Securing quick wins and rapid ROI from your Business Intelligence and Performance Management Initiatives. Join over 100 expert practitioners from across the UK. Discover how you and or your colleagues will achieve increased productivity and drive your business forward.

The Obis Omni team is delighted to announce the confirmed date for the 6th Annual Obis Omni Forum 2010. We would like to invite you to join expert practitioners from across the UK and Jaspersoft - our first sponsor to sign up for the event!

Graham Spicer, CEO of SolStonePlus shares his thoughts on why organisations must implement new performance management systems and establish capable business intelligence (BI) programmes to ensure financial stability in the current economic climate. Graham offers his view on how organisations can emerge from today's economic challenges in a more favourable and competitive position. Graham also discusses how BI solutions can provide that all-important competitive edge and deliver an immediate return.

Data without any context isn’t all that useful. Unfortunately, most of the data that we do collect in the enterprise has little to no context.
To compensate for this, IT organizations have been investing billions, maybe even trillions, of dollars in data warehouses and business intelligence applications. We are collecting more data than ever, which in turn is in straining not only our ability to make sense of that information, but also our storage budgets. What if we took an entirely different approach to collecting data in the first place that was inherently more efficient in terms of assigning context to information? That’s the strategic goal of a G2 project that Jeff Jonas, IBM distinguished engineer and chief scientist for Entity Analytics, is working on.

IBM has announced a cloud-basedbusiness analytics service to challenge more established cloud computing players such as Amazon, Google and Microsoft.

The Audit Commission’s report ‘Is there something I should know?’ provides access to excellent research, advice and tools designed to help Local Government bodies make the most of their information assets to transform performance.

Use it up. Wear it out. Make it do. Or do without." That adage from the Great Depression is making a comeback these days among corporations that are digging deep to maintain profitability using business tools they already have in-house.

Business intelligence refers to skills, applications, practices, and technologies used to help a business better understand its nature. This provides views of business operations, not just current and predictive, but also historical. The bottom line is, business intelligence aims to support better decision making.
 

BI applications are expected to have the highest impact on organizations such as manufacturing firms over the next two to five years, according to the Aberdeen Group's 2009 State of the Market: Mid-Year Insights Report.

Business intelligence solutions are historically complex, expensive and take months or years to install. However QlikView software, developed by QlikTech, costs around a third of other systems and can be up and running in days.

There is a strong link here to my Vision vs Pragmatism article. In this I argued that Vision and Pragmatism are both essential for the success of any project, be that related to change, to IT, and certainly when using IT to drive change. Unsurprisingly, similar comments apply to whether a holistic or incremental approach to BI is the superior route. However, in this case, I will come down more firmly on the side of one of the options

Of course failure can also be instructive; as the saying goes “we learn more from our mistakes than from our successes.” Given this, and indeed the Internet’s obsession with “x reasons why y fails”, I have also written on the subject of how Business Intelligence projects can go wrong a few times.