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Business Intelligence
A Bird in the Hand: Are You Making Use of the Wealth of Data at Your Disposal?
There’s a lot to think about when contemplating the value and use of the mass of data that is undoubtedly accumulating every day within your firm. In this issue of CBR, we provide you with a solid footing for understanding and moving forward with your own deliberations. In a manner of speaking, your data is the “bird in your hand” that you may not even know you hold — or have not yet developed the skills to hold. Reading what our experts have to say on the subject (based on our survey and on real-world case studies) will provide a mental framework for approaching the decisions necessary to take advantage of the wealth of information at your fingertips.
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Helping us make sense of the management of large volumes of data, or "Big Data," is one of our favorite academic contributors. Richard T. Watson is the J. Rex Fuqua Distinguished Chair for Internet Strategy in the Terry College of Business at the University of Georgia (USA). Among other things, Rick is former President of the Association for Information Systems and the current Research Director for the Advanced Practices Council of the Society of Information Management, a forum of senior IS executives. Rick is a good friend and a real thinker, a person who is very willing to look at things differently, even if what he has to report is unpopular. He is very creative, and his work often has me scratching my head, saying, "I did not think of that!" Coauthoring with Rick in this issue is Research Assistant Tyler Williamson, a senior honors student at the University of Georgia pursuing a bachelor's degree in MIS.
Our view from the practice side in this issue is provided by April Reeve, Enterprise Architect and Program Manager for EMC Consulting. April brings to us more than 25 years' expertise in the financial services industry, with a plethora of practical knowledge in working with massive amounts of data. She is certified by Data Management Association International as a Data Management Professional (CDMP) and certified by ISACA in both Enterprise Governance of IT (CEGIT) and as an Information Systems Auditor (CISA).
Published: April 2011, 17 pages, PDF format
Authors: Gabriele Piccoli, Editor; Richard T. Watson, Tyler Williamson, April Reeve
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Adopting a Practical Social Media Strategy: An Enterprise Guide
Whether it’s through tools like LinkedIn, Twitter, WordPress, Yammer, YouTube, Flickr, or Google+, social media is increasingly relevant to the professional life of your colleagues, employees, competitors, and most importantly, your customers.
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This report is also available in print format.
The report Adopting a Practical Social Media Strategy: An Enterprise Guide provides a common-sense approach to developing your organization's social media strategy. You'll explore the multiple uses and benefits of social media in a business context, the issues that hinder adoption, and how to maximize the benefit/risk ratio. Plus, you'll review the six mistakes organization's make when adopting social media.
The strategies provided in this report will help you:
- Use social media to improve your connection to customers
- Move beyond your fears of confidentiality breaches and productivity losses to develop a successful social media strategy
- Create a vision of what you want your enterprise to look like as a "corporate citizen of the Internet"
- Use social media for technology watch and competitive intelligence -- intelligence that is "hidden in plain sight"
- Leverage conversational marketing to remain closely engaged with your marketplace
- Gingerly handle issues of governance
- Utilize the new product development strategy of "release and listen"
What's more, you'll look at new tools that have emerged to facilitate social search, such as SlideShare, Aardvark, Hunch, and Quora. And you'll receive links to eight online social media compliance policies, including ones at IBM, BT, the Red Cross, and Coca-Cola.
Learn how to create a reasoned social media adoption plan. Order your copy of this report today!
Publication Date: 20 October 2011, 30 pages, PDF format
Authors: Steve Andriole, Claude Baudoin, Vincent Schiavone
Adopting a Practical Social Media Strategy: An Enterprise Guide (Print Edition)
Whether it’s through tools like LinkedIn, Twitter, WordPress, Yammer, YouTube, Flickr, or Google+, social media is increasingly relevant to the professional life of your colleagues, employees, competitors, and most importantly, your customers.
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This report is also available as a PDF.
The report Adopting a Practical Social Media Strategy: An Enterprise Guide provides a common-sense approach to developing your organization's social media strategy. You'll explore the multiple uses and benefits of social media in a business context, the issues that hinder adoption, and how to maximize the benefit/risk ratio. Plus, you'll review the six mistakes organization's make when adopting social media.
