We live in an app world

There is no denying that we live in a world where we can get an app for almost anything, pizza delivery, movie times and even medical advice. These apps are great because we can remain relatively anonymous as we use them and if we get tired of them, we can delete them and if we lose our phones, we can re-download them. They almost never contain our private information and we feel safe using them on public wi-fi systems and on mobile networks. But what would happen if mobile applications started containing personal or privileged information? Would be be so ready to use them?

Anything you can do, I can do too

You can do almost everything on a mobile device, so the natural progression of business intelligence was mobile business intelligence. The wave of 2011 has been getting business applications, including business intelligence on to mobile devices such as iPads. These devices are great because they are pretty powerful and allow users to do cool things without being tied to their computers. So naturally, you might consider getting a mobile BI app, to extend your current in-house BI system.

But I would be cautious about doing that. Unlike desktop computers which have a tendency to be hard-to-steal or lose, mobile phones are lost at an alarming rate, 113 phones are lost every minute in the US alone. Imagine what would happen if one of those mobiles had an application on it with your firms data held in your mobile BI application’s cache? How much would your data be worth?

Browser Based BI

Don’t get me wrong, I am all for Mobile BI. I think it will revolutionize the way individuals, who are not always at their desks, like CEOs, Sales, Hospitality and Healthcare employees work. What I do think is there has to be a way to deal with these security issues. And interesting idea coming out of a software company called DSPanel is the idea of browser based mobile BI. What this means is all BI is accessible through the devices browser, by sending links to the dashboard, scorecard, or report. These items are then consumed and manipulated with the same functionality as a native app. If a mobile device is lost or stolen, the created mobile dashboard is simply deactivated by the creator and the link changed so it can still be accessed by users. This means business data remains secure and users get to enjoy the freedom mobile devices give them.

Mobile Computing

The hot topic in computing right now is mobile computing. The race is on to get everything you can do on your computer on your mobile device. Everything can be brought to a mobile device, or so we are meant to believe. The SAP and Sybase merger announced last week as all about the mobile functionality and bringing data to users wherever they are. While there are multiple unanswered questions in this merger that other bloggers have dealt with, no one seems to be addressing the key that opens the lock box of a mobile data user’s happiness, quick communication. The method of delivery, the application, the functionality, has to be so smooth that my finger can move the information around and have so few chains attached to it that my mobile browser and more importantly any mobile connection has to be able to handle it.

A Certain Fondness for SAP

Now I have fond memories of trying to dig out relevant bits of information using SAP. At the best of times I was able to take multiple coffee breaks waiting for my final results. The process was complicated, long and arduous at the best of times. While I enjoyed the time getting a coffee, I’m not sure how I feel about starting into my mobile phone waiting for the information I need to appear. Also, what happens if I get a call, the connection will cut out and then will I have to start the query all over again?

I don’t know how a SAP business solution will look on a mobile device. The merger just happened, and after some of the comments I have heard from SAP executives, I wonder if anyone at SAP really knows. But what I know is that in order for me to want to use any analytics software on a mobile device the software had better ensure that what is happening at the backend of the system doesn’t interfere with what’s happening on the front end. The time to value on a mobile device has to be almost instantaneous. If I have to wait around, staring into my mobile phone like I have had to do on my computer, you better believe I won’t bother.

Gathering and processing data needs to not only be fast but it has to be easy. The number of steps from query to answer should be minimal. If I need to access multiple systems and make cross dimensional queries from a mobile, the platform needs to also be able to do that simply and easily.

Mobile BI can work

But that’s not to say I haven’t seen some great BI applications on a mobile device. Performance Canvas mobile BI server for instance offers users the ability to view dashboards, mashboards and scorecards from any web enabled mobile device. I tried their free online demo and I surprised with how quickly I was able to manipulate data in dashboard. Mobile BI does exist and it can be quick and easy, so I do have hope.

We know business users need to access information on-the-go, its what made Blackberry so popular. Is the SAP/Sybase merger going to make this happen? We are all waiting in anticipation to see.

For years this was how it went, IT would declare they needed something new (a piece of expensive hardware or software) and companies would blindly follow or fear being left behind.  Today, the IT officer isn’t special anymore. Today, IT within companies is seen like a Greek God, interesting historically but not relevant for bringing lasting change to the business.  Today, IT is supposed to do more with less. CFO’s demand IT cuts before any other department. IT implementation is a thing of the past; instead IT manages the current systems and adds new employees to the systems. IT managers, instead of fighting for their place within the company, are accepting the role of being outdated relics of the IT Golden Age.

Can the IT department be relevant again?

