The Acinta booth at Platon IM2008 conference

So this is me at the Acinta Booth at the Platon IM2008 conference.

Is this hip in the BI world?

Platon IM2008 June 18^th, 11:25 – 12:10

This entry was held by Mr. Jørgen Steines and represents his view of what is hip in the world of Business Intelligence, or more specifically – the hip technologies, existing as well as emerging ones.

According to Mr. Steines, all companies today have one or two datawarehouses. Terabyte datawarehouses are more the standard than an exception today.

When talking about what is popular in the BI landscape we have to look at what the primary drivers are for the businesses that employ business intelligence systems to improve their profits and competitive abilities.

Driver #1: Business process integration

BI is moving out of the analytic departments into all divisions and operations of businesses and thus needs to become integrated into the existing operational systems so all users can get transparent access to BI information.

Driver #2: Flexibility

Users need to combine data in new ways to get the right context for decision making. Therefore there is a great need for flexibility in the tools that provide BI information.

Driver #3: Real-time data

In many business processes it is required for data to be real-time because critical business decisions must be made on a minute-to-minute basis. Examples of this could be logistic planning processes.

Driver #4: Growing number of users

BI will become pervasive for growing numbers of users and systems.

Driver #5: Growing data volumes

Data volumes are growing and growing and the number of source systems seems to grow as well.

Mr. Steines added another interesting perspective: The hefty consolidation taking place in the BI market with the acquisitions of Business Objects, Hyperion and Cognos being some of the more prominent, could change the BI landscape dramatically. Mr. Steines hopes that SAP will hold true its promise to let BO be an “independent” vendor of BI tools due to its breadth of tools and technologies.

So, according to Mr. Steines, these technologies are the answers to the business requirements:

Hip #1: SOA (Service Oriented Architecture)

Data must be decoupled from the applications and be provided through open data services that can be combined much the same way as LEGO bricks. The layer of services will make it transparent where data comes from whether it is a datawarehouse, ODS, Master Data or even data hosted at partners.

The SOA angle is the approach preferred by most of the companies that have acquired BI companies with products that now need to be integrated into complete product suites.

Hip #2: EII (Enterprise Information Integration)

Much like traditional DW architecture but the main difference is that the common integrated data model is a virtual view of the data sources. Sources are mapped to common views and then dynamically extracted to applications, reports, portals, message queues etc.

The concept was made popular by IBM’s Web Sphere Federator. The key aspect of EII from a BI perspective is the ability to join data from the data sources. (Now, this has a remarkable resemblance with the concept of “Virtual datawarehouse” developed by no less than Acinta, doesn’t it?). To keep up performance an EII system must employ advanced caching mechanisms provided by specaialized services in the data sources.

An example of this is to combine data from the datawarehouse with live data from the operational systems.

Hip #3: Datawarehouse appliances

First there was the monolithic mainframes that were used for everything. Later appeared the OLAP dedicated servers in various flavors.

Lately we have seen column-based databases, in-memory databases and now datawarehouse appliances: Everything needed for a datawarehouse built in to one combined product. The operating system, the hardware, disk systems etc. are all built into one box that has very low maintenance costs and increased performance. This is achieved by designing systems for the sole purpose of DW – everything is tuned from the factory and it will not work well with other uses.

Hip #4: In- memory tools

All data in memory – this is especially interesting after the introduction of 64–bit systems that allow for very large memory address spaces.

Currently there are two types of tools with this technology:

• In memory BI applications (e.g. ClikTech)
• Caching of traditional RDBMS (e.g. Oracle Times Ten, SAP BI accelerator)

According to Gartner: “By 2012, 70% of Global 1000 org. will load detailed data into memory as the primary method to optimize BI application performance”

Hip #5: Open source BI tools

The primary drivers for using open source tools would include that they are cheap, may offer special functions/features, are vendor independent, allow access to source code and are mostly standard-based.

Survey: 43% are already using OS. 24% are uses OS BI. 31 consider OS BI.

