Deployment of New Website

I am looking for feedback or content suggestions for my new website my new website. It is currently in its infancy stage. I could sure use some help as to building this website in such a fashion in that it would become useful to folks like yourselves. Please go to the “Contact Us” section of the website and input anything from feedback, to content suggestions, to web features and really anything that you believe we could all leverage in the world of business intelligence.

www.businessintelligenceonline.org

A Personal Story of Fusing Career Paths

So I have decided to go back for a third Masters degree. Since my company pays for it, I am thinking why not? The degree is 100% online and is called “Master of Science in Interactive Communications and Media” (ICM for short). I am currently progressing steadily in my career as a business intelligence manager, however adding to one’s repertoire can never hurt. What’s interesting about this new degree are some of the courses that have to be taken including:

• Intro to the Study of Interactive Communications
• Visual Aesthetics
• Media Imaging and Sound Design
• Game Development and Game Theory
• Writing for Interactive Media
• Interactive Development
• Information Animation
• Media Law

I guess what I am getting at is questioning whether or not I am supplementing a business intelligence career with this type of academics, or taking a new fork in the road. I realize that with these skills, that my career could potentially take a left turn someday. But can you think of any ways that these types of courses can be applied to current and specific business intelligence ideas and theories?

To view more about this program, please view the link below:
http://www.quinnipiac.edu/x4016.xml

Business Intelligence, Business Smart?

PUNE, INDIA: Mukund Deshpande, head - BI and Analytics Practice, Persistent Systems has spent eight years of action in BI that also covers heuristic driven algorithms, classification and prediction algorithms after PhD in Computer Science from the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, USA with a thesis on 'Data Mining Techniques for Sequences and Graphs'. He talks on a range of issues flanking BI today.

When it comes to day-to-day business, what role does or can BI play? How much information derived in BI is indeed actionable?

BI is important because the company wants to know about the customer, wants to analyse the competition, wants to study customer churn properly for corrective action, specially in context to today's scenario and the crowded marketplace wherein competition has become more fierce.

Churn identification, for instance, helps at the decision-making level directly for customer or campaign management. It's done by churning out reports, dashboards, predictive analysis etc from data warehouses.

How best can BI be applied to broader issues like national security?

Security is a hard management problem. It's all about how best to identify and focus on the priority areas. It's all about expanding relationships. Information in security incidents is mostly divided and scattered, but it's there. You have to find how best to link them.

The inference part is where the human comes in. But linking and tracing information is where technology can play a role. Today terror attacks are planned and managed often on Internet. What can be done better is that in reflection, one can connect the dots and we can have a frame of reference.

If we take a frank look at BI's evolution so far, how successfully has the reactive to proactive gap been covered?

Yes, EPA (Enterprise Performance Management) is where we are doing proactive work. Unlike the earlier report-generating work and focus on time-cutting, there is need for proactive work. A lot of BI is still reactive but EPM is a new breed. BI is trying to look at decisions the other way round with stuff like 'what-if' questions and scenario-based analysis.

What's the connection status, between BI and higher realms like human intelligence, artificial intelligence, robotics, cybernetics etc?

These are advanced analytics areas whereas BI is an analytics area focusing specifically on data and business problems. Its focus is mainly on decision-making.

With new scenarios like clouds and grids redefining computing and data, how does BI realign itself?

BI may go to cloud or Grid if privacy and security are taken care of. That's a challenge. But for that big leap in mindset is required. More so on areas like support and control. Guys like Google and Amazon can afford the infrastructure to do it.

What's your take on future trends and the status of BI in India?

As we move ahead, BI would graduate to real-time BI. The quicker, the better. DWA (Data Warehousing Applications) is another area that helps in how to deal in hardware to solve big data problems.

Apart from that, open source BI would be something to watch out for. The way open source has made inroads in areas of OS, Internet browser etc with Linux or Firefox, we have to see what happens in BI space.

Talking of India, the problem here is that unlike in the West, there is no unique identifier for data like the SSN in the US. I heard it's about to come in India too, and if that happens, it will take away the identification problem for BI. Not all data is captured here. Industry is still tactical in its approach towards BI.

What has been Persistent's ground of action so far in BI?

It's been traditionally an area of database. We have focused on building tools. Our work happens around BI tool vendors, and product development for some major DB and DWH vendors, which is the OPD flavour. We also build lots of applications and tools. The spectrum so far covers product engineering for leading ETL vendors where we have data cleaning, de-duping.

