Frank Buytendijk Blog

It starts to become much more clear now where Oracle is taking EPM (Enterprise Performance Management) after the Hyperion acquisition. There is a clear roadmap that discusses product integration milestones and product innovation. This roadmap, bringing together the complete product offering, is the result of the joint development and marketing teams, and it shows an incredibly smooth and swift company integration process. It has been great to see such a process in action. The acquisition was announced on March 1, and the integration planning process between announcement and closing allowed for swift implementation once the transaction was completed. Here are a few observations about the process:

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  Communication was open and often. We received frequent updates--sometimes even a few times per week--with emails and FAQ documents on the intranet giving answers to employees' questions and concerns, or pointing out when a detailed answer could be expected.

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  Integration teams with senior staff from both sides throughout the whole company worked on integration plans ranging from development to finance, HR to facilities management, IT to Legal, involving key people throughout the companies, which was helpful in making implementation of these plans after closing a success.

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  The best people at the best spot, period. Regardless of where they come from.

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  Light-speed integration of processes and systems. It is better to make a clean cut and move an acquired company to an entirely different set of systems and processes, than trying to create a best of breed mix of processes and systems, leading to patchwork.

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  Perhaps the most important thing is the people. Since the beginning, Oracle has gone out of its way, in many different countries, making people feel welcome, and approaching the acquisition with a strong "can do attitude".

My previous post on the responsibilities of "the business" and "IT"  when defining a business case and discussing the Return On Investment seemed to have stricken a nerve.

The basic discussion is about the deliverables for a BI project. Paul Gallagher stated that this is not "let's define 20 reports," but that it is what is being done with that information. I responded that the "business" is often criticizing IT about not realizing the business case or the ROI and argued that it is the business itself who is responsible for that.

Check out Tom Hudock's blog entry in which he adds:

When I want a vehicle to drive, I don't ask the mechanic to find one for me. Although I'm sure the car would be great under the hood. Because maybe I want my unique style, colour, prestige, the right growl to the engine. Aesthetics. Generally not a mechanic's forte.

Then Erin McCune, who runs a blog for finance professionals, also weighs in with:

As I've emphasized many times in this blog and in my articles systems projects are doomed to fail when business stakeholders fail to take an active role.

In the meantime, Gints Plivna comes with a great real-life example in his blog:

Some days ago I've spotted a nice estimate of a work task that takes the problem described above to the next level i.e. the core of problem is initiated even before the real project begins. Task was much bigger containing of many subtasks including:
1) three separated subtasks for three different reports. Each report was quite precisely explained;
2) a task formulated as follows: "Up to 20 reports defined more accurately in analysis phase". No more information was supplied, no more information was known to anyone.

So how do you think - what were the estimates for analysis and implementation? According to estimate analysis of each separated report should take 1, 2 and 3 workdays. Implementation estimate of each of them was 2, 3.5 and 3.5 workdays. And now the most interesting part: analysis and implementation of up to 20 unknown reports was estimated 15 days for analysis and 20 days for implementation.

So for known and quite precisely defined reports the average analysis and implementation work was estimated 2 and 3 days respectively for each report. BUT for completely unknown reports without any further information and/or restriction estimate was 0.75 days for analysis and 1 day for implementation.

It seems we still have a long way to go...

frank

A few weeks ago, I titled a blog entry "BI 2.0," and it got a ton of reactions. So maybe it is good for my blog popularity to keep talking about the hypes. Here's another attempt ;-).

In the last few weeks, in my home country The Netherlands, I had a discussion with some fellow BI professionals about a very simple and fundamental question in our field of expertise: What is business intelligence? I pointed out there are many definitions, depending on whom you talk to. Accountants will relate BI to Control System Theory, which explains how to manage the flow of goods, the flow of money, and the flow of information. Technology people will see BI as an umbrella term, describing tools for querying, reporting, OLAP, statistics, advanced data visualization, dashboards, and so forth. I have always liked a more human oriented definition: "BI is structurally and in a structured way looking for data in order to come to fact-based decisions."

Most people in the discussion pointed out that BI is the supply of information needed to manage and optimize business processes. But the developments in BI over the last few years have made me doubt that traditional view.

• If you share management reports (one form of BI) with your customers for them to benefit from (such as managing the business relationship they have with you). It may help your customers with their business processes (or lives when it is about consumers), but for you it is not managing a business process. It has become a business process itself, BI becomes part of your customer value proposition.
  
• If you provide sales data to suppliers, and user that offer as a strategic instruments in a procurement process, it is not managing a business process, but creating a better procurement result in a different way.
  
• If you have an active policy of informing investors, through a fast close and transparent information supply, you are not only managing your business better, but BI is part of the process of attracting capital.
  
• If you invest in social and environmental reporting, BI is part of public relations, as well as managing business processes better.

BI is not only there to manage business processes, BI increasingly becomes an integral part of the process itself. To make a long story short, BI becomes a product or a service itself. From a macro-economic perspective, this makes sense. We have moved from the industrial age to a service, knowledge and experience economy. BI is simply following this trend.

In this discussion, Andries Bottema came with a very good definition, that I immediately liked and herewith adopt.

"BI is deploying information as a factor of production."

In other words, BI makes information the fifth factor of production, next to labor, capital, materials, and facilities.

I think this view is much more impactful than the technology-focused discussion on BI 2.0. Thoughts, anyone?

frank

. . . obviously come from Oracle. What can I say. But this weekend they had to compete with something like a BI tool, almost as good as Oracle's ;-) : the Nike+ system. Nike+ is a collaboration between Nike and Apple. It consists of a sensor and a receiver. The sensor, placed in your running shoe, sends through a bluetooth connection a pulse on every step you take to the receiver that is connected to the Apple iPod Nano. While you are running (in my case jogging -- at least my attempt to it), you can see your average speed, distance covered, time spent running and an approximation of calories burnt. Through the earphones, there is audio feedback: "1km completed, 3km completed, halfway point, 500 meters to go." All in real-time. After finishing your workout, you upload the data to the Nike+ website, and you can see your overall results in graphical form, as well as progress towards your longer-term goals. And through the Nike+ community, you can even challenge your friends world-wide, for instance by tracking who runs most during a period of, let's say, 2 weeks.

That's perfect BI. First of all, it helps you track your short-term goals, helping you to achieve the task at hand. How far to go, how much time to spent, how much resources consumed. Second, it helps manage long-term objectives through the website. The short-term goals are managed through a real-time device, the longer-term goals have a richer user-interface, and you analyze that while sitting behind your computer. Lastly, the most important thing: it's not about control, it's about motivation. The system helps you want to make your goals, because of the continuous feedback of where you are and where you need to go. It's great to hear Lance Armstrong's voice after jogging: "Congratulations, this was your longest workout yet." Makes you want to go for even more.

I am not the most athletic person, to put it mildly. But the Nike+ system helped me to improve from after-three-minutes-spontaneous-disintegrating-spleen to running close to 10 kilometers in one hour.  In fact, this weekend I completed my first official run, the Dam-to-Dam run in the Netherlands, 4-mile distance. I finished almost last, but hey I finished in time!  

frank