How aggressively are organizations currently investing in ERP solutions and what are the risks and rewards? Computer Economics just published a study in which it examines the three-year trend in ERP adoption and investment. In this interview, Computer Economics President…
Oracle’s OpenWorld event was a coming-out party for the ERP and CRM giant’s Fusion platform, which Oracle CEO Larry Ellison touted as supporting “a complete integrated suite of ERP, Human Capital Management, CRM, Supply Chain Management and many other applications.”…
Social and mobile are two enterprise software trends that often get mentioned in the same breath – and for good reason. After all, many people interact with social applications primarily via their mobile devices. So it’s not surprising that major…
In a recent Enterprise Apps Today interview, Dresner Advisory Services founder and president Howard Dresners said cloud computing, mobile technologies, and collaborative capabilities are combining to become a kind of super trend, because the three things complement each other so well.…
Though early efforts at mobile business intelligence faltered, the trend has taken off in the last year. Dresner Advisory Services just published its third report on the topic since mid-2010. Ann All discussed the findings of the report with the…
There has been lots of buzz about mobile business intelligence, but actual adoption numbers have remained low. The 10th edition of the BI Survey, an annual research report produced by the Business Application Research Center that examines why customers buy…
Back in July, I wrote a post suggesting CIOs could provide business value by working with human resources professionals. HR is a largely untapped opportunity for CIOs, because HR has been slow to adopt software that can be used to improve employee…
It used to be so much simpler to hire a data analyst. You looked for someone who knew how to take data that had been loaded into and then extracted from a data warehouse and produced reports based on that…
I’ve been hitting the tablet angle for business intelligence pretty hard, writing about it several times in the past few weeks. But that’s because so many companies are demanding it and vendors are rolling it out. Check the order of…
In May, I wrote about how data-driven decision making was far from a mainstream practice despite its obvious benefits. A growing number of CIOs, however, appear to be recognizing the possibilities for creating value through better use of all the data…
It’s only been a few weeks since I wrote about the growing buzz for mobile business intelligence, particularly when it’s delivered via tablets. I shared BI expert Howard Dresner’s opinion that iPads and other tablets, which are popular with executives, offer a…
Last spring I wrote about the need to beef up business intelligence in college curriculums, citing my interview with an executive from Information Control Corp., an Ohio IT services provider that had developed a program designed to attract young people…
I love a story about a successful deployment of business intelligence. (Who doesn’t?) So I enjoyed reading about Station Casinos’ installation of a real-time enterprise data warehouse with BI reporting that it uses for customer gaming and guest interaction data at its…
Lots of organizations want business intelligence to be not just about collecting data and creating reports, but about directly facilitating operational improvements. Earlier this week I spoke with Howard Dresner about the latest Dresner Advisory Services BI market research study (more about…
As I wrote last week, citing a recent study by the MIT Sloan School of Management’s Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson, there’s a growing awareness that companies can derive real value from data. The two men found a strong connection between…
In 2003 Nicholas Carr created a stir among tech professionals by writing a Harvard Business Review article, titled “IT Doesn’t Matter” (that he later extended into a book, “Does IT Matter? Information Technology and the Corrosion of Competitive Advantage”). As…
Remember when Microsoft had a reputation as an “anti-open” software company that zealously guarded its proprietary code? Things have certainly changed. The software giant is showing an increasing tendency to open up its software to the world via application programming interfaces…
I’ve long thought that business intelligence and social technologies were made for each other. Last January I wrote about BI and mashups, noting mashups not only make it easier for users to work with disparate data but also to share their insights…
It seems companies turn to business intelligence to give them a competitive edge in a still-shaky economy. Enough of them did it last year to drive a healthy increase in BI spending. According to Gartner, global spending on BI, analytics and…
I think the whole “as a service” phrase has jumped the shark as I was quick to tell a Verizon representative who recently walked me through the company’s unified communications-as-a-service offering. “Nice solution, but change the name. The whole ‘as-a-service’ thing is…
In a post I wrote as 2010 was drawing to a close, I noted that a year-end wrap-up piece on TDWI named “insurgent” business intelligence, an approach that minimizes IT involvement, as one of the five top BI trends for the year. Another of the…
Mobile business intelligence is something every organization should at least be thinking about, considering that influential industry analyst Howard Dresner recently predicted mobile will become “fundamentally the new platform for business intelligence.” But there is a big gap between thinking…
I’ve got a working list of eight factors that can derail IT projects. My list: Lack of effective governance Poor communication between business stakeholders and IT Not enough input from folks who will actually use a new system or technology Changes…
A business intelligence best practice pretty much everyone can agree on is establishing a BI competency center (BICC). While competency centers are a good idea for any enterprise software initiative, they are especially important for BI because both BI technologies and…
Ever read an annual report without a pie graph? Me either. That’s because most companies recognize the value of using visuals to break up reams of dry data and spotlight significant trends in a way that’s accessible to users. Despite…
It’s not unusual for people to use the terms “business intelligence” and “business analytics” interchangeably. But now with a debate brewing over whether analytics should become a standard part of BI offerings, it seems like a good time to clarify the…
As I wrote recently, there’s a growing sense that business intelligence just isn’t cutting it for a lot of folks, leading to a trend TDWI recently dubbed “insurgent” BI. As TDWI noted, a slew of emerging vendors including Bis2 Inc., WhereScape Inc., Kapow…
Sometimes an IT budget that’s too big is as bad as one that’s too small. IT pros with lots of dough have the luxury of buying more hardware to solve their infrastructure ills. The result (sometimes, though certainly not always) is…
As the year draws to a close, it’s time for all of those “looking back at the trends of the prior year” stories. There’s a good review of business intelligence trends on the TDWI website. Like most lists of this type, it’s…
Earlier this month longtime HP observer Mark Smith, CEO and EVP of Ventana Research, wrote that HP may be planning to abandon its Neoview business, by ceasing product development and sales and marketing efforts for the data warehousing technology. This is in stark…
I must confess, I get tired of all the effort put into trying to define nebulous IT terms like “cloud computing.” Thus my initial response to a post by Rob Collie on the =powerpivot(pro) blog, in which he suggests it might be…
I interviewed Cindi Howson, founder of the BI Scorecard and author of “Successful Business Intelligence: Secrets to Making BI a Killer App,” about a year ago. The conversation stuck with me because she made what I thought was a great point: With all of…
With all of the advances in business intelligence and data analysis, a significant number of business decisions aren’t based on data. When I interviewed Jeanne Harris and Robert Morison, two of the authors of “Analytics at Work: Smarter Decisions, Better Results,”…
Actuate, sponsor of the open source business intelligence project BIRT and a provider of commercial BI software based on BIRT, last week announced the project has surpassed 10 million downloads. An item on PC World dashes a little cold water on that…
An eWEEK story about the advisory firm’s recent research quotes Shvetank Shah, executive director of its Information Technology practice, who says continued economic uncertainty “will require even richer analytics and data-driven insight to supplement executive intuition.” As they look to generate…