forums around the globe. He has written two books: “The Performance Management Revolution: Business Results Through Insight and Action” and “Profiles in Performance: Business Intelligence Journeys and The Roadmap for Change”.

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This 10 minute movie takes you through the establishment of business intelligence: its early beginnings, the invention of data warehouses, the establishment of the first data management companies in the 1970s. Light-hearted and sprinkled with the occasional amusing anecdote, this video does a good job of keeping your attention from start to finish.

Most basic definitions are covered during the course of the video – What is data / a decision / information / intelligence.. coupled with easy-to-understand explanations.

See the video for yourself:

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1. 5 BI and Data Visualization Trends for 2010

One of the more popular entries on our blog, we thought we’d remind you of the 5 BI and data visualization trends we identified for this year.

2. Top Five Unconventional Uses of Business Intelligence Software

An interesting approach to the uses of business intelligence software, this list is designed to give you a sense of the wide range of projects you can tackle using it.

3. Top 5 Reasons Why Your Business Intelligence Project Will Fail

5 potential reasons for failure, along with 5 antidotes to try and avoid it.

4. Five Steps to Business Intelligence Success

Similar to the above, this list gives 5 steps you can take in order to implement a successful business intelligence project.

5. Top 5 Business Intelligence Considerations for Enterprises

Before deploying any BI solution, you should think through these top five BI considerations from Leslie O’Neill.

If you know of any more, we’d love to hear about them. Feel free to leave a comment.

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Should BI teams reside on the IT or the business side?

Taking our inspiration for a post from a discussion on the Business Intelligence & Analytics Group on LinkedIn, we thought about whether Business Intelligence should be controlled primarily by the IT department or people from business functions.

Divided opinions

First of all, it’s important to remember that the answer to this question depends on the type of BI provided. For example, in house specialists are vital for traditional BI software, which require code to be written for each query as well as servers to be maintained and software to be integrated. SaaS BI is delivered over the internet so there is no software to install, no servers to maintain and no integration to be done. It is intuitive to use and does not require a single line of code. We can’t speak directly for other software vendors, but our software Bime is designed to empower professionals outside of the IT department, with a view to freeing up IT demand so that IT departments can focus solely on their strategic IT role.

Other voices thought it depended on how BI is defined in the organization:

“If the largely accepted definition, that BI = Analysis + DW infrastructure, is held in the organization, then the Analysis side should reside within the business, and the DW team should be within IT. Some people prefer to use the term BI to describe just the Analysis part, if that is the case, then it should be on the business side.”

Others felt slightly different, in that a lot rides on the technical abilities of the BI team itself, as well as how well integrated the IT and the BI teams are.

Some came up with “both and neither” arguments, stating that BI should exist on it’s own accord and should simply liaise with business and IT functions across the organization.

Several offered up their own personal experiences – “I’ve seen it working well both ways, and I’ve seen it struggling both ways. Too often, IT lacks the understanding of the business needs and the sense of urgency. On the flip side, too often the Business doesn’t have any appreciation for structure, consistency and sound fundamentals. From my experience, the best combination happened to be when IT was an active partner alongside the Business team, and the solution was built mostly by IT professionals, with close participation from the Business.”

A common theme

One common theme that seemed to emerge from the discussion was that it was important for the users to have a good understanding of the organization as a business, whether they were IT specialists or not. A lot of opinions felt a mix of the two was the best way to deploy BI, with IT functions taking care of the infrastructure part and business functions carrying out the analysis and reporting.

You can find the original discussion here and a similar discussion for comparison purposes here. (You need to be a member of both groups to view the discussions).

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A savvy IT professional will ask end users about their requirements, before trying to introduce business intelligence to his or her organization. They will ask questions like: “What information are you looking for?” and “How do you want it to be formatted?”.

1. What level of technical skill do the users already have?

This question should not be posed directly to users. Many end users have a somewhat optimistic perception of their technical abilities and most consider themselves more of an expert than they actually are. As a general rule of thumb, if you are handy with Excel, i.e. can use formulas and sort data, and you can interpret numbers with relative ease, you are likely to be able to comfortably work with a business intelligence solution.

