The Balanced Scorecard is one of the most popular methodologies for measuring business performance, with a view to enhancing it. First made popular in the early 1990s, this performance management framework was intended as a tool to provide managers with a more complete and “balanced” view of their organization’s performance by including nonfinancial metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) in their assessments. Despite this excellent approach to the state of an organization—previously viewed from a purely financial perspective—some organizations are still struggling to achieve success with this method. Many of the problems seem to stem from the balancing part of the evaluation. Well, maybe it’s OK to keep your scorecard a little off balance. Read the rest of this entry »

Research for one of my projects led me to ask both software vendors and customers about the factors most important to software users in the selection of a business intelligence (BI) solution. Two topics resounded: the use of BI tools to improve data management and business performance management. Consumers are continuously looking for innovative ways to move, store, and improve the quality of their data as well as to ways to capture the most valuable information for improved decision making and business performance.

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The greatest value of a picture is when it forces us
to notice what we never expected to see.
—John W. Tukey. Exploratory Data Analysis. 1977.

Data visualization is core to business intelligence (BI), as it’s the means by which data is communicated to the user. Results, alerts suggestions, or even more controlled guidance—all of these elements are passed through the data visualization function of a BI application. No matter how much importance software providers give the aesthetics of visualization, all agree that a BI or business analytics application requires a visualization framework that is clear and simple and able to communicate the intended message. Here are three major trends of the last year that are reshaping the BI and analytics space: Read the rest of this entry »

Managing data—particularly in large numbers—still is and probably will be the number one priority for many organizations in the upcoming years. Many of the traditional ways to store and analyze large amounts of data are being replaced with new technologies and methodologies to manage the new volume, complexity, and analysis requirements. These include new ways of developing data warehousing, the emergence of big-data providers to store and analyze very large sets of information, and new hardware and software technologies to speed the data analysis process, among others.

One of the important players in this fierce and competitive space is Kognitio, a company founded in 2005 with headquarters in Bracknell, United Kingdom, and offices in the United States in Chicago, New York, and Minneapolis.

Kognitio is a provider of data warehouse and business intelligence (BI) systems that incorporate in-memory, massively parallel processing (MPP), as well as an interesting virtual online analytical processing (OLAP) cube solution.

We had the pleasure of interviewing Roger Gaskell, chief technical officer (CTO) of Kognitio, and got some of interesting insights on Kognitio’s systems as well the BI and the data warehouse space in general. Read the rest of this entry »

Having improved many of its functionality features, Bizagi recently released version 9.1.6 of its business process management (BPM) software. I’m pleased to announce that the Bizagi BPM Suite 9.1.6 is a TEC Certified system for BPM functionality.
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Being able to manage unstructured text is no longer a “nice to have,” as companies and individual users alike have to deal with increasing amounts of unstructured text, work with it, and gain knowledge by interpreting it. Cirilab is a company that provides software products to search, retrieve, and categorize information from unstructured text sources. Read this interesting interview with Ron Carrière, chief executive officer (CEO) of Cirilab, and get his take on the role of Cirilab in the software industry and the company’s approach to the unstructured content management space.
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It appears that many organizations are rapidly adopting mobile business intelligence (BI), and the technology promises to become a natural component of every BI application in the near future. And this has only been made possible by the hard work of number of software companies over the past several years in establishing the foundation, changing mindsets, and applying new mobile-based techniques to the BI space. One such company is Transpara, a provider of a product called Visual KPI, a software application that enables organizations to monitor and manage dashboards, alerts, and analytics using mobile devices. In this interview of the Thinking Radically series, we speak with Michael Saucier, chief executive officer (CEO) of Transpara and Robert Hylton, vice president (VP) of Transpara. Take a minute to read both Mr. Saucier’s and Mr. Hylton’s thoughts on their product Visual KPI in particular and on the mobile BI space in general.

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In 1997, TARGIT acquired Morton Systems, a company founded by Dr. Morten Middelfart and devoted to providing business intelligence (BI) and analytics solutions. Dr. Middelfart was then appointed chief technology offer (CTO) of TARGIT, and since then, he has become the technology and educational leader for TARGIT BI. [Evaluate TARGIT BI using TEC Advisor.] Read the rest of this entry »

I’m pleased to announce that the Bizagi’s BPM Suite 9.1 has recently joined the ranks of TEC Certified systems providing business process management (BPM) functionality. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the things I love about my job is the opportunity I have to speak with great people. In this installment of Thinking Radically, I speak with Gary Cokins, an internationally-renowned speaker and expert on performance improvement systems. Please take a minute to read this interesting and informative interview with one of the gurus in the business performance and analytics spaces.

Gary Cokins is an internationally recognized expert, speaker, and author in the areas of advanced cost management and performance improvement systems. Read the rest of this entry »

To work in the software industry world it is often necessary to think radically, or “out of the box” in order to innovate, solve problems, or stay ahead of the competition. Today we start a series of interviews with some of the thinkers who are reshaping the software industry. Read the rest of this entry »

We are pleased to announce that Business First from W4 is now available for online evaluation of business process management (BPM) solutions in the Project Portfolio Management Evaluation Center, joining the ranks of TEC Certified systems providing BPM functionality. Read the rest of this entry »

In this issue of BI Hits the Road, I’d like to take a look at the mobile offerings of two business intelligence (BI) software providers: MicroStrategy (see vendor profile) and QlikTech (see vendor profile). These companies’ mobile BI strategy development efforts have paid off in fervent interest in their solutions by small to large organizations in various industries. Read the rest of this entry »

We are pleased to announce that the Ultimus Business Process Management Suite has joined the ranks of TEC Certified systems providing business process management (BPM) functionality. Read the rest of this entry »

Every day business intelligence (BI) gets closer to chaos. Don’t get me wrong—I’m by no means saying that BI will one day become obsolete and that you’ll need to avoid it at all costs. On the contrary, Read the rest of this entry »