Business Intelligence

Business Intelligence Goes Virtual

noreply@blogger.com (Business Intelligence) — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 20:36:00 +0000

Business Objects joins the growing list of software companies offering virtual appliances compatible with the VMware infrastructure.

Business-intelligence software never makes it past the wish list at many companies. Why? Because of the time and commitment it takes to install and get the software working right. It’s an even bigger problem at smaller businesses with limited IT resources.

Several tech vendors earlier this year introduced BI appliances; boxes that are pre-configured with business intelligence software and ready to go. But that doesn’t get around the annoyance some IT shops have with that approach — you’re stuck with yet another box to fit into the data center.

Now BI appliances are going virtual. Business Objects, the largest pure-play BI vendor, announced this week its first virtual appliance, which it will sell both direct and through VMware’s Virtual Appliance Marketplace. A business with a virtualization infrastructure in place can install a pre-configured, pre-optimized version of Business Objects Crystal Decisions, including a ready-to-go database, and the proper security protocols, on any available box in its data center. More of the company’s offerings will be available as virtual appliances next year, the company said.

Consider the virtual appliance an alternative, and not a replacement for the BI appliances that come in actual hardware form. IBM (IBM) and Netezza in March began selling BI appliances loaded with Business Objects software through a partnership with the company, and Cognos introduced its BI appliance in May. And for pure maintenance-free BI, Business Objects also offers its software as a service.

Business Objects is targeting all its appliance offerings at small and midsize businesses, a customer base that’s been growing 50% faster than Business Objects enterprise business, said VP Todd Rowe. The sale of BI appliances through IBM and Netezza already has resulted in “significant revenue,” he said.

About 600 virtual appliances are sold through VMware’s marketplace. Microsoft (MSFT) Exchange Server and SQL Server are among the most popular downloads, as are various flavors of security systems and firewalls.

But Business Objects and a smaller BI vendor, Panorama Software, are the only ones–so far — to venture into the virtual appliance world (Panorama announced its offering in June). Many Business Objects customers are already running the software on a VMware infrastructure, Rowe said, but the virtual appliance approach requires less IT involvement. He claims a company can be turn on a virtual appliance and have it in operation within several hours.

As Business Objects and other vendors try to help businesses tick away at the cost of BI through virtual appliances and hardware appliances, it’s making it possible for more small and midsize companies to invest in business analytics. Yet barriers to entry for smaller companies remain with BI that appliances — virtual or otherwise — haven’t yet solved, including ease of use, data quality problems, and the cost of good data architects and BI software licenses.

Pentaho Receives $8M in Series B Funding

noreply@blogger.com (Business Intelligence) — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 20:32:00 +0000

Leading Venture Capital Firms Invest in an Accelerated Growth Plan for The World’s Most Popular Open Source BI Suite

Pentaho Corp., creator of the world’s most popular Open Source business intelligence (BI) suite, today announced that it has received an additional $8M in funding in order to further fuel its accelerated growth. Pentaho’s existing investors, New Enterprise Associates (NEA) and Index Ventures, funded the entire series B financing round.

Andre M. Boisvert, Pentaho’s Chairman and co-founder stated, “We are delighted with the fact that the market’s adoption of our leading Open Source BI platform has gathered such momentum. In order for the Company to be in a position to fully capitalize on this trend, the Board of Directors approved the acceleration of the initial business plan and additional growth capital.” Boisvert went on to add, “Savvy venture firms always want to put additional capital to work in their most promising portfolio companies. Our existing investors clearly saw the opportunity to increase their stake in Pentaho and accelerate the company’s growth in the process.”

Demand for the Pentaho BI project has grown from 5,000 downloads/month in August 2005 to more than 55,000/month in June 2006. These numbers show that there is clear demand from the marketplace for Pentaho’s Open Source BI solution.

Vladimir Jacimovic, NEA Partner and Pentaho Director, stated, “The success behind the Pentaho BI project is an indication and validation that Open Source BI is being seriously considered and implemented by customers. A recent survey by Ventana Research has found that 43% of organizations are evaluating Open Source BI solutions and that another 40% are actually deploying Open Source BI solutions. When you couple these facts with Pentaho’s leading position in the Open Source BI market place, it was an easy decision to step up our investment.”

Industry surveys continue to rank Business Intelligence as one of the top five focus areas for IT investment. Leading research firm IDC is predicting that the BI market will grow by 10% to almost $6.5B in software spending in 2006. Richard Daley, Pentaho’s CEO and co-founder, stated, “We felt that by taking in additional capital we could more rapidly execute on our product roadmap, thereby giving customers and the community more reasons to give up on proprietary offerings sooner rather than later.”

Bernard Dalle, Partner at Index Ventures and Pentaho Director, said, “We believe that Pentaho has the vision, a strong team, the best technology and the support of a smart, global community to become the single most significant force in business intelligence. As such, we were eager to increase our investment and we look forward to continuing to work with such a dynamic and exciting company.”

MOSS 2007 - What It Means for Your Business

noreply@blogger.com (Business Intelligence) — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 20:28:00 +0000

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, more commonly abbreviated as MOSS 2007, is one of the critical business intelligence tools available today. According to Microsoft itself, MOSS 2007 can be used to “facilitate collaboration, provide content management features, implement business processes, and supply access to information that is essential to organizational goals and processes (1).” As such, this is a product that is important to understand in today’s business world and that can be used by both large and small enterprises.

What is MOSS 2007?

MOSS 2007 is a cohesive integration of business intelligence tools established by Microsoft to ease collaboration by using specialized websites, or portals. These portals can host documents, files, and even run programs and services such as blogs and wikis. Multiple users can be granted access to these portals and to all or some of the items hosted there. Users can then log in and make changes directly to these items in a centralized space.

The business intelligence tools offered by SharePoint are of particular use to companies that have employees in multiple offices around the world or employees that telecommute, but it can also be used within a single location when collaboration on a single document is critical.

The Six Pillars of MOSS 2007

The biggest selling point for MOSS 2007 when it comes to its business intelligence tools is that it enables easy collaboration between users, whether they are in a single office or located around the world. It is commonly accepted that the MOSS 2007 system is based on six pillars (2):

* Business intelligence
* Collaboration
* Portals
* Enterprise search
* Enterprise content management
* Business processes and forms

These pillars work together to create a comprehensive system of business intelligence tools that enables an entire enterprise to work together as a team. MOSS 2007 is extremely useful to any business that has to collaborate with its employees via documents or e-mail, printed or voice communication. It hosts all of this information in a single space and allows for information gathering and updates without major hassles. SharePoint is installed quickly and easily on a server and replaces many free utilities (Joomla or Mambo, for example).

