Business Intelligence Trends

7 Top Business Intelligence Trends For 2013

Short list of BI hot buttons includes dashboards, self-service, mobile, in-memory, cloud, collaboration and, of course, big data. 

Many people seem to want to stick a sexier name on business intelligence, whether that's "business analytics" or "big data." To me, it's still business intelligence, a top-priority technology that can help companies boost revenues, improve customer service or control costs by making better, faster decisions.

Whatever you want to call this still-vital category, here are my predictions for the top BI trends of 2013, along with a few looks back at highlights of 2012. 

 
1. Dashboards Evolve, Expand
You would think that there's not much room for dashboard innovation now that they're the bread-and-butter BI interface, already in use among most large and midsized companies. And yet dashboards were rated the top priority for expansion and innovation in the BI Scorecard 2012 Successful BI Survey. The dashboard's rise to prominence is a confluence of next-generation technology along with a recognition that BI must be aligned to business goals to be successful.
[ Want more on trends in the year ahead? Read 5 Cloud App Trends To Expect In 2013. ]
Access to data alone doesn't help a company improve. Next-generation dashboards keep workers focused on the right metrics and inform in a way that lets employees take preemptive action. Key features enabling such dashboards include in-memory processing, the ability for users to mash data together and to assemble their own dashboards, KPIs, faceted (filter-by-category) search, mobile, and the ability to link insight to action. 
With big BI platform vendors IBM, Microsoft, and SAP generally lagging the dashboard capabilities provided by specialty vendors, customers will continue to mix and match systems from different providers in 2013. Differentiated leaders include QlikTech, which supports rapid deployment and intuitive "associative" analysis, JackBe, which has strong operational dashboards, and Metric Insight, which offers top-notch KPIs.
Look for all vendors in this space to continue to improve their capabilities in 2013. SAP, for example, recently released its next-generation dashboard tool, Design Studio, though data-source support is initially limited to SAP BW and the Hana in-memory database. Look for SAP to improve related mobile and data-visualization capabilities. SAP will also eventually integrate and merge its once-leading Xcelsius dashboarding product, now rebranded "Dashboards," into Design Studio. QlikTech also is expected to release a next-generation dashboarding product this year.
Looking back, one important dashboard release in 2012 was Oracle Endeca Information Discovery, acquired by Oracle at the end of 2011 and adapted to run on its Exalytics appliance. Oracle classifies this product as a discovery tool, but in my view it's best positioned as a dashboard application uniquely positioned to explore unstructured data using faceted search.
 
2. Self-Service BI Gets Real
Self-service BI continues to be a vision for many companies in which users are empowered to explore new data sets without much IT support. Visual-data-discovery tools have become synonymous with self-service BI and are growing at three times the pace of the overall BI market. Unfortunately, some vendors are too quick to attach the visual discovery moniker to their products. As I wrote in the latest BI Scorecard Strategic and Product Summary report, there's a continuum of self-service BI capabilities that ranges from interactive reporting to business query to visual data discovery, and yes, even to tools such as spreadsheets.
My hope in 2013 is that practitioners recognize this range of self-service, and that vendors help educate rather than just jumping on whatever bandwagon has the most hype. Leading companies will make the shift to self-service BI, both to empower workers and to ensure the smartest allocation of constrained IT resources. In our Successful BI Survey, 44% of respondents say BI teams do not have adequate time, funding or resources to keep up with BI demand. With the fight for BI talent, simply hiring more people is not the solution. Instead, business users have to embrace responsibility for routine BI tasks. At the same time, IT has to let go of some of the mundane enhancement requests and focus on complex data challenges and leveraging innovations.
In 2013 Tableau will release version 8 of its software, which will include browser and iPad-based authoring, a relative rarity in the visual data discovery category. Also look for improvements in other first-generation visual discovery products:
-- SAS Visual Analytics Explorer, first released in February 2012, is due out with a new version that will support calculated columns, forecasting, decision trees, and maps.
-- Microsoft's Power View via SharePoint (released in Q1 2012) will reemerge as an Excel add-in.
-- AP Visual Intelligence, first released for Hana in March 2012, is now on a six-week release cycle, gaining support for more data sources and capabilities.
 