In a world where technology is everywhere and everything is technology, how can an IT officer and the IT department become relevant again? At a recent seminar by Peter Hinssen, a group of CIOs were told to ask themselves this same question. The answer it appears is surprisingly simple. IT needs to become risk takers again. When the world-wide-web was first becoming popular, IT implementers were the pioneers, guiding companies into the new world through our knowledge and the sheer force of knowing that IT was the future. The IT gurus in the company knew the Internet was going to be huge and they were sure they could make it work for their companies. Today, IT needs to take risks again. IT managers need to look at a company through fresh eyes and guide businesses into the future.

The forgotten bottom line

How can this happen if IT budgets are all about keeping current systems in place? Again, the answer is like a big, duh! The IT department needs to start thinking like a business. Look at the marketing department in your company. They have a budget to keep things like the website up to date and the marketing papers current, however, their second remit is to find ways of creating value for the business. If they seek $10,000 for a social media campaign, you better believe they’ve done their homework on the ROI this is going to bring to the bottom line of the company. The same needs to happen within the IT department. How many projects have you recommended that are going to bring a ROI within a year? In fact, in the last 5 years, how many IT projects have you recommended that will bring value to the company and did not simply support existing databases?

The Crystal Ball of the 21st century

One way of making the IT department relevant again is to sit in on each department and see what they do on a daily basis. What does Marketing, Finance, Operations and HR do and how can you help them do their job more efficiently? One really important question to ask is where are they doing the bulk of their work? As Michael Singer wrote on his blog Internet Evolution “The mobile phone and the laptop have replaced the desktop PC and cubicle as the workspace of the new millennium. So the challenge for enterprises today is to ensure that the mobile workforce is not only connected, but pretty much psychically linked.” As IT Professionals, you should be the crystal ball of the company. Where is technology moving and how can you implement this technology to give your companies the competitive advantage? Looking at the management team, are the software solutions you’ve recommended helped facilitate open communication and collaboration? Have these solutions enabled managers to make better, real time decisions? Is there a way to facilitate this decision, helping increase productivity and contribute to the bottom line of a company? Microsoft Office Suite 2010 is trying to offer this solution. Also, Business Intelligence packages like Power Pivot embedded in Excel 2010 or to get your organization on the right trace, solution that embeds advanced, unified planning and reporting capabilities right into excel. Performance Canvas Planning, offers a solution that offers complete information synthesis between departments as well. There are simple solutions that can start making your IT department relevant but they do require putting your IT department back into the corridors with the rest of the workplace.  As Mark McDonald said, “the value of IT exists through time, so any measure of IT should be shown across time”, while, it may be the case that you are no longer feared as Gods but in the 21st century you can still be relevant as productive, innovating and entrepreneurial where your input contributes to the bottom line of the company and doesn’t just diminish it.

To learn more about Office 2010 and planning functionality, go to the DSPanel website.

We’ve been working for a while connecting and combining data coming from the semantic web with data from inside and outside the company firewalls which is a very exciting prospect. The W3C SPARQL query language is a great tool to query data off the web and combining it with other structured or semi-structured data inside the company. It’s easy to see that Google Squared is a way to create structured or semi-structured data out of unstructured data using Google search technologies. Combining these two makes perfect sense. Creating semantic web databases interactively using Squared and the enabling them to be accessed using SPARQL.

When we start to extract data from outside of company control it immediately raises multiple questions:

• Can the data be trusted? How to QA data from the internet? Risk management?
• In what way does it connect to internal data? Inferred joins?
• How does this relate to Data Warehousing as we know it?
• Should this be done by the IT department or Business?

All of these questions come together in one answer. It means several wise (hopefully) business persons have to put their heads together – what we call collaboration. Google Wave shows us the way forward for a federated collaboration user interface this creates exciting opportunities to resolve the above questions by more dynamically and directly handling the risks and complexities involved.

Seems complicated?

Let’s take it step by step again to understand how the different pieces fit together

• Use Google Squared to create datasets matching your query needs based on web data. Use a Wave to do this working together with your colleagues.
• Use SPARQL to query web datasets. Use a Wave to work with the risk and quality related issues of working with web data together with your colleagues insides and outside the company.
• Use Performance Canvas to interactively create objects for Business People to work with. Use a Wave to do this working together with your colleagues.
• Publish the resulting Canvas, Mashboard, Dashboard, Report, Analysis or whatever you would like to call it. Use Waves to collaborate and get feedback to improve.

Why Google & SPARQL?

Google is innovative right now. Have a look at other technologies as well. Whether it will be Squared and Wave that will win this game remains to be seen. SPARQL is a W3C query language which seems to be the current emerging standard. No matter what product will prevail in the end all three are very interesting technologies showing us the way into a world where BI is less constrained by slow-moving Data Warehouses and more inheriting the multi faceted agility and do-it-yourself spirit brought by the web.

