Falling demand, tight credit, and unprecedented economic challenges are forcing businesses to look for tools and means of reducing cost, increasing productivity, maintain-even increase customer base, avoiding costly initiatives, and improve quality. The essence of this initiative, Supply Chain Institute, is to address these problems by providing analytics, modeling capability, and execution methods to assist with the resolving of the real life business problems.
Tag Archives: Data Warehousing
The TOFU (Top of Funnel Users) Approach to Business Intelligence
The TOFU (Top of Funnel Users) Approach to Business Intelligence
An interesting article in Forbes.com entitled, “Why Top Of The Funnel BI Will Drive The Next Wave Of Adoption”, written by Dan Woods, sparked some great conversations about bottom of the funnel users (20-30% wanting specific business information), and Top of Funnel Users (or TOFU) that want to interact with information in a personalized way and express their interests. I was fortunate to have Matt Milella, Director of Product Development for Oracle Business Intelligence Mobile Apps, and Jacques Vigeant, Product Strategy Director for Oracle Business Intelligence & Enterprise Performance Management, join me for a podcast to discuss their opinions about “The TOFU approach to business intelligence (BI)”.
Jacques explained that the article is basically about how BI has historically focused on what we refer to as the ‘business analyst’ or the ‘power user’. That’s the person in a company that has the unenviable task of analyzing data, finding trends, and synthesizing data into dashboards that he/she then shares with management. The common thinking, in BI companies, is that roughly 20% of the users prepare data that the ‘rest of us’ consume. There are many practical and technical reasons why BI started using this model 30 years ago, but the world of technology has come a long way since then. Today, the average user can do much more with much less help from IT.
Do you think that this article is interesting? Do you have any opinions? Thank you for reading. If you have any questions, send us a messageor leave a comment below.
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Box Partners With Roambi To Attack The BI Market
Box Partners With Roambi To Attack The BI Market
Box and Roambi just announced a partnership that is both old fashioned and empowering, and may be an accelerator for companies struggling to expand the use of data without creating a mess.
Spreadsheets are at the core of the Top of the Funnel BI challenge that companies all over the world have faced for decades. The challenge defined by TOFU BI (as I’ve discussed in “Why Top of the Funnel BI Will Drive the Next Wave of Adoption”) is how do you get everyone in the enterprise using data to maximum effect.
… the point of this partnership is to keep the wildly popular paradigm of self-service spreadsheets and add a delivery mechanism created for the modern, mobile world. Both Box and Roambi are well suited to solve parts of the problem and work together. Box acts as the repository that helps control the sprawl of hundreds or thousands of spreadsheets and makes them manageable. Roambi Analytics extracts data from spreadsheets and other sources and creates attractive dashboards or e-books (in the Roambi Flow product) that present data in an attractive way. …
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iView Systems’ iTrak® Business Intelligence Delivers Dynamic Dashboard Risk Analytics & Reporting
iView Systems’ iTrak® Business Intelligence Delivers Dynamic Dashboard Risk Analytics & Reporting
iView Systems, a leading provider of loss prevention solutions for the security and surveillance environment, is excited to announce the most recent addition to the iTrak® family of Incident Reporting and Risk Management solutions, the iTrak® BI (Business Intelligence) Module. The iTrak® BI Module delivers powerful dashboard visualizations from information reported in the iTrak Incident Reporting and Risk Management and other data sources in real-time, providing users a visual representation of their incident and other iTrak information. This allows organizations to quickly extract meaningful business intelligence to detect emerging trends & identify risks, threats & vulnerabilities.
iTrak® BI real-time, interactive dashboard reporting and visualization.
- Manages dynamic business data, providing the ability to control the visualization and analysis of data in real-time.
- iTrak® BI is equipped with a large selection of high-quality data controls and visualizations, effectively presenting the data to associated audience.
- Connects and consolidates data into one system, regardless of where your data resides; saving time and money.
- iTrak® BI empowers end-users to create, interpret, analyze and drill down through a wealth of information for effective decision-making in real time.
- iTrak® BI adapts to the business so users don’t have to adapt to the product.
