03.21.08
Posted in Business Intelligence (BI), Data Management, Gartner at 11:43 am by irusgroup
To cope with a tightening economic environment, businesses should prepare now for cutting IT costs, and the data management discipline is one area that affords numerous opportunities for reducing and controlling costs, according to Gartner, Inc.
“When aiming to optimize costs in data management and integration initiatives, it is critical to know what steps to take and where significant savings can be realized while maintaining success in these projects,” said Ted Friedman, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. “In most cases, the cost of implementing the steps will be far outweighed by the savings that can be realized.”
Gartner identified nine key areas in which CIOs can significantly reduce costs during 2008 as they continue to support data management and integration-related initiatives:
- Perform Operational Database
- Optimize Data Integration Tools Licensing
- Leverage Established Data Structures and Data Integration Process
- Perform Data Mart Consolidation
- Enforce Standards to Foster Reuse and Agility
- Defer Replacement of Custom-Coded Architectures
- Explore Open Source Licensing
- Renegotiate Services Contracts
- Defer Low-Priority/Limited Benefit Projects
Gartner analysts will further discuss data management and integration issues at the Gartner Business Intelligence Summit being held April 1-3 at the Hyatt Regency Chicago.
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03.13.08
Posted in Business Intelligence (BI) at 1:04 pm by irusgroup
The Irus Group has implemented Oracle business intelligence technology at Federal Government agencies including the Navy, Army, Air Force and Peace Corps. Oracle has a nice microsite inside Federal Computer Week. Articles include Oracle Governance, Risk and Compliance Management Suite for Public Administrations: The Path to Strengthening Citizen Confidence, Oracle Solutions for Public Sector, and Drowning in Data: Find the Answers with Enterprise Business Intelligence for the Public Sector. Great articles to get a sense of what Oracle is doing today for the Government in the area of business intelligence.
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03.05.08
Posted in Business Intelligence (BI), Events at 1:22 pm by irusgroup
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March 30 – April 1, 2008
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This is always an interesting event.
The MDM Institute, DM Review and BI Review are pleased to present the Spring MDM Summit, March 30 – April 1, 2008 at the Hilton San Francisco in San Francisco, California (formerly the CDI-MDM Summit). Hear the latest topics from the leading analyst authorities, seasoned veterans, and visionary vendors in the hot topics of CDI, MDM and data governance. New features for Spring 2008 include:
• Extended Concurrent Session Times (1 hour minimum)
• New PIM Data Hub Track
• Even More Real-Life Case Studies & Networking Opportunities
• MDM Professional Compensation Survey Findings
• … And much more!
Click here to register. |
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03.04.08
Posted in Business Intelligence (BI) at 2:48 pm by irusgroup
Much of the innovation in the business intelligence platform market will come from emerging technologies like visualization, in-memory analytics, search, software as a service and service-oriented architecture/Web 2.0. Click here to download Gartner Research Director Kurt Schlegel’s research note “Emerging Technologies Could Prove Disruptive to the Business Intelligence Platform Market.” Schlegel will be one of the analysts on hand at the upcoming Gartner Business Intelligence Summit, April 1-3 in Chicago, IL.
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Posted in Business Intelligence (BI) at 11:45 am by irusgroup
We’ve done business intelligence and ERP projects in the past around IBM systems. An article published today by IBM’s Sherman Hammack in DM Review hits nicely on our views of how many organizations stand to benefit from some degree of enterprise integration at the business process, application and data levels. However, there are conflicts between the inherent goals of data warehouses and service-oriented architectures that need to be addressed to gain true business intelligence from the systems.
Hammack discusses three methods that have been proposed by practitioners for reconciling SOA with BI: service contracts for BI, service-oriented business intelligence (SoBI), and event-driven architecture (EDA).
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02.05.08
Posted in Business Intelligence (BI) at 12:04 pm by irusgroup
Irus Group President and Thought Leader Vijay Suri will speak on Public Sector Business Intelligence Strategies at Oracle’s 2008 Collaborate User Conference. He’ll address the urgent need Government Agencies face in using their voluminous amounts of data to make better business decisions for citizens.
