3. Dashboards will continue to provide buzz within corporations.

Business users will get excited about being able to actually see data graphically and then drill down into the details (exception reporting from a graph!) IT will use dashboards to justify BI projects, particularly when past BI efforts stalled out after only attracting “power users.”

Remember when dashboards used to be called Executive Information Systems (EIS)? Now that every BI tool vendor offers them, they're more available and relatively easy to deploy. It’s terrific to be able to deploy dashboards to effectively present information to business users, enabling them to monitor their corporation’s performance. It is also an excellent vehicle for IT to understand what data the business needs to better monitor the business.

4. Reporting continues driving BI initiatives from a business perspective. Sure, dashboards are sexy, but reporting is what the business cannot live without.

After purchasing thousands of licenses for sophisticated analytical capabilities with slice-and-dice, drill-down-across-over-and-out functionality, business users still just want their daily or weekly reports to know how the business is doing. It's not their job to play with BI tools. They need to focus on running the business.

It was only the “power users” that ever wanted to play with BI tools. Reports are not just static PDFs, but support parameter-driven inquiry with drill-down to examine the interesting details. Ultimately, reports and spreadsheets are the mainstay of how business users are going to monitor their business. The big three in reporting (Business Objects, Cognos and Hyperion) have all recognized this and either built or acquired reporting capabilities for their product suites.

5. Corporate performance measurement (CPM) systems will continue to be at the top of the marketing slides for every ERP, enterprise application and BI vendor, as well as major consulting firms. Many pilots and initial rollouts will be involved.

CPM systems offer business solutions oriented to specific business functions (finance or marketing, for example), or to specific business applications such as fraud detection in insurance