- iTrak® BI gives users a range of viewing options that are designed specifically for both desktop and mobile delivery providing important metrics on the-go.
- iTrak® BI allows communication, collaboration and the ability to take direct action via commenting capability directly on the dashboards – allowing effective and immediate the insight to make better business decisions.
- iTrak® BI Dashboards lets users choose, filter, format and sort metrics they need to see, with the ability to share and collaborate the finished results (mashups) with other users.
- The web-based solution lets users create, view, and interact with dashboards directly in a web browser – with no need to install a separate desktop application.
If you have any question, leave us comments below of send us a message.
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Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms
Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms
Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms
Data discovery capabilities are dominating new purchasing requirements, even for larger deployments, as alternatives to traditional BI tools. But “governed data discovery” — the ability to meet the dual demands of enterprise IT and business users — remains a challenge unmet by any one vendor.
The BI and analytics platform market is in the middle of an accelerated transformation from BI systems used primarily for measurement and reporting to those that also support analysis, prediction, forecasting and optimization. Because of the growing importance of advanced analytics for descriptive, prescriptive and predictive modeling, forecasting, simulation and optimization (see “Extend Your Portfolio of Analytics Capabilities”) in the BI and information management applications and infrastructure that companies are building — often with different buyers driving purchasing and different vendors offering solutions — this year Gartner has also published a Magic Quadrant exclusively on predictive and prescriptive analytics platforms (see Note 1). Vendors offering both sets of capabilities are featured in both Magic Quadrants.
For this Magic Quadrant, Gartner defines BI and analytics as a software platform that delivers 17 capabilities across three categories: information delivery, analysis and integration.
As a result of the market dynamics discussed above, the capability definitions in this year’s Magic Quadrant have been modified with the following additions and subtractions to reflect our current view of critical capabilities for BI and analytics platforms.
Capabilities dropped:
- Scorecard: Most companies do not implement true scorecard/strategy maps using BI platforms — they implement dashboards. Also, most BI vendors report limited sales activity for their scorecard products. Scorecards are primarily delivered by corporate performance management (CPM) vendors (see “Strategic CPM as a Driver for Organizational Performance Management”). Therefore, we have included scorecards as a type of dashboard, rather than as a separate category.
- Predictive Analytics: covered in the new “Magic Quadrant for Advanced Analytics Platforms.”
- Prescriptive Analytics: covered in the new “Magic Quadrant for Advanced Analytics Platforms.”
Capabilities added:
- Geospatial and location intelligence (see the Analysis section)
- Embedded advanced analytics (see the Analysis section)
- Business user data mashup and modeling (see the Integration section)
- Embeddable analytics (see the Integration section)
- Support for big data sources (see the Integration section)
Feel free to leave us your comments or send us a message.
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Business Intelligence Barista: Mixing your choice of BI Coffee with Tableau, Power BI or Qlikview?
Business Intelligence Barista: Mixing your choice of BI Coffee with Tableau, Power BI or Qlikview?
Choosing a Business Intelligence is a bit like making coffee for the whole company. Everybody likes it their way, and they want it right now. Plus, everybody wants it differently. So, given that everyone has different requirements, how do you go about keeping everybody happy? If you think about how hard it is to keep everyone happy when you’re just making coffee, think how hard it is to select a business Intelligence solution. Not just any solution…. the *right* solution.
So, given that everyone has different requirements, how do you go about keeping everybody happy? If you think about how hard it is to keep everyone happy when you’re just making coffee, think how hard it is to select a business Intelligence solution. Not just any solution…. the *right* solution. The one that will keep everyone happy and give them what they want. The solution that will keep the ambulance away from the door, where constraints must be met or there will be serious trouble. The solution that will keep everyone out of danger whilst making sure that the sprinkle lovers get their sprinkles, and the folks who like a chocolate covered spoon in their coffee get a little chocolate covered spoon – in milk, dark or white…
Hopefully this article could provide an insight for you to decide the best BI tools for you company. If you would like to know further, or if you have any question, please contact us or leave us comments below.
