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.
Read the rest of this article…
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.
Read the rest of this article…
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?
Read the rest of this article…
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?
Read the rest of this article…
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?
Read the rest of this article…
A big part of any Business Intelligence solution is getting data into the data warehouse / data mart / multi-dimensional data store. There are a number of BI vendors who claim data connectors to a large number of data sources – indeed at myDIALS we have 35+ standard connectors to various CRM, ERP, manufacturing systems, databases, spreadsheets etc. These allow us to extract data from the source system using a variety of web services interfaces, APIs, ODBC / JDBC, SQL script, file extracts etc. This is fine for ensuring a comprehensive, consolidated data store, but it is a bit primitive as it leaves a lot of configuration and maintenance to be performed manually by a system administrator. Businesses continually change – adding sales reps, introducing new products, selling through new partners, moving to new locations, restructuring the organization etc, and the configuration of the dimensional hierarchy must be updated to match, in order to ensure information accuracy and consistency.
As we have evolved our focus to being “BI For the Cloud” as opposed to simply “BI In the Cloud” we realized we had to do things differently, as the majority of the mid-market companies gravitating to SaaS solutions don’t have the IT or system admin resources to manually update configurations. This is made more difficult by the situation where companies are selecting multiple SaaS solutions to cover all of their business system needs. So here is what we believe is required to take the leap forward to “Dynamic Data Source Integration”. Read the rest of this article…
I am continually impressed by the traction cloud-based systems are gaining, particularly Software as a Service (SaaS). You are probably aware of the large public SaaS companies such as salesforce, NetSuite, SuccessFactors, Taleo, Concur and others – there are around 20 public SaaS companies today. It seems that there are a number of other SaaS companies heading towards an IPO in the next twelve months – for example Cornerstone OnDemand recently filed. The SaaS ecosystem continues to expand and it is relatively straightforward to fulfill all or at least the majority of business system requirements in the cloud today – CRM, ERP, Ecommerce, Marketing Automation, HR and Talent Management, Supply Chain Management etc.
I find this very interesting as this is where the industry was a decade or two ago with on-premise products from multiple vendors that supported different functions before Oracle, Infor, Sage and others began their respective acquisition sprees. Remember JD Edwards, Siebel, BaaN, Manugistics, I2 and a bunch of others? What business people quickly realized was that although all these helped by supporting specific functions or aspects of the business, it was difficult to understand the performance of an entire business process or value chain, identify issues and opportunity areas, and quickly gather enough relevant information to make good business decisions. This lead to the advent of Business Intelligence (BI) as a solution category to span these various systems, extract relevant data that was loaded into data warehouses and then made available for visualization, reporting and analysis.
We have a similar phenomena happening today, although with some nuances to match the cloud computing environment.
Read the rest of this article…
Analytics is a hot topic with a lot of buzz in the industry. All too often I fear that business people tune out discussions of analytics because it is perceived as a topic for analysts, technologists, statisticians and “propeller heads”. The reality is that carefully crafted analytics can be used by everyone making daily business decisions to enhance the speed and efficacy of those decisions. As an example we might be alerted to a performance issue that requires our attention. We typically go through a series of questions as we try to characterize that issue including:
- What lead up to this?
- Has it been a gradual decline in performance or something that happened abruptly?
- If I take no action what is likely to happen?
- What was happening the same time last month, last quarter or last year?
- What are the major contributors to the issue?
- Is this an abnormality or a systemic issue?
- Is there a cause and effect relationship that can be identified?
Read the rest of this article…
I read an interesting report by Aberdeen Group titled “The ABCs of Executive Analytics”. You can get free access to this report here for a limited time. I like Aberdeen’s analysis as they seek to identify the differences between “Best in Class” companies versus “Average Companies” and “Laggards” around a specific topic. In this case there are some big differences in terms of performance:
- Best in Class achieved 42% average improvement in year over year operating profit versus 11% for Average and -5% for Laggards;
- Best in Class also achieved 41% average organic revenue growth versus 12 % for Average and -5% for Laggards.
With this clear level of performance superiority, it is certainly interesting to see what the Best in Class are doing differently to achieve those results.
Read the rest of this article…
