Gavin quotes Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO, as saying that his corporation will be “sticking to the knitting” in response to Oracle‘s swoop on Sun. He goes on to cover some aspects of the Oracle / Sun link-up; specifically referring to the idea of “BI in a box” that seems to be gaining credence as one rationale for the deal. In his words, this trend is about:
storing, serving, and understanding information […]: the trend for getting fast access to huge quantities of data on massive networks and making sense of it.
However mention is then made of co-offerings that Oracle and HP have teamed up to make in this space – surely something that would be potentially jeopardised by the Sun acquisition:
Oracle last year announced the HP Oracle Exadata Storage Server and HP Oracle Database Machine, a box from Hewlett-Packard featuring a stack of pre-configured Exadata Storage Servers all running Oracle’s database and its Enterprise Linux.
Returning to Microsoft’s response, the article stresses their modus operandi of focussing on software components and then collaborating with others on hardware. Refernce is also made to Kilimanjaro, Microsoft’s forthcoming SQL Server version that will further emphasise business intelligence capabilities.
In closing Gavin states that:
Acquisition of a hardware company would break the DNA sequence and fundamentally change Microsoft in the way that owning Sun’s hardware business will change Oracle.
It’s tempting to note that DNA is broken (and then recombined) millions of times by RNA Polymerase, that is after all how proteins are synthesised in cells; one characteristic of Microsoft’s success (notwithstanding its recent announcement of its first ever dip in sales) has been a willingness to reinvent parts of its business (else where did the XBox come from), while relying on a steady income stream from others. When it comes to the idea of Microsoft acquiring a major hardware vendor, I agree it seems far-fetched at present, but never say never.
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Some of the furore following on from the announcement of the proposed acquisition of Sun Microsystems by Oracle appears to have died down today. However, taking a look round the blogosphere and various on-line discussion forums1, there does not seem to be much of a consensus about Oracle’s motivations, or future plans for Sun. There are a number of moving parts to this:
Sun’s hardware platforms
Solaris
Java
MySQL
OpenOffice.org
One area that people seem agreed upon is the importance of Java to Oracle’s application strategy, so it makes sense – as a defensive move if nothing else – for them to seek to prevent influence over its future direction falling into the hands of a competitor (which in turn raises the question of when exactly Oracle and Sun started talking and how much overlap there was with the IBM negotiations).
The future of MySQL seems less clear. Some commentators feel that Oracle will support it and allow it to continue to thrive as one of their products. At the other extreme, I have seen suggestions that it will be killed off. Of course as an open source database, this might be easier said than done. There seems to have been a steady trickle of MySQL people out of Sun, pre-acquisition and I would have thought that there is enough expertise and ownership outside of Oracle/Sun for MySQL to have some sort of future regardless of Oracle’s strategy for it.
A bit of a dark horse is OpenOffice.org. A lot of commentary has focused on Oracle positioning themselves to compete with IBM via the acquisition. Perhaps OpenOffice.org offers Larry Ellison another chance to cross swords with his old adversaries at Microsoft.
Moving from software to operating systems, Sun’s Solaris has probably suffered more than most from the rise of Linux, but there have been rumours about Solaris offering Oracle a better route to the current technology Nirvana of cloud computing. Whether this is really the case, I’ll leave to more technically competent authorities to discuss.
But beneath Solaris beats the SPARC chips and other components of Sun’s hardware. Is Oracle’s real aim to offer a complete solution: ERP, CRM, BI and DW in a box? Sun’s hardware has not exactly been flying off the shelf in recent months, but perhaps the sales team at Oracle have other ideas. Maybe their feeling is that all that Sun’s boxes need is to be part of a more alluring overall package. Leveraging Sun’s hardware and operating system is what many people assume is behind Oracle’s strategy. This is certainly the path that would lead to challenging IBM as a company that can meet many of an organisation’s needs as a one-stop-shop.
However, this segues into another observation. If Oracle really has IBM in its sights, then it lacks one crucial piece of ammunition, a global services organisation; the sort of outfit that IBM acquired from the hiving off of PwC’s consulting arm. Maybe now is a good time to but stock in CSC?