The strategies provided in this report will help you:
- Use social media to improve your connection to customers
- Move beyond your fears of confidentiality breaches and productivity losses to develop a successful social media strategy
- Create a vision of what you want your enterprise to look like as a "corporate citizen of the Internet"
- Use social media for technology watch and competitive intelligence -- intelligence that is "hidden in plain sight"
- Leverage conversational marketing to remain closely engaged with your marketplace
- Gingerly handle issues of governance
- Utilize the new product development strategy of "release and listen"
What's more, you'll look at new tools that have emerged to facilitate social search, such as SlideShare, Aardvark, Hunch, and Quora. And you'll receive links to eight online social media compliance policies, including ones at IBM, BT, the Red Cross, and Coca-Cola.
Learn how to create a reasoned social media adoption plan. Order your copy of this report today!
Published: October 2011, 30 pages, delivered in print, by post
Authors: Steve Andriole, Claude Baudoin, Vincent Schiavone
BI Unwired: The Case for Mobile BI
Corporate adoption of mobile BI — the ability to access, view, and interact with corporate data on mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets via reports, interactive dashboards, visualizations, and ad hoc reporting — was fairly limited for its first five years or so.
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Today, organizations are increasingly employing mobile BI applications. This Executive Report by Curt Hall examines the potential implications of mobile BI. It covers technology, tools, and applications and examines business benefits afforded by mobile BI, as well as important issues involved in implementing mobile BI applications.
Published: September 2010, 16 pages, PDF format
Author: Curt Hall
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BI: Lessons for Business from the Sports World
Today’s BI providers struggle with lightning-fast data mining and presentation — two things that sports intelligence providers have mastered.
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The announcer's teleprompter and on-screen graphics prove that information can be both instantaneous and engaging. The sports world has also mastered mining and refining historic data for the highest possible intelligence. This Executive Report by Dann A. Maurno makes the connection between the industries, with strong recommendations for BI providers and users.
Published: May 2010, 20 pages, PDF format
Author: Dann A. Maurno
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Business Intelligence 2.0: From Intelligence to Real-Time Analytics
Business intelligence (BI 1.0) is turning the performance corner toward the next generation (BI 2.0).
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While we're still dealing with data issues and worrying about platform compatibility, we've now connected business intelligence to business performance management, a step that reflects rising expectations about what the BI endgame looks like. We've begun the journey toward structured/unstructured data integration/interpretation and real-time analytics -- as well as semantic processing, in anticipation of Web 3.0. In this Executive Report by Steve Andriole, we take a look at BI 2.0, which is now a reality and ready for optimization.
Published: February 2010, 16 pages, PDF format
Author: Steve Andriole
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Business Intelligence 2010: Delivering the Goods or Standing Us Up?
Business Intelligence has no doubt come a long way. Everyone certainly has more data in a more timely fashion than they used to (well, almost everyone) …
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... but is it better data? Has BI promised much more than the insight and business objectives it has actually delivered? In this issue we have five articles, with views from several of the BI hills and a couple from some of the valleys.
Published: June 2010, 40 pages, PDF format
Authors: Dave Higgins, Kas Kasravi, Bhuvan Unhelkar, Amit Tiwary, Jan-Paul Fillié, Ralph Menzano, and Martin Bauer
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Business Intelligence and Networks of Things and People
The overall mission of operational and business intelligence (BI) is to make sense of and to strategically leverage data and information, much of which can be unstructured.
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In the near future, thanks to the proliferation of sensor-based information networks, the typical opportunities and challenges linked to knowledge mining will intensify. This Executive Report by Paola Di Maio provides an overview of the essential components and architectural features of future embedded intelligence and their relevance to BI. It recommends steps that CIOs and BI professionals should consider to keep track of the rapid developments in this field.
Published: March2010, 20 pages, PDF format
Author: Paola Di Maio
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Complex Event Processing: Technology, Products, and Applications
Complex event processing (CEP) monitors, aggregates, and analyzes large volumes of events in real (or near real) time across multiple data streams to offer instantaneous insight into live data on markets, transactions, customers, and operations — thus enabling immediate response and better decision making based on timely information.