Business Intelligence Tools that Seamlessly Integrate with Microsoft Office

One of the key benefits of MOSS 2007 is its ability to integrate with Microsoft Office, a system that many businesses already use on a daily basis. This program offers an assortment of business intelligence tools and processes that allow employees to quickly and easily collaborate with one another. Through SharePoint Portals, a website can be established to which Microsoft Office files can be uploaded and distributed outside of an e-mail setting. An online task list can also be established for all users to utilize, and templates are available as well. Users can either log into the portal site via a standard web browser or can open up the Office application from within MOSS 2007 directly.

MOSS 2007 has the greatest benefit with its business intelligence tools when people are dealing with Microsoft Excel. For example, a user can upload an Excel spreadsheet to a SharePoint website. The original user can choose to make all or just part of the spreadsheet accessible by others. The benefit of this is that proprietary formulas and other data can be kept confidential while still allowing outside users to provide the necessary new information for the spreadsheet.

In addition, with MOSS 2007, there is a single spreadsheet that all users are accessing. If e-mail had been used to distribute the same spreadsheet, then various users would have different versions and it would require extra time to find out who was in control of the “latest and greatest.” If different users were handling different copies of the spreadsheet, the data would be scattered and would need to be compiled at a later time. Instead, all users can take advantage of the business intelligence tools offered by SharePoint and can log in to interact directly with a single worksheet.

Helping Create a Solid Team

Users of the business intelligence tools provided by MOSS 2007 are brought closer together as a team. MOSS 2007 allows users to contact one another via e-mail and instant messaging, which can enhance productivity. MOSS 2007 also provides the ability to create templates that can be accessed easily through a consistent user interface.

In addition, one of the business intelligence tools provided by MOSS 2007 enables team leaders to establish and monitor key performance indicators (KPIs). In this way, everyone on a team can see at a glance what goals have to be met and what milestones have already been attained. In this way, team members can make intelligent business decisions. Team members can also look at aggregate data from a variety of sources to monitor trends, which can then help to make decisions about future concerns for the business.

Conclusion

MOSS 2007 benefits business intelligence because its business intelligence tools allow for easy collaboration and for various team members to adjust and approve a single document in a central location. Almost any industry can benefit from the use of SharePoint, particularly if the company already uses Microsoft Office. By installing MOSS 2007, a company will find that it can strengthen existing teams, help create new teams, and eliminate confusion while making it easier for employees to work together on a wide variety of projects.

Flex your Business Intelligence

noreply@blogger.com (Business Intelligence) — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 20:25:00 +0000

For the past two years I have been wading through the waters of Business Intelligence or BI as it is commonly referred as. I have been developing universes (a meta layer that binds to tables and columns, this is the short definition) and reports as well as modeling data for analytical purposes. My tool set is pretty standard as my company has invested in Oracle as the database and Business Objects XI , also known as BOXI, as the BI analytics tool.

BOXI is a tool that provides end users with the ability to answer their business questions by creating a data cube and slicing through the data. BOXI allows users to choose their dimensions and measures and output the data in various formats (excel, csv, pdf, etc) or a Web Intelligence document. The Web Intelligence document allows the user to drill down, up, and across the cube to find the ‘one version of the truth,’ the holy grail of BI.

BOXI provides an SDK for Java and .net that has allowed developers to embed BOXI reports into web applications, but now there is a new tool for integrating data from BOXI. Hold on, because this is where it gets cool. BOXI Release2 offers ‘Query as a Web Service.’ This tool enables a developer to create a web service through a desktop interface that is then published to an application server. Think of this as ‘black box‘ development. The developer selects dimensions and measures from a universe, provides some filters, and selects the publish button. Presto! There is a soap based web service waiting to be consumed . “But what does this have to do with Flex” you ask.
Flex the Service

By utilizing the Flex 2 framework you can consume a web service in a very few lines of mxml. We consume the service created by Query as a Web Service and then we bind it to a visual component (DataGrid, List, Chart, etc.). Here is a snippet of Flex 2 code that shows how to consume the service.

{userid.text}
{password.text}

{scac.text}

So What’s the Big Deal?

What’s the big deal?! I created a web service based off of a Business Objects universe and deployed it without having to write any code! Then I took the data retrieved by the web service and wrote a few lines of Flex to create a component that can provide my end user with data within any web application or device that has the Flash runtime. Now that’s what the big deal is! Fast and efficient development cycle that produces useful Business Intelligence data without having the user to muck around with the BOXI interface. Well, maybe it isn’t that big of a deal, but it’s still pretty cool.

ASU Launched Master’s Degree in Business Intelligence

noreply@blogger.com (Business Intelligence) — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 20:23:00 +0000

The American Sentinel University announced the availability of their newly accredited online degree program, Master of Science in Business Intelligence (MSBI). This new online degree is designed to hone the analytical skills and prepare the student for a position in the fast growing business intelligence field.

With this degree in Business Intelligence, students will now be able to address the needed core strength in real-time analytics and data-driven operations. They will be able to acquire the necessary competencies that are required to gain insight and intelligence for the efficient operations of modern business enterprises. The needs for qualified professionals to fill the high-growth sectors of our economy will now be supplied.

For more information about the Master’s Degree in Business Intelligence, and how this course works, please click here.

Of interest: As businesses grow knowing more about business telephone systems and the uses of steel buildings may become more important to you, so research steel buildings ahead of time to save money and buy good merchandise.

Overachievers make me feel like I haven’t achieved enough

noreply@blogger.com (Business Intelligence) — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 20:18:00 +0000

It seems like everyone at my new job has an MBA from Stanford. Those that don’t have an MFA or a PhD or won the Macarthur Genius Grant. Okay maybe not that last one. But still!

