The Best-Run Businesses Run SAP

The scope of BI solution is pretty broad and includes reporting, dashboards, advanced query and analysis, data integration and data quality, as well as a number of analytic applications such as planning and budgeting (which fall outside of the scope of BI, but are natural extensions). With limited IT resources, small IT budgets and typically a difficulty for the operational and executive staff to take on multiple new initiatives simultaneously, how should SME customers take on BI projects? (more…)

Most small and medium businesses (SMBs) can relate to Albert Einstein’s famous quote that “Information is not knowledge.” Many SMBs have plenty of data, but find it challenging to get the insights from it that they need to run their businesses more effectively and efficiently.

Businesses have always needed the ability to track and measure critical success metrics in a quantifiable way. The problem is that when there’s too much information, people find it difficult to fully comprehend it and make decisions. In fact, more than one- (more…)

A colleague and I were recently discussing a report by McKinsey Global Institute titled “Big data: The next frontier for innovation, competition and productivity”. I said I was surprised that it only mentions data quality once in the entire 143 pages. My colleague said it is meant to show executives the business value of the massive amounts of data being collected, and executives generally at best give data quality lip service.

I have to admit I got a little upset and got on my soapbox about how information integrity was the foundation for getting business value from data. I used the spreadsheet example to validate my point of view that executives should care about information integrity.

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Location has always been part business intelligence. You want to see sales by product by region. Then drill down to country, state or city. What’s new is the way location is visualized by overlaying the BI numbers onto geospatial maps.

Maps provide an intuitive visualization that aids in the communication of information about behavior and events based on where the objects or individuals are (more…)