2. How much time can you dedicate to finding, accessing and analyzing information?

This is a pretty essential question, probably the most important of the five, but is often completely ignored. Yet if it is answered realistically, you can easily create an accurate deployment plan, even without responses to the other four questions. In most companies, people need access to information, but they often lack the time to dedicate to it. If you don’t have a lot of time to spend finding, accessing, and analyzing information, then you probably don’t require business intelligence capabilities. How much time someone has to devote to reporting is often related to their role in the organization. For example, CEOs may have very little time to spend analyzing data, while analysts will have more since analysis is what they are primarily responsible for.

3. What types of questions will users be asking?

Different types of questions are best asked and answered by different types of solutions. Performance management, dashboards, and scorecards are about monitoring the status of a key metric, whereas ad hoc query tools are better suited to asking random or on-the-fly questions.

4. How timely must the data you are accessing be?

Your BI deployment will be influenced by the required latency of the data involved. Business intelligence has three possible levels of latency – scheduled update, on demand, and real time.

With scheduled update, the information is not up-to-the-minute. The data source is probably updated on a scheduled basis, e.g. once a day or every hour. Or, the data can be close to real time, and be updated incrementally within minutes of a transaction. The majority of BI deployments work well with some kind of a scheduled update.

Users will require direct access to information contained in a near real-time data warehouse with an on demand solution. While this does not necessarily affect the BI deployment itself, it is uncommon for BI tools to give users access to this kind of information, because it is usually stored in a form that makes creating ad hoc queries difficult. However, dashboards, reports, and guided ad hoc reports are effective business intelligence deployment methods when on demand access is required.

Finally, true real time means that the information being displayed is updated as an event happens – even before the relevant data makes its way into a database. Only dashboards and reports will enable the dynamic display and update of information in real time.

5. What role does the user play within the organization?

Understanding a user’s role gives you a certain insight when it comes to their BI requirements. For example, executives look primarily for key performance indicators, whereas analysts will often spend their time analyzing data in more detail. A front office worker, such as a customer rep, often searches for information to solve specific problems. While there are likely to be differences from one organization to the next, understanding the characteristics of the various users in your particular firm will help you better understand user requirements.

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Results from a recently released survey, 2010 SMB Routes to Market Study, reveal a few interesting trends about how SMBs discover, learn about, evaluate and buy technology solutions and services – including their thoughts about BI solutions. The results suggested that small AND medium businesses consider “getting better insights out of the data they already have” as their highest technology priority. Business Intelligence solutions can help solve this problem by enabling the tools that measure and manage organizational goals and objectives. BI can also assist with conducting “what-if analyses to evaluate different courses of action.

Here are the top 4 technology challenges for each:

Top technology challenges for small businesses:
1. Get better business insights from existing data: 35%
2. Figuring out how different solutions can help the business: 32%
3. Implementing new solutions/upgrades: 32%
4. Integrating social media with Web site, marketing tools, etc.: 24%

Top technology challenges for medium businesses:
1. Get better insights from existing data: 33%
2. Figuring out how different solutions can help the business: 32%
3. Integrating social media with Web site, marketing tools, etc.: 32%
4. Implementing new solutions/upgrades: 30%

In very small companies, spreadsheets and other ad hoc tools are often considered enough to complete the task. But as companies expand, the amount of data being handled grows: there are new products and services, new markets and opportunities, investments, sales, marketing, among many other systems.

As a consequence, more people are increasingly roped into being part of the data collection and analysis process, and different people in the organization (marketing, human resources, finance, etc.) are required to analyze data in different ways. Typical problems with using only spreadsheets are:

* Time consuming and labor intensive to establish and maintain. Setting up a company-wide model, creating organizational plans, distributing and collecting information from different managers, consolidating multiple spreadsheets, and debugging broken macros and formulas becomes unsustainable and unproductive.

* Insufficient collaboration and feedback capabilities. Desktop spreadsheets are siloed, and don’t enable real-time data sharing and updating. Getting a unified, accurate view becomes difficult.

* Errors can be common. Research shows that 20 to 40 percent of all spreadsheets contain errors, and as they become more complex, error rates increase. Without an audit trail, changes and mistakes can go undetected and businesses end up making decisions based on bad information.