Here is the kind of bio these people all have (name omitted to decrease recognizableness): “Focus areas include information management (advanced search and navigation, information integration, multi-modal interfaces), social software (social networks, blogs, wikis, P2P), and intelligent agents, with applications to internet search, business intelligence, ecommerce, productivity and collaboration. PERSON formulated an investment thesis on the future of search and played a key role facilitating the firm’s investment in COMPANY. PERSON was also an advisor to VC COMPANY’s consumer internet portfolio, including SUCCESSFUL COMPANY, SUCCESSFUL COMPANY, SUCCESSFUL COMPANY.”
I then was reading the New York Times over the weekend, and glanced at the marraige pages, and I started seeing how many people who are 28 or 30 years old that have titles like “Senior Vice President” or “Managing Director.” Most of those people also have graduate degrees, which means they probably never really had any of the shitty jobs at the bottom of the ladder, thus saving themselves 4 or 5 years of advancement.

So what do I have that the 30-year old senior vice president doesn’t have? I guess it boils down to just years and years of experience dealing with people and organizations and projects and knowing what tends to work and what doesn’t. Is that as valuable as a graduate degree? I have no idea. I kind of get scared that I jacked myself out of a senior vice president job when, after graduating from college, I opted to just start working instead of going back to school. I wanted to get it STARTED!

And some of the personality traits that derailed me in college serve me quite well as an internet worker. For example, I used to always turn in my first drafts of papers; I never did a “final” draft. Because back then I was typing everything on a typewriter and if you realized as you went along that you could phrase something better, or make a stronger argument, you’d have to re-type the entire page, or worse, start over! And since I always finished these things the night before, I never had time to re-type ANYTHING.

And that tendency, the tendency to do the real work at the last minute, has served me well too. Something that drives people nuts at web companies is the accelerated pace that everything runs at, with super aggressive deadlines and everything is rush rush rush with barely any time to check your work before you push it out to the world. But for me it’s exactly like college, but instead of frittering away an entire semester before the paper was due, now I only get to fritter away my weekends before the next “life or death” deadline. But it never ever bothers me; it’s the way I’ve always worked.

I went to Los Angeles for work last week, and everyone there is an overachiever in a totally different way. Like, no one has a graduate degree, but they are “on” and creative all the time. Also, they know everyone else in the industry and are networking all the time. It’s funny, I thought I would party and shop in Los Angeles since it’s always been that kind of city for me to visit. But I didn’t! It was like an actual business trip! I went to bed early two nights, and the one night I got someone at the company to go out with me, I had three martinis and called it a night by 10:30. (That’s right, going to bed early for me means way before 10:30! I am old and tired!)

IBM Acquires Business Intelligence Firm Alphablox

noreply@blogger.com (Business Intelligence) — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 20:15:00 +0000

Most people who have used WebSphere Portal v5.x, have seen the rich editors that are shipped as part of the built-in Portal Document Manager. What a lot of people don’t realise is that this technology comes from a company called Alphablox (it’s in the “about” dialog box on the portlets if you look carefully enough !).

Apparently IBM just bought Alphablox - which to me seems like a good move - they seem to have some very useful tools, not just these editors, but other technology for business intelligence, including charting, and embedded analytics.

It makes sense to me to have the option to include more advanced functionality into products like Portal - analytics and business intelligence is one of the key business drivers behind Portal solutions our customers are asking for.

e-Pro Magazine covered the article:

IBM Acquires Business Intelligence Firm Alphablox

July 19, 2004 —
IBM has just inked a deal to acquire Alphablox Corp., a privately held business intelligence company based in Mountain View, California. Financial details were not disclosed for the deal, which is expected to be finalized later in July, according to IBM.

Alphablox’s operations will be integrated into IBM’s Information Management software business, and its products will be available from IBM and its business partners. Alphablox products allow customers to embed analytics, such as customer buying trends, into existing applications. This helps companies improve business insight by accessing data from across the enterprise and presenting that information in custom views.

Future of News workshop

noreply@blogger.com (Business Intelligence) — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 20:10:00 +0000

Confirmed speakers include Kevin Anderson, David Blei, Steve Borriss, Dan Gillmor, Matthew Hurst, Markus Prior, David Robinson, Clay Shirky, Paul Starr, and more to come.

The Internet—whose greatest promise is its ability to distribute and manipulate information—is transforming the news media. What’s on offer, how it gets made, and how end users relate to it are all in flux. New tools and services allow people to be better informed and more instantly up to date than ever before, opening the door to an enhanced public life. But the same factors that make these developments possible are also undermining the institutional rationale and economic viability of traditional news outlets, leaving profound uncertainty about how the possibilities will play out.

Our tentative topics for panels are:
» Data mining, visualization, and interactivity: To what extent will new tools for visualizing and artfully presenting large data sets reduce the need for human intermediaries between facts and news consumers? How can news be presented via simulation and interactive tools? What new kinds of questions can professional journalists ask and answer using digital technologies?
» Economics of news: How will technology-driven changes in advertising markets reshape the news media landscape? Can traditional, high-cost methods of newsgathering support themselves through other means? To what extent will action-guiding business intelligence and other “private journalism”, designed to create information asymmetries among news consumers, supplant or merge with globally accessible news?
» The people formerly known as the audience: How effectively can users collectively create and filter the stream of news information? How much of journalism can or will be “devolved” from professionals to networks of amateurs? What new challenges do these collective modes of news production create? Could informal flows of information in online social networks challenge the idea of “news” as we know it?
» The medium’s new message: What are the effects of changing news consumption on political behavior? What does a public life populated by social media “producers” look like? How will people cope with the new information glut?

Semi-structured data spreadsheets

noreply@blogger.com (Business Intelligence) — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 20:04:00 +0000

I will christen this blog with a brief discussion about semi-structured spreadsheets (or what we, here at DataDefractor.com, call “semi-structured spreadsheets”) - the primary kind of data sources targeted for normalization by DataDefractor.

DataDefractor’s User Guide contains an extensive chapter dedicated to the intricate details of this kind of data sources, so I will try to be concise and you can consider this an introduction to the main problem DataDefractor is designed to solve.

Depending on who you ask, you may get a different definition of the term “semi-structured data”. Some people, for instance regard semi-structured data as data stored in XML or HTML format. Another group defines it as data, which contains free-form text, video or sound information, which others believe is actually “unstructured” data.

