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Visualization Broadens Business Intelligence's Appeal
It makes sense that interest in business intelligence visualization is increasing, given the highly visual nature of hot trends in both consumer and enterprise technology: big screens, HD, iPads, eReaders and smartphones. Everyone wants data served up in high resolution, with sharp color and the best graphics.
Executives are beginning to grasp the appeal of visualization and putting it on their enterprise business intelligence roadmaps. As reported in Datamation, recent research by Dresner Advisory Services found advanced visualization ranked as the fourth most important technology in organizations’ business intelligence strategies, trailing dashboards, end user self-service and data warehousing
Seen, heard and tweeted at the Gartner BI Summit
On Monday morning, hundreds of IT and line of business professionals attended the opening remarks and keynote address for the Gartner BI Summit in Los Angeles, which touched on how the industry has changed and how businesses need to change right along with it.
This year also marks Gartner’s 10th annual BI summit. To acknowledge the milestone, Gassman welcomed to the stage Howard Dresner, a former Gartner analyst and the “proverbial father” of BI. Dresner, who went on to found Dresner Advisory Services, coined the term business intelligence in 1989.
BI training too important to skip, experts say
Training is the final step of a software implementation and the one everyone loves to skip. The scenario is all too common. Companies spend time up front justifying the purchase, selecting the software and implementing it and then decide they’re done — giving short shrift to the crucial last piece.
When it comes to business intelligence (BI) software implementation, this mistake could render the whole undertaking null and void. BI training that goes beyond the tool’s technical features is crucial to helping employees gain the insights they need to do their jobs better, industry observers say.
More on manufacturing business intelligence
But without in-depth training, employees won’t properly use the BI software, depriving organizations of the benefits of this new IT investment. Before planning training programs, however, companies will likely need to do some work preparing their organizations culturally for the BI implementation.
The underpinning of a BI implementation is a pooling of an organization’s information in a data warehouse. Everyone queries the same data, so presumably the result is more trustworthy than the previous ways of doing analysis, in which employees generally crunched data residing on their hard drives. Unfortunately, a cultural shift is required to start trusting the data in the BI tool, and the same is true for getting employees to become more open with their data, according to Howard Dresner, chief research officer at Dresner Advisory Services, in Nashua, N.H.
Building a business intelligence software implementation checklist
Implementing manufacturing business intelligence software, or BI, is a good way to get a clearer understanding of how a business works and its overall health. Before jumping in, however, companies should review recognized best practices for a BI implementation. As with any new software system, there are a number of traps awaiting the unwary BI implementation team.
The first critical item in a pre-implementation checklist: Ensure that your BI implementation aligns with and supports the corporate strategy. “You have to be clear on the reason you are implementing BI in the first place,” said Howard Dresner, chief research office of Dresner Advisory Services in Nashua, N H., and author of several books on BI. “It can’t just be about giving the executives fancy dashboards. It needs to be tied to something more substantial like gaining true perspective on how the business is doing to help move it forward.”
Once a company has cleared this basic hurdle, the technical work of the BI implementation begins. Prepping data to populate the data warehouse against which queries will be performed is no small job. Every organization has “dirty” data, according to Dresner, meaning duplicate, inconsistent, inaccurate or incomplete data. Manufacturers must improve the quality of their data before proceeding, or the whole endeavor will be for naught. A business can’t make better decisions based on faulty data.
A Business Intelligence Renaissance: Howard Dresner Shares His Wisdom
Are we at the dawn of a new more lucid era? With the renewed energy around all things analytical, it would seem to be the case. Analytics and business intelligence is back in the top spot in Gartner’s Top 10 CIO Business and Technology Priorities in 2012 and the buzz about cloud, social and mobile has not been lost on this market.
Recently I sat down with Howard Dresner, someone who knows just a thing or two about the Business Intelligence (BI) market, to find out what’s hot in BI. Howard spent 13 years at Gartner, where he was a Research Fellow and Lead Analyst for BI. He also served as Chief Strategy Officer at Hyperion Solutions prior to forming Dresner Advisory Services in 2007. Howard caught me up on why the business intelligence market is once again buzzing.