3. Mobile BI Boosts BI Adoption
Just when you thought the dust had settled on the question of tablet leadership (the iPad), Microsoft released the Windows Surface and Apple missed Wall Street earnings estimates. Prime-time ads for the Surface abound! And oh, how I would love to more easily synch my Outlook calendar!
Gone are the days when corporate IT can set mobile device standards. Instead, users are increasingly bringing their own devices, forcing IT (and BI vendors) to support a broad swath of smartphones and tablets. The most promising way to support diversity is to support HTML5, but the best user experience continues to be through device-native apps. Just what those apps need to support is a moving target, as user requirements evolve. For example, availability of offline data-interaction capabilities -- rare in 2011, but supported by specialty vendor RoamBI -- increased in 2012 with MicroStrategy, SAP Mobile and Oracle Mobile HD adding such capabilities.
Will we see native support for Microsoft Surface in 2013, or will vendors use the HTML5 approach for this device? It's too early to tell, but I don't anticipate any broad shift. The debate about which capabilities to provide on smartphones versus tablets will continue. Mobile Device Management will remain a separate market segment, but savvy mobile BI providers and customers will integrate with these solutions so that when a device is lost or stolen, there is additional security beyond just a user name and password so that offline data can be wiped.
Mobile will also continue to drive BI adoption in 2013, re-igniting executive interest and making BI more relevant to field and front-line workers. In last year's Successful BI Survey, only 11% of respondents said their firms had successfully deployed mobile BI. BI adoption at those firms stood at 39% of employees, far ahead of the industry average of 24% of employees.

4. In-Memory Goes Mainstream
In-memory technology saw several major releases in 2012, and that makes 2013 an opportune year for companies to implement this technology. In-memory was initially an approach leveraged by a few OLAP systems (like TM1, now part of IBM Cognos) and a few specialty vendors (like QlikTech and Tibco Spotfire).

Now all leading BI platform vendors have in-memory solutions, with Oracle being the last to join the ranks with its Exalytics appliance, which runs the TimesTen in-memory database. Kicking off 2013, SAP announced the ability to run its core transactional (OLTP) applications on the Hana in-memory database. Nonetheless, debate about when to use in-memory or when to use an analytic appliance, columnar database or disk-based data warehouse will continue, driven by constraints including available expertise, analytic demands and cost. 


Other noteworthy 2012 in-memory announcements included:
-- Microsoft Hekaton, an in-memory transaction support within SQL Server, expected in 2014 or 2015
-- IBM Cognos 10.2, which includes dynamic, in-memory cubes for relational data sources
-- SAS LASR Server, which combines in-memory processing with Hadoop infrastructure for large-scale analytics and visual discovery.
[ Want more on trends in the year ahead? Read 5 Cloud App Trends To Expect In 2013. ]
 
5. Big Data Generates Big Interest
Reminiscent of the Gold Rush era, there's money to be had (and to invest) in big data, but only a few, as of yet, are striking it rich.
Big data such as Web clicks, tweets, and genomic data are critical in certain industries, such as ecommerce, gaming, advertising, and healthcare. Some associate big data only with Hadoop and with the demise of the data warehouse. However, I see Hadoop and NoSQL solutions as being only a part of the architecture for handling structured and unstructured data. The traditional data warehouse, analytic appliances and BI vendors all have roles to play here.
So in 2013, companies in certain industries will indeed embrace new solutions from big data startups including Datameer, Karmasphere, Platfora, and SiSense. Others will leverage big-data connectors from their existing BI tools. The majority of companies are still grappling with basic data access, so big data will continue to be just an interesting cover story.

6. Cloud Becomes Just Another Option
Cloud is another area of BI that is grabbing a lot of headlines, but to date, not a lot of deployments. Cloud accounts for only 3% of total BI revenues, according to Gartner. Cloud BI would seem to fall, then, in the domain of "nice to have." But if you talk to CIOs, many would welcome the chance to outsource the problem of infrastructure maintenance and instead focus on higher-value IT investments. BI in the cloud provides that opportunity, along with flexibility to handle elastic (variable) workload demands.
Security concerns were initially the biggest barrier to cloud BI deployments. There's now greater acceptance that cloud BI can be secure. The question becomes whether a cloud provider can do a better job than you can in ensuring reliability and security, though doubts were recently raised by yet another Amazon blip during the make-or-break Christmas season.
BI vendors have had to re-architect their products to be cloud-ready, both with multitenancy and the ability to work with data retained on premises. In 2013 we will see more POCs and trial-use of BI cloud products. Cloud will increasingly become a routine deployment option rather than a product differentiator. Oracle says it will preview a cloud-based reporting and analytics offering in the first half of the year. Also look for Pentaho to release a new, multitenant architecture.

