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June 30, 2006

Enterprise-Wide BI and Data Warehouse Capability

Has your company stopped growing lately? Stopped exploring new markets, customers or channels? Stopped introducing new products or services? Do you no longer encounter new competitors in the market? Is the structure of your organization static? Have business users within your company stopped asking new questions? Has your IT department stopped deploying new or enhanced data collection systems?

Changes in your business have a significant impact on the reporting and analysis needs of people in your business and user communities in terms of the metrics they want to see, the data needed to derive these metrics and the technologies needed to deliver the business intelligence (BI) solutions. Continue as BI Review discusses BI Enterprise-Wide Imperative and Challenges

June 29, 2006

Breakthrough Analysis: Will Search Deliver Better BI?

Business Objects, Cognos, Information Builders and SAS recently announced partnerships with Google Enterprise, and Cognos additionally hooked up with Autonomy, FAST and IBM OmniFind. Do these alliances portend a revolution in how we do BI? Or will the search box--omnipresent on the Web and indicative of Web-design shortcomings--merely be another easier access method? Seth Grimes poses the question, and provides some insights.

Read Full article by Seth Grimes

Finding the Right Performance Measures for Contact Centers

Ventana Research recently completed a study that shows companies use a variety of measures to assess the performance of their contact centers. The most popular are based on measuring how efficiently calls are handled. First-time resolution of problems is high on this list because managers see it as impacting both costs and customer satisfaction. But Ventana observations suggest that many companies distort the real results by applying questionable operational practices. Ventana recommends that companies seeking real performance improvements scrutinize these practices and supplement efficiency measures with others more directly related to their business goals.

Continue article at Intelligent Enterprise...

 

 

June 28, 2006

Unica ships Affinium NetInsight web analytics for an integrated view of customer behavior

Unica, a provider of Enterprise Marketing Management (EMM) solutions, today announced the shipment of Affinium® NetInsight(TM), a robust, enterprise-level web analytics solution. Affinium NetInsight enables cross-channel information integration - giving marketing professionals comprehensive insight into their customers buying behavior to improve decision-making and drive more effective customer interactions.

Key differentiators and benefits of the Affinium NetInsight solution include:

  • An open, extensible data architecture facilitates direct integration of web analytics data with other channel and customer data, business intelligence (BI) solutions, and any other ODBC-compliant application without requiring additional APIs or adaptors;
  • On premise or on demand options, with the ability to use page tags, log files or any combination of the two, deliver greater flexibility and faster deployment;
  • Unique "drag and drop" capability allows business users to create their own reports and improve speed to market;
  • Drill-anywhere, trend-anything capabilities across all reports, dashboards and KPIs ensure detailed data, down to specific web visits, is accessible for deeper insight and informed decisions.

June 27, 2006

Data Warehouse 2.0 tackles industry trends

Bill Inmon tackles industry trends, unstructured data and the data lifecycle with Data Warehouse 2.0

Of all the mainstream business technologies, classic data warehousing might well be considered the least evolved in terms of practice and approach. And while data warehousing continues to spread as a foundational technology, the availability of information and speed of change have led businesses to add operational data strategies to the data warehouse mix - something the textbook writers did not originally envision. So it might well be left to one of the fathers of the industry to update the definition of the data warehouse. That person is Bill Inmon, president of Inmon Data Systems. His model - called Data Warehouse 2.0 - is delivered with a complete architecture, outright enthusiasm - and a little ambivalence.

You will find the technical details in Inmon recent articles in DM Review and at his Web site, www.inmoncif.com; more recently, DM Review Editorial Director Jim Ericson spoke with Bill Inmon for a philosophical take on DW 2.0.

Microsoft Targets the Analytic Applications Market

In early June Microsoft announced that it was augmenting its business intelligence product portfolio with Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server 2007, an enterprise performance management analytic application with scorecarding, planning, budgeting, forecasting, consolidation and financial reporting functionality.