Disclaimer

After reading what I just wrote I think a disclaimer is in place. This is not a product. What is descibed above may never work for real. Google Squared is not ready for prime time. Google Wave is not here yet. SPARQL however is supported today in commercial products like Performance Canvas.

Read More

• Chris Webb – is thinking outside the Cube

Why is Google Wave important to Business Intelligence?

Business Intelligence, Planning, Analytics and Reporting have all been sold as standalone applications only loosely integrated with the context of Business where the should be put to use. Defining and setting up the BI environment used to be the property of technically skilled BI professionals working off-line from the Business. The Canvas changed this, putting Business People in charge but still we’ve desperately missed the context of collaboration that would integrate BI to the rest of the world seamlessly.

Google Wave changes this. Just imagine…

• Creating your business gems and mashboards in a Wave working with your colleagues. The old static BI will be forever gone and replaced with the dynamics of online collaboration.
• Typing in a one-to-one or group conversation and while a robot constantly analyzes your discussion and searches the Business Intelligence both inside and outside the organization for relevant information annotating your discussion with gems of information, graphs and table easily available in the collaboration context.
• Working with a planning assignment integrated in its business document. The numerical part of the planning automatically synchronized with the financial planning system, the associated report collaboratively authored and comments written and answered – all in the same context.
• Collaboration and comments seamless between the published mashboard and the collaboration/ communication context editing of the Wave. BI publishing will no longer be a waterfall process but change to the agile round-trip authoring where we all want it to be. The death of Business Intelligence is here and will free us from the burdens of the old data-warehousing publishing methodologies.

Mashboards, Mashups and Waves

Products like Performance Canvas today deliver Mashboard functionality to be able to embed all kinds of content into what used to be a simple BI dashboard or scorecard. The reverse is true as well – by using BI Wiki technology non-programmers can create mashed applications in different contexts. Waves will be canvases for mashboards, dashboards and scorecards with unprecedented collboration and integrated mashup cababilities. Published Mashboards, Dashboards and Scorecards  will be Wave-driven to unleash the energy, creativity and power all to often buried in organizations.

Business Intelligence will be faster and more fun – Stay with us to experience it!

Some more reading:

• Michael Dortch - Google Wave: The Future of Online Collaboration and Business Intelligence
• DBMS2 - Reinventing business intelligence
• Richi Jennings – Google Wave: who, what, where, why, when?
• Press Release – Performance Canvas adds Business Intelligence to Google Wave
• Desh – “…maybe this could serve as the centerpiece of a collaborative and real time Business Intelligence system of the future…”
• Chris Webb – Google Wave, Google Squared and Thinking Outside the Cube

IMPORTANT: All of the below mentioned information is so far unconfirmed by Microsoft Now Confirmed by Microsoft – Official Blog 1, Blog 2 and Video

Microsoft will announce an update to its Microsoft Business Intelligence roadmap. Microsoft’s continued strategy is to deliver BI through Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) and Excel – and of course based on Microsoft SQL Server BI.

• Microsoft states that based on customer feedback they are moving Monitoring and Analysis from Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server into Office SharePoint Server Enterprise. In mid 2009 a PerformancePoint Server 2007 service pack 3 will be released. After that point no further investment in the standalone versions of PerformancePoint Server is to be expected. Microsoft will of course continue to support the product. This effectively means the end of the Planning piece.
• PerformancePoint Server 2007 will disappear from Microsoft price list as of April 1, 2009. Monitoring and analytics capabilities will be included in the next release of SharePoint Server and will be available to SharePoint Enterprise CAL customers. 
• PerformancePoint Server will be available only to SharePoint Server 2007 Enterprise CAL customers with Software Assurance only. 
• Core ProClarity capabilities will migrate to SharePoint and Excel over the coming releases

UPDATE: Read more on this in the Chris Webb blog about his further thoughts on the death of PPS Planning. And from a SharePoint perspective this is of course good news! (some more SharePoint perspectives)

Where will Microsoft head with BI now?

This news leaves a lot of unanswered questions

• Will the BI focus of the SharePoint team be sufficient for Microsoft to be a major player on the BI applications market?

• Will current and future customers trust the Microsoft BI strategy to be a core business asset?

• Will partners that have made huge investments in PerformancePoint be able to transition these into the new offerings?

• Will there ever be another Microsoft BI conference?

• Or as Chris Webb says “Perhaps the future is Gemini? Who knows…”

In these exciting times one thing remains true. The SQL Server team continues to deliver the greatest Microsoft BI product around. Which is a comfort to all of us in the Microsoft partner community!

Business Intelligence today is not what it should be. We want to change that. And we say “BI is dead, long live BI”. The current approach isn’t working, the model is broken and if we want to really leverage the value of information then things need to change. And they need to really change. Feel free to follow us on this strange and wonderful journey, who knows – you might even enjoy it.