Hip #6: Mash-up technologies

Mashups started in the music industry by sampling parts of different songs and combine it into new songs. The idea is the same for IT: Various services are mixed into dedicated applications. E.g. combine BBC news with a Google map to see where the news event took place.

In BI this translates to integrating internal and external data sources. But what is the difference between Mashup and SOA? Mainly, SOA is very formalized and contains a large framework of standards, whereas mashups are “rule-less” - there are some basic techniques for connecting things. So they can be made without expert assistance.

Hip #7: BI Search

BI data must be searchable the same way as in Google. Google already provides certain BI features in its OneBox enterprise search product by integrating with the metadata repositories of various BI vendors.

Summing it all up

• Business process integration: Is already happening. Many companies require this by default
• SOA: Interesting but doesn’t solve the data quality problem
• EII: Can be useful in certain scenarios especially when live data is combined with datawarehouse data
• Data Warehouse appliances: Yes, yes, yes!
• In memory tools: Are special purpose tools. Good for some, not for others.
• Open Source BI tools: The question is, will consultants be more expensive when software is free?
• Mashup: It will get inside companies due to flexibility and user-friendliness
• BI search: Try it.

Remember: Don’t try to prohibit emerging technologies. Instead remember that technology is the easy part and should never be the first consideration. For example business requirements and data quality must be considered first.

Question from the audience: “What about security?” It can be applied at multiple levels, for example the database and/or the application interface. BI systems are not special from all other IT systems.

Mr. Steines provided a good overview of what is going on in the BI landscape. However, one of the proposed technologies is questionable in value mostly because it is a fault engineering of a good idea. EII in one of its corner stones builds on the idea of virtually coupling data sources with applications. The primary motivation for doing such a thing would be to keep system complexity down, but this is contradicted by requiring such a system to be able to handle and integrate all sorts of data from all sorts of sources, require source systems to provide special interfaces and services and so forth.

Thus, as a Danish saying has it: “Den person kan med rette kalde sig ekspert, som tager det lette og gør det svært”. (Translation: That person can truly call himself an expert, who can take the simple and make it hard).

Make the decision loop faster to beat your competitors

Platon IM2008 June 18^th, 09:25 – 10:10

In 2004 Dr. Morten Middelfart wrote a PhD in Business Intelligence, called CALM (Computer Aided Leadership and Management).

In Dr. Middelfart’s perspective the art of running a business much resembles warfare tactics and thus much of his PhD takes offset in theories about maneuver warfare tactics.

Reporting is any extraction of data in reports, dashboards etc. while analysis is about pivoting data, drilling up and down and so forth. That is, traditionally speaking.

However, with CALM things look different. Targit wanted to go in another direction – what is an ideal form of leadership? “Things are moving faster and faster, we must make decisions based on more and more information” is what we used to say. But the internet is making a big impact.

Morten was at A.P. Moeller Maersk in the mid 90’. They had the world’s largest electronic network at the time and the power of being able to transmit data about cargo traffic all over the world in an instance gave Maersk a tremendous advantage over its competitors. But over night the competitors were able to do the same things due to the arrival of the internet!

This paved way for new ways of thinking about business: “Isn’t it more important to know where the cargo is than whether the cargo goes on our ship or not?” I.e. the information is what really matters! In this way Maersk could optimize the planning of shipping regardless of which carrier the cargo was on.

Going back to the internet: The fact that the internet is so effective means that the costs of providing services and products have decreased dramatically. This means that the entry cost for new companies is very low, so you don’t know who is going to be your competitor tomorrow.

This is the hyper-volatile world: CHAOS!

A chaos system is sensitive to initial conditions and it is impossible to know all the initial conditions.

We need to know our core competences and how to apply them to any challenge or threat at the company.

In war the Americans had a disadvantage with their Sabre against the MIG15. Using the ODA loop (Observe, Decide, Action) by John Boyd, the idea was to win by making this loop shorter. This will also help a company win over its enemies.

The ODA loops are prevalent throughout the business at all levels. It is NOT one big loop – it is many small loops all over the company. The most changes will happen where the rubber meets the road, i.e. in the operational parts of the company. The basic KPIs are still turnover and gross profit – this is not about to change. But the way we use and apply this information is crucial.