Microsoft entry into a market typically has several effects, not the least of which are bringing attention to the technology and increasing the overall level of competition. The pre-announcements served as a catalyst for many BI tools vendors to further differentiate themselves by offering analytic application solutions.

Read Full Article at TDWI

June 26, 2006

Data Strategy: Business Value Shows Up at the User Interface

Business value migrates in the direction of the user interface. Experience shows that no matter how much upstream data collection, information transformation and intelligent integration occurs, the payoff in the experience of the client occurs at the user interface. Whether business analyst, electronic file clerk, top executive, system administrator or power user, the "Ah ha!" moment occurs at the user interface. Information delivery provides a last opportunity to synchronize the experience of the user with the business process that is unfolding in the IT system. This is a basic principle in thinking about system architecture and the design of a usable software interface.

Read Full Article at DM Review

June 25, 2006

Panorama Software Integrates BI Tools With Google Spreadsheets

Panorama Software, a business intelligence (BI) solutions vendor, today announced its new integration with the latest release of Google Spreadsheets as part of its NovaView BI suite. Recently Panorama announced its plans to integrate with the upcoming release of Microsoft Office Excel 2007 and Microsoft SharePoint – leveraging these powerful applications for enterprise BI solutions. By extending these capabilities with Google Spreadsheets, Panorama will enable new collaboration scenarios outside the firewall.

"Panorama recognizes that the business paradigm is changing, and that the business community is demanding a more accessible way to collaborate outside the firewall," said Oudi Antebi, Vice President Marketing and Business Strategy, Panorama Software. "Today there are gaps in a company’s ability to communicate and collaborate efficiently with people such as partners and suppliers outside their corporate firewall. By working with Google, we have taken a leadership position to help address these challenges. By integrating with Google Spreadsheets, we enable customers to collaborate in real time with business intelligence data outside the firewall and work beyond a central network to access data stored on the Web."

By leveraging Panorama NovaView™, Panorama’s flagship solution, information workers can remotely access BI data quickly and easily through web-based Google Spreadsheets. "Panorama is proud to be the only BI Company to integrate with Google

Spreadsheets to offer this revolutionary new capability," said Antebi. "Today’s announcement is only one from a series of strategic development initiatives that Panorama is planning with Google and other innovative technology providers."

More information is available at http://www.panorama.com/.

 

June 24, 2006

How to define effective key performance indicators (KPIs)?

One of the most common questions people ask about performance dashboards is, How do we define effective key performance indicators (KPIs)? The answer is important because KPIs govern how employees do their jobs.

Metrics used in performance dashboards are typically called key performance indicators because they measure how well the organization or individual performs against predefined goals and targets. There are two major types of KPIs: leading and lagging indicators. Leading indicators measure activities that have a significant effect on future performance, whereas lagging indicators, such as most financial KPIs, measure the output of past activity.

Continue Reading .....

Cognos Delivers BI Solutions for SaaS

Cognos a provider in business intelligence and performance management solutions, recently announced that it is becoming the business intelligence solution of choice for software as a service (SaaS) application providers and their customers.
 
"SaaS will be a pervasive application business model over the next four years, and Cognos is already at the forefront of this evolution through its strong relationships and partner deployments," said Jennifer Francis, Vice President of Market Development, Cognos. Cognos 8 BI provides enterprise-class business intelligence capabilities to organizations through a low-risk, low-cost hosted environment, and helps companies gain better visibility and insight into organizational performance.

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IBM Unveils New Master Data Management Software

The newest version of IBM WebSphere Product Center provides master data management (MDM) capabilities for managing product information in the retail, consumer packaged goods, consumer electronics and manufacturing industries. Designed to improve performance, flexibility and scalability, it offers new service-oriented architecture (SOA) features to help organizations collect, author, rationalize and publish product information across multiple internal systems, as well as externally with trading partners. This should help accelerate time to market and generate new business and revenue opportunities. WebSphere Product Center also supports SQL-like queries to help organizations find and retrieve precise product-related information.

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June 01, 2006

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