But to return to some of the points I made earlier, there is a further possibility. Perhaps Oracle don’t want to move into the fiercely competitive and low-margin arena of hardware sales after all. Perhaps it was Sun’s software assets that were the real goal. Does Oracle really want to position itself as a hardware vendor, no doubt poisoning strong relationships with people such as HP in the process? Maybe not. If this is indeed the case then maybe there will be a spin-off of Sun’s hardware assets, or indeed a sale to someone like HP – assuming that they wanted them.
One of the most intriguing aspects of Oracle’s proposed acquisition of Sun is just how many balls have been thrown up into the air by it. It will be really interesting to see how they fall over the next few months.
1.
Some of the blogs that I have read on this subject are acknowledged at the end of my earlier article.
Today’s big news is of course that Oracle and Sun Microsystems “have entered into a definitive agreement under which Oracle will acquire Sun common stock for $9.50 per share in cash.”
As Sun’s press release goes on to say, “the transaction is valued at approximately $7.4 billion”. At the time of writing, Sun’s stock was up nearly 36% and Oracle‘s was down just over 1%. The price Oracle is paying represents a 42% premium over Sun’s closing stock price on Friday – that’s a big premium.
What is interesting is that the previous mooted IBM / Sun deal appears to have foundered at least partly on issues of price (though potential antitrust issues were also a concern). IBM was rumoured to have offered a price identical to what Oracle will now be paying. So what, taking Larry Ellison’s deep pockets to one side, was the difference?
Well while there seemed to be some synergies for IBM in the earlier deal (a big say in the future of Java obviously being one that would have attracted both suitors), the acquisition of Sun is unarguably a much more transformational event for Oracle. Despite Sun’s recent problems in shifting big iron (funny how UNIX platforms are now viewed that way isn’t it?), Oracle post-acquisition will have a product set ,matched by few companies. In fact it will probably be matched by only one: IBM. So, while buying Sun might have made business sense for IBM, it would not have changed the nature of the organisation overnight. Oracle’s announcement today would appear to have done just that, positioning them as the other big beast in the “buy everything from us” jungle. Whether this deal proves successful for all concerned (and not just Sun’s shareholders) is a question whose answer will probably not be clear for a long time.
A comparisson of Oracle and Sun's positions with key competitors in the Forbes Global 2000
Stepping back from all this IT fervour for a moment, it is perhaps instructive to compare the merger madness that seems to have taken over the sector with trends outside the technology industry. Here the picture is very different. Over the last 10 years the majority of sprawling conglomerates have been split up; previously cherished businesses have been spun off, or sold to competitors. This has all been in homage to the business school orthodoxy of focus and core competencies. Many an internationally renowned name now sells just a fifth of its previous product set, with other assets now owned by those who can presumably generate greater profit from them and who feel that they are more compatible with their own core strategy. Deals where two similar companies have swapped assets and businesses to create two more distinctive entities have been common. While it is always notoriously difficult to assess the impact of such trends, general opinion seems to be that this phenomenon has generated greater value (or at least destroyed less value) than the previous focus on mergers and acquisitions.
So where does this leave IT with its rash of mega mergers over the last couple of years? Well it could of course be argued that IT itself is a single sector (and thus an area of focus and core competency) and that mergers within the technology sector are not the same as say a consumer electronics firm taking over a Hollywood studio (Sony / Colombia TriStar) or old media taking over new (TimeWarner / AOL). But many elements of Sun and Oracle’s businesses are quite different from each other. Ellison must believe that he can run a more diverse stable and still breed winners. The track record of Oracle successfully managing acquisitions is mostly impressive, so he may have a point. Perhaps bucking the trend towards being highly focussed is a masterstroke. The merger may prove to be a Waterloo for the world’s third biggest software and services firm; but whether they are playing the role of Wellingtion or Napoleon remains to be seen.
UPDATE: The above chart reflects: “According to the recent JoinVision study ‘Open Source in the Fast Lane’, IT specialists indicated they deploy MySQL 30% more frequently than Oracle, SQL Server or DB2.” Not quite the same thing as market share.
WordPress.com provides a handy widget that shows the articles (and pages) on this blog that have had the most hits over the last 24-48 hours. This appears as the second box from the top of my sidebar, just beneath the RSS subscription options. However this time-period is a little too short to assess the true popularity of articles. In order to remedy this, I have used WordPress.com’s own tracking stats to produce the following list, which covers the brief life of this site since November 2008.
