The really strategic, bet-the-company decisions by CEOs get most of the attention. But what matters even more are the ones frontline employees make every day – the operations, sales, marketing, customer service, and other decisions that determine if a grand plan flies or flops.
That’s why companies need smarter enterprise applications – and why such apps as ERP and CRM that are already critical to companies will increasingly be used to deliver so-called “embedded business intelligence” and analytics.
Your company almost certainly has at least one BI system, and probably several. But is decision support delivered within the transactional interfaces that plant managers use to make production decisions? How about in the software that customer service reps use to guide interactions with each customer?
“Executives can’t just stand up at the front of a room and say, ‘This is the new corporate strategy.’ You have to make sure your organization executes on that strategy in every transaction,” says decision management expert James Taylor, co-author of the influential book Smart (Enough) Systems (Prentice Hall, 2007).
Some of the midtier enterprise application players, including Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT), Lawson Software Inc. , and Epicor Software Corp. , have advanced the notion of embedding insight with their latest product releases. Market leaders SAP AG (NYSE/Frankfurt: SAP) and Oracle Corp. (Nasdaq: ORCL) are poised to raise the bar. With its move to acquire Sybase and in announcements made last week, SAP made it clear it intends to deliver real-time BI and advanced predictive analytics directly within its applications. It’s even promising to eliminate the need for separate BI and information management infrastructure, a development that would dramatically lower IT costs.
Oracle, too, will make embedded BI a big part of its Fusion Applications, due later this year. And it’s sure to tie in its high-powered Exadata appliances, which can process both transactional and analytic workloads. It’s a different route to the same destination: real-time insight within the application.
Don’t count out dedicated BI and analytics vendors. IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM), SAS Institute Inc. , MicroStrategy Inc. , and others can make a strong argument that most companies have diverse applications, so companies need analysis tools that are agnostic to the data source and application.
There are two key tests for companies: Can they get better, timelier, and more usable intelligence from their apps and vendors? And can they drive operational decisions that are tied to their unique strategies? They can, though only if they carefully align those insights with their business goals and not depend on cookie-cutter dashboards and analytics.
BI needs to evolve much further to be of significant utility to most organizations.
It needs to be customizable,moldable and simple to use.These are requirements which are still not being met by most BI solutions(the complexity is a major turn off for most end users except hardcore Techies/Tech lovers).
We need to dumb it down further to ensure more widespread adoption across the ERP spectrum(as well as make it more ingrained).
What I'm wanting to know is how long before BI benefits both the consumer and businesses in real time NOTICEABLY? In similar scenario as Primo Water, consumers are notified of the latest news such as the major water main break, then via a mobile device, smart applicane or web(pc/mac), they can see the changes in their shopping list for availability of water in the local retail centers (in real time, stock, price, whereabouts etc) updated. Of course this information services the businesses also (rfid, location based services, consumption/sales).
I really enjoyed reading the Information Week hardcopy today and seeing the Big Report!
Wireless Carriers pinpointing "Alpha" consumers in India ROCKS!!! Hmm, wonder if that is taking place "incognito" here in the states!
I think one of the hardest things in the BI world is the movement of the vendors to go big while customers are going small.
Many enterprises are collections of smaller companies, branches, or disciplines--same for government. So, while these BI vendors might say, "That's the point!," it's hard to make operational sense of some of the features at the highest level. Meanwhile, individual departments are small enough that they don't have the resources to invest in BI or are so close to the operations, they don't need it anyway.
It just seems like an industry that's a paradox. You need BI apps, but they are meaningless at an enterprise level, yet as you drill-down to the micro level where analytics are most useful, the apps become too expensive and less "a-ha."
Maybe that's the point of the study--there seem to be plenty of vendors, but little innovation beyond the traditional applications.
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Social media has been with us for a decade -- but employer policies and the law are anything but firm about the most appropriate usage of this powerful tool.
Businesses often struggle to decide which domain to use. When it comes to purchasing a domain name, you have plenty of extensions to choose from, ranging from .com and .net, to .me, and even .mobi. But which one should you pick?
I've been writing about how the next evolution of the Internet might just be an advertising revolution, and how corporate IT can stay involved as the enablers and providers of the technologies that make this possible.
In the 1970 science fiction thriller Colossus: The Forbin Project, two giant supercomputers from the United States and Soviet Union secretly join forces to take control of the collective nuclear might of the two countries. In the film, the two machines discover each other's existence, communicate back-and-forth, share their collective data, and cut their human creators out of the process. It is the ultimate example of machine-to-machine communications, or M2M.
New York's Metropolitan Transit Authority is conducting a pilot test of digital kiosks to guide subway users to where they want to go more efficiently and at lower cost.
The whole Amazon.reader debate is a double-stupid. It's stupid to think that there's any e-book buyer who doesn't know Amazon's URL, and it was stupider to let ICANN launch the whole free-form TLD initiative to start with.
While NFC's original goal was to enhance mobile commerce applications, it is finding its way into a number of other uses, which is creating both opportunity as well as challenges for IT departments.
Enterprises would like to move to cloud computing but are hesitant because they are concerned about providers’ ability to secure company data. Here are some tips that help to ensure that if breaches occur, the business is not left holding the bag.
Edmunds separates customers into segments based on the info it collects on its site and from partners, and uses that to push out custom content, said Brian Baron, director of business analytics for Edmunds.com, at Predictive Analytics Innovation Summit.
The automotive website uses propensity modeling to target ads and customer registration forms, said Brian Baron, director of business analytics for Edmunds.com, at Predictive Analytics Innovation Summit.
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M2M: Rise of the Machines? Not Yet David Weldon In the 1970 science fiction thriller Colossus: The Forbin Project, two giant supercomputers from the United States and Soviet Union secretly join forces to take control of the collective nuclear might of the two countries. In the film, the two machines discover each other's existence, communicate back-and-forth, share their collective data, and cut their human creators out of the process. It is the ultimate example of machine-to-machine communications, or M2M. CLICK FOR MORE
M2M: Rise of the Machines? Not Yet David Weldon In the 1970 science fiction thriller Colossus: The Forbin Project, two giant supercomputers from the United States and Soviet Union secretly join forces to take control of the collective nuclear might of the two countries. In the film, the two machines discover each other's existence, communicate back-and-forth, share their collective data, and cut their human creators out of the process. It is the ultimate example of machine-to-machine communications, or M2M. CLICK FOR MORE
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