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CEP is generating greater interest as a way to increase operational efficiency. This Executive Report by Curt Hall examines CEP technology, as well as available CEP software vendors and products, and provides an overview of CEP applications.
Published: April 2010, 16 pages, PDF format
Author: Curt Hall
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Current Solutions for Unstructured Data
Open the Door To Your Organization’s Hidden Knowledge!
80% of all corporate data is unstructured. Developing the capability to mine unstructured data and apply it to business processes is imperative. But analysis must meet real business needs and coexist with information developed from structured data in data warehouses. Emerging technologies are beginning to make this possible.
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The Cutter Consortium report Current Solutions for Unstructured Data by Brian J. Dooley explores the increasingly powerful techniques being developed for compilation, analysis, combination, and visualization of unstructured data. You'll gain tips for integrating unstructured data into a structured environment, maximizing search solutions, and analyzing unstructured multimedia data.
This report will help you:
- Derive context from data, helping you uncover hidden relationships that can explain underlying causes for complaints, opinion, actions, or sales
- Consider various analysis techniques for unstructured data, such as text mining and analytics, natural language processing, Web content mining, text categorization and classification, and more
- Explore the growth of sentiment analysis on social networks
- Better understand search solutions, such as keyword search, federated search, conceptual search, and multimedia search
- Make information relevant and accessible to decision makers
- Explore text analytics categories, including Word tree, the tag cloud, and a phrase net
This report also identifies and describes 19 text analysis software solutions, such as Attensity, Autonomy, EMC Documentation, Endeca, Exalead, Expert System, and others, including three open source solutions.
Published: February 2011, 13 pages, PDF format
Author: Brian J. Dooley
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Developing a Master Data Management Strategy
Does your company fully appreciate the value locked inside its data?
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When data is properly maintained, cleansed, and stored in an efficient and consistent manner, it can provide key information that will assist in short-term tactical and long-term strategic decisions -- without fear that the underlying information is erroneous.
The report Developing a Master Data Management Strategy helps your organization implement a master data management (MDM) solution that delivers a consistent set of information across all operational and reporting systems in your enterprise. You’ll learn how to make a business case for MDM, what to look for in an MDM solution, and how to better define your MDM requirements.
This report will help you:
- Create an MDM master repository that is clean, labeled, and protected from accidental overwriting
- Reduce duplicate data entry, force commonality of codes, and impose better control of business processes
- Select an MDM tool that imposes the least intrusion on your organizational infrastructure
- Conduct a proof of concept to better determine MDM vendor offerings
- Ensure your MDM solution supports the different data formats required to transport data across your enterprise
- Meet the needs of BI toolkits that require refined data for the complex models in their applications
You’ll learn what enterprise data types are a good fit for an MDM solution,
the profound impact that search technology is having on the MDM world, and what mistakes to avoid when choosing an MDM vendor, such as conducting a proof of concept with a scope that is too large and complex.
You’ll explore the four MDM application layers -- end user application layer, system integration layer, business integration layer, data management layer -- and the specific tasks for each of the five project phases in each layer. And you’ll discuss a number of MDM technology enablers, such as the cost per byte of data storage, the speed of data retrieval, and grid computing.
This report also reviews three case studies detailing how these enterprises use an MDM solution to solve their critical business problems, and offers four recommendations to consider when building a business case for an enterprise MDM solution.
Published: June 2007, 90 pages, PDF format
Authors: Steve Andriole, Greg Mancuso, Al Moreno, Ken Orr
Enterprise BI Architecture Groups: The Key to Effective Agile Data Warehousing
Agile data warehousing delivers powerful BI applications in the shortest time frame possible, yet coordinating multiple fast-moving BI teams demands more than simple project management. Organizations need an enterprise business intelligence architecture (EBIA) function to coordinate high-level requirements, designs, and technologies in order to avoid ruinously expensive mistakes and redundancies.
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The report Enterprise BI Architecture Groups: The Key to Effective Agile Data Warehousing Programs by Cutter's Ralph Hughes helps you create an environment where an enterprise data warehouse will naturally emerge from multiple agile data mart development projects. To do this, you'll learn how to evolve the commonplace architecture review board into an EBIA function that can align the deliverables of the agile development teams.
