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Spending wisely on analytics: Teradata (July 2010)
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Chief information officers currently making decisions about investments in data warehousing have more choices today
than ever before. Just as important, they can now also benefit from expert guidance in the best way to propose their
investment recommendations to their CEOs. This paper is written as an objective, informed, quick-reference guide to
examining data warehousing options and framing CEO proposals.
Despite the fact that an integrated, centralised approach to enterprise data management has been proven to be an
intelligence optimising, total cost of ownership (TCO) reducing exercise, it can be a challenge to convince the uninitiated
peers of the CIO – while the strategic direction of the company applies a brake on expenditure from one direction, the
allure of new technologies that can do more things faster, and perhaps more economically, pulls from another. Meanwhile, the current state of the organisation’s data warehousing/business intelligence environment cries
out for change. The result is the need to make some difficult decisions, though it’s not easy conveying relevant nuances
to those who can’t necessarily grasp all of the crosscurrents and tradeoffs.
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Choosing a standard for business intelligence: IBM (March 2010)
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Standardising business intelligence (BI) tools across an entire organisation has obvious benefits in terms of
simplification and cost savings. But for standardisation to be truly effective, it must revolve around the right solution, one
that addresses the organisation’s exact BI needs at a relatively low total cost.
IBM Cognos products – from IBM Cognos ReportNet for enterprise reporting to IBM Cognos 8 Business Intelligence for
complete BI capabilities – have a proven record of success. And with speedy deployment times that ease strain on IT
and intuitive interfaces that lead to wide user adoption, IBM Cognos solutions achieve a fast return on investment. The reasons driving standardisation in business intelligence and reporting are core to every company – cutting costs,
boosting revenue and increasing profits. What drives the increased interest in standardisation today is the fact many
companies are actually doing it. Other companies don’t want to miss the competitive opportunity.
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Financial governance: resistance is futile!: Rinedata (January 2010)
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Financial governance may still be a controversial subject in some boardrooms, but in the wake of recent accounting
scandals and the effect that the financial crisis continues to have on the global business community, it’s an aspect of
modern corporate life that is here to stay.
Indeed, the impact of this type of oversight has altered the role of the chief finance officer (CFO) dramatically in the last
10 years as finance teams have come under growing internal and external pressure to prevent financial irregularities
within the enterprise as well as increase the transparency and reliability of financial processes. The impact of governance on the role of the finance function can be seen as an increased focus on four related areas:
the delivery of verifiable financial information; the development and maintenance of efficient and reliable business
planning and reporting processes; the management of regulatory compliance; and the deployment and regulation of
comprehensive financial control processes.
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IBM Cognos 8 Business Intelligence for professional users: IBM (September 2009)
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Professional report authors need a single reporting solution that draws data from a variety of sources and enables wide
collaboration yet delivers the resulting information rapidly – at ‘business speed’.
IBM Cognos 8 Business Intelligence includes web-based reporting tools that allow individuals throughout the
organisation to join in the creation and delivery of BI reports that are richly detailed, customisable and easy to distribute.
This provides the kind of end-to-end view of business operations that supports good decision making. Given that most organisations today have deployed a number of business intelligence (BI), reporting and dashboard
software products, the challenge that this business environment creates is that each product requires concurrent
support, administration and maintenance.
Each product may access specific and different data sources that provide only some of the required report options.
Without completeness or ease of use, the professional report author must spend too many of their scarce resources to
advance every stage of the reporting lifecycle, from support and maintenance to creation, modification and distribution;
and too much time cobbling together the data from disparate solutions.
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Best practices for planning and budgeting: PROPHIX Software (August 2009)
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The continual changes in the business climate constantly challenge companies to find more effective business
practices. However, common budgeting limitations are preventing companies from moving forward; they have become
so universal and accepted in the marketplace that it is becoming more difficult to move ahead and progress the
business. Flexibility, accuracy and control over the budgeting process are three prominent factors slowing this
progression.
Many finance professionals want to grasp the big picture of the company’s position by having the flexibility to evaluate
and understand the effect of various factors. They want the ability to review previous years’ budgets, add/remove
accounts or change budgeting assumptions with ease. However, with the lack of flexibility in their current tools, the
depth of understanding and awareness are very limited.
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Deliver business data you can believe in with data governance: Kalido (April 09)
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Have you ever delivered a loyal customer’s order to the wrong address? Or had to explain how a customer got a better
price by shopping at different outlets of your company? How many times have you heard stories of unhappy customers
who didn’t get the service they deserved?
Have you ever gone to look for the facts and figures to help you make an important decision, only to find that the data
you need is scattered across many different sources and doesn’t even make sense when you try to put it all together?
Does your organisation scramble to answer simple questions for your CEO like, “What did we sell across all divisions
and product lines this year?” and, “How does our growth compare to last year and before our most recent acquisition?”.
