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NEXT-GENERATION
BI
INSIDE:
2
Business and
IT Must Align
on BI Strategy
5
Leveraging
Existing Tools
for Better BAM
9
Five Tips for a
New BI System
14Bringing
STRATEGIES
Business intelligence is critical to
Analytics Back
In-House
many initiatives. Therefore, CIOs need to
pay special attention to changes in the
business. Learn more about the latest BI
systems and how they can help meet the
changing needs of the business.
Leveraging Existing
Tools for Better BAM
By Christina Torode
tal and scanners placed around the time sales monitoring, integrating the
park to display, in 15-minute intervals, POS sales data on the SharePoint por-
where visitors were gathering, Gass- tal with information from store scan-
man says. This real-time business ners that counted the number of cus-
activity monitoring approach, with tomers coming into the record stores.
BusinessObjects portal views dis- Employees could look at a SharePoint
played in employee workroom areas, portal in the backroom and see, for
allowed employees to see where they example, that the Boston store had a
were most needed. Alerts were also 60% conversion rate (turning people
sent to employee mobile devices walking in the door into paying cus-
CHAPTER 1
when ride lines became too long. tomers); Chicago had a rate of 30%;
Business and Such projects have immediate pay- and Seattle 60%.
IT Must Align
on BI Strategy backs in terms of better customer “Employees turned this into a con-
service, which is why tactical projects test, and management let employees
are popular right now, says Colin experiment with placement of mer-
CHAPTER 2 White, president and founder of con- chandise, putting the top 10 DVDs in
Leveraging
Existing Tools sulting firm BI Research in Ashland, the front versus the back of the store,
for Better BAM Ore. for example, and then they would
“The biggest growth area for opera- check data to see how that worked,”
CHAPTER 3
tional BI is using it for short-term cost- Gassman says. “It turned into an infor-
Five Tips for a benefit projects. People are focused mation democracy.”
New BI System
on tactical projects that address spe- A level information playing field is
cific business units and performance also under way at WildBlue Commu-
CHAPTER 4 cost centers,” he says. Operational BI nications Inc., a satellite broadband
Bringing is also used in fraud detection and risk service provider in Greenwood Village,
Analytics Back
In-House analysis. Colo., with 400,000 subscribers.
That was the case at a national CIO Mike Casullo wants to elimi-
record store, which set up a system nate paper reports and give everyone
to monitor cashiers because manage- in the company access. “We are corre-
ment suspected some workers were lating data in different [display] for-
giving friends steep discounts, mats from the bottom up, so the CEO
Gassman says. As cashiers sold mer- receives the same data as everyone
chandise, the transactions from their else,” Casullo says.
point-of-sale (POS) terminals, includ- To monitor a range of data, from IT
ing discount percentages, were col- systems performance to customer
lected and aggregated across 12 performance, the application develop-
stores on a SharePoint server for ment team started building monitor-
management to view. ing capabilities into its custom appli-
Over time, the store morphed the cations. WildBlue also recently
practice from fraud detection to real- invested in HQ Enterprise, a business
exposed to XML as possible and run been getting the business lines to
XQuery on top of it. agree on what can be made common,”
But, he adds, you don’t have to per- Howard says. Private wealth bankers
fect data management to start on BI.
“It’s not like you have to eat all the
peas on your plate before you move “Managers don’t want
to the turkey.” other people to look at
Poor data quality will lead to poor
decisions, Hostmann agrees. Organi- their numbers. They talk
zations must establish a process or about compliance and
CHAPTER 1
set of automated controls to identify governance, valid rea-
Business and data quality issues in incoming data
IT Must Align
and to block low-quality data from
sons. But generally they
on BI Strategy
entering the data warehouse. Imple- like the opportunity
ment the process using custom code, to spin the numbers
CHAPTER 2 data quality technology, paged data
Leveraging
integration tools or a combination of
themselves.”
Existing Tools
for Better BAM these. —BILL HOSTMANN,
Remember, data quality cannot be Analyst, Gartner Inc.