There is clear water between the top five and the chasing pack. The next most popular article, The Top Business Issues facing CIOs / IT Directors – Results, is 176 hits back on 694. Of course one might assume that an “all-time” list would favour the earliest posts on this site. It is therefore interesting to note that the list instead features a number of more recent pieces and that the only really “old” piece is my first article plagiarising John Gray’s famous book.
I should also note that I have removed Keynote Articles (1,073 hits) from the list as this page aggregates all of my other posts, rather than being an article in its own right.
Of course this is merely a snap-shot of today’s figures and the list is already out of date as I write. I may look to update the figures occasionally, perhaps every three to six months.
Lest it be thought that I am wholly obsessed by the Business Intelligence vs Business Analytics issue (and to be honest I have a whole lot of other ideas for articles that I would rather be working on), I should point out that this piece is not focussed on SAS. In my last correspondence with that organisation (which was in public and may be viewed here) I agreed with Gaurav Verma’s suggestion that SAS customers be left to make up their own minds about the issue.
However the ripples continue to spread from the rock that Jim Davis threw into the Business Intelligence pond. The latest mini-tsunami is in an article on CIO.com by Scott Staples, President and Co-CEO of IT Services at MindTree. [Incidentally, I’d love to tell you more about MindTree’s expertise in the area of Business Intelligence, but unfortunately I can’t get their web-site’s menu to work in either Chrome or IE8; I hope that you have better luck.]
To turn data into information, companies need a three-step process:
Data Warehouse (DW)—companies need a place for data to reside and rules on how the data should be structured.
Business Intelligence—companies need a way to slice and dice the data and generate reports.
Analytics—companies need to extract the data, analyze trends, uncover opportunities, find new customer segments, and so forth.
Most companies fail to add the third step to their DW and BI initiatives and hence fall short on converting data into information.
He goes on to say:
[…] instead of companies just talking about their DW and BI strategies, they must now accept analytics as a core component of business intelligence. This change in mindset will solve the dilemma of data ≠ information:
Current Mindset: DW + BI = Data
Future Mindset: DW + (BI + Analytics) = Information
Now in many ways I agree with a lot of what Scott says, it is indeed mostly common sense. My quibble comes with his definitions of BI and Analytics above. To summarise, he essentially says “BI is about slicing and dicing data and generating reports” and “Analytics is about extracting data, analysing trends, uncovering opportunities and finding new customer segments”. To me Scott has really just described two aspects of exactly the same thing, namely Business Intelligence. What is slicing and dicing for if not to achieve the aims ascribed above to Analytics?
Let me again – and for the sake of this argument only – accept the assertion that Analytics is wholly separate from BI (rather than a subset). As I have stated before this is not entirely in accordance with my own views, but I am not religious about this issue of definition and can happily live with other people’s take on it. I suppose that one way of thinking about this separation is to call the bits of BI that are not Analytics by the older name of OLAP (possibly ignoring what the ‘A’ stands for, but I digress). However, even proponents of the essential separateness of BI and Analytics tend to adopt different definitions to Scott.
To me what differentiates Analytics from other parts of BI is statistics. Applying advanced (or indeed relatively simple) statistical methods to structured, reliable data (such as one would hope to find in data warehouses more often than not) would clearly be the province of Analytics. Thus seeking to find attributes of customers (e.g. how reliably they pay their bills, or what areas they live in) or events in their relationships with an organisation (e.g. whether a customer service problem arose and how it was dealt with) that are correlated with retention/repeat business would be Analytics.
Maybe discerning deeply hidden trends in data would also fall into this camp, but what about the rather simpler “analysing trends” that Scott ascribes to Analytics? Well isn’t that just another type of slice and dice that he firmly puts in the BI camp?
Trend analysis in a multidimensional environment is simply using time as one of the dimensions that you are slicing and dicing your measures by. If you want to extrapolate from data, albeit in a visual (and possibly non-rigorous manner) to estimate future figures, then often a simple graph will suffice (something that virtually all BI tools will provide). If you want to remove the impact of outlying values in order to establish a simple correlation, then most BI tools will let you filter, or apply bands (for example excluding large events that would otherwise skew results and mask underlying trends).
