Disruptive Change in Business Intelligence

In the past weeks I've worked with Good Data as a marketing consultant. I've spent a lot of time studying their value proposition, and their technology. The market they are in – Collaborative Business Intelligence – is very interesting.

The BI market has several strong established players, and most of them have been acquired by the industry giants: Business Objects by SAP, Cognos by IBM and Hyperion by Oracle. For now, they will still rule the Fortune 500, but there are new competitors coming up from the bottom. That is one of the characteristics of disruptive change, according to Clayton Christensen's book 'The Innovators Dilemma'.

What is new about vendors like Good Data? I'd say there are a couple of aspects:

• SaaS Business Intelligence model (rather than on-site software)
• Focus on user experience and collaboration
• Pre-built vertical applications

These aspects improve the ROI of cloud business intelligence projects: it is less costly to roll out because of the on-demand model and the pre-built applications, and user adoption is higher because of the user friendliness and collaborative features.

Actually the best case for online business intelligence is made by Evangelos Simoudis on the Sandhill.com blog. He indicates that online systems are better at aggregating data from various locations, from inside and outside the company. Only this will create true new insights.

Also, a cloud-based analytics system is a natural for social features. Collaboration is taking place all over the web. Whether it's a generic social network like Facebook or MySpace, a white-label social network on Ning, or a micro-blogging service like Twitter. This has the potential to transform BI from a solitary activity to a collaborative process.

An additional benefit is more operational in nature. True cloud-based systems are multi-tenant: in other words, only one instance of the application is used by multiple customers. This is done in such a way that the data for each customer is totally isolated, but application maintenance is much easier. Even better, the actual end-customer never has to to application maintenance: the new features simply appear in the product.

Evangelos mentions a total of 12 points in favor of on-demand business intelligence. So if this is of interest to you, please be sure to read his full article.

Another recent article about the pros and cons of hosted BI was published on TechTarget.com. They are quoting a Forrester report by Boris Evelson. As the benefits he mentions: “less reliance on internal IT, anywhere access to the application, pay-as-you go pricing with no up-front cost and vendor management of the application and infrastructure.” But as a drawback he mentions “lack of built-in integration with the rest of an organization's data and processes”. The original report can be accessed on the Forrester website (subscribers only).

Conclusion

In this post I've tried to summarize some benefits of cloud-based business intelligence software, with links to other relevant articles. Please let me know if you have additional suggestions.

Other links:

• analytics service
• analytics dashboard

How Bank of America Steals from the Poor

Normally I don't write about politics, I prefer writing about topics related to my job. I vaguely heard about a Credit Card bill that Obama has proposed to end abusive lending practices. I'm not familiar with that bill, but I do have an experience that I would like to share. 

When I moved to the US almost 4 years ago, I did not have a credit history. Therefore I applied for a secured credit card at Bank of America. They provided excellent service, and I was happy that I could start building a credit history, even though I had to deposit $1000 to get a $1000 spending limit. 

Being privileged with a stable middle-class job and healthy spending habits, I was able to get better credit card offers fairly quickly. However, every 2 weeks I still get a letter from Bank of America that tries to lure me into an unsavory deal. 

The envelope says "Account Information Enclosed" and it contains 3 checks that you can use with a 1.99% promotional APR that is good until January 2010 (8 months). That sounds like a great deal: you could pay the rent or the mortgage, for only 2% interest. 

What is does not say that a transaction fee of 4% applies (recently raised from 3%), and that after January 2010 the APR goes up to 20.99% (5% higher than the APR for credit purchases). Before BofA corrects me: it is listed in the small print, but it took me 5 minutes to find it. 

So is this abusive or not? I tend to say 'Yes'. This offer is clearly designed for people who need cash most, and those are not financially priviliged, to say the least. The BofA letter only emphasizes the benefits, while hiding the downsides: people in urgent need for cash will be lured into this deal for sure. Therefore my strong statement: "BofA is stealing from the poor". 

What do you think? Is this indeed unsavory, or is this just the American way of doing business: buyer beware?

PS. I called in to stop receiving these checks, but that didn't help, they just increased the frequency.

 

PPS. Also, I still pay a $39 annual fee just to have this BofA credit card (it's my oldest card, so I keep it for my credit history). BofA claims this fee is needed to ensure global acceptance, customer satisfaction, to provide online account access, to maintain security, and to give you balance transfers and cash access. Then why does my other credit card pay me approximately $1000 per year in cash back? 

Collaborative Analytics

Tomorrow I'm meeting with the marketing team at Good Data, an innovative provider of Collaborative Analytics software.

What is Collaborative Analytics?

As far as I currently understand, Collaborative Analytics allows a group of people to create reports on a dataset together, to discuss results, and to refine reports.

It seems to me that there is still an important role for IT, or at least for a reasonably technical person, to upload the dataset and configure the data model. But after that initial step is taken, the reports are fairly easy to use by non-technical people.

The 'collaborative' part of it is that they can leave comments in the reports, not unlike sticky notes. They also support tagging (like you do with blog posts) and revisions, so you can see who made which changes at which time (like with wikis).

Good Data's collaborative analytics solutions runs on Amazon Web Services, so it is almost infinitely scalable.

Stay Positive by Mark Victor Hansen

How Mark Victor Hansen stays up through down times

It’s easy to stay motivated when times are flush. But staying up in down times? That requires a whole other set of skills.

This post is to illustrate how choosing the right keywords in your Title, Heading and content of the article have a dramatic impact on search engine rankings.

This article is about Mark Victor Hansen, and it talks about how he stays positive in a bad economy. So it is key to include his name, and the "Stay Positive" phrase in the title of the article.

Also, any bold or italic text is assigned more weight. On the bright side: it is fairly easy to improve the search engine rankings when you focus just on a couple of things.

This post refers to the article by Selling Power Magazine: Stay Positive. By linking from here, the original article get more credibility.

However, Google says it has not indexed this specific page. You can find out about this by typing the following in the Google search box:

cache:http://www.sellingpower.com/article/display.asp?coverStory=TRUE&aid=SP4774329&pageTitle=

However, the following URL is found:

cache:http://www.sellingpower.com/article/display.asp?aid=SP4774329

Therefore be careful with URL parameters: they may mess up your ranking.

If you search for "Stay Positive Mark Victor Hansen" the Selling Power website is only on position 29, and the URL that is indexed is not a permanent URL, but the temporary 'cover page' URL.

Wedding Website

My fiancee and I recently created a website for our wedding. However, people google "Tina Jep Wedding" and they don't find our website.

I found out that the site (www.tina-jep.com) is not indexed by Google, probably because no other sites are linking to it.

You can add a site to Google, to make Google index it. But this can take a while.

Just to be sure, I'm also adding the link on this website. Google is adding more weight to websites if other websites link to them, ideally using the keywords that are relevant, such as: Tina and Jep's Wedding Website. I hope this helps!