For us, folks who make a living by building business intelligence systems and enterprise data warehouses, the most interesting definition of the term is the one given by database theorists:

Semi-structured data is data that exhibits any of the following characteristics:
No fixed schema (e.g. not relational)
Structure is implicit and irregular
Data is nested and heterogeneous

In our data integration efforts, we often encounter data sources, which seem to fit this description. These are typically spreadsheet documents, arbitrary data dumps, business intelligence cross-tab reports, etc.; documents, produced by various processes within and outside of the enterprise. It is a common requirement to augment a data warehouse, data mart and other kinds of data analytical systems with data captured in such semi-structured data sources for the purposes of performing business intelligence.
The problem of course is the fact that being semi-structured, this data is not loadable into the relational BI system right off the bat even with the more advanced ETL tools. Usually it requires some involved, at times even complex scripting exercise, which leads to a limited solution, bound to handle only part of the possible variations of the individual data source.

Let’s take a look at a sample business report and examine the characteristics that would land it into the category of semi-structured data. I downloaded this report from the National Association of Home Builders website:

No fixed schema (e.g. not relational)
The report has no fixed schema (from relational point of view), because it may grow horizontally and because the columns of the report have no fixed type.

The report contains data about the employment rates of specific categories of employees. Since these categories are positioned across the columns of the report, adding more categories does not change the purpose of the report, but it certainly changes the schema (again, in the relational sense of the term).

As for data type, the second through seventh columns contain both text and numbers. The numbers are the facts captured by the report, while the text is the context of these facts, namely category of employees and the time period the facts have been recorded for.

Structure is implicit and irregular
To the human eye, there is clear structure to the report. However, this structure is implicit and parts of it are not contained within the report itself.

For instance the first column contains both geographic regions and sub-totals. In addition to this, a natural hierarchy exists for the regions. We can easily distinguish the geographic regions from the names of the sub-totals. We can also tell which level a geographic region is at.

We make these distinctions based on our implicit knowledge and the visual guides embedded in the report. Our knowledge is obviously external to the report. As for the visual guides, yes, they are part of the report, but these guides alone do not contribute to the formal structure of the document. What’s missing is a system of rules, which explicitly defines this structure.

Data is nested and heterogeneous
Data nesting can be observed in several places on the report. To begin with, the time period is nested within the context of the employee categories on the horizontal axis of the report. The separate levels of geographic regions, on the other hand, are nested within each other on the vertical axis.

The fact that the data is heterogeneous ties back to the no-fixed-schema discussion. Many data columns in the report contain different types of data at the same time - for example text, integer numbers and currency.

Well, this pretty much covers it for now.

See this series of posts, where I am demonstrating the development of a SQL Server 2005 BI system, which extracts the data stored in this semi-structured data source and loads it into a SQL Server Analysis Services UDM.

Personalization And The Real-Time Social Graph

noreply@blogger.com (Business Intelligence) — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 20:02:00 +0000

In 1971, Herb Simon, Nobel Laureate and Turing Award winner, made an observation that today looks stunningly prescient:

“…a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it”

More than twenty years before the web and email explosion of the 1990s, and before recent developments such as blogging, social networks, microblogging, lifestreaming, location-based services etc., he had identified a fundamental problem that would exist in any information-rich world. Unfortunately, at the time he made the observation, and for most of the next 25-30 years, few people took any notice. As he noted in 1996:

” …many designers of information systems incorrectly represented their design problem as information scarcity rather than attention scarcity, and as a result they built systems that excelled at providing more and more information to people, when what was really needed were systems that excelled at filtering out unimportant or irrelevant information”

Today’s social web, financed mainly by advertising, has created a major new challenge/opportunity that is directly related to the point made by Simon. The goal of “real-time computational advertising” is to intelligently deliver highly relevant, personalized advertising to users of social networks and other web services, in a way that enhances the user experience rather than detracting from it. The effect of the advertising should be to keep the user engaged, to keep their “attention”, rather than turning them off. As the social network model is incorporated into new enterprise software systems, the same issue arises, but with personalized advertising replaced by personalized business intelligence.

Viewed in computational terms, the general problem is pretty easy to describe (if not to solve): How can we continuously deliver the most relevant real-time stream of personalized information to users, e.g. advertising within social networks, or business intelligence within enterprise networks. The starting point for solving this problem is, of course, precisely what Simon pointed out. We have a wealth of live and stored information, and therefore a corresponding attention scarcity. We need systems that excel at filtering out unimportant or irrelevant information in real-time, based on the dynamically changing attention of each user.

So the “social graph” needs to be much more than a static snapshot of stored attention profiles (likes, dislikes, friends, groups, interests), like the static crawl of the web in a search engine. It needs instead to be a live, dynamic structure, continuously adapting in line with the real-time activity streams of each user, for example:
current and recent mobile locations, communications, searches, page visits, tags, invites, accepts, news items read, purchases
wrote about, advertised for sale, wants to buy

Complex real-time analytics on this dynamic “social stream” can then be used to continuously deliver highly relevant personalized information at all times. An outstanding first step in this new direction is Facebook’s powerful News Feed algorithm. The idea is however of much wider applicability, and will potentially have an even bigger impact in reshaping the business intelligence industry. Many/most BI systems today deliver too much information, too slowly, to too few people, and no information to others. It is an area that is ripe for a major overhaul, an overhaul that can be at least in part driven by some of the positive lessons from social networks in recent years, in terms of how to improve engagement and attention.

More on Measuring Business Intelligence (BI) Performance

noreply@blogger.com (Business Intelligence) — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 20:00:00 +0000

Gave this one a little more thought and changed the one axis from Organization to Shareholding Majority. To be honest it is really difficult to represent a projects “power chain” in this simplistic fashion but I think the simplification is useful in that it allows you to discuss an aspect of the power chain. In reality the sponsor could well be a Director of the organization and the MD or CEO could come in between the Sponsor and the Shareholding Majority. The Shareholding Majority may also not be a simple concept in an organization that is widely and indirectly held.

The main point here is an organization (and a projects) governance structure is made up of specific people with specific values and agendas to realize them. This means it is often not useful to talk about what the organization values and more useful to question what specific people in the “power chain” value. If you can get the answers to these questions you can then start to align the values held in the “power chain” and get everyone pulling in the same direction or kill the project early if there is some unresolvable conflict in values in the “power chain”. In the latter case you might have an even bigger problem than just running a successful project!

MUSING - Next Generation Business Intelligence

noreply@blogger.com (Business Intelligence) — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 19:58:00 +0000

I have spent the last two days at a meeting of the Governing Body of the MUSING project (www.musing.eu). This EU project is dedicated to investigating ways “to integrate Semantic Web and Human Language technologies and combine declarative rule-based methods and statistical approaches for enhancing the knowledge acquisition and reasoning in Business Intelligence applications towards industries with a deep socio-economic impact”.

