The future of Innovation in Business Intelligence

Dear readers,

Historically the best times for innovation have been times of great conflict: World Wide War 1 & 2, Cold War, etc. The same can be said of Business Intelligence, it is during times of economic deceleration that we are start seeing more innovations in the field as the companies try to get any competitive advantage they can over their competition.
The last time we saw something similar was during the 2001 recession, now almost seven years later, we are again in uncertain times for the global economy with oil prices climbing, the dollar falling and inflation pressures at all time high. While in 2001 we saw a strong paradigm shift from text based report to graphical dashboards, the wind today is blowing in a different direction. 2008 presents a climate that favors mergers, as companies try relentlessly to reduce costs. The BI industry has not been immune to this trend as we have been big fish eat the smaller (and sometimes more juicy) fish.
So, what’s does this mean? Are we in the proper time to see innovations? Or are the entrepreneurial companies under economic pressure cashing out and selling to the big software players?
The answer (as always) is two fold: yes, we are seeing a trend where the smaller (and more innovative) companies are being acquired by big software conglomerates that are trying to make a profit, but also we are seeing a major shift from BI Reporting and Analysis into Actionable Insights.
While it is certainly true that when a big company acquires a smaller vendor, they shift resources from innovation into integration with the bigger platform, we are also seeing an investment (primarily from system integrators) to wire the BI applications into the organizational core processes by making it easier to act on the information provided. (E.g. A CPG company was able analyze the results of a product introduction campaign in almost real time, but it took more than two weeks to make this information actionable by correlating it to how the product was priced for each market. By enabling the flow of the information between the BI platform and pricing systems, changes can be made in days, as they bypass the traditional interdepartmental communication barriers.)
Most of these solutions are sold in bundles, including services and software, giving the companies a true solution to a business problem, rather than just technical pieces. However be aware of the big software vendors that include out-the-shelf software (that btw was just recently acquired from another company) with their consulting services at a much reduced price. This practice channels most of the revenue away from product development and into their services department; effectively reducing even more the resources spent in research and development to incorporate new features in the BI platform.
In summary, these are times of great change for the BI industry and as such present unique opportunities for innovation and mindset changes. What happens next? That, my readers is up to us and decisions we make.

Noe Gutierrez

The Global Landscape and Business Intelligence

Dear Readers,

While it has been a while since my last posting, I have not been idle. I have been heavily immersed in Global BI Implementations. During this time I have gathered enough evidence that the world is not really flat, but rather heavily interconnected. Picture a big Swiss cheese with holes all over its surface, it you drop a small ball in one the holes, you do not on which side of the cheese it is going to come out. A few years back, the world was more isolated, events could be contained within borders and bad or good economic decisions usually favored a few. Today this is no longer the case, with the growth of global companies and brands, multinationals now have direct influence of global commodities prices and control over local markets in dozen of countries.
Business Intelligence is enabling this trend by providing global consolidated information, and thus allowing companies to make local market decisions from a centralized corporate location that might be thousand of miles away. With the right information strategy and metrics, previously disparate markets can be now be compared side to side and position to compete with each other, shifting power from mature to development markets where growth becomes the main driver.
This trend will accelerate and continue as companies continue to look for the best talent at the best price and international boundaries become less relevant as global information flows freely through data networks.
In my next posting I will outline the challenges that Global BI implementations face and some strategies on how to address them.

Noe Gutierrez

In the beginning...

Dear Readers,

Before I officially start posting to the Blog, please go through some of my publications. I will make reference to them as I post additional information on this forum.

• Enabling a Business Intelligence Self Service Platform across the Enterprise


• Business Intelligence Governance


• Demystifying Market Basket Analysis
• Performance Management (PM) – The key for a successful C-Commerce relationship


• Effective Visualization Techniques for Business Intelligence: Clickable Mock-ups

Feel free to email me with questions & comments if you would like for any specific topic to be discussed here. Also, I would like to remind the reader that all postings are my point of view and do not represent any endorsement from my employer or my current clients. All characters that will be portrayed on this blog are fictional and they do not have any connection to real people unless explicitly said so,

Thanks for reading this forum,

Noe Gutierrez

Welcome!

Welcome to the blog of Noe A. Gutierrez, a business intelligence global consultant. This blog will try to capture the learnings from multiple Business Intelligence (BI) and Performance Management field engagements with Fortune 500 companies. It will discuss foundational issues like BI Governance and Self Service, while exploring rarely documented topics like Information visualization and business interaction. Most important all the posts on this blog will be based on actual experience, so together we can avoid a significant problem that has plagued Decision Support projects from the very beginning: too much theory but not enough real expertise.

For more information about who I am, please visit my homepage at http://www.noegutierrez.com/

Hope to hear from all of you,

Noe Gutierrez