Gartner’s Business Intelligence Outlook for 2010

Some of the big takeaways from GeoJan’s highlights of the Gartner’s predictions for BI in 2010:

• Compound growth rate for BI platforms through 2013 will be 6.3%.
• Momentum grows in the shift from a central core of report authors to empowering users to analyze the data themselves to get the answers they really need.
• SAP and IBM (Cognos) customers are loosing patience. Attributed to these companies still being in the midst of the transition pains that come from acquisition.
• All those Challengers in the BI space were Visionaries the year before and that’s good.  Their innovation is driving better product development choices from the Leaders of the quadrant.
• The goal to consolidate to one enterprise BI platform is still a talking point at a lot of organizations.  The difficult economy and the need for better, faster competitive intelligence open the doors for the pure-play vendors to slip into the same organizations where the megavendors have setup shop.
• (Reading between the lines)  A growing challenge will be how to manage all the intelligence evolving on the network shares and desktops with the growth of these light-weight, pure-play BI tools.

Below is the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence.  Are you seeing these trends taking shape where you are?

Source: GeoJan

Let Your Team Amaze You

“Imagination is more important than knowledge.”    -Albert Einstein

Take a look at your development team(s).  Do you see a bunch of acronyms or are you blown away by their creativity? When you ask for a solution to a problem do you get one answer, or four possible solutions?  Do they ever walk to your desk out of the blue to bounce a brand new idea off of you?  Do they have pet projects and did they come up with those themselves?

There are lots and lots of people who can write code, draw up a project plan, fix a bug or create a data model.  But you don’t want a manila team.  Big thinkers energize everyone they come into contact with.  Even if many of those ideas are half-baked and unrealistic, these are the kind of people you want on the team.  Because sooner or later they’re going to hit onto something big.  And that’s one more big idea than those that develop-by-the-numbers.

Thinking of it another way, if you were planning a big event, a gathering of some of the most important people in your life, and you had the choice to hire a short order cook or a chef to work it which would you choose?

Creative types deliver better solutions.  Encourage it, cultivate it and shape it.  Then stand back and watch your team amaze you.

The #1 Reason BI Isn’t Getting To That Next Level

The quality is bad.

Interesting quote by John Thompson of Kognito:

‘[Executives] are saying, “Are you certain that syndicated sales data and marketing data from last year is high quality data I can use to make decisions?” They’re still asking about that.’

When talking about the quality of any system there’s two parts to it:  real quality and perceived quality.   The prior are things you can eyeball, create QA/QC test plans around, foot to baselines, regression test and hand off to your development team to fix.  This type of quality is what most technology teams focus on.

Perception, however, is more powerful, influential and much-much-less scientific.   If someone doesn’t believe in the quality of your data, or your team, then it really doesn’t matter if the data is correct or not.  Often the perception is well warranted at some point.  However, once the real quality is corrected, that perception lingers.  What needs rebuilt at this point is your reputation and that doesn’t happen in a day.

You need to work harder at changing your image, and it needs to be at the top of the list.  If people don’t have faith in the quality of what you and your team do then you’re not going to be able to move forward with the things you really want to do and the business really needs.

Quality is job #1.  Nail that before moving onto the more innovative initiatives.  It’s your dial tone.