Gartner’s recent statement about companies misinterpreting the concept of business intelligence is all over the news. No wonder, companies need to be confronted with this common fallacy of thinking that BI is just about technology.

Phillip Britt from DestinationCRM in his recent article chews out Gartners point and suggests nine ways (corresponding to Gartner’s nine “fatal flaws”) to consider in adjusting your approach to business intelligence.

The first thing to realize here is that developing a “BI initiative from a data-centric perspective won’t work unless there is involvement from the business side from the beginning.”

He goes on criticizing the spreadsheet culture and the way companies underestimate the importance of sharing data across enterprise.

Then, oh, my favorite one: data quality.

“Data quality issues are almost ubiquitous and the impact on BI is significant — people won’t use BI applications that are founded on irrelevant, incomplete, or questionable data.”

Amen!

The other fundamental problems with the way companies approach BI include “one-stop shopping” approach, “stability” (BI goals should be reevaluated and the action plan should be adjusted accordingly from year to year, actually), outsourcing BI (cost-cutting is not the primary goal of your BI practice), lack of collaboration across enterprise (no agreement on a “single truth” to aim for across different departments), etc.

Finally, the biggest flaw - “lack of a documented BI strategy.” This one actually holds true for each and every part of the overall enterprise strategy, it holds true for data integraion, data quality, data migration, ETL, literally EVERYTHING in the related field.

Gartner’s Bill Hostmann even “recommends creating a team tasked with writing or revising a BI strategy document, with members drawn from both the technology and the business sides.”

Thanksgiving is over, Apatar keeps releasing new solutions, Christmas is coming up quicker than we think…

…auch, the time really flies when data integration is not an issue! =)

I loved the way this article makes a parallel between the work of postal services and data integration. It compares the mail we send via regular post to the data we migrate between applications enterprise-wide.

Come to think of it, data integration market these days is a lot like the postal services market. People don’t feel 100% confident with neither of them,  whether it’s something of value you decide to send to your relatives, or it’s your customer data you’re synchronizing with your accounting system. The way out? At least with data integration you can check to see that the integration tool lives up to your security expectations before using it, or considering the tips the article mentioned above mentions for sharing data securily:

1. Do not expose your internal network.
2. Make sure that intermediate storage is secure.
3. Ensure that data at rest is protected.
4. Protection from data deletion, data loss.
5. Protection from data tampering.
6. Auditing and monitoring.
7. End-to-end network protection.

I just stumbled upon this article by Ajay Bhargava on BeyeNetworks. The article explores the recent trend of closer alliance between enterprise data management (EDM) and data warehousing/business intelligence. I quite liked the way Mr. Bhargava doesn’t leave out such fundamental components of enterprise data as data quality, metadata, data security, data governance, etc.

Here’s his vision of the key component that make up EDM and the fields that benefit from them:

With the financial crisis, mass lay-offs and vanishing resources, companies get only more demanding. We emphasize reliability and get only more irritated if things are not neat, simple and under control.

Software is the last thing you want to sweat about in this situation. So when your business depends on commercial software and it lets you down, things can really suck.

It’s interesting to watch how financial crisis makes a lot of companies previously skeptical of open source and software as a service turn to these two and try to get the most of them.

Open source looks appealing because it’s free for the most part and, you literally have a 24/7 support from a community of extremely committed developers.

SaaS is good because most of the work is already done for you, and subscription-based payment plans tend to be tempting.

Let’s go further though, to the pre-built solutions. These are even better, as they rid you of all manual coding and let anyone (Literally. Anyone.) on the staff “watch and relax”, making minimum to no effort at all.

Open source is free and out there available to everyone. You’re not making a long-term financial commitment by trying it. Neither are you sweating it while getting your bearings in a new pre-built technology. Work’s done for you. So, it’s like there’s a bonus that comes with a pie: not only are you saving money, you’re saving loads of time and increasing the overall efficiency.

Pre-built open source, the new green (pink, red… whatever), is it?

A recent Aberdeen report found that companies struggle with a high proportion of non-productive time. The report suggests that six hours per employee per week could be reclaimed for productive contribution.

Some of the strategies Aberdeen recommended to fight non-productive time spendings included data integration across the enterprise, desktop-to-enterprise integration, adoption of web applications etc.

I’d also say that pre-built solutions, which automatically do half of the work for you could help raise the productivity. If on average your integration project would take months and might lead to huge data losses, or simply fail, with pre-built solutions you can avoid all that trouble.

I just listened to the Halloween edition of the DM Review radio broadcast, and it’s awesome and hilarious at times and lol, you gotta listen to it. Leading data management experts (including, by the way, CEO and founder of Apatar Mr. Renat Khasanshyn) talk about the horror stories of information management from their experience (not without humour) and exchange views on open source and the role it plays across enterprises today.