7. Collaboration Goes Beyond Social
Did you think that social networking and collaboration would just be passing fads -- or ways to share photos and look up old flames? In the midst of Hurricane Sandy, many used Facebook and Twitter to find hotel rooms, places to shower and to charge cell phones. It was a study of contrasts of those who knew how to use the technology and those who didn't -- I couldn't find Jersey Central Power & Light's Twitter handle. New Jersey Governor Christie started off with useless tweets, like "watch my live stream" -- uh, not on limited battery power. But he eventually provided more useful tweets, such as when specific communities would get power restored.
I still get the sense that most vendors add collaboration without a clear vision or passion for what sharing can bring. A few BI vendors seem to get it, most notably Panorama and Lyzasoft. Some BI buyers tell me their users don't ask for these types of features, to which I recall that nobody initially asked for mobile phones, either. When I read about how, for example, United Health Group and the Mayo Clinic will be sharing and mining data across boundaries, I think collaboration in BI has the potential to bring the best data to the best analysts.

These are my predictions for the biggest trends in the year ahead. Wherever your priorities lie, enjoy the journey!

Outlook CRM Software

Outlook CRM and Contact Management – Keeping It Simple
 
1 Overview
This article looks at how you can use Microsoft Outlook as your Contact Management and CRM
system with out the installation of any additional client software or Outlook Add-Ins, and still interface Outlook with your back-end CRM or ERP system.

It represents a new, yet incredibly simple approach to CRM that is guaranteed to work where other systems may already have failed. Equally important, for those organizations wanting to adopt a CRM system, it is a very good system to implement first, even if one later “graduates” to a more comprehensive system.

2 The Problem
CRM has received a lot of negative publicity over the years because of the failure rate of CRM implementation projects.

A recent Butler Group report found that 70 percent of CRM implementations fail. A Gartner study found that approximately 55 percent of all CRM projects failed to meet software customers' expectations. In a Bain & Company survey of 451 senior executives, CRM ranked in the bottom three categories among 25 popular tools evaluated for customer satisfaction.

The findings of a poll of 100 SME organisations with CRM implementations revealed that while 60% of sales directors insist that CRM is fundamental to their sales processes, a quarter have lost customers directly through their ineffective use of CRM technology.

Essentially sales teams are not using their CRM systems correctly with 44% of sales directors admitting that fewer than 80% of their staff use the technology effectively. The knock-on effect is a loss of potential revenue and increasing levels of customer dissatisfaction.

But sales directors themselves are hardly blameless with 72% confessing that they tolerate inefficient use of the CRM they have invested in, while a mighty 73% do not discipline staff who fail to use CRM systems. Common reasons for this lack of use include:
• resistance to changing the way they work among sales people
• reluctance to use new technologies.

A comment made in response to this report summaries the current situation:
“The main problem with sales CRM systems is that they are simply too cumbersome and
complicated for many salespeople to use. When confronted with something like SalesForce with its multitude of fields and processes, many salespeople just roll their eyes and go back to the Excel spreadsheets that have served them well for years. Until more useable and simple systems are available CRM horror stories will continue to be commonplace.

3 The Solution – Microsoft Outlook
The Fear of/Resistance to Change Syndrome dictates that the less the users have to change the way they work, the more likely they will adopt any new system that is based around what they are already used to. So if your users are already sending mail, managing their own contacts in their own Personal Contacts folder, and scheduling appointments with the Outlook Calendar, they don’t want to change this. ExchangeWise (Pty) Ltd www.exchangewise.com, Outlook CRM and Contact Management – Keeping It Simple

The Resistance to Change factor has another side that’s reflected in a popular saying namely “Up to the age of 18 you make your habits; thereafter they make you”. The reality of these words of wisdom is summarized as follows: If a new system is introduced such that not only is training required to learn the system but one also has to form a new set of habits associated with the procedures necessary to run the system, then it will take the average worker 3 to 6 months to develop these new habits to the point where they are ingrained into their daily work routines. And invariably if the user does not see sufficient benefit in the system soon enough (i.e. before these new habits are fully developed), then they continue to do what they were doing before the new system was introduced and as such the new system falls into disuse. One common excuse we
used to get during post-implementation audits from users who were found not to have been entering activities into the new CRM system was “Oh, I keep forgetting to open the system”, or “it takes too long to open the system when I need it”.