The CALM circle

The CALM circle has 4 phases.

Observation phase

Agents will give relevant employees information about significant events such as unexpected values of KPIs, automatically.

Orientation phase

Observation requires orientation, so it is important that users can go directly from the Observation phase to the Orientation phase, i.e. be able to analyze the data in a report or agent directly and interactively.

Decision phase

The decision phase must be supported by having access to unstructured data, e.g. e-mails, documents.

Action phase

Actions include calling someone an idiot – this will not go out of style anytime soon. But why not put up storyboards or dashboards on large screens in the offices so the whole organization will be oriented towards company KPIs and thus company goals?

In Dr. Middelfarts opinion too much time is spent on creating reports. Why not spend more time making sure we get the right information at the right time? Create intelligent agents that keep all employees informed about important information.

What’s in a click?

A click (with the mouse) is a measure of the effort associated with moving around the ODA loop. Every click takes time, imposes a threat of errors and it requires more education. So the number of clicks is a measure of the cost/time to move around the ODA loop that we want to minimize.

The number of clicks can be reduced through intelligent application design and even artificial intelligence. For example the system can automatically highlight relevant data in reports and it can remember previous actions and use that information to help the user get to the same information later.

Some important technologies relating to CALM:

• Ad-hoc agents. Everyone must be able to create an agent, not just administrators and super users. Reacting fast to actual data is easier and more powerful than creating forecasts. Not that one should not make budgets and so on but fast reaction is more powerful.
• Hyper-relations. Any click on data will let the user view relevant, related data.
• Intelligent analysis. Suggestions by the system for how to analyze certain KPIs. A Smiley can show you trends in the underlying data, so you can click the Smiley to find out what is wrong.
• Search in unstructured data.
• Storyboards.

Dr. Middelfart predicts than the next years will be spent doing well-known activities such as ensuring data quality. Search will be more and more predominant and new things will happen in the Action phase. But all this will require a solid foundation in form of trustworthy data sources and data warehouses.

Dr. Middelfart’s warfare perspective is an interesting way of regarding BI as a weapon to fight down your competitors and will certainly appeal to some. However, it can be questioned whether such a perspective will allow companies to ensure ethics such as social and environmental responsibilities.

Business integration doesn't make your company more intelligent

Mike Ferguson’s keynote Tuesday afternoon summed up the entire day and we started with application integration, went on to business integration and that the challenge now is Optimization. This means that we need to get the entire enterprise running towards the same objectives. The challenge is immense, because it’s not only technology, it’s also getting work processes and the people in the enterprise to work together, and we have to make sure that all levels of the organizations follow the lead from the C-level?

“Steering wheels” exist at all levels of the organization. It is important that everyone steers in the same direction or the business will be torn apart,” as Mike Ferguson put it

To make that possible it is necessary that the systems reflect the way the corporation works while giving the managers control downwards and getting data from below. At the same time the infrastructure needs to be able to sustain changes continuously without exposing it to errors or vulnerabilities.

And with the explosion of data, sooner or later it will be impossible to give people all the information they need to make decisions on all events for the business. This makes way for the need of automated decisions, claims Mike Ferguson.

Still, today, most of the world’s larger companies, in one way or the other, have room for improvement, even with basic stuff like common data names and definitions. A data quality firewall is necessary at every point of data entry, to prevent bad data from entering the systems. And even when that is taken care of, there is still the almost universal challenge of getting unstructured data into the BI-systems.

The goal is to place BI in the centre of the enterprise and connect it with all of the enterprise and it needs to be available wherever it’s needed, whenever it’s needed. Mike Ferguson calls this Right Time Business Optimization. To do this it is absolutely necessary to react before the data reaches storage – even in memory.

This is the challenge for the modern enterprise and no one has solved it yet, but Mike Ferguson predicts that automated decisions will start to make an impact already in 2009-2012.

