Our Q3 Newsletter

Newsletter from Dresner Advisory Services

As we approach the final 3rd of 2013, we thought you might appreciate an update and progress report from Dresner Advisory Services.

It's been an especially busy year for us and we're pleased with what we've achieved and excited by what lies ahead.

Here are some highlights from this year:

Our Website: We've reorganized our website dresneradvisory.com and made it much more useful and accessible. On the home page you'll find our twitter feed, recent articles, latest blog entry and most recent research products.

We've also added a "complimentary research" section, with free articles covering essential topics related to Business Intelligence. Titles include: What Influences Value of Predictive Analytics?, Watch Out for the Credibility Gap in BI Data, Make Sure the Heat is on for Business Intelligence, Involve Customers and Suppliers in Your BI Chain and Are You Ready for the Mobile BI Diamond?

We encourage you to visit our website and welcome your feedback!

Research: We took on a pretty ambitious research agenda for 2013 and have succeeded in publishing a number of breakthrough market studies.

Our 4th annual flagship report - The Wisdom of Crowds ® Business Intelligence Market Study was expanded for 2013 and contains 124 pages of in-depth market analysis, with 80 charts and tables, 23 vendor rankings AND an exclusive 17-page buyers' guide! This buyers' guide compares and contrasts 22 BI vendor products across 19 key feature sets and 3 platforms: Traditional, Cloud and Mobile.

We published our 2nd annual Cloud Business Intelligence study in July with everything needed to assess this market phenomenon with 66 pages of in-depth market analysis, 50 charts and tables, 13 vendor rankings and a buyers' guide comparing and contrasting BI vendor cloud capabilities - including user BI features, cloud architectural support and cloud security.

And, we launched our inaugural Embedded BI study - focusing upon the requirement to make BI capabilities pervasive by including them as a part of other applications.  Like our other thematic research reports, Embedded BI explores user perceptions and intentions and includes vendor rankings and a buyers’ guide, making it a valuable tool for anyone considering investing in embedded BI products and services.

All of these premium research products can be found on our products page on dresneradvisory.com/products.

What's next: Moving forward, we are gearing up for our fall data collection project, which will support Mobile Computing, Mobile BI and (new this year) location analytics. We'll be sending out another email when data collection begins. As always, we welcome user participation in our studies and reward participation with a complimentary copy of the findings.

We'd also like to hear from you! If you have specific suggestions that you'd like to share, please respond to this email!

Hope the rest of 2013 is a successful one for you!

Best,

Howard

Chief Research Officer
Dresner Advisory Services

Dresner’s Point: Are You Ready for the Mobile BI Diamond?

A participant in one of my Friday #BIWisdom tweetchats observed that “in the mobile ecosystem, Big Data + social + the NSA data surveillance news are a perfect storm.” Will the NSA storm change attitudes regarding mobile BI and thus hinder its growth? It’s a good question and it sparked an interesting discussion in our Twitter group.

Before the perfect storm, our tweetchat tribe (comprised of customers, vendors and consultants/analysts) were of the opinion that the growing “app” mentality for “cool stuff” among consumers and the easy-to-consume info in mobile apps could end up increasing trust and thus lead to less testing and faster releases.
But one of the tribe tweeted that, at a minimum, the NSA storm will draw more attention to the organizational risks inherent in BYOD models. However, another member pointed out that BYOD is already a big challenge in mobile BI adoption because it makes it difficult to keep standardize and optimize the mobile BI experience.

Someone tweeted that users in finance groups were already the least interested in mobile BI. They tend to be risk averse, and the NSA storm may cause the risks to seem even larger. But another participant tweeted that customer-facing business units are the biggest adopters, not the back-office finance groups. In fact the biggest drive for mobile BI is coming from the boardroom.
The #BIWisdom tribe concluded that the perfect storm won’t have much impact on the growth of mobile BI because “it’s absolutely essential that data be real time” and “in a data-driven culture, the information needs to follow people everywhere.”

Our group agreed that a lot of organizations are trying mobile BI, but achieving success is a slow process. Other organizations are reluctant to justify the investment without greater proof of success, and many of the benefits (such as more eyes on the information, ready access to information) are hard to quantify.

Challenges include:

• Connectivity issues that make live mobile BI undependable.
• Difficulty in authoring and using advanced analytics until the UI/UX fundamentally changes. It can’t just be a simple port of existing code to mobile; it requires rethinking.

An even bigger issue, tweeted a tribe member, is that by definition mobile BI informs one person at a time. “What happens after people are seamlessly informed individually?” he asked.

“They can still collaborate,” tweeted someone else. “What’s the difference if they collaborate on the road or in a cube?”

“Collaborate how?” he responded. “Collaboration requires some thoughtful engineering, which is currently lacking.”

“BI can’t be in its own dimension,” another tribe member tweeted. “Collaboration must be part of the workflow and process to decision making, and that workflow must be smooth and transparent. And not all users feel comfortable with collaboration features, so there’s a cultural shift that must take place.”

The #BIWisdom group concluded that, despite the NSA storm and the technical issues that still need to be addressed, mobile BI will grow.

Bottom line: Like an unpolished diamond in the rough, mobile delivery of business intelligence hasn’t yet reached its potential. But our annual Wisdom of Crowds® market studies show that mobile is increasingly becoming a force in BI. In fact, our recent report on the Wisdom of Crowds® Cloud Business Intelligence Market Study highlighted the fact that 70.4 percent of respondents ranked mobile BI as “critically important” in 2012.