He’ll headline a breakout session on April 17 at 11am. COLLABORATE 08 is presented by the OAUG (Oracle Applications Users Group) and IOUG (Independent Oracle Users Group). The event is designed to help users of the full family of Oracle business applications and database technologies gain greater value from their Oracle investments. The title of Suri’s presentation is “Business Intelligence Strategies for Public Sector Markets.”
Suri is a frequent speaker and commentator on business intelligence, corporate performance management, and data warehousing topics. His presentation will help public sector leaders address planning and budgeting, BI, and EPM challenges by focusing on technical and business requirements for developing and implementing systems that help them make sense of the business of government. The benefits for those attending his presentation include:
- Will help public sector agencies implement more sound business intelligence processes.
- Demonstrate specific ways the Oracle BI tool set can help Federal agencies realize their missions.
- List the key questions to ask now to get a smart business intelligence process underway.
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Posted in Business Intelligence (BI) at 11:45 am by irusgroup
Oracle just posted a look awaited white paper on OBIEE Plus from a Technology perspective. The paper goes into great detail about the makeup of the components of OBIEE. What’s compelling about the white paper is how it ties all of Oracle’s new acquisitions together under the OBIEE umbrella, including all of the Hyperion products. We’ve done a lot of work with Hyperion and have a clear picture on Oracle’s vision for the solution.
OBIEE consists of several interdependent components, with the Oracle BI Server at its core. For the purpose of this whitepaper, Oracle refers to these components as OBIEE:
· Oracle BI Server — a highly scalable, highly efficient query and analysis server that integrates data via sophisticated query federation capabilities from multiple relational, unstructured, OLAP, and pre-packaged application sources, whether Oracle or non-Oracle.
· Oracle BI Answers — a powerful ad-hoc query and analysis tool that works against a logical view of information from multiple data sources in a pure Web environment.
· Oracle BI Interactive Dashboard — rich, interactive pure Web dashboards that display personalized information to help guide users in effective decision making.
· Oracle BI Publisher — a highly scalable reporting engine capable of generating reports from multiple data sources in multiple formats via multiple delivery channels.
· Oracle BI Briefing Books — reports that capture a series of snapshots of an Oracle BI Dashboard or report allowing the information to be viewed offline presentation style.
· Oracle BI Disconnected Analytics — a packaged solution to offer Answers and Dashboards to mobile professionals on computers disconnected from the network.
· Oracle BI Office Plug-In — automatically synchronizes information from Answers to Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.
· Oracle BI Delivers — an alerting engine to capture and distribute notifications via multiple channels in response to predefined business events to speed decision making.
The specialty BI reporting components acquired from Hyperion include a widely deployed set of Business Intelligence tools which offer significant complementary functionality to OBIEE. These areas include strong integration with multidimensional data sources such as Essbase, a report centric approach to query and reporting, as well as robust native access to SAP data. For the purposes of this white paper, we will refer to these as the “Plus” components:
· Hyperion Financial Reporting — a reporting solution for multidimensional data (OLAP) that generates highly formatted, GAAP compliant, book quality financial and management reports and supports the emerging XBRL standard.
· Hyperion Web Analysis — a context driven, thin client reporting and analysis tool that enables the graphical interaction, presentation and reporting of multi-dimensional (OLAP) data.
· Hyperion Interactive Reporting — a “report centric” query and reporting tool that transforms data from heterogeneous sources into meaningful queries, dashboards and reports via connection through the Oracle BI Server or direct connection to underlying databases as needed.
· Hyperion SQR — a high performance engine and development language for high volume, pixel perfect report creation, spanning multiple enterprise data sources including SAP R/3 and SAP Business Information Warehouse.
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01.21.08
Posted in Business Intelligence (BI) at 11:20 am by irusgroup
A study published in December 2007 by Centage and the Institute of Management & Administration (IOMA) said that despite frustrations with spreadsheets, they remain the most common tool for budgeting and forecasting, used by 85 percent of Small to Mid-Sized Businesses (SMB) and 76 percent of Small to Mid-Sized Enterprises (SME), frequently in combination with an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system.