CHAPTER 3
solved by the IT department with a
Five Tips for a tool. Bill Hostmann, an analyst at
New BI System
Stamford, Conn.-based Gartner Inc.,
says business users must be engaged tend not to want to share with the
CHAPTER 4 to determine what is “good enough” company’s retail bankers, for example.
Bringing in terms of data quality. And don’t From an infrastructure perspective, it
Analytics Back
In-House mistake data accuracy for relevance. is important to try to normalize that
That leads to the next big uh-oh. relationship.
Hostmann calls the phenomenon
“managers dancing with the num-
IS THE DATA TRANSPARENT? bers,” flaw No. 2 on his list of BI mis-
Whipping data into shape means hav- takes.
ing expert data modelers who also “Managers don’t want other people
double as “great ambassadors,” to look at their numbers. They talk
Howard says. “They’re going to spend about compliance and governance,
most of their time working with the valid reasons. But generally they like
business guys who understand how the opportunity to spin the numbers
the data is intended to be used.” themselves. They don’t want to have
You need strong executive leader- transparency by a dashboard or score-
ship to drive the business lines. “The card or report. They want to go into
biggest problem with BI has always the monthly executive-level meeting
Bringing Analytics
Back In-House
By Linda Tucci
mission statement.
CHAPTER 1
Business and Learn how one Meredith needed a BI solution to
IT Must Align
on BI Strategy firm chose a BI provide marketing and circulation
managers with timely, standardized
solution to bring its and detailed information about their
CHAPTER 2
Leveraging
customer database promotions, says Jose Lora, a BI solu-
tions architect at Des Moines, Iowa-
Existing Tools
for Better BAM and analytics back based Meredith. The existing system
in-house. was made up of multiple heteroge-
CHAPTER 3 neous databases that required inten-
Five Tips for a sive manual work to consolidate. The
New BI System
system was also inflexible and new
WHEN A MIDWEST media company reports required heavy support from
CHAPTER 4 decided to bring its customer data- IT resources. “In fact, there were
Bringing base and all analytics back in-house, analyses that were not possible
Analytics Back
In-House it bought a data warehouse from Tera- because of the long time that it would
data Corp. and launched a search for take the staff just to put them togeth-
a business intelligence (BI) platform. er and because historical data was
The company, Meredith Corp., pub- not available to the users due to the
lishes such well-known magazines as limitations of the existing system,”
Ladies’ Home Journal and Family Circle, Lora says.
as well as books, websites and 24
other magazines; it also owns a dozen
TV stations. The company outsourced CHOOSING A VENDOR
the analytics and reports for its main Which BI vendor to go with, however,
consumer database to Acxiom Corp. invited more debate, says Lora, who is
when it decided its vast data stores part of a 25-member BI team at
needed to be in-house. Its database Meredith. Lora oversees a team of five
includes more than 85 million names, BI architects who focus on BI report-
according to Meredith’s corporate ing. He had to advocate forcefully for
the business intelligence platform “The Web interface was really user-
from MicroStrategy Inc. friendly. The users liked how powerful
“It was not the cheapest tool in the and flexible it was,” he says.
market, and I believe it is still not the Then there was the technical wow
cheapest,” Lora says. factor.
“From my side, I really liked the
organic growth of MicroStrategy. It
“IT teams throw didn’t feel like a Frankenstein of many
tools put together. I liked how archi-
a BI tool at their users tecturally sound it was—one single
CHAPTER 1
and think they’ll be metadata repository! None of the
Business and
happy because that is other tools had that at that point.”
IT Must Align
on BI Strategy MicroStrategy, certainly not the
what they are clamoring largest of BI vendors, also jibed with
for. In fact, it’s much Meredith’s predilection for best-of-
CHAPTER 2
more nuanced than breed tools, Lora says. The company,
Leveraging
Existing Tools for example, recently started using
for Better BAM that.” Kxen Inc. analytics tools to speed up
—WAYNE ECKERSON, director of its development. It uses Hummingbird
research, The Data Warehousing Institute for extract, transform and load (ETL).
