The size of the SaaS market continues to explode and future predicitions indicate extremely strong growth for a number of years to come. For example Forrester Research is estimatingthat the SaaS application market will grow from $10B in 2010 to $92.8B in 2016. This is obviously a very big market, but what I find even more impressive is the number of SaaS applications that are available and being launched. For a quick look at these, check out the SaaS Showcase within the Cloud Computing Showcase. Here you can find many applications by category or industry. There are many horizontal applications, and there are an equally large number of industry-specific solutions.
My take away from this is that companies, and their IT departments, are embracing the benefits of SaaS: speed of deployment; cost-effectiveness; no hardware and software to purchase, deploy and maintain; no shelf-ware etc. This is great to see, particularly when the movement to SaaS is driven by IT departments who see their role as one of providing services to the business regardless of whether those services are delivered in-house, through packaged applications or via a SaaS application.
There is another aspect of the proliferation of all these SaaS applications that should be taken into consideration. There are very few single applications that provide all the functionality an organization requires to support all aspects of their business. There may be some highly-specialized vertical applications for smaller businesses such as a doctor’s office or a real estate office that come close. And NetSuite is a good example of horizontal application that provides multiple components including ERP, CRM and Ecommerce. However, it is likely that most companies will combine multiple SaaS solutions to fulfill their business system requirements.
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An important aspect of effectively presenting performance metrics is that of context. If you were to check the dictionary for “context” you might get definitions such as “the parts of a written or spoken statement that precede or follow a specific word or passage, usually influencing its meaning or effect” or ”the set of circumstances or facts that surround a particular event, situation, etc”. These definitions give a good indication as to why context is so important when reviewing operational or business performance. To truly understand the meaning and implications of a performance metric, we should understand the circumstances and the meaning of the information we viewing. In short, we need context such as:
- How do I interpret this metric? We need the context of the metric definition, how it is calculated, what exactly it is measuring etc.
- Is the current value good or bad? We need the context of a target, goal or best practice;
- Is the metric getting better or worse? We need the context of the historical trend and perhaps forecast projections.
When we start to investigate and analyze the situation, context becomes even more important.
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In the discussion around self-service Business Intelligence, there is a lot of talk about providing users with broad access to information that would be of interest to them. I like how we are heading towards ”democratization of data” to help people in business make better decisions more quickly, but I also believe there has to be some balance with what each person should be able to access given their specific role and scope of authority. The way we look at this is providing “permission-based personalization”. The infrastructure required to make this a reality is sophisticated, particularly since it should operate totally transparently to end-users. Here is an examples of what this means in a use case:
- The vendor might provide best practice templates or modules that contain pre-defined metrics, calculations, alert conditions, visualizations, analytics etc., and may want to protect these so that future upgrades can be rolled out seamlessly;
- At the corporate level, the administrator might have copied and amended some of the vendor provided, charts, gauges, dashboards, metric definitions and may also have augmented these with company-specific elements – again these need to be preserved; and
- At the department or functional level, additional elements may have been added to support the specific needs of the organization.
Against this backdrop, what rights should an individual user have to personalize their experience? There are a variety of ways to address this, but a typical approach may be:
- The individual user is not allowed to modify elements from the vendor, corporate or department level;
- Based on their permissions, individual users can take a copy of selected elements and save these in their personal area (or perspective) and then modify those copies;
- They can create new elements – dashboards, gauges, charts, scorecards etc., but in so doing they are only able to incorporate metrics their permissions allow them to access, including any contextual limitations on each metric (for example a sales rep may only be able to see opportunities in their assigned territory);
- Any new elements they create are available in their personal space (or perspective) but they are still able to access the original vendor, corporate and department perspectives;
- The user can choose to share any new elements they create, and can specify individual users or groups; However when ever any of these new users attempt to access or incorporate these new elements into their personal space, the permissions infrastructure will check their access rights before allowing them to proceed.
Self-service or Personalized Business Intelligence is a great concept, but in order to prevent complete anarchy a sophisticated permissions infrastructure is required. Implemented properly, this is unobtrusive and the user is guided transparently through the process. If you’d like to learn more about this approach, ask us about our new Visual Designer capability, or access more information here.
I’ve been on the road almost continuously lately talking to many people in the industry. We’ve had some great conversations regarding the inevitable movement to the cloud, and what it will take for companies to deploy SaaS applications to support their business systems. As companies move to the cloud, they typically are deploying multiple SaaS applications that might include:
- CRM (Salesforce, NetSuite CRM, Sugar CRM,…)
- ERP/Financials (NetSuite, Workday, Intaact, Plex…)
- Marketing Automation (Eloqua, Marketo, Silverpop…)
- Customer support (Parature, LiveOps, ServiceNow…)
- HR (SuccessFactors, Taleo, Ultimate, Workday…)
- Supply Chain (SPS Commerce, Kinaxis,..)
There are many other SaaS applications so if your favorite is not listed, please don’t be offended as I tried to provide examples rather than a comprehensive list.
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I’ve been speaking with analysts about the capabilities we announced last week and have received a lot of very positive feedback. One area we’ve had some interesting comments on is when I use the term “Personal BI” to describe our enhanced personalization that allows each individual user to easily modify their user interface and the data presented (within the bounds of their access security) and either keep that private or share these changes with others. Some analysts suggested that they thought I was referring to making a version of our BI platform available solely for a single, individual user. I’ve had others comment that they throught ”Personal BI” was targeting personal use outside the work environment. In reality we are making enterprise BI personal to each user within the company.