I think this is highly unlikely that there will be any impact what so ever, since automated decisions already take place in most enterprises and since they really have nothing to do with BI in particular. Intelligent business systems will continue to evolve and more automated decisions will enter any enterprise.

If Mr. Ferguson is referring to automation of strategic decisions then this could – however compelling it may sound – pose a significant threat to a business that follows this path. Because any automated decision and structure can be mapped and reverse engineered by competitors who can then take advantage of the rigid structure inherent in automated systems against the business. Automation of strategic decisions will lock corporations into fixed reaction patterns making them much easier to predict by competitors who will not hold back.

The woes of BI in the coming information explosion can be much more easily handled by democratization of BI throughout the enterprise.

The BI-advantage is disappearing for large corporations

From SAS Institute, Jesper Schleimann presented the demands that the market puts on new and existing BI-solutions. While BI is a mature product today the challenge has changed from building new BI-systems from the bottom up, to evolve the existing BI-solutions to follow the changes any corporation has to deal with. As the organization grows and new values appear in both old and new data existing systems must either adapt or be replaced, both are very expensive propositions to large enterprises.

The main drivers in the BI-evolution, is the constant need for even faster business?? and a market that seems to get more volatile every day. And on top of that, there’s a new drive to make information infrastructure business oriented. This means changes and heavy investments for large enterprises.

SAS delivers solutions to some of the worlds largest and most competitive companies, but the arguments that make these major players go even further into BI, are the exact same arguments that will drive BI deeper into the smaller corporations as well.

Business Intelligence based on expensive data warehouses and major upgrades is out of reach for many successful companies of all sizes, but LEAN BI will level the playing field and give small companies the same benefits as their largest competitor, instantly.

With leaner organizations, fewer data and fewer applications, most of the hassle of BI will disappear and today BI can be delivered in less than a day at a fraction of the cost.

LEAN BI works with your live data, eliminating the need to copy data from your existing systems into data warehouses or data marts before you can use them in your BI-system. Since a lot of companies are in fact using similar systems there is a broad range of experience in the market place and this allows LEAN BI systems to be implemented extremely fast, even when tailoring data models to existing data structures.

The bottom line is that the advantage that larger companies had before with extensive BI, may now turn into a disadvantage, since smaller and leaner competitors can now implement the same capabilities simpler, faster and much cheaper.

All this will slow down the largest enterprises while the SMB-market will pick up the best of classical BI in faster, cheaper and trustworthy LEAN BI applications.

Technology is the tool, people are the key and results are what matters

Microsoft is here at IM2008 as well, driving the message home that technology is not the solution in it self. Actually, technology is the barrier, simply because it is too difficult to work with technology, it is usually fragmented and almost always inflexible and when it is deployed departmentally, the business never gets the larger benefit of a complete view of the business.

Online tools are prevalent in the worlds most successful enterprises with almost 60 percent of managers in World Class enterprises, while less than 40 percent of more average “peer-to-peer” companies can access tools immediately where ever they are. This analysis was made by Hacknet.

As Platon, Microsoft wants to focus on the people in the processes. To do this, solutions needs to be focused on the results and the way to these results. Data is still important, technology is important, but it’s how people leverage data and technology that sets companies apart.

While Microsoft focuses on large enterprises Acinta uses Microsoft technology to deliver the results speedy, in real time and without the usual heavy investments in data warehouse and hardware upgrades. Acinta exploits SQL Server to deliver swift and on-time BI to companies with millions of rows of data at a fraction of the cost of other solutions.

Dashboards are vital in all solutions that handle large amounts of data. They are easy to understand and immediately usable. As Michael Borges mentioned in his keynote this morning, we need to measure how well we do, to make sure that we maintain focus.