Of course it is maybe a little more difficult to do something like eliminating seasonality from figures in these tools, but then this is pretty straightforward to do in Excel if it is an occasional need (and most BI tools support one-click downloading to Excel). If such adjustments are a more regular requirement, then seasonally adjusted measures can be created in the Data Mart with little difficulty. Then pretty standard BI facilities can be used to do some basic analysis.
Of course paid-up statisticians may be crying foul at such loose analysis, of course correlation does not imply causation, but here we are talking about generally rather simple measures such as sales, not the life expectancy of a population, or the GDP of a country. We are also talking about trends that most business people will already have a good feeling for, not phenomena requiring the application of stochastic time series to model them.
So, unlike Scott, I would place “back-of-an-envelop” and graphical-based analysis of figures very firmly in the BI camp. To me proper Analytics is more about applying rigorous statistical methods to data in order to either generate hypotheses, or validate them. It tends to be the province of specialists, whereas BI (under the definition that I am currently using where it is synonymous with OLAP) is carried out profitably by a wider range of business managers.
So is an absence of Analytics – now using my statistically-based definition – a major problem in “converting data into information” as Scott claims? I would answer with a very firm “no”. If we take information as being that which is generated and consumed by a wide range of managers in an organisation, then if this is wrong then the problem is much earlier on and most likely centred on how the data warehousing and BI parts have been implemented (or indeed in a failure to manage the concomitant behavioural change). I covered what I believe are often the reasons that BI projects fail to live up to their promise in my response to a Gartner report. This earlier article may be viewed here.
In fact I think that what happens is that when broader BI projects fail in an organisation, people fall back on two things: a) their own data (Excel and Access) and b) the information developed by the same statistical experts who are the logical users of Analytic tools. The latter is characterised by a reliance on Finance, or Marketing reports produced by highly numerate people with Accounting qualifications or MBAs, but which are often unconnected to business manager’s day-to-day experiences. The phrase “democratisation of information” has been used in relation to BI. Where BI fails, or does not exist, then the situation I have just described is maybe instead the dictatorship of the analysts.
I have chosen the word “dictatorship” with all of its negative connotations advisedly. I do not think that the situations that I have described above is a great position for a company to be in. The solution is not more Analytics, which simply entrenches the position of the experts to the detriment of the wider business community, but getting the more mass-market disciplines of the BI (again as defined above) and data warehousing pieces right and then focussing on managing the related organisational change. In the world of business information, as in the broader context, more democracy is indeed the antidote to dictatorship.
Also for those with less time available, and although the article is obviously focussed on a specific issue, the first few sections of Is outsourcing business intelligence a good idea? pull together many of these themes and may be a useful place to start.
If your organisation is serious about adding value via the better use of information, my recommendation is to think hard about these areas rather than leaping into Analytics just because it is the latest IT plat du jour.
A whole mini industry has recently been created in SAS based on justifying Jim Davis’ comments to the effect that: Business Intelligence is dead, long live Business Analytics. An example is a blog post by Alison Bolen, sascom Editor-in-Chief, entitled: More notes on naming. While such dedication to creating jobs in the current economic climate is to be lauded, I’m still not sure what SAS is trying to achieve.
Given that I have been evangelizing BI for more than 12 years as practitioner, analyst, consultant and marketer, I should be leading the calls of blasphemy. Instead, I’m out front leading global marketing for the SAS Business Analytics framework. Why?
One answer that immediately comes to mind is contained in the question, it is of course: “because Gaurav is the head of global marketing for Business Analytics at SAS”.
Later in his argument, by sleight of hand, Gaurav associates business intelligence with:
Traditional and rapidly commoditizing query and reporting
Of course everything that is not “query and reporting” must be called something else, presumably business analytics is an apt phrase in Gaurav’s mind. To me, despite Gaurav’s headline, this is just yet more wordsmithery. No other commentators seem to see BI as primarily “query and reporting” and if you remove this plank from Gaurav’s aregument, the rest of it falls to pieces.