Mobile BI is also a natural complement to cloud BI, which is definitely growing in importance. Our 2013 Wisdom of Crowds® study also found that many small organizations are embracing mobile BI and cloud BI as a means of side-stepping traditional computing. The user data indicates strong synergy between cloud and mobile in BI.

The demand for business intelligence arises from multiple needs; some won’t suit mobile delivery, but some will. So mobile BI adoption will grow despite its current drawbacks.
Consequently, mobile BI will engage a whole new group of users — and they will need to be educated about the use of BI data.

Click Here to Purchase Your Copy of the 2012 Wisdom of Crowds ® Mobile Computing/Mobile BI Market Study


Howard Dresner is president, founder and chief research officer at Dresner Advisory Services, LLC, an independent advisory firm. He is one of the foremost thought leaders in Business Intelligence and Performance Management, having coined the term “Business Intelligence” in 1989. He has published two books on the subject, The Performance Management Revolution — Business Results through Insight and Action, and Profiles in Performance — Business Intelligence Journeys and the Roadmap for Change. He hosts a weekly tweet chat (#BIWisdom) on Twitter each Friday. Prior to Dresner Advisory Services, Howard served as chief strategy officer at Hyperion Solutions and was a research fellow at Gartner, where he led its Business Intelligence research practice for 13 years.

Dresner’s Point: Involve Customers and Suppliers in Your BI Chain

August 15, 2013

Do you remember when you thought it was too risky to purchase something online? Remember when you held out for a while and didn’t immediately hop on board the bandwagon like others to enjoy the convenience of paying your bills via online banking? Or maybe you still haven’t taken those plunges. The same phenomenon is affecting some organizations’ entrée into cloud-delivered business intelligence. But others have injected a big dose of value creation into their BI activities by moving to the cloud.

In fact, one of the significant nuggets in our recent 2013 Wisdom of Crowds® Cloud Business Intelligence Market Study is that organizations targeting external users (customers and suppliers) are the biggest users of cloud BI. It makes sense because of the cloud’s scalability and elasticity —and the ability to isolate those users from internal systems..

Integrating end-to-end value chains is definitely valuable, from the perspectives of data source as well as delivery. Without involving customers and suppliers in the BI chain, you don’t get full value. In addition, delivering BI in the cloud (private or public) allows organizations to spend their resources on innovation as opposed to operations. The cloud’s elasticity and pay-as-you-grow pricing model makes it easier to budget and allocate resources.

So why are some organizations opting for traditional BI instead of tapping into the value of BI through the cloud? I wanted to take a deeper look at this from the perspectives of the tribe at my Friday #BIWisdom tweetchats. Their positions and insights span the horizon of buyers, vendors, and analysts, and they’re on the cusp of what’s happening in the business intelligence space.

On a recent Friday we plunged into a discussion about the nuances of adding customers and suppliers to the BI value chain. The tribe members’ real-world observations align with our survey findings around the top barriers to adopting cloud BI — security issues and loss of control.

It all comes down to trust.

The tribe tweeted that one of the points of moving BI to the cloud is to give some control to users. But that power shift can be significant, and not fully understanding the risks causes some uneasiness. Tweets pointed out that:

• “Internal users having control is one things, but external users (customers and suppliers) affecting control could present risks.”
• “By giving these external partners more control of what data/information they see via the cloud, they may bring their own agendas into your BI.”

“Where do you draw the line?” they asked.

When it comes to the barrier of security, several participants tweeted that in reality data is no more secure these days inside the organization than it is in a public cloud (think NSA). Nevertheless, perception is as important as reality. Most of them agreed with me that inadequate security is an easy crutch to lean on when there are other hidden agendas for not moving to the cloud.

I asked the tribe what needs to happen for cloud BI to earn more trust to overcome the control and security barriers. Policy changes? Education? New technology?

• A member suggested that executives might gain more trust if the cost drops to the point where that trust is bought. Another said trust can’t be bought, especially since the days of Enron.
• Someone else tweeted that big brands like Amazon help overcome the trust issue and cloud providers are bending over backwards these days to show security and compliance.
• One was of the opinion that “Trust with the cloud is only as good as the gap between now and the next news story on compromised or lost data. Even if you lose cloud data because of internal mistakes, people will still remember that it was in the cloud when it happened.”

My view: Trust takes time. After all, some people still won’t pay their bills online.

Bottom line: For some organizations, bringing customers and suppliers into their BI corral is a good starting point for moving BI to the cloud. And delivering greater value through cloud BI can be the proving ground that leads to larger acceptance within the organization.

Because of the trust issue, most organizations will opt for private cloud BI before moving across to public clouds. Organizations that don’t want to fully move BI to the cloud right away will find the right mix of on-premises and cloud that works best for them.

The cloud will continue to disrupt the business intelligence space just as it has in all other aspects of technology. And whether or not there is a trust issue, cloud BI will catch on just as e-commerce did when people realized they liked the benefits of shopping online.

Click Here to Purchase Your Copy of the 2013 Wisdom of Crowds ® CloudBI Market Study

Howard Dresner is president, founder and chief research officer at Dresner Advisory Services, LLC, an independent advisory firm. He is one of the foremost thought leaders in Business Intelligence and Performance Management, having coined the term “Business Intelligence” in 1989. He has published two books on the subject, The Performance Management Revolution — Business Results through Insight and Action, and Profiles in Performance — Business Intelligence Journeys and the Roadmap for Change. He hosts a weekly tweet chat (#BIWisdom) on Twitter each Friday. Prior to Dresner Advisory Services, Howard served as chief strategy officer at Hyperion Solutions and was a research fellow at Gartner, where he led its Business Intelligence research practice for 13 years.