We can relate to this. Irus has been implementing budgeting and planning solutions for the past decade for companies and government agencies that were stuck in “Excel Hell.”
Budgeting trends identified by the survey include:
- Most finance executives are not totally confident in the accuracy of their budgets.
- The overall trend is to link compensation and goal achievement, seen at 47 percent of SMBs and 65 percent of SMEs. The trend is most prevalent at larger companies (82 percent at those with revenue of $500 million and above).
- The larger the company, the more compensation is put in this at-risk category: under 10 percent to 20 percent for SMBs, 10-20 percent for SMEs, and 20 percent or more for larger companies.
- Executives at more than 40 percent of the SMBs/SMEs view their budgets as extremely or very important cash flow management tools, and about 40 percent rate them as somewhat important.
- The most common Key Performance Indicators (KPI) are Net Income/Loss, Gross Profit, Operating Expenses as a Percentage of Sales, and EBIT.
The second most common “pain point” cited was working with spreadsheets or other technology-related issues. Four out of five of these replies expressed frustration specifically with budgeting in Excel spreadsheets, including: the manual and time-consuming process, frequency of errors, difficulties generating reports and rolling up numbers, and the inability to drill down into the numbers or create what-if scenarios.
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01.04.08
Posted in Business Intelligence (BI), Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Enterprise/Corporate Performance Management (EPM/CPM), Oracle OBIEE at 3:03 pm by irusgroup
The Public Broadcasting System (PBS) had been using Microsoft Excel as its primary budgeting and planning tool. As the organization grew, the limitations of using Excel as an enterprise level budgeting and planning tool became painfully obvious, for all of the usual reasons and then some.
The Irus Group helped PBS understand the benefits and opportunities presented by moving to Oracle EPB (Enterprise Planning and Budgeting). When Oracle introduced EPB, Irus Group was one of only a dozen firms on the planet that were trained to design, develop, implement, and manage EPB. This support was critical to PBS as it was moving to an enterprise system for the first time. The enterprise nature of EPB would open up many financial management opportunities for PBS such as better reporting, easier consolidations, and more effective process management. Since this was such a high-risk endeavor for PBS and since only a handful of consulting firms were even familiar with EPB, PBS needed the Irus Group’s expertise in budgeting and planning and business intelligence to ensure that such a high-risk development effort went flawlessly.
Check out more in this case study.
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12.15.07
Posted in Business Intelligence (BI) at 2:57 pm by irusgroup
We’ve planned, designed, developed and implemented many business intelligence projects over the years. Frequently, our clients ask us to distinguish between scorecards and dashboards. We found a good distinction in a white paper called Scorecards and Dashboards: Choosing the Right Solution by Panarama Software.
“Both dashboards and scorecards are capable of summarizing key information that would normally be scattered throughout numerous pages of reports. Both of these technologies address some aspect of business performance. Dashboards and scorecards cannot, however, be used interchangeably, as each delivers an exclusive set of capabilities.
Users employ dashboards to measure and understand what is happening in the business right now within a context that is relevant to them. To help build the context, these information workers can define and manipulate information pulled from a variety of sources into a single visual representation of performance trends. Dashboards are often used to alert workers to exceptional and unexpected performance results, and users can analyze business drivers and trends – though not causality – from the dashboard application. Given their relatively low barrier to entry in terms of both price and ease of deployment, dashboards are more readily adopted than scorecards.
Scorecards, on the other hand, are used to see beyond what is happening throughout the organization into the cause-and-effect relationships between performance and strategy to help define what must happen next. Scorecard applications also enable an organization’s strategists to work together in defining and managing business strategy and action, and then communicate strategy and goals across the enterprise. Scorecards are a greater undertaking than dashboard solutions, and not only because they are often more expensive to acquire and implement. The deployment of a scorecard solution requires a deeper understanding of the organization’s needs and KPIs from the beginning to achieve the full business benefits. For organizations already using dashboards, most scorecard solutions are not an easy addition to these existing deployments due to lack of integration. As a result, the implementation of scorecards represents a completely new project rather than a growth strategy that ultimately yields a comprehensive performance management solution.”
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