What this means in reality is a group of academics, technologists and business people combining leading edge research and practical experience in projects that will result in the building of a platform that can be deployed in real businesses and, most importantly, to deliver real business value. I will write more on this in the coming weeks but the key areas of interest include:

- Semantic-based Knowledge Management - taking unstructured data in different forms and using new techniques to turn this into data and thence into knowledge. This has links to the drive towards the Semantic Web, aiming to exploit the vast amount of unstructured information on the internet.

- Ontology Engineering - is a key element of the ability to understand unstructured information. Ontologies allow us to describe the kinds of entities that exist in a domain and to describe the relationships they have with each other. This goes further than an XML schema or a data or class model, in that it represents what we know about a domain and not just that entities are related but the reasoning behind those relationships.

- Bayesian Statistics - in the real world, most situations involve a mixture of qualitative and quantitative information and the use of Bayesian analysis and Bayesian networks enables us to bring these together in more effective ways, in order to arrive at a more accurate view of the real world around us.

So what does this mean for Risk Management? - well rather a lot. The issues that we are addressing in MUSING can improve our ability to manage many of the key elements of Risk Management:

- Risk Identification - it can be the risks that are missed completely that cause the greatest damage. Semantic methods, linked to well defined ontologies can play a major role in improving the identification process.

- Risk Assessment - risk assessment is often not quantitative and, where it isn’t, these techniques can be used to find the key assessment data from a wide range of sources and bring them together more accurately than currently possible.

- Loss Management - loss data comes in a wide range of forms; formal and informal, quantitative and qualitative, structured and unstructured, internal and external. The MUSING technology will help to find more information and to make better use of the information that can be found.

- Risk Mitigation - in the same way that Bayesian networks can be used to assess correlated risks, they can also be used to make sure that the benefits gained through mitigation of one risk are reflected in correlated risks.

- Key Risk Indicators - the ability of Bayesian analysis to help us find the correlations between apparently unrelated data and then measure its significance is sure to prove of great value in avoiding risk events.

Using RSS feeds and the Vista RSS Gadget for Business Intelligence

noreply@blogger.com (Business Intelligence) — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 19:48:00 +0000

On occasians I have met a requirement to provide reports or data where all that is required is the value of a single KPI or the number of sales done today. What overkill it is to have to create a report, save it to a BI tool somewhere, ensure scheduling is enabled to send when asked for and to the right place, then I have to phone the user to tell him that his report is there to read should he log on and open and email.

Instead I have provided three solutions to this requirement, if an SMS server is available we have set up a text messageing service, if the office is littered with monitors or LCD screens then we have created ticker tape live reports, however now with every company using Sharepoint and moving to Windows Vista the use of RSS feeds can provide a very quick and effective way of moving non secure punchy data about the company.

Using SQL server I created a very straight forward solution that follows.

First I created a table in a database that I knew a login account used for updating sharepoint and some asp pages in the business had write access too.

CREATE TABLE [dbo].[RSSFeed](
[ItemID] [int] IDENTITY(1,1) NOT NULL,
[ItemName] [varchar](100) NULL,
[PublishDate] [smalldatetime] NULL CONSTRAINT [DF_RSSFeed_PublishDate] DEFAULT (getdate()),
[ItemDesc] [varchar](max) NULL CONSTRAINT [DF_RSSFeed_ItemDesc] DEFAULT (''),
[ItemURL] [varchar](100) NULL CONSTRAINT [DF_RSSFeed_ItemURL] DEFAULT ('')
) ON [PRIMARY]

Also on that table I created a trigger, a trigger is not necessary, a stored procedure or a prompt from the SQL agent will do.

CREATE TRIGGER [dbo].[TR_SendRSS]
ON [dbo].[RSSFeed]
AFTER UPDATE, INSERT
AS
BEGIN
-- SET NOCOUNT ON added to prevent extra result sets from
-- interfering with SELECT statements.
SET NOCOUNT ON;
exec sp_makewebtask @outputfile = 'C:\inetpub\wwwroot\info\rss.xml',
@query = '
SELECT
LTRIM(RTRIM(ItemName)) AS title
, CONVERT(VARCHAR(10),PublishDate,101) AS pubdate
, LTRIM(RTRIM(ItemDesc)) AS description
, LTRIM(RTRIM(ItemURL)) AS link
FROM
RSSFeed item
FOR XML AUTO, ELEMENTS', @templatefile = 'C:\SSMS\XML\RSSTemplate.xml'
END

The trigger is using the sp_Makewebtask command that utilises three parameters.
The output file - @outputfile
The query - @query
The template file - @templatefile

The sp_Makewebtask will take a template text file and look for a series of parameters set within the file and will replace them withe the results of the query, outputting the result as the output file. Write access for the file location and admin writes to the server is needed as well, which I am not too sure of should be the case. Also the Enable Web Assistant check box must be set to true in the SQL server Control Surfaces For Features configuratiuons.

The trigger also uses the FOR XML type script that converts data in table to an XML format. You can try building up the script step by step and using SSIS to export the text file instead.

As for the FOR XML command it will create quite complex data at XML format with one step , but it is collated at the root level. It is then necessary to be able to add the header and footer appropriate for an RSS feed, this is where the template file is used and is pre-created with the relevant information.

Create a new text file, paste in the following.

RSS Management Information Hot List
Important Info delivered via RSS
http://www.bay-it.co.uk/blogs
<%begindetail%>
<%insert_data_here%>
<%enddetail%>

then save the file with extension .xml somewhere the SQL server will be able to see it. Amend amend the trigger parameter setting for the @templatefile as the file path of the newly saved template file.

The parameters with the % signs are replaced directly by the query results parsed by the sp_makewebtask command.

The @outputfile parameters can be changed to somewhere within veiw of the web site used to allow for subscribing to the RSS feed.

Edit or provide a page for the internet of intranet, add the following link to the header of the HTML page. Ensuring the link is the web version of the path to your output xml file

This will enable the orange RSS feed button on IE, for users to either skip to the RSS page or to add the feed to the list of subcribed RSS feeds.

Now to test it.