We also cover predictive analysis consulting area with churn analysis, targeted advertising, risk-modeling and cross-selling as some constituents. Apart from this, we have various domain-specific practices in industries like telecom, retail etc for reporting, dashboards.

The Future of Business Intelligence

Computerworld - Our call for predictions about the future of business intelligence yielded a bountiful crop.

In five years, 100 million people will be using an information-visualization tool on a near-daily basis. And products that have visualization as one of their top three features will earn $1 billion per year. -- Ramana Rao, founder and chief technology officer, Inxight Software Inc., Sunnyvale, Calif.

Within three years, users will begin demanding near-real-time analysis relating to their business -- in the same fashion as they monitor stock quotes online today. Monthly and even daily reports won't be good enough. Business intelligence will be more focused on vertical industries and feature more predictive modeling instead of ad hoc queries. -- Thomas Chesbrough, executive vice president of Thazar, a Skywire Software company, Frisco, Texas

Like standards in manufacturing for product quality, "data certification" will become a critical standard in the next three years for ensuring that vendors, customers and suppliers who acquire and/or share third-party data can measure the quality of that data before it's purchased or used. With a formal methodology, published set of criteria and certification test, information purchasers will be able to analyze data for appropriateness -- and request discounts for any deficiencies. -- Frank Dravis, vice president of information quality, Firstlogic Inc., La Crosse, Wis.

In the next three years, companies (and their business managers) will become utterly dependent on real-time business information, in much the same way that people expect to get information from the Internet in one or two clicks. This instant "Internet experience" will create the new framework for business intelligence, but business processes will have to change to accommodate and exploit the real-time flows of business data. -- Nigel Stokes, CEO, DataMirror Corp., Toronto

Companies are drowning in terabytes of data. In order to exploit the growing ocean of data, businesses will focus their business-intelligence spending in the next three years on technologies that address the inefficiencies of the underlying data storage, rather than the already powerful analytic applications. -- Foster Hinshaw, chief technology officer, Netezza Corp., Framingham, Mass.

In the next two years, business-intelligence capabilities will become more democratized, with a far greater number of end users across the enterprise using the tools to get better visibility into the performance of their segment of the business. Think of it as executive dashboards for worker bees. -- Steve Molsberry, senior consultant, Stonebridge Technologies Inc., Dallas

Business-intelligence data is what allows a company to grow and exploit future opportunities and, as such, is the target for corporate espionage, computer crime and terrorism. Stealing existing financial assets creates little overall impact. Stealing a company's information assets diminishes its ability to compete in the future. This will be the year that corporate boards and shareholders ask questions about what companies are doing to protect their information assets, which will trigger more IT security spending in 2004 and 2005. -- Ryon Packer, vice president, Intrusion Inc., Richardson, Texas

By the end of next year, banks will rely more and more on information gleaned directly from customers to predict loan defaults and collections. Lenders will use notes from customer interactions and conversations with collection center agents, as well as e-mail and other streams of unstructured communication, to significantly improve the prediction of the customer behavior. Banks currently rely on historical structured transaction data that's only producing marginal returns. But higher write-off rates and debt delinquencies will force financial institutions to deploy new methods. -- Gwen Spertell, CEO, Intelligent Results Inc., Palo Alto, Calif.

By improving the targeting of marketing messages, business-intelligence technology may save more than $200 billion dollars a year in wasted advertising and direct marketing. Data mining combined with marketing automation changes the fundamental economics of marketing and will probably increase the efficiency of all marketing expenditures by as much as 20% by 2007. -- Dave Morgan, CEO, Tacoda Systems Inc., New York

In the next three to five years, business intelligence will cease to exist as a stand-alone market, as Microsoft, database vendors and application vendors make analytics a simple extension of their offerings. Integration providers, using Web services and messaging standards, will make data movement simpler and provide "right-time" access to any data source. -- Bob Zurek, vice president of advanced technology, Ascential Software Corp., Westboro, Mass.

Today, consumers may be amused at marketers' clumsy attempts to personalize service, like being offered a new Lexus while shopping for a used Pinto. But consumers won't laugh at such amateur antics in two years or so. And neither will chief financial officers, who will refuse to pay for collecting and analyzing data that gets used unintelligently. -- Helen McMillan, vice president, Experian Database Solutions, Costa Mesa, Calif.