Microsoft looks at BI in three different ways:

• Personal BI: Analyze your data and use it to work smarter. It is usable in small companies, but as soon as you need to share your data, you need other solutions.
• Team BI: Lets your team access data, the relevant dashboards, report data and maybe even run their own analysis
• Corporate BI: How does your company do in the market? Corporate BI paints the large picture and should ideally give you a direct reading of your companies pulse. But, special needs arise as well, because Corporate BI needs to reach the end-users in the organization. To do this and benefit from it, you need a thorough Information Strategy

Tying Microsoft’s products together makes it possible to do all this, scaling from the largest companies in the world down to SMB and even SOHO. The technological advances makes it possible today for smaller companies to get into BI without investing heavily in hardware and network upgrades – what we call Lean BI.

Lean BI is faster, simpler and better. Faster because LEAN BI accesses your data directly in the system where they belong, for instance in Microsoft Dynamics. It’s simpler because LEAN BI contains ready to use data models that will get you started doing BI within hours. And it’s better because there are fewer possibilities of errors in the simpler architecture.

With Microsoft and Acinta, you get a BI-solution in as little as half a day at a fraction of the cost of data warehouse BI. If you already have MS SQL-server and Microsoft Dynamics, you just need Acinta to get into lean BI

Michael Borges Kicks off IM2008.

Today and tomorrow we are visiting Platons IM2008 which is the largest Information Management (IM) in the Nordics. There are loads of very interesting speakers and some exciting keynotes ahead.

IM2008 started with a blast from the past and a short video of Borges fighting his way from the office to Scandic Hotel in the beautiful sunny Copenhagen.

Information strategy is the issue and more than 50 experts from Nordic businesses will cover their perspective on managing the flow of information and the development of the business.

The basic message of Michael Borges’ keynote speech was to stop and think. BI is developing extremely fast and today we need to think more holistic about our business. This goes for IM as well. We don’t need more isles of data and fragmented strategies will not be able to transform the company to a real information driven entity.

And the way to do it is to focus on the information strategy and make it a continuum: No surprises, no abrupt changes, but at a steady development of the company’s information and the use thereof.

Michael summarized the current issues in a short list of the 7 deadly sins within IM:

Seven Deadly sins of the Information strategy continuum

Sin #1. Wait for the silver bullet
Waiting for the final solution that will suddenly appear out of nowhere – IT WILL NOT HAPPEN. The need is there now and the challenge will only increase with time.
Nobody will provide a ”killer-app” that will fix all you problems just like that.

Sin # 2. Bite off more than you can chew
Focus ! But remember there are synergies that can be harvested through BI. And about 80 percent of data in any company is unstructured

Sin # 3. Choose a technology focus
Strategy is NOT choosing between Microsoft or SAS, and still 9 out of 10 think this choice is strategy. But it’s important to involve the business, and it may seem like a hassle, but this way we open up for the vast knowledge inherent to the company. But, this too have challenges because the existing organization does not work with the information strategy. Based on that companies can continue to establish the information strategy that comprises policies about how the company wants things to work.

Sin # 4. Allow a process vacuum
You need a transition strategy to get from where you are to where you want to be; it’s clearly not enough to define your goals – you need to think about how you get there. BI never ends; data grows and changes and we need to adapt our business and BI-systems accordingly.

Sin # 5. Ignore execution
“Vision without execution is day dreaming” as bill gates once said. You need to DO, thinking and wondering is clearly not enough. We need strategy yes, but we need to act on it. TIP: If you measure it, it will happen. This is very basic but if you don’t measure your progress, how will you know how to go forward: you don’t even know where you are. Build the program, govern the program, review the program, modify and then start over

Sin # 6. Make nobody accountable
You need someone to take charge of this, because your company needs the focus and this is NOT easy. Also, your company probably sports loads of different opinions on what is good and not so good and there will be wildly differing ideas on the right way for this to work. Make one person accountable – that is the way to push the company forward. And let formal power follow the accountability

Sin # 7. Make information the “be all – end all”
Information is never enough in it self; to get the value of information you need to process it and use it where its useful. And even tough data is extremely important, other parts ot the organization might not even think about the data. You need to be able to understand how the information is being used and what the people with the information prioritizes.

Have you committed a sin? Mr Borges invited anyone who had committed a sin to come to him and make a confession – under a wow of silence naturally.

/Nikolaj Henrichsen, Acinta.dk