To create the file insert some data into the RSSFeed table

INSERT INTO [RSSFeed]
([ItemName]
,[PublishDate]
,[ItemDesc]
,[ItemURL])
VALUES
('US Sales Up ! 10% - MTD $45,507,221'
,GETDATE()
,'More information on the main subject, that is displayed when the feed item is selected'
,'http://www.google.co.uk')INSERT INTO [RSSFeed]
([ItemName]
,[PublishDate]
,[ItemDesc]
,[ItemURL])
VALUES
('UK Sales Down ! 5% - MTD £300,000,000'
,GETDATE()
,'More information on the main subject, that is displayed when the feed item is selected'
,'http://www.google.co.uk')INSERT INTO [RSSFeed]
([ItemName]
,[PublishDate]
,[ItemDesc]
,[ItemURL])
VALUES
('Top Salesman - Jenny Hudson - from Birmingham scoring 48'
,GETDATE()
,'More information on the main subject, that is displayed when the feed item is selected'
,'http://www.google.co.uk')

-> a few examples but I hope for a BI person it is not too hard to work out a way of getting the more relevant information into the table. The trigger now will recreate the xml output file for every insert or update, meaning that however frequent the users are refreshing the RSS feeds the data is displayed as soon as the data entered the table.
Now open up the adapted web page and see if the RSS button is now enabled.
Click and see the RSS format xml page, which should allow you to subscribe to the feed and change the frequency update settings.
Lastly, open the RSS feed Vista Gadget and click the options. Chose the ‘RSS Management Information Hot List’ and click save.

There we have it, a real time reporting solution. When ever a row is updated or inserted into the RSSFeed table all subcribers will have it on there screen in minutes.

Business Intelligence at the personalized level

noreply@blogger.com (Business Intelligence) — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 19:43:00 +0000

Previously, I have written about the benefits considering your life as a company - you are the boss and you can only be sacked by your own death.

Another more poetic picture could be that you are the Spaceship Commander on a journey through the big Universe. A unique journey never traveled before by anyone. Would you go on such a journey without at least some kind of navigation and registration tool?

Let us think back for a while. Surely, you remember stories about human beings, societies, minor communities, time ages - and you name it - who and which have had such great influence on the way we do live today.

Where do you think we had been today - and how much do you think we had known - if we today did have no writings from the past?

I hope we do agree that writing with the purpose of registration and navigation is common sense (- but let us not forget the amusement doing this )

Let us go back to the “company picture” for a while.

“Business Intelligence” today is a quite big area in most companies which have reached a certain size; The size where it really becomes important how data and all kind of Matter flows through the “company organism”, how work procedures are carried out, described and enhanced, quality and a lot of other things are kept under control - all the time - in order to make the company able to grow and survive.

Business Intelligence has become a discipline in itself and the IT possibilities - both with regard to hardware and software - have never been bigger or better in order to manage the soul and organism of a company. I have no doubt this area will continue to expand for years. A question is: At what level it is a sound idea trying to do this?

Another question is: What and how much from the “Company” scenario do we want “transferred” to our own management of our own Time, Thought and Matter? Do we want a work description for how we actually eat our breakfast stored in the personal or family based “IT Backbone System”?

That is a big question - together with many others. Today I read about The Home Server recently introduced by Microsoft enabling people “in a home” to share information - also through the internet, outside the home as far as I understood. I do consider this as one of the first steps making it possible to manage a personal life, a small community - a family, sports-club and so on - “professionally as a company” - in some kind of automated level not seen until now.

I have no doubt that organization of Time, Thought and Matter is an area in its childhood. Neither do I have any doubt that my concerns about separation of databases due to the amount of data in the future will become completely unnecessary - because of the ongoing technical progress.

But, there is another question: At what level should we implement Business Intelligence in our own personal database system - our “Personal IT backbone System”?

Should we go down to the smallest detail - or? This question has extremely big influence in our Life Database Design as well as the choices determining which tools we want to use when accessing those data.

If we even could “mirror” our brain into a computer system - would it be sensible to so?

More about this important issue later.

Supporting the National Business Awards

noreply@blogger.com (Business Intelligence) — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 19:39:00 +0000

The success of British industry is annually celebrated with the National Business Awards; held this year on 13 November 2007 at London’s Grosvenor House.

This year’s venue - London’s Grosvenor House.

Once described by Britain’s Prime Minister Gordon Brown as ‘the UK’s business Oscars’, the National Business Awards is an independent programme which recognises and rewards excellence, innovation and success, and identifies outstanding businesses of all sizes and from all sectors across the UK.

The Institute of Commercial Management is very pleased to be involved in the awards, which are sponsored by Orange, in association with The Daily Telegraph and organised by CMP Information.

The 2007 programme celebrated organisations large and small, showcasing outstanding examples of best business practice across the board. John Hutton, Secretary of State for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform, opened the proceedings and the event was hosted by the revered television presenter Sir Trevor McDonald OBE.

Philip Forrest, Chairman of Judges, commented: “This year showed another step-change in the upward trend in the quality of applications that has become the hallmark of the National Business Awards. It is a continued reflection of the competitive strength of the UK business community.”

The finalist companies together represented a £1,000 billion turnover, generate ?95 billion profit and provide employment for 2.5 million people in the UK and over 250,000 people in the rest of the world.

Judging the awards - ICM’s Chief Executive Professor Tom Thomas

“The UK’s business oscars.”

Drawn from leading businesses, business schools, government, public sector organisations and think-tanks - the 250 judges are selected for their business acumen, knowledge and experience of the specific subject matter.

Professor Tom Thomas, Chief Executive of ICM, has been a judge for the National Business Awards for four years now, having initially been approached whilst Dean of the Business School at Southampton Solent University. In 2007, Tom was a member of the panel of judges for The Orange Business Leader of the Year Award, which is awarded to ‘the outstanding individual who has best demonstrated exceptional leadership and vision’.

This award counted among its finalists the CEO’s of some of Britain’s leading companies, such as J Sainsbury, Balfour Beatty, British Sky Broadcasting and Diageo. The panel finally chose as its winner Warren East, the CEO of ARM Holdings, based in Cambridgeshire.

Professor Thomas said: “I am delighted to be involved in the National Business Awards. My experience of judging various categories over the past four years has been both rewarding and stimulating. The whole process is run in a most professional manner and the quality of entrants in the various categories seems to be getting even higher year on year.