The choice of words is interesting. Recent pieces by SASers have applied adjectives such as “traditional”, “classic” and even “little” to the noun-phrase “business intelligence” in order to explain exactly what Jim Davis actually meant by his remarks. Whether any of these linguistic qualifications of the area of BI are required, separate from the task of supporting Mr Davis’ arguments, remains something of a mystery to me.
I for one would heartily like to move beyond these silly tit-for-tat discussions. My recommendations for the course that SAS should take appear here – albeit in lightly coded form.
Short of retracting Mr Davis’ ill-thought-out comments, the second best idea for SAS might be to be very quiet about the area for a while and hope that people slowly forget about it. For some reason, it is SAS themselves who seem to want to keep this sorry episode alive. They do this by continuing to publish artciles such as Gaurav’s. While this trend continues, I’ll continue to publish my rebuttals, boring as it may become for everyone else.
Once upon a time there were two technology companies, both operating in the Corporate On-Line Analysis market. One was called Credible Organisational KPI Enterprise (IT people love acronyms so much that they sometimes even nest them) and the other was known as Predictive Enlightenment Powered by Statistical Inference. However, both companies were generally better known by their respective acronyms; as was the market in which they competed.
Credible Organisational KPI Enterprise and Predictive Enlightenment Powered by Statistical Inference had parts of their respective product sets that overlapped with each other, but also had some more distinctive offerings. In the places where their portfolios diverged, each was seen as a market leader. In the shared areas, things were less clear-cut; some users preferring Credible Organisational KPI Enterprise and others Predictive Enlightenment Powered by Statistical Inference. Often those who expressed a preference did so in very strong terms, but not always with much evidence to back this up.
Well none of this mattered too much to most regular people until one day the head of marketing of Predictive Enlightenment Powered by Statistical Inference made a speech in which he claimed – contrary to all previous industry thinking – that the usefulness of general Corporate On-Line Analysis had been overstated and that only Predictive Enlightenment Powered by Statistical Inference could really offer users any benefits.
The deep insight underpinning the claims of Predictive Enlightenment Powered by Statistical Inference’s Chief Marketing Officer was that while Credible Organisational KPI Enterprise’s products relied on mostly water and sugar to make their customers happy, the revolutionary tools provided by his company had a secret, special ingredient, code-named only hydrated-C12H22O11.
These claims caused rather a furore in the Corporate On-Line Analysis world, with many commentators strongly disputing them. Several of the colleagues of the Predictive Enlightenment Powered by Statistical Inference CMO rushed to his defence. Some indeed went on to claim that Corporate On-Line Analysis was merely a subset of Predictive Enlightenment Powered by Statistical Inference, this despite most people having previously thought of both Credible Organisational KPI Enterprise and Predictive Enlightenment Powered by Statistical Inference as being different types of Corporate On-Line Analysis vendors.
While this move by Predictive Enlightenment Powered by Statistical Inference was probably intended to highlight the strengths of their product set and to better differentiate themselves from Credible Organisational KPI Enterprise, instead it just confused most people working in the area of Corporate On-Line Analysis and made them wonder whether the people at Predictive Enlightenment Powered by Statistical Inference understood their own products and market.
In the end, the people at Predictive Enlightenment Powered by Statistical Inference came to their senses, realising that what had initially seemed like a great marketing idea was actually counterproductive and even making them look slightly ridiculous. They issued a statement saying that their CMO’s comments had been taken out of context but nevertheless unequivocally retracting them.
After this outbreak of sensible behaviour, things in the Corporate On-Line Analysis world started to settle down again and everyone lived happily ever after.
Before the legal teams of any beverage companies start issuing writs, I should point out that any similarity between the above fable and their products is wholly coincidental. Any similarity to the recent behaviour of other commercial organisations may be somewhat less of a coincidence.
This blog is generally focused on topics in business, technology and change; often all three at the same time. However, from time to time, a personal post leaks in. This is one such post… or is it? Read to the end and then I will leave you to make up your own mind about this question.
Introduction
Over the years I have played many sports. For example, both cricket and rugby union consumed much of my youth. I have also recently got into mountain biking and really enjoy it. However, the activity that I am most engaged in currently is rock climbing, something that I alluded to at the beginning of a blog post yesterday. Rock climbing forms a very broad church and I have taken part in many aspects of it. However, for a number of reasons, I have gravitated to the sub-genre of bouldering over the last few years.