Reluctance to Use New Technology: If everyone is already using Outlook, and has been trained on Outlook, or at least has become familiar with its functionality then there is no impact on their daily routine. They continue to use the same elements of Outlook in the same way they’ve always done. Microsoft has made enormous investments in studying the usability of Outlook and soliciting user feedback. So why reinvent the wheel when the users already know (and usually love) this interface.

The “WIIFM” Concept: Here Outlook definitely comes to the rescue. Users already appreciate the benefits of Outlook as a “Personal Information Manager”, especially as Microsoft touts Outlook as being one. The emphasis on Personal implies the primary benefit is to the user and not necessarily the company. So Microsoft in that sense has solved the issue of “What’s in it for me?”

Having looked at the fact that Outlook certainly addresses some of the “human” factors associated with a CRM implementation, we still need to look at how well Outlook meets the challenge in terms of functionality. We can do this by looking first at the basics of a Contact Management system, which still today is the core of any CRM system.

4 The Basics of any Contact Management System
Any contact management application needs at least the following basic functionality:
a) A mechanism to store and profile Contact information.
b) A means to plan and organize appointments with those contacts, not only for yourself but other team members managing those same contacts.
c) A means to schedule tasks and to-do’s for those contacts.
d) A mechanism to record any kind of interaction with a contact, namely meetings, phone calls, e-mail, documents, etc.
e) Some way of storing documents sent to and received from a contact.
f) A way to send and track e-mail communication. ExchangeWise (Pty) Ltd www.exchangewise.com Outlook CRM and Contact Management – Keeping It Simple

5 Outlook’s inherent Contact Management Functionality
With reference to the requirements list above, Outlook at least satisfies the following
requirements:
a) A mechanism to store and profile Contact information: The “Contacts” folder in
Outlook already allows a comprehensive profile of any personal or business contact to be
maintained.
b) A means to plan and organise appointments for those contacts: Outlook’s
calendaring facilities provide these very effectively and when coupled with Exchange
Server incorporate a huge number of collaborative features that are extremely difficult for
any other stand-alone CRM system to emulate or reproduce.
c) A means to schedule tasks and to-do’s for those contacts: Outlook’s task
management facility is excellent for this.
d) A mechanism to record any kind of interaction with a contact: The “Journal” facility of
Outlook contains the standard fields necessary to record phone calls, meeting, etc. with
clients, and can even time such activities.
e) A way to send and track e-mail communication: The Inbox and Sent Items stores
inward and outward e-mails.
However, while Outlook does have the basic foundation for solid contact management
functionality, there are certain limitations of Outlook that one needs to be aware of.

6 Limitations of Outlook
As a contact management application however, Outlook has the following limitations:
a) Private Mailbox (Contacts, Appointments, etc.): Without setting up and customising Public Folders, most users will just utilise their Private Mailbox Contacts folder for managing their contacts, thus limiting the sharing of that information and potentially creating massive duplication of the same data within the organisation.
b) Contact-centric: By virtue of their being only a Contacts folder (and no Companies folder), Outlook tends to be Contact-centric rather than Account-centric, which can be limiting for those users managing corporate accounts.
Microsoft Outlook is Microsoft’s messaging and personal information management program that helps you manage the following:
• Contacts
• Scheduling (Calendar/Appointments)
• Time/To-Do Management (Tasks)
• Activity Tracking (Journals)
• Messaging (Inbox/E-Mail)
Microsoft product box shot reprinted with permission from Microsoft Corporation ExchangeWise (Pty) Ltd

c) Discrete, independent folders: Most users tend to use their Outlook folders as discrete elements, i.e. because it is fairly cumbersome for users to link one item to another, (e.g. a contact to an appointment) they seldom do this. Thus it is difficult for users in the organisation to get an overall picture of all the activity occurring within the organisation against any particular company or contact. The universal objective of any CRM system however, is to provide a “single-view of all customer-related information to everyone in
the organisation”.

7 Overcoming Outlook’s Limitations with MX-Sync
By installing MX-Sync (http://www.exchangewise.com/Products/MXSync), an application that synchronizes Outlook data between Exchange Server Private/Mailbox folders and a back-end database, the above-mentioned limitations can be overcome.
a) By providing two-way synchronization between a user’s private Contacts folder and the corporate database, everyone is updating the same common customer list, rather than each maintaining separate ‘Personal’ Contacts folders that are not visible to anyone else. One still has the ability to keep certain contacts simply by not marking them with the Category that identifies to MX-Sync that a contact should be added to the corporate database.

b) By providing automatic linking and copying of e-mails, journals, tasks and appointments to the corporate database, the whole company is informed about all important customer interactions.

c) By linking e-mails, appointments etc. to the relevant contact(s), everyone can get a view
of all activity occurring with a specific customer.