“Likewise, the professional approach adopted by the National Business Awards is highlighted by the awards ceremony itself. It is a tremendous occasion and provides a real boost to all the participants, not just the award winners. I look forward to continuing involvement with the scheme in the coming years.”

Taking responsibility

With an International Centre for Social and Economic Development, it was natural for ICM to be named as one of the sponsors for the ‘The Corporate Social Responsibility Award’, won in 2007 by Adnams Brewer and Leisure Retailer.

Chairman of Adnams Brewery, Jonathan Adnams receives the CSR award from Sir Trever Mcdonald, left, and Sir Tom Farmer.

The awards’ Finalists Book stated: “Adnams views CSR as a way of doing business and not a series of initiatives. It has 17 pubs, a retail chain called Cellar & Kitchen, and it sells 97 per cent of its beer products to other pub outlets. It has created The Adnams Charity which is committed to giving one percent of profit and it has recently created a completely eco-friendly new distribution centre on the outskirts of Southwold.”

ICM looks forward to the 2008 National Business Awards programme, where it will see more evidence of business and industry taking seriously their commitment to the wider social and economic environment surrounding us all.

Visit ICM’s projects website to learn more about the social and economic development initiatives it currently supports: http://projects.icm.ac.uk.

Distributing business intelligence

As a publisher of business and management books, ICM is very interested in harnessing the value that lies in the applications submitted to the National Business Awards. As a result, the Institute is working alongside Southampton Solent University and the National Business Awards to create a book of case studies detailing all of the applicants in the programme - culminating in what is hoped to be an indispensable manual for leadership, business development and commercial success.

Introducing Predictive Analytics

noreply@blogger.com (Business Intelligence) — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 19:35:00 +0000

Todayâ€™s topic is Predictive Analytics and this is the first in a series of audio podcast interviews on this topic. Dr. Eric Siegel is a former computer science professor at Columbia University and the President of Prediction Impact.

Here are questions that I asked:

Q: What is Predictive Analytics and does it accomplish?

Â A: Predictive Analytics is business intelligence technology that produces predictive scores for each individual customer or prospect. What you need to do before employing predictive analytics, is first decide which customer behavior will be most valuable to predict, such as predicting which customer is most likely to respond to an offer or which customer is most likely to cancel their subscription. And the next thing you need to do is prepare the data.Â Your data, which is, essentially, your organization’s collective experience, is leveraged by predictive analytics to produce predictive models and in so doing you’re actually learning from experience.

Q:Â What kind of investment in infrastructure required?

Â A: Well you can start with a pilot initiative for very little, in the way of hardware and software requirements.Â And this is also, you know, a place to start, to achieve a proof-of-principle, demonstrating what kind of return-on-investment can be achieved, such as improved customer retention, or increased profitability of a campaign.Â In this case, the core predictive modeling can usually be done with free evaluation software licenses or with a free open-source tool.

Having said that, however, it’s important to note that what you do need is expertise in predictive analytics, either by way of internal resources, and/or employing professional services.Â This expertise is needed to optimally position this technology, in order to determine the kind of behavior that’s going to be most valuable to predict on the business side, and then, more technically, what data’s require to achieve that prediction goal, and how you really need to prepare that existing data you have now in the right form, so that the resulting predictions you end up getting will be valuable in that they’re accurate and business-actionable.Â And then you apply what’s learned by way of directing, let’s say, a retention campaign, or selecting targeted content on a per-customer basis as far as what’s the product or message each customer is most likely to respond to.

The CFO’s Roadmap to Business Intelligence

noreply@blogger.com (Business Intelligence) — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 19:20:00 +0000

The more things change, the more things stay the same! A year ago, there were three main independent vendors in the Business Intelligence space. A year later they have all been swallowed up. Oracle purchased Hyperion, IBM purchased Cognos and SAP plans to acquire Business Objects. So with all this M&A activity, has what’s important to you changed?

The goal is to rapidly convert your raw data into simple to use, strategic business knowledge. Regardless of how the CPM industry consolidates, what’s important to you as a CFO, still hasn’t changed.

Establish the value proposition - Establish a clear understanding of how business your performance can be improved by investing in a BI program and define the scope of the BI initiative.

Align business intelligence strategy with business strategy - Clearly, organizations would never develop business processes such as order to cash or procure to pay without knowing the purpose of the processes and how they contribute to achieving business results. Use the same business mind set when developing out your BI initiatives.

Address the pleasure and pain principle - having a good BI app with solid training is not enough to ensure the process will be used. In one case I worked on, it took well over a year to get a major international business unit to adopt a very powerful and beneficial BI program mainly because they had other “fires to fight” and were reluctant to go through the “pain” of this implementation. Identify potential issues like these up front and “market” the vision internally to obtain organization support. Get key business stakeholders actively involved in defining and linking the BI strategy and to their business strategy Lastly, here are some additional thoughts to consider:

Always identify a strong business sponsor. In today’s fluid environment, also identify a backup business sponsor.
Make sure to identify the stakeholders with whom you communicate regularly with.
Identify the team members
Once a Project Manager is assigned, determine if it is full time or if they are splitting it with other administrative responsibilities.
Determine how much time each business representative is committing to this project. Is it part time, full time or on request only?
Perform a cost-benefit analysis.
Determine whether you can implement the requested scope given the schedule and the available resources
Address the skills level needed for your team members to perform the responsibilities of their assigned roles. If they need training, make sure they get it.

Unfortunately, too few organizations think about these concepts before jumping in. Maximize your benefit, stop and think about how you are addressing these tips and build out a road map to follow for your BI project.

Oracle Business Intelligence Warehouse Builder 10g

noreply@blogger.com (Business Intelligence) — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 19:18:00 +0000

In this post I would like to tell you more about Oracle Business Intelligence Warehouse Builder (OWB). OWB can import source data from any Oracle database, any database with an ODBC driver or one that is supported via Oracle’s Gateway products. If your data is held in a file, OWB can parse the file and import in the metadata, then generate either an External Table definition or a control file for SQL*Loader.

Once source data has been loaded, mappings can be created to translate source data into tables in the operational data store. OWB provides a graphical user interface to build mappings, a library of common data cleansing transformations including name and address matching, and generates PL/SQL packages that can be scheduled using Oracle Workflow Server, Oracle Enterprise Manager, or your own preferred scheduling tool.

Once your table definitions and mappings have been defined, you can use OWB’s Deployment Manager and Change Manager to manage the lifecycle of your data warehouse project.