* Inadequate analysis and reporting. Collecting information and integrating it together into one spreadsheet is a lot of hassle. The detailed information that decision-makers require can be difficult to obtain or not even available to them.

Business Intelligence solutions give businesses a way to streamline and unify the data collection, analysis and reporting process. BI solutions are built on a unified database, so everyone involved in the process gets a single, real-time view of the data. Many BI solutions feature self-service dashboards and reporting tools that make it easier and less time consuming to contribute to and manage the process.

What else should you consider?

Make sure you are aware of vendor differences in pricing, solution capabilities and complexity. You would benefit from starting off by conducting a thorough assessment of your internal requirements, and then carefully investigating and evaluating how different offerings are aligned to your organizational requirements and limitations. You should take advantage of free trials and demos which will help you get a better idea of whether a specific solution will fit your needs. By taking more time in the first place to assess, evaluate and compare your alternatives, you’ll greatly increase the odds of selecting a solution that will meet, but not exceed your needs and budget.

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Globalization. The world is becoming increasingly interconnected… BI/Data Mining can play a greater role in identifying the potential and real impacts of global events on an organization.

Social Media. As it becomes ever more prominent, it is becoming more and more important for groups to pay attention to what is happening in the social media universe, and BI solutions can help organizations capitalize on this.

Regulation. As governments continue implementing rules and regulations at an unprecedented rate, it was thought that BI/Data mining would play a major role in monitoring, reporting and possibly enforcement of compliance.

Small Business. Business intelligence is getting simpler and easier to setup as more and more vendors try to enter the market. This will enable smaller companies to take advantage of business intelligence.

An industry that seemed to crop up a lot was healthcare. The application of BI in healthcare, especially healthcare analytics was mentioned by several different people during the course of the discussion. This was coupled with the idea of the need to move from “analyzing events after they happen to being able to predict events before they occur”, exactly what BI solutions are designed to do, and exactly the kind of solution that the healthcare industry can benefit from.

Another idea touched on the movement away from static reports and towards advanced data visualization – something we identified in our recent blog post (5 BI and Data Visualization Trends for 2010) as a trend already happening this year.

Participants also felt that creating BI tools that empower managers and other users was very important for the future, with a view to freeing up IT demand so that IT departments can focus on their strategic IT role only.

You can find the original discussion here.

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One thing to remember : A KPI is a metric, but a metric is not always a KPI. When we use the term metric we are referring to a direct numerical measure that represents a piece of business data in the relationship of one or more dimensions. A KPI is simply a metric that is tied to a target. More often than not, a KPI represents how far a metric is above or below a pre-determined target. KPI’s are normally shown as a ratio of (actual : target) and are designed to instantly inform a user if they are on track with their plan, without the end user having to specifically focus on the metrics being represented.

You should identify the most important indicators for your specific organization’s needs, but here’s hoping that this post will give you some inspiration or at least a starting point. Choose a few indicators to start off with; measure them on a regular basis and share them throughout your organization – you can always add more later on!

Here is a list of just some of the more mainstream indicators.

Sales

1. Bookings
2. Number of orders
3. Sales qualified leads

Finance

4. Revenues
5. Expenses
6. Profits
7. Operating margin

Technical Support

8. Number of support calls
9. Resolved Cases
10. Average waiting time

Manufacturing

11. Number of units manufactured
12. Manufacturing times
13. Number of defects

Fulfillment

14. Number of days to ship
15. Inventory levels
16. Return rates

Marketing

17. Marketing funnel: for example – Inquires -> Marketing qualified leads -> Sales qualified leads -> Opportunity Pipeline
18. Customer demographics
19. % Revenue sourced by marketing
20. Referrals
21. Social media mentions

Human resources

22. Employee satisfaction
23. Employee turnover

Information Technology

24. Network downtime
25. Fixed application bugs

Web Services

26. Number of visitors
27. Click through rate
28. Conversion rate (e.g. number of product registrations)
29. Average time per visit
30. Bounce rate

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The recently released report by TDWI’s Wayne Eckerson is all about how the need among business intelligence (BI) teams to do “more with less” has significantly increased following the recession. We summarize the underlying points in the report.