The guidelines in this report will help you:
- Improve the speed and quality of your projects
- Discover the challenges and benefits an EBIA group can offer agile teams
- Deliver your crucial BI applications more efficiently
- Forecast the services and productivity tools you'll need ahead of time
- Persuade your development teams to voluntarily align with corporate warehousing goals
- Gain insight into your organization's collective operations and competitiveness
You'll also be provided with a clear set of methodological patterns, design decisions, and prepopulated data components that an EBIA can offer your project architect that will shave months off prep work and the team's delivery.
And you'll get a suggested 120-day plan for implementing an EBIA function in the average organization as a starting vision for the work, milestones, and funding that an effective enterprise warehouse alignment program will require.
Order this report today!
Published: September 2011, 23 pages, PDF format
Author: Ralph Hughes
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Enterprise Integration with the Business Architecture
During the past several years, interest in this newly realized architecture of the business has sparked interest and gained momentum. The best way to build a business architecture (BA) is to always consider it as integrated with the firm’s chosen enterprise architecture (EA) framework and driven by the corporate strategy. This results in development of a corporate nexus, which enables the integration and alignment of enterprise components.
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The report Enterprise Integration with the Business Architecture by Ralph Whittle discusses enterprise integration with the BA and in the formal context of an engineering discipline. It describes the BA as a reusable asset that can bring about a "new order of things." Several BA models that illustrate the integration of enterprise components -- the manifestation of an engineering discipline -- support the discussion.
Table of Contents:
- The Business Architecture’s Organizing Principle
- The Business Architecture to BPM Relationship
- Business Architecture Leads to Systems Thinking
- The Business Architecture to Business Intelligence Relationships
- The Business Architecture to Strategy Nexus
- The Business Architecture to IT Architecture Nexus
Integrating the BA throughout the enterprise within an EA framework creates an asset that is used over and over again and improved over time. The BA is changing corporate behavior, creating a new unifying structure, delighting customers, integrating the enterprise, and achieving a competitive advantage.
Published: September 2011, 19 pages, PDF format
Author: Ralph Whittle
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How Not to Run an IT Project: A Case Study
The reasons for, and statistics on, IT project failures are well known and cited. However, because so many organizations attempt to hide their dirty laundry, rarely do we see an insider’s account of the precise points at which a project derailed.
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In this Executive Report by Phil Simon, a case study is utilized to examine these issues at one organization, along with data quality and data governance.
Published: January 2010, 20 pages, PDF format
Author: Phil Simon
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KM in Perspective: The Dynamic Knowledge Synchronization Model
Bhuvan Unhelkar presents the dynamic aspect of knowledge synchronization through the use of mobile technologies.
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Knowledge synchronization is a crucial aspect of knowledge management (KM) that bridges the gap between the tacit, subjective knowledge stored in people's heads and the explicit, objective knowledge stored within the organization's IT systems. This Executive Report lays out the four specific characteristics of mobility -- location independence, real-time interactions, formation of dynamic user groups, and provision of dynamic organizational context -- and demonstrates how they are utilized in this model to pave the path for a dynamic learning organization.
Published: August 2010, 17 pages, PDF format
Author: Bhuvan Unhelkar
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Social Business Intelligence: Why Every Company Needs Social Media
Social media applications — blogs, wikis, social bookmarking, crowdsourcing, commenting, and more — offer a crucial opportunity to leverage new technology to achieve strategic and operational business objectives. But you have to make sure that your processes precede technology deployment, that you understand the technical and human resources necessary to exploit the technology, and that you pilot the technology before you launch major implementations.
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The new report Social Business Intelligence: Why Every Company Needs Social Media by Steve Andriole and Vince Schiavone focuses on the roles that social media can play in the execution of your business strategies and the improvement of your business processes and
models. The report introduces a social media optimization blueprint consisting of strategy, architecture, skills assessments, and project slates. Special emphasis is placed on the value of "listening" to internal and external social media.
This report will help you:
- Match social media applications to short- and long-term business requirements.
- Develop two different strategies for the adoption of social media -- internal and external.