Business is war! Like in any war, survival depends on being able to act quickly in a constantly changing environment. Business intelligence will eventually operate as a business command-and control-center (BCCC). Similar to how a missile command center constantly performs tracking and analysis and triggers countermeasures, the BCCC will track variables, such as operational performance, market conditions and competitors' performance, in real-time. -- Sol Klinger, director, Sterling Management Solutions Inc., Princeton, N.J

Unstructured customer feedback contains critical indicators for customer attrition, upsell opportunities and product enhancements. In 2003, companies that fail to utilize their customers' unstructured feedback will be left in the dust! -- Guy Jones, vice president and founder of Island Data Corp., Carlsbad, Calif.

By 2006, half of all data warehouses that exist today will be replaced by a more streamlined architecture that I will call "data shopping malls." They'll contain sets of data arranged by use for each business unit that will allow the business-unit managers to analyze data specific to their area of interest. The data shopping malls will be more accurate, more responsive and less susceptible to the statistical anomalies of large data sets in the data warehouse. -- Craig Branning, senior vice president, Tallan Inc., Glastonbury, Conn.

Knowledge workers have tended to analyze data in isolation because the software they use doesn't let them do anything else. But data analysis must move from solo to collaborative if we're ever going to eliminate the bottleneck of specialized business analysts. This means packaging analytical applications into portal interfaces that ordinary people can access online and then allowing them to share not just the static output, but [also] the actual dynamic analytical experience through online collaboration. We'll see this happen among early adopters later this year, and it will be mainstream by 2005. -- Andrew Coutts, CEO, Databeacon Inc., Ottawa

Within two to three years, companies will ditch the traditional model of making business adjustments on a quarterly basis. Instead, they'll use business intelligence and performance management tools to make real-time shifts in strategy to respond to changes in the marketplace. --Rob Ashe, president and chief operating officer, Cognos Inc., Burlington, Mass.

Vendors that promise business intelligence but capture only historical data from company databases will be tomorrow's memories -- extinct providers who simply couldn't deliver true real-time intelligence. Real business intelligence means analyzing not only documents, databases and e-mail, but also other sources of rich and constantly changing data, such as Web site content, PDF files, Internet-based discussions, call logs and survey responses. -- Mahendra B. Vora, chairman and CEO, Intelliseek Inc., Cincinnati

Within five years, terms such as business intelligence and data mining will have all but disappeared from the corporate lexicon. They'll be replaced by business actions automatically triggered by systems with "corporate foresight," based on predictive analytics. And instead of being used by a limited number of technical analysts, these technologies will be applied at all levels, from the CEO managing corporate risk to the human resources professional identifying attrition risk among the best employees. -- Colin Shearer, vice president of customer analytics, SPSS Inc., Chicago

Users will demand more integration between the numbers and the commentary. At some point, all business-intelligence applications will include content management or knowledge management tools as well. -- Brian Hartlen, senior vice president, Comshare Inc., Ann Arbor, Mich.

In about five years, we'll see a dramatic 40% increase in the number of end users who use business-intelligence tools. The monolithic data warehouse strategies will be replaced with technologies that build virtual data access points based on the end user's query needs. These points will dynamically collect data from a variety of sources including data mart, data warehouse, production systems and external sources and present a single personal data view. -- Frank Gelbart, CEO, Appfluent Technology Inc., Arlington, Va.

In early 2004, some bored geek starts an open-source OLAP [online analytical processing] initiative. Suddenly, Oracle doesn't think that Linux and its ilk are that cool anymore. -- Gerald Boyd, director of research, NCS Technologies Inc., Piscataway, N.J.

In a few years, competitive advantage will come from using business intelligence to understand customer behavior and preferences at a narrow segmentation level and even an individual level and then delivering customized, context-sensitive offers. But given the cost and difficulty of actually doing this, by 2010, at least 50% of the Fortune 500 will turn to outsourcing contractors that have the next-generation technology and database marketing expertise to do it.

-- Jeff Zabin, vice president, Seurat Co., Boulder, Colo.

Oracle Business Intelligence Rates

Oracle Business Intelligence rates are on the rise year over year. See below:

HotGigs collects and aggregates hourly bill rate data from the thousands of consultants on our Staffing Exchange and provides rate research summary data as a free service to our visitors. Use our bill rate data to plan for contract resources and to compare bill rates against the market. The current average for 2009 hourly bill rate: $137.50. Do you feel this is on the high side or low side of appropriate professional business intelligence rates?

What is the greatest challenge when it comes to enterprise software implementations?

There are many challenges that managers face when implementing an enterprise level software package. But of the following, what would you consider the biggest challenge?

1. Data Migration
2. User buy-in and resistance change
3. Gathering proper requirements
4. Developing accurate business test cases
5. Poor data quality
6. Limiting access to immediate results

Let me know what you think...