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I am often asked to define Business Intelligence to others. What can make this challenging is the audience's perception of what BI is or is not.

People ask me to clarify if BI is:

• Data Warehousing
• Master Data Management
• BPM (Business Performance Management / Monitoring
• Reports
• Dashboards / Scorecards
• Data Quality
• Cubes
• Alerts (part of BPM)

The truth is that it is all of the above. Let's use a different analogy.

Think of a cake. What is a cake? ...

You do NOT have to be the superstar every time !

I recently sat through a series of 'The Office' starring Steve Carell and laughed till my sides hurt from the management bumblings of Michael Scott, the self-obsessed, egomaniac character that Steve plays. In show after show, you can't help thinking 'what a jerk! I hope I never report to someone like him!'. Although it is littered with typical American slapstick humour (my opinion), it nonetheless invokes a feeling of sympathy from me ...

I've often come across the situation where some user has access to a star schema and decides that they want to run a query (let's say product sales by region for the last quarter, compared with the same period a year before. Data volumes make a huge difference here.

So the query in its simplistic form (for current selected period) might look something like this:
select p.Desc as Product, R.name as RegionName, sum(T1.Amt) as TurnoverAmount
from
FactSales T1 ...

I've seen a lot of informative BI systems, where graphs, reports and charts just keep appearing.

However, if organizations are to see a tangible benefit to BI, it needs to prompt us (the consumers of BI) into action, otherwise it is very much like looking at your temperature gauge in your car that is flashing red telling you it is overheating (imploring you to take action) and you not doing anything about it. Without some action, it's just noise and does nothing to prevent trouble, ...

This is going to be a lengthy post, so go grab a cup of coffee or tea and take this mini-journey with me. We'll discuss the reasons why so many Business intelligence deployments are flawed and why a lot of BI projects are eventually abandoned or taken up very slowly.

Lack of upfront planning

A common assumption in BI projects is that "If we build it, they will come".

Inconsistent implementations, lack of executive sponsorship, ...

The answer to this question might be given away in the form of other questions, like:

• How many top-class athletes do you see hanging out at greasy fast-food joints?
• How important is diet to an Olympic athlete?
• How important are good tyres (ok, tires for the US audience, there!) to racing car performance?

The GIGO (Garbage In --> Garbage Out) principle most certainly applies when it comes to data quality. For BI to be pervasive in the organization, the organization must firstly trust ...

Today's topic will be a hybrid of technical and business talk.

Most of us should by now be familiar with the differences between a pure OLTP relational design and a Star Schema design. If not, a brief discussion here on Star Schemas. We're not going to address MDM (Master Data Management) issues in this thread. One typical MDM issue is to ensure that Profit and Customer and Sale (all business terms) mean the same thing in all environments and all star schemas. As stated, we're not discussing ...

I was working with one of my customers recently, for whom I configured a server in late 2009. The server purchased was an Acer with 2X Xeon quad-core CPU's, 12 GB of 1.3GHz DDR3 ram. Sadly, the server was only able to fit a pair of 2.5" drives, so the manufacturers put in a pair of 5400 rpm laptop drives (bargain!). I think my forehead still has a bruise from the headslap accompanied by 'DUH!' I gave myself when I found this out. This was like fitting retread tyres to a Ferrari and wondering ...

In this day and age (2010), I find it shocking to run into organizations where IT still has a draconian condescending attitude towards business. There are still a handful of organizations where the lords of IT still dictate how and what ought to be done? You have got to be kidding me?! Take a look around, everywhere is corporate collapse, it is at this time in particular when IT needs to be as flexible as an Olympic gymnast to bend over backwards to give the business what they need.

...

Pictures paint 1,000 words. People have been created as visual beings, so the more one can express on pictures the better. One can thus conclude (almost) that the more dimensions one can put into a chart, the more useful it will be. Dead wrong! Let's explore why?!

3D charts create so much more confusion and noise than having things expressed in 2 D. Take a look at some of these 3D charts, some of which look pretty slick and cool. However if the purpose of information is to inform, then ...

TCO: Total Cost of Ownership

There is a business equation that states: Value = benefit / cost.

As at the time of this post creation, the world is reeling from a financial crisis brought about mostly by mismanagement or not considering that at some stage, the piper needs to be paid. For history, here is the full story. Basically, the Pied Piper was hired by the mayor of Hamlin in Germany in 1284, to rid the town of a rat infestation. He did this by very unconventional ...

The promise of BI in today’s business world sounds exciting, fascinating and shows potential rapid ROI, yet uptake is slow because most organizations do not want yet another application for their end users to log into, yet another application where the data does not match their existing applications’ data and where IT resources are going to be employed to hunt down the discrepancies between systems. So how does BI provide an immediate and tangible return?

In the usual world, where companies ...