- Improve conventional processes such as marketing, customer service, innovation, training, and R&D.
- Determine how to acquire, store, and analzye the structured and unstructured data and knowledge created by social media.
- Utilize the seven characteristics of an effective social media listening platform.
- Make informed decisions on how your social media architecture will look.
Gain expert insight that will help you understand, track, apply, and measure social media. Order your copy of Social Business Intelligence: Why Every Company Needs Social Media today.
Published: June 2010, 16 pages, PDF format (867 KB)
Authors: Stephen J. Andriole and Vincent J. Schiavone
Online resource center clients: Access this report online
Social Business Intelligence: Why Every Company Needs Social Media
Steve Andriole and Vince Schiavone focus on the roles that social media can play in the execution of your business strategies and the improvement of your business processes and models.
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This Executive Report describes a process that should lead to the optimization of social media in your company. It recognizes the role that social media can play in improving conventional processes such as marketing, branding, customer service, innovation, training, and R&D, as well as how social media can fundamentally refine old processes for business value. The report also provides a social media optimization blueprint consisting of strategy, architecture, skills assessments, and project slates. Special emphasis is placed on the value of "listening" to internal and external social media. Ultimately, the report argues that social media is a relentless trend that all companies must understand and exploit. There's no hiding from the social media tsunami.
Published: June 2010, 16 pages, PDF format
Author: Stephen J. Andriole, Vince Schiavone
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Tablets in the Enterprise: Entering the Post-PC Era?
What’s happening in organizations with respect to tablet adoption and use? What are some of the trends at the heart of this “coming storm”?
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This special issue of Cutter Benchmark Review offers benchmarking data on the state of the adoption and use of tablets in the enterprise, in an attempt to understand whether they have become pervasive and how organizations are approaching their integration in the firm's overall infrastructure.
You'll receive insightful and provocative analysis on the applications of tablets in the enterprise, their use (or nonuse) as workstation replacements, and the possible barriers to adoption, such as concerns over data security.
Table of Contents
- The Tablet: A Solution in Search of a Problem by Joseph Feller
- A Storm Is Coming In by Niel Nickolaisen
- Tablet Excitement Is Here, Uses Still Emerging by Gabriele Piccoli
- Tablets in the Enterprise Survey Data collected by Cutter Consortium
Published: August 2011, 22 pages, PDF format
Authors: Gabriele Piccoli, Joseph Feller, and Niel Nickolaisen
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The Emergence of Organizational Intelligence
Organizational intelligence is a new way of looking at business improvement and survival, combining the latest management thinking with advanced software technologies to produce highly effective organizations.
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People and technology have complementary forms of intelligence, and in an intelligent organization these abilities are coordinated and mobilized to the best advantage. This Executive Report by Richard Veryard surveys the six key capabilities of organizational intelligence and shows how a range of organizational and technological innovations each contributes toward the whole framework.
Published: July 2010, 16 pages, PDF format
Author: Richard Veryard
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The Indoor Garden: Cultivating Openness Inside the Organization
Over the last decade, open innovation, crowdsourcing, and peer production have enabled organizations, communities and crowds to work, create, and solve problems individually and together.
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The new Cutter Consortium report, The Indoor Garden: Cultivating Openness Inside the Organization, by Joseph Feller, examines organizational and community-based openness and collaboration practices -- maximizing the power and intelligence of crowds -- and applies it behind the firewall to create the "internally open" organization. You’ll learn how you can improve problem solving and encourage innovation in your organization by applying these strategies to your own knowledge sharing, information processing and product/service co-creation practices.
This report will help you:
* Understand how peer production of open content (such as Wikipedia) can be applied to knowledge sharing in your organization.
* Use collaborative filtering and social navigation to improve intranets, content management systems, and document repositories.
* Create Web portals specific to your organization's interests and goals.
* Develop internal software products using the principals of peer production processes -- and get five lessons for doing it right.
* Learn how to use co-creation techniques to enhance the quality of your products and stimulate innovation.
Get key issues and insights to identify and harness the power of your internal communities and crowds.
Order this report today!
Published: December 2011, 16 pages, PDF format
Author: Joseph Feller
Online resource center clients: Access this report online
