It is always good when other people independently come to the same conclusions as you! This is why I liked Ryan Dunn’s Medium post Dash-bored so much.
Regular readers of this blog will know that we have been passionate about interactive dashboards (now known as Dashboard Apps) for a long time. So, reading Ryan’s post and his conclusions was music to our ears.
Two years ago we published a post which explained “Five reasons why SAP Lumira is not the natural successor to SAP Dashboards (aka Xcelsius)”, and further why we believe that our DecisionPoint™ product is a better way forward.
The advice in this post still holds true, and indeed the events of the last year have reinforced our viewpoint.
With the current buzz in the market you could be forgiven for thinking that the only things you need to consider to plan your information strategy are machine learning and artificial intelligence. Yes, these are areas that will become important for all organizations. But, narrowing your focus to them alone will impair your ability to do business today.
In a recent blog post: “The Myth of Self-Service Analytics“, data visualization expert Stephen Few took BI vendors to task for their use of the term “self-service”. He opened with the remark: “Exploring and analyzing data is not at all like pumping your own gas”.
The pumping gas analogy is one I like. It is also one I have used myself for some time. The earliest example I could find being this slide from a presentation I gave back in 2013: Continue reading
In his recent blog post, Wayne Eckerson opens:
From there, he goes on to explain how he has seen this vision fail inside organizations, in a post which nicely articulates some of the pitfalls of self-service analytics.
However, I want to take a step back and look at his opening premise. Particularly, the aspect summarized as: Self-service analytics gives business people information “how they want it”. Continue reading
Do you have time set aside in your business intelligence (BI) project plan to train your business end-users? If you do, then I would urge you to think hard about what you are doing, because the need for business user training may well be an indicator that your project will not be the success you are hoping for.
As Mico Yuk is fond of saying, there is only one success metric which matters in BI: User Adoption. And, there are three reasons why the need for business user training kills adoption: Continue reading
Last week, Howard Dresner, a long-time BI analyst and the person who, back in 1989, coined the modern use of the term Business Intelligence, posted to his blog on Sand Hill an article which, at least to my mind, contained two of the best pieces of news about BI I have heard for a long, long time. These were the following quotes from his “Wisdom of Crowds® Business Intelligence Market Study”:
Almost as soon as I had published my last post (speaking up for forgotten business intelligence users), I saw the following question in a tweet from industry analyst, Wayne Eckerson (@weckerson):
“Should everyone have access to self-service data integration?”
This is a bit like asking:
“Should we give sharp knives to all children?” Continue reading
There seems to be a conspiracy in the Business Intelligence (BI) world to ignore the needs of the large majority of users in an organization, namely most of the business users!
I don’t for a minute think this is deliberate. But, it is a significant oversight in a world where getting information to EVERYONE should have become a basic requirement of doing business.
In listening to the commentary around the market, you would be forgiven for thinking that the only capabilities that matter any more are: Continue reading
If there is a data lake in your organization, what percentage of your organization see data from it on a daily basis?
I suspect the answer in most organizations, even the most Big Data savvy ones, is very low – possibly much lower than 10%.