8 MX-Sync Features & Benefits
MX-Sync is an Outlook synchronization utility which synchronizes data bi-directionally between standard Microsoft Exchange Server folders (both Private Mailboxes and Public Folders) and any database, be this a SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL or other database. So you can sync Outlook data to SQL or SQL Server data to Outlook/Exchange Server folders. MX-Sync caters for scenarios where data is being updated in either or both databases.



8.1 Contacts
MX-Sync will synchronize selected contacts in the SQL database to each user’s Personal Contacts folder, and vice versa. So MX-Sync will update changes made by anyone on the host database back to each user's respective Contacts folder. If a user has set his or her Personal Contacts folder to sync to their PDA, then these changes will of course be automatically replicated out to their smart-phone, Windows Mobile or Blackberry device. Likewise users can add contacts via their PDA’s or Blackberry devices and flag them in
such a way that when these contacts sync back to their Personal Contacts folder in Outlook, MX-Sync will automatically add them to the SQL database.
 
In summary:

1. Creating a contact in your Personal Contacts folder and setting a specified Category (e.g. ‘MX-Sync) will create that contact in the back-end SQL database (if it does not exist already). ExchangeWise (Pty) Ltd Outlook CRM and Contact Management – Keeping It Simple

2. Creating or editing a contact in SQL that matches a specified filter condition (per user) will sync that contact from SQL down to the user’s Personal Contacts folder in Exchange/Outlook.

8.2 E-Mail
MX-Sync performs server-side linking of e-mails from designated personal mailboxes to the SQL Server E-Mail Folder. So any mail that drops into the Inbox or Sent Items folder that is from or to a contact that is in the SQL Contacts folder will be automatically linked to that contact and copied to the E-Mail folder even if no Outlook/MX-Contact client is active at the time.

This ‘server-side’ linking of e-mails also means that e-mails sent from a user’s Blackberry or PDA will automatically be copied to the E-Mail table even if that user does not have Outlook open on their machine at the office.

8.3 Tasks and Appointments
Tasks and Appointments will be synchronized between Exchange and SQL in the following scenarios:

1. creating an appointment/task linked to a personal contact in the Personal Contacts folder that has been synchronized to SQL will create the appointment in SQL and then link the appointment to the user, the contact and the contact’s primary company.

2. creating a task/appointment (not linked to contact) but setting a specified category (e.g. ‘MX-Sync’) will create the task/appointment in SQL, linked to the user.

3. creating an appointment where a contact in the SQL database is invited as an ‘attendee’ will create the appointment in SQL and then link the appointment to the user, the contact and the contact’s primary company.

4. creating a task/appointment with the e-mail address or a specified ‘descriptor’ in the Subject line that identifies the contact/company to which the appointment should be linked will create the appointment in SQL and then link the appointment to the user, the contact and any other entities identified by the ‘descriptor’.

8.4 Journals
Journals are probably the least-used folder in Outlook; however they serve a very useful purpose in Contact management with regards to recording details of important phone calls or meetings. Journals will be copied from Exchange to SQL in the following scenarios:
1. creating a journal linked to a personal contact in the Personal Contacts folder that has been synchronized to SQL will create the journal in SQL and then link the journal to the user, the contact and the contact’s primary company. ExchangeWise (Pty) Ltd www.exchangewise.com
Outlook CRM and Contact Management – Keeping It Simple

9 Summary
Microsoft’s earlier promotion of Outlook as a “Personal Information Manager” created the impression amongst users that Outlook was only intended to manage one’s personal contacts and was not suited as the basis for a corporate-wide Customer Management System. However in conjunction with a back-end SQL database that the majority off the office-based organization has access to, Outlook can be a powerful tool that satisfies most of the requirements for basic contact management.

The reality is that many mobile workers do not have time to record more than just the basics of their interactions with customers. And the fact that they can do this recording via the standard Contacts, E-Mail, Tasks, and Appointments functionality on their notebook via Outlook or on their Windows Mobile or Blackberry devices and have this contact information shared automatically with the rest of the company greatly enhances the organization’s ability to manage their customer base efficiently.