Two of Gartner’s smartest analysts - Kurt Schlegel and Gareth Herschel (shameless plug) - just published an excellent little paper called “Business Intelligence and Decision Making“. This paper was one of Gartner’s Strategic Planning Assumptions and the (free) summary says:
A subset of organizations that seek a competitive advantage will evolve the primary role of their [...]

Well today was Earth Day - you knew that, I hope. I knew because last week I was at John Muir’s house with a wonderful group of 4th/5th graders doing a simulation of his period. So, in the spirit of Earth Day, how are Enterprise Decision Management and Smart (enough) Systems “green”?

If your marketing systems [...]

Howard Dresner, now independent but previously of Gartner and Hyperion and one of the leading voices in the Business Intelligence and Performance Management space listed Some good sources and included our book and our blogs (this one and Neil’s on Intelligent Enterprise). Thanks Howard.

This review in destinationCRM of iRobot’s automated customer service system - in which the system was given a 2008 Elite award - reminded me of an experience with a different iRobot system. iRobot’s return system is less award-worthy. Let me take you back a few months…
At Christmas I took advantage of an iRobot offer to [...]

I was checking out Doug Henschen’s interview of Kurt Schlegel - Gartner BI analyst - and page 2 was particularly excellent. Kurt clearly understands the value of being decision-centric and the need for BI to broaden to include rules and predictive analytics. And he plugged the book too, which is always appreciated. It’s a pity [...]

Mike Kavitz had a great post on his blog today Want SOA Success? Try this Recipe. I really liked the article, not least because it was clearly based on hard-won experience on Mike’s part. Reading it I saw how similar an Enterprise Decision Management or EDM success recipe would be.

Research the living daylights out [...]

I am often asked the question in the title - what is a smart (enough) system? Here’s the list we use when we talk about it:

Operational
While one can make systems of all kinds “smarter” we are talking about making operational, transactional, high-volume, typically customer facing applications smart enough to be useful.
Real-Time
As a result we talk [...]

First session today is Jayne Dutra of NASA on Re-Thinking Search in a Web 2.0 World. Jayne started by going over some of the basics, talking about web 1.0 with portals/websites/search moving to Web 2.0 with blogs, wikis, RSS, social networking and community portals. She used a Mills Davis slide that talked about web 3.0 [...]

This was my session. You can get a PDF of my slides or View them on SlideShare.
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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 [...]