CHAPTER 3
Five Tips for a Kxen might not be the “best-known
New BI System
tool, but it is the best for what we
need,” Lora says. Likewise, Humming-
CHAPTER 4 bird is the best ETL tool for the com-
Bringing MicroStrategy has both a desktop pany’s Teradata warehouse, he says.
Analytics Back
In-House and a Web client version. Meredith Meredith bought its MicroStrategy
uses the Web version for all its users Business Intelligence Platform back in
in an effort to simplify deployment 2003. Then came the hard part.
and management: The zero-footprint
Web client works in all the browsers
the company supports, Lora says. NAVIGATING THE PEOPLE PART
The company uses the desktop tool “Managing adoption was a big issue
for the more advanced super users. for us,” says Lora, who in addition to
Only 5% of its users have access to his computer science degree has an
the desktop tool today. MBA from Iowa State University.
But two attributes gave the Micro- Most of the Meredith users at the
Strategy Web-based platform an edge time were accustomed to static PDF-
over BusinessObjects SA and a Soft- based reports. “We did not want to
ware as a Service offering from Cog- shock them into this brand new, very
nos ULC, Lora says. dynamic Web interface.”
Wayne Eckerson, director of the PDF view they were used to. That
research at Renton, Wash.-based The was to help in the adoption process,
Data Warehousing Institute, says IT and it really did help, at least in the
teams that fail to manage user adop- first two years.”
tion are courting failure. Then the BI team realized that most
“IT teams throw a BI tool at their of its users were running reports then
exporting the data to Excel to do the
“real analysis there, creating pivot
“Managing adoption tables and charts.” he says. “We
decided to tap the power we had in-
was a big issue for us. house.”
CHAPTER 1
Business and We did not want to Lora’s BI team cultivated “super
IT Must Align
on BI Strategy shock them into users“ in Meredith’s business areas
and trained them to teach others in
this brand new, the more advanced features of
CHAPTER 2 very dynamic Web MicroStrategy. These super users
Leveraging
Existing Tools interface.” were typically people who had asked
for Better BAM for more—more complex reports,
—JOSE LORA,
BI solutions architect, Meredith Corp. additional metrics. “Our approach was
CHAPTER 3
to provide them with the basics so
Five Tips for a they could self-serve,” Lora says.
New BI System
The result? Today, the tool is gener-
ating 4,000 reports, well beyond what
CHAPTER 4 users and think they’ll be happy Lora’s band of five BI experts could
Bringing because that is what they are clamor- have produced. “About 95% of the
Analytics Back
In-House ing for. In fact, it’s much more reports are created by users.”
nuanced than that,” Eckerson says.
BI experts must understand how
users absorb information, he says. In TURNING INEXPERIENCED
addition, how business users analyze USERS INTO AVID CONSUMERS
information today will be different Then, when MicroStrategy came out
from what they will need tomorrow, with its new Dynamic Enterprise
he says, and it is incumbent on IT to Dashboards, “they all started asking
“build that bridge.” for them,” Lora says.
Lora’s group began with a set of Once again, his group managed user
core, comprehensive reports that adoption, starting with familiar-look-
would fulfill the current business ing graphs, “no complex timeline
needs, “but they were very basic.” charts,” Lora says. “With the initial
Most were grid reports, with a few dashboard, we said, ‘Here are your
graphs thrown in. “We tried to mimic five reports you care about condensed
to a single view.’”
IT’s disciplined approach to adop-
tion has turned inexperienced BI users
into avid BI consumers. Now, users are
clamoring for advanced widgets like
the pretty Bubble charts that plot met- Next-Generation BI Strategies
is produced by CIO/IT Strategy Media,
ric values as bubbles of different col- © 2009 by TechTarget.
ors and sizes, relying on the BI group’s
Jacqueline Biscobing
expertise in Flex to make it happen, Managing Editor
Lora says. In fact, enthusiasm for per-
sonalized widgets is so high that Lora Linda Koury
CHAPTER 1
Art Director
Business and has had to impose limits. “Once you
IT Must Align
on BI Strategy put in these very nice widgets, they Christina Torode and Linda Tucci
will ask for more and more. You have Senior News Writers