So I’ve decided to do some crowd-sourcing and see if I’m off on a tangent with the use of “Personal BI”. It seemed to me that many vendors are using “self-service BI” and as a result this term is somewhat abused, and to me, self-service doesn’t really cover the personalization aspects that we’ve built into myDIALS. When looking for a new term we started with “Personalized BI” but the additional syllables makes it hard to roll off the tongue, and we adopted “Personal BI”. So here are the highlights of what we offer:
- Modules of best practices (metrics, calculations, visualizations, alerts, analytics etc) around specific functional areas and business processes, which can be extended for specific needs;
- Additionally fully customized solutions can be easily and quickly configured;
- Each user is presented with information specific to their role, scope of authority and decisions they make;
- A Visual Designer enables each user to easily personalize their experience by changing the layout, content, alert conditions and visualization used to present their information;
- The user can then choose to keep these changes private or share their modified components with selected other users or groups of users.
The question is: Should we call this “self-service BI”, “personal BI”, “personalized BI” or something completely different? I look forward to your comments.
It has been a busy week in which we announced new functionality and we have been participating at NetSuite’s SuiteWorld event in San Francisco. One of the new capabilities we have is more sophisticated Sales Pipeline and Forecast Analysis, which is included in the myDIALS NetSuite Module V2, and is also available for Salesforce.com customers. In a blog last week, I highlighted the types of questions sales professional ask on a daily basis, and we’ve tried to address all of those with this new module.
I’m excited about this new capability because it seems to be a distinct gap area for many CRM systems. Of course you can configure a myriad of reports, and then go about running them to show projected forecasts for a time period or saving off periodic snapshots to provide pipeline history. But this is truly cumbersome and takes lot of time to produce, run and maintain all the plethora of reports you end up creating. There has to be a better, automated, more intuitive and interactive way to analyze your sales situation.
I’m please to say there certainly is, as we have applied our multi-dimensional BI approach and analytic capabilities to this problem. To make it even more cost-effective and to reduce maintenance, we utilize our dynamic integration infrastructure to automate the configuration and continuous synchronization of the dimensional hierarchy. This is very important as every company adds or changes almost daily with new customers, sales reps, products etc, and having the BI configuration programmatically maintained is a huge time and resource saving, and also ensures consistent, accurate data representations.
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There are a number of vendors in the market talking about “self-service BI”. I find this term confusing as it could mean simply that a business analyst is able to extract business data and slice and dice it to produce reports without needing assistance from IT or a vendor. It could mean complete anarchy where anyone can decide to create a metric, calculated in any way they choose and then use that as “their” KPI. This typically happens when performance management by spreadsheet goes viral and each department or person has their own special set of metrics they use to show how well they are doing even if they are completely inconsistent with how the next department or person is calculating metrics with the same or similar names.
Personal Business Intelligence is a term we are using to describe the ability to achieve business information consistency, with the ability for every person using that information to personalize the way they use that information - the layout, visuals and the content of the information they use to make better, faster daily decisions. Of course they have access only to the information they have been authorized to see based on their job function, role and scope of authority. This week we have announced our newest version of myDIALS and it is in large part focused on making Personal BI a reality – I think about it as we’ve put the “my” into myDIALS.
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We’ve been busy addressing an issue that has vexed sales people and management for almost as long as people have sold items to other people. To succeed in sales, there are a number of questions that switched on sales professionals ask on a daily basis:
- Am I going to reach the target for this period (month / quarter / year)?
- Are my to-date sales on track? What is their trend and projection look like?
- Do I have enough opportunities that have a high enough probability remaining to close in the period?
- Am I at risk due to some large deals associated with a single customer, partner or sales rep?
- Are we building backlog because we have some products that we can’t ship?
- What is the average sales discount and what is driving that?
- Are we closing deals with sufficient gross margin?
- What is the overall average sales cycle? How much time are deals staying in each stage?
- Are deals moving through the various sales cycle stages or are they getting delayed in one or more stages?
- Are there any anomalies relating to expected seasonality and past history in sales cycles or forecast projections?
- Is my win/loss ratio on track and trending the right way? What deals have I lost? Is there a pattern (a particular partner, sales rep, product line, competitor etc.)?
- Are the conversion ratios and cost per lead/opportunity/sale all looking OK?
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I recently participated in a discussion on DM Radio that was a segment on “Knowing where to Look with Dashboards and Scorecards”. It was a great discussion, but like many of these live conversations, you think about other things you should have contributed after it ends. So this post is intended to provide more perspective on the current status and best practices for dashboards and scorecards.
We can view dashboards and scorecards from three perspectives:
- What characteristics should be incorporated into today’s dashboards?
- What content should be presented on the dashboard?
- How can dashboards be most effectively used?
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It seems that Business Intelligence has always been thought of as something that is used by business analysts to slice and dice various business data in order to gather insights and provide supporting information that is used by management and executives to make strategic decisions. It’s time that we thoroughly overhauled that thinking. Business Intelligence shouldn’t just be for a select few business analysts, and it definitely shouldn’t be constrained to only supporting strategic decisions.
All the business books I’ve read highlight the need for operational excellence – some even rate that higher than having a great strategy. This means that Business Intelligence has to evolve and support the decision making process across a broad audience within a company – in short BI has to become Personal. But what is Personal BI?
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