For the uninitiated, bouldering is climbing un-roped, often on actual boulders, but also on small outcrops and generally going no more than 5-6m (15-20 ft) off the ground. You carry around crash-pads (bouldering mats) with you to hopefully take the brunt of any falls. Indeed the idea with bouldering is to fall… to try again… and to fall again. In fact maybe Beckett had bouldering in mind when he wrote:
The whole point is that, because bouldering is relatively (and I stress the word relatively) safe, you can try to make moves that are at the limit of your ability; moves that would not be terribly sensible to even contemplate making on a longer, higher, roped climb. In fact bouldering climbs are so difficult that they are generally described as “problems”; an apt name that also conveys the fact that sometimes you have to use extreme subtlety and finesse as well as brute strength to get up them.
People often literally spend years attempting to complete a problem, particularly if it represents a new level of climbing for them, or if no one else has climbed the line before. Because of this, such unclimbed lines are often called projects. It’s common to ask a fellow climber about how their current project is progressing. This choice of name perhaps begins to give some indication of why I am sharing my experiences in bouldering with you today.
Having said that most boulder problems are short, some hardy souls also embrace high-ball bouldering which, as the name suggests, takes you a lot further off the ground. The following video shows one of the world’s best climbers, Chris Sharma, bouldering in Bishop, California. It segues to him and another top climber, Ethan Pringle, attempting a high-ball problem that weighs in at around 11-12m (35-40 ft).
Note 1: Ethan issues an expletive under his breath towards the end of the clip. I might well have been tempted to do so myself in similar circumstances, but count yourselves warned.
Note 2: As will be apparent if you try to click on this video, it is sadly no longer available, probably to do with copyright issues. Instead I would recommend that you take a look at the bouldering section of Dead Point Magazine’s site.
Copyright notice. This piece is taken from the DVD King Lines which features Chris Sharma climbing all over the world. The copyright holder is BigUp Productions, a world-renowned and award-winning producer of climbing DVDs.
So what does this have to do with the price of fish?
Please substitute “the price of eggs” if you are in the US
Green Wall Essential (V2). The Buttermilks, Bishop, CA
I have recently taken to showing the above photograph at the mid-point of my public speaking about business intelligence and change management. Generally I have introduced it with the comment that I wanted to relieve the audience’s boredom by showing them some of my holiday snaps.
As in the above video, this climb is also in Bishop, California, a world-class bouldering venue. The problem is called Green Wall Essential and its grade of difficulty is V2. Without going into enormous detail about the different grading systems for boulder problems, I’ll simply say that V2 is towards the easier end of the spectrum; V15/16 is the hardest that people have climbed.
The reason that I share this image with business/technology audiences is related to the number of times that I tried (and failed) to climb it. Here are some statistics:
More than 80 attempts
On 4 different days
During 2 separate visits to Bishop
Spread over 8 months
I mentioned the term project above; Green Wall Essential became my project and my obsession. The above statistics represent more effort than I have ever put into climbing anything else. The quartz monzonite rock is hard and crystalline. It digs into your fingers and peels off your skin leaving the rock stained with your blood (you can see the tape holding the tips of my fingers together in the photograph). Your muscles and tendons ache from trying to push yourself just that little bit harder in order to attain success. You endlessly try different foot holds and body positions. You try to be slow and precise. When that doesn’t work you try to be aggressive and dynamic. When that doesn’t work… and so on and so on.
Now in order to put in that much effort over that much time, and to put up with that much pain and that much failure, you have to really want to do the problem. You have to be persistent, despite set backs. You have to continue to keep a positive mind-set, to believe that you can be successful, even when you have just failed for the 80th time.
In my experience, that is precisely the same mind-set that you need to be successful with major projects, particularly in the business of change management. Hopefully your fingers will bleed less, but it will not be easy. There will be set-backs. Progress may sometimes seem glacially slow, but if you persevere then the goal is worth it.