Whatever industry you’re in, these problems all share the same root cause – the data you use to run your business is
often low-quality, badly organised, or worse – it’s just plain wrong.
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The changing shape of BI – the journey continues: COA Solutions (February 2009)
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Corporate performance management (CPM) is the must-have for all businesses seeking to improve performance and
increase competitiveness. But is it new? All organisations have some form of CPM already in operation – they must
have, from operational reporting through analysis and planning to consolidation and statutory reporting. The question is
how to improve on the existing elements to achieve maximum effectiveness. We cannot wait because our competitors
are not waiting. CPM is a journey that we have already started, but it must continue – at an even greater pace. “Too much information is a dangerous thing” – how often have we all heard that expression? But maybe it should be:
“Too much inaccurate information is a catastrophic thing.”
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Delivering strategic advantage using BI: FSN/COA Solutions (February 2009)
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The broadening and deepening of information requirements, together with accelerated timescales for reporting means
that developing robust performance management systems is a high priority for most businesses. Yet over the years, the
delivery of business intelligence has often been poorly understood. As many organisations have found to their cost, the
notion that superior business performance can be delivered with specialised software tools alone is severely misguided.
However, as the BI market matures, realisation is dawning that achieving enhanced business performance and
enduring business change requires a more holistic approach. It must be driven from the very top of the organisation and
supported by robust methodologies. BI should not be treated as a ‘one-hit’ project. It is a living, breathing organism that
must become an accepted part of the corporate DNA. Successful delivery needs a clearly articulated strategy with a
common and widely communicated set of performance indicators.
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How business intelligence should work: Information Builders (February 2009)
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Business intelligence (BI) has been around for a long time, and over the years has taken on many different forms –
reporting, OLAP, ad hoc, performance management, predictive analytics, data mining, etc. For someone who’s new to
the concept of BI, these various solutions can be quite confusing. Many potential users struggle to understand the
differences between the numerous technologies and methodologies and find it difficult to prioritise them.
But the fact is that each facet of BI is important, and each plays a vital role in a company’s overall information strategy.
However, few organisations truly understand how these different tools and techniques should be used together to drive
efficiency and effectiveness across the entire enterprise.
After more than 25 years in the industry, I have learned that BI is used in three distinct ways – strategically, analytically
and operationally.
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Business and its unhealthy addiction to technology: Crimson Systems (Feb 2009)
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The rapidly increasing maturity and sheer capability of technology – software suites, middleware, monitoring/control
systems and increasingly powerful hardware – should mean that IT is increasingly perceived as ‘easy’, a real business
enabler…but this isn’t happening.
Most people would agree with these statements: large companies, shackled to legacy systems and forced to invest in large-scale IT change programmes, are blinded
by options: SaaS, COTS, OTS, bespoke, .NET, Java – the permutations are seemingly endless; far too frequently IT expenditure is wasted on poorly matched or compromised solutions, based on a subjective and
thus flawed needs assessment process, with the key focus being to select a technical solution rather than to capture the
business objectives of the exercise; because of the division between IT and ‘the business’ in most boardrooms, a higher-level, joined-up view is rarely
considered, resulting in a misalignment of what IT should be doing, which is to serve and facilitate the business’s core
strategic goals.
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Budgeting, planning and forecasting: plan to outperform: Tagetik (June 2008)
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In today’s climate, with external credit becoming more expensive and difficult to secure, coupled with increasing operating
costs, successful organisations are seeking to move beyond the traditional annual budgeting cycle focused typically just on
profit-and-loss analysis, to rolling forecasts that also incorporate balance sheet and cashflow planning to manage their
corporate performance.
To meet these new requirements, organisations must replace their dated spreadsheet tools with new technologies that can
deliver sophisticated financial and planning models. By unifying profit-and-loss, balance sheet and cashflow forecasting,
organisations can generate comprehensive and realistic budgets and forecasts, support insightful decisions and, ultimately,
plan to outperform the competition.
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Unified versus integrated CPM: Tagetik (June 2008)
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The new millennium has witnessed a rapid proliferation of corporate performance management (CPM) solutions. The term, first
coined by Gartner in 2001, comprises “all processes, methodologies, metrics and technologies that enterprises use to
measure, monitor and manage business performance”.
Although planning, budgeting, consolidation and reporting are hardly new concepts or solutions, most companies still organise
and execute them as separate, isolated activities. CPM, on the other hand, unites these processes in an holistic approach to
help companies to translate their business strategy into day-to-day operations and actively gauge their performance in real
time.
In the wake of major accounting scandals and emerging regulations, more and more companies are turning to CPM solutions
to ensure compliance, streamline business processes and drive business performance. Large software players, which have
identified CPM’s immense sales potential for their global customer bases, have seized the opportunity to enter this booming
market segment. Their quest to ‘fill in the blanks’ as quickly as possible, however, has resulted in a rippling effect of mergers
and acquisitions of small, specialised vendors.
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