Finally, OWB can automatically generate an End User Layer for use with Oracle Business Intelligence Discoverer, to provide a ready-made reporting requirement for operational reporting users.

Operational Reporting

Using OWB, you have defined a set of reporting tables within the Operational Data Store layer, populated them with data drawn from a number of source schemas and tables, and then created an End User Layer so that users can use Oracle Business Intelligence Discoverer Plus and Viewer to create ad-hoc reports. The End User Layer structure can be viewed using Oracle Business Intelligence Discoverer Admininstrator.

Once the End User Layer has been created, you can use Oracle Business Intelligence Discoverer Plus to author workbooks and worksheets based on data in the End User Layer. Using Discoverer, you can build up worksheets by dragging and dropping data items onto the worksheet canvas, and you can select from over 50 types of graph to help you visualize the data you are displaying.

Putting the eye in Business Intelligence - conference overview

noreply@blogger.com (Business Intelligence) — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 19:15:00 +0000

The terminology for Business Intelligence (BI) is rather simple. Putting it to use however is quite a different story. As I have come to understand, there are two key components of BI - a business model side, and an IT side. Combining these to create a more efficient worker, workforce and company is a concept that continues to evolve. However many organizations have successfully incorporated BI, and thus saved money and become more productive.

I do not claim to be any sort of expert on BI, however recently I was in a room full of them.

On March 25 & 26 I joined others from industry at the EUCI Business Intelligence conference in Washington, DC. Co-sponsored by SAS and DecisionPath Consulting, it provided unique knowledge on different angles of BI and how some companies are currently adapting. There was also some mention of technologies related to the IT systems, and a wonderful post-conference delivered by Mr. Steve Williams, President of DecisionPath Consulting.

Day one started off with a great opening presentation from Rose Watkins of Pepco. As the manager of IT projects, she is instrumental in initiating a BI efficiency evaluation for her company. John Bub from NY ISO followed her with a topic on the approach towards justifying the expense of a BI initiative. After a brief networking break, David Haynes from Nexidia spoke about using BI to support the decision making process. This seemed like a clearly defined role for BI, as more companies come to terms with it’s potential. Chris Larson got us started after lunch by discussing how to create a system architecture to support system growth and Bill Dagan from Endasol discussed some methods for streamlining your BI. A recent addition, Jeremy Oosthuizen from Oracle incorporated some interesting topics on technology and finally the end of day-one held a panel discussion on BI vs. performance management and where do the lines meet.

I was very interested in knowing a bit more about how IT and business development worked together and asked a few people about that at our drinks reception following day one. Quite funny how many people made comments on the SAS image of a goldfish with a 3-second memory, as well as showing the intelligent marketing team SAS employs!

Day two was kicked off by David Bloom from DecisionPath talking in detail on how you can derive value from BI investments, I believe he called this ‘process-centric’. Jeff McDonald from California ISO delivered one of the tangible presentations on leveraging enterprise business intelligence to improve efficiency in monitoring. The last presentation was on the other side of BI - marketing. Grace Tian from PECO underlined the need to improve customer satisfaction while achieving financial goals.

Moving forward, Mr. Hawali, conference producer for EUCI will be handling Business Intelligence.

I’d just like to thank the wonderful people I met at the conference and hopefully will cross paths again at another event.

OpenOffice.org annonces Business Intelligence

noreply@blogger.com (Business Intelligence) — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 19:12:00 +0000

Sun and the OpenOffice.org community found an agreement Pentaho to integrate business intelligence features into the next release of OpenOffice.org. Pentaho has recently integrated formerly separate open source projects JFreeReport, Mondrian, Kettle, and Weka to a powerful business intelligence server complete with reporting, analysis and OLAP capabilities.

The project offers a J2EE compliant reporting server, that can connect to many data sources and integrates workflow to create and distribute important report information to the authorized people in an enterprise. The project also offers a powerful report designer based on Eclipse and is modular so it can be integrated into other applications.

Apparently, Sun has decided it will build a Report designer of its own that defines reports in Pentaho’s formats. These reports will draw data from the Pentaho business intelligence server as well as from other sources.

If you want to see how example the integration of OLAP features into an Excel spreadsheet could look like, watch the demos of Jedox Palo Server a repository and OLAP server for Excel spreadsheets. These demos cover a specific case of OLAP and Spreadsheet integration, which I think is one possible use of the OpenOffice.org Business Inteligence integration project. However, it makes the abstract term of business intelligence more concrete. By the way Palo announced at the beginning of the year that it seeks sponsors to build a spreadsheet server for OpenOffice Calc. The sponsors role is to help cover the cost of open source development and to become first users.

Collective Business Intelligence and Enterprise 2.0

noreply@blogger.com (Business Intelligence) — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 19:02:00 +0000

Web 2.0 as defined by Tim O Reilly is "the design of systems that harness network effects to get better the more people use them" . In his blog piece he describes very eloquently how Google's Page Rank mechanism is good case of harnessing user generated content.

Now take this to the Enterprise context. Up till now most of the discussion of Enterprise 2.0 I have seen revolves around two things
1. Harnessing Collective Intelligence of workforce to collaborate and share via tools like Wiki's , blogs . Product sets include Lotus Connections , Suite Two
2. Conversion of traditional office tools to Office 2.0 style platforms. Google Docs , HP Adaptive Enterprise Solution are excellent examples that basically focus on the ability to conduct normal business in a collaborative environment without being co-located.

A third part perspective of Enterprise 2.0 that should probably be included in the mix is the Business Intelligence gathered as a result of the network effect taking place with the continuous accumulation of Employee and Customer generated data and having an even broader data set as a result of SaaS applications serving more than one Customer.

So consider Salesforce.com - with several organizations using salesforce.com , they pretty much know the business benchmarks of processes in an industry (example :If they have 15 customers in the consulting space who use salesforce from sale to staffing cycle , salesforce will have the data to understand what it takes to improve the cycle by comparing various customers).

Frankly , If I was an SaaS player , I would pay to get users to use my software so that I can get their data and further master the business processes based on Data Analysis. As Tim pointed out , that in Web2.0 world Data is King and for Enterprises in 2.0 world , knowing what data is your core asset (and hence not shareable) and what data is something that you can share is going to be key.

So now you know - why did SAP buy Business Objects ? To enable Collective Business Intelligence on their Business By Design platform stupid.