Sometimes we want to find a magic recipe for success, or – to mix the metaphor – a silver bullet. We want to discover a series of defined steps to take that, if repeated religiously, will guarantee that we get to the desired goal each and every time. That’s why articles entitled “The 5 ways to […]” and “My top tips for […]” are so well-read on the web. My take is that the secret ingredient may be very simple: plain, pig-headed perseverance.
By way of illustrating the benefits of this approach (and closing this article), here I am having achieved my own personal goal on Green Wall Essential… EVENTUALLY!!!
Me a very happy boulderer having completed my project.
I wish you luck with your own projects, be these in business intelligence, other areas of IT, change management, or even bouldering. My own “Top tip” – if at first you don’t succeed, persevere.
If I have whetted anyone’s appetite about bouldering, you can take a look at my partner’s bouldering blog, which contains bouldering photos and videos, together with her musings on what motivates her to climb.
I had been aware of a short film about the history of Business Intelligence flitting its way around the Twitterverse, but had not made the time to take a look myself. That changed when the author, Nic Smith from Microsoft BI Solutions Marketing, contacted me asking my opinion about it.
Back in the day I was a regular Internet Movie Database reviewer, coming out of “retirement” recently to post some thoughts about Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (see also A more appropriate metaphor for business intelligence projects). More recently, I have reviewed rock climbing DVDs, filmed rock-climbing shorts with my partner and have even written a piece aiming to apply Hollywood techniques to Marketing Change. Given this background, I thought that I would treat Nic’s work as art and review it accordingly. This article is the result.
The review
Nic’s film is epic in scope, his aim is to cover the entire sweep of not just business intelligence, but data and business systems as well. It is amazing that he manages to fit this War and Peace-like task into only 10 minutes 36 seconds. However lest the reader expects Bergman-esque earnestness, it is worth pointing out that the mood is enlivened by the type of pop-culture references that are likely to appeal to a 40-something geek like your reviewer.
I’ll try to avoid giving too much of the plot away, however Nic’s initial aim is to answer the following four questions about BI:
Where have we been?
Where are we now?
Where are we going? and
Why should you care?
It is recommended that anyone wishing to avoid spoilers clicks here now!
Having failed to get a satisfactory definition of BI from Wikipedia (I trod the same path looking for a definition of IT-Business Alignment in the presentation appearing here), the director embarks on a personal quest to find the answer himself. Along the way, he comes to the realisation that BI is about decisions and that people take these decisions. In trying to explore this area further, Nic takes a journey from the advent of databases in the late 1960s; through the creation of the business systems to populate them, and the silo-based reports they generated, in the 1970s; to the arrival of the data warehouse in the 1980s – a stage he tags BI 1.0.
As the profile and importance of BI increased during the 1990s and the amount of data, both structured and unstructured, increased exponentially – notably with the growth of the web – the number and type of BI tools also proliferated. Because of the variety of tools, their complexity and cost, the market then consolidated, with many of the BI tools finding new homes in the same organisations that had previously brought you business systems. The resulting menu of broad-based and functional BI platforms is Nic’s definition of BI 2.0.
Nevertheless, the director felt that there was still something not quite right in the world of BI; namely the single version of the truth was about as likely to be pinned down as a Snark. The problem in his mind was that people were still left out of the equation (Nic likes equations and includes lots of them in his film). This realisation in turn leads to the denouement in which Nic brings together all of the threads of his previous detective work to state that “BI is about providing the right data at the right time to the right people so that they can take the right decisions” (a definition I wholeheartedly endorse).
The film ends with a cliffhanger, presaging a new approach to BI that will enable collaboration and drive innovation. I suspect the resolution to this punctuated narrative will soon be playing at all good Microsoft multiplexes along with the other summer blockbusters.
Nic Smith joined the Microsoft team in December of 2006, bringing a deep knowledge base of the Business Intelligence space. Prior to joining Microsoft, Nic spent time with Business Objects, a pure play BI company, where he was responsible for the vision of BI and performance management. Nic also spent time with former BI company Crystal Decisions, where he helped bring an enterprise reporting BI platform to market. Nic brings a unique blend of market knowledge, brand development and a solution orientated focus as an evangelist for BI. In addition to his business initiatives, Nic is involved in elite athletic development for youth. He holds a Bachelors Degree in Marketing and Communications from Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, British Columbia.
