SPSS and IBM’s Cognos group recently made an announcement of a partnership to integrate their products. I don’t have any more details than the press release but take this announcement as an indication that IBM/Cognos reached the logical conclusion that Predictive Analytics is distinctly and uniquely different from Business Intelligence/Performance Management and that customers want/need [...]

I saw a post with the title “Has Business Intelligence Outlived its Usefulness?” on Colin White’s blog and my first reaction was one of shock. On reading it, however, I see that Colin is taking aim not at BI in general but at the use of the phrase - a narrower and easier target!
I do [...]

Had a briefing today from the folks at LucidEra about their new product releases (press releases here and here). I met them through their blog and I think this whole area of AaaS (Analytics as a Service, though that’s not the best acronym) is an interesting one. After all, if you think improving operational decisions [...]

This morning I watched and listen to two old friends of mine - Wayne Eckerson of TDWI and Dan Graham of Teradata as they gave a webinar on “Approaches to operational BI” (PDF of slides, Webinar Recording). Wayne and Dan did a nice tag team discussing the principles involved and giving some Teradata-specific examples.
Wayne [...]

Thanks to my friends at IDC I got to attend an IDC Breakfast on their predictions for 2008. First up was Henry Morris discussing general economic trends. He pointed out that economic indicators are mixed and that IT buyer confidence is low and IT spending very sensitive to GDP. In particular, Japan , NA and [...]

While the primary focus of applying EDM to customer service should not be cost containment or reduction, there is still a role for EDM in managing costs. For instance:

With 25% churn and complex IT systems, training costs are a huge problem for call centers.
By automating decisions EDM can reduce the complexity and thus cost of [...]

Mike Kavitz asked this question - Why are you still generating reports? - on his blog today and it made me think. Why ARE you still generating reports? Not just in the way Mike means the question (why is IT generating reports instead of empowering users with information). I mean this in a broader way [...]

Ron Shevlin had a great post today - Four BS BI Trends (And One Good One) - in which he took exception to some BI trends reported in CIO Magazine (Five Key Business Intelligence Trends You Need to Know
). Like Ron I have some comments about these trends.

Trend No. 1: There’s so much data, but [...]

Mike Kavis, a blogger on ITToolbox and Chief Architect, sent me an interesting question about enterprise metadata
He says “My company has huge amounts of historical data. We load 500M new rows a day and keep data for 116 weeks. I am trying to move this company away from being report writers to being [...]

One of my favorite BI bloggers, Cyril Brookes, had an interesting post today - What Does Web 2.0 Really Mean for BI’s Future?. He starts by pointing out that “Successful BI enables the executives and professionals to make better decisions” to which I would add that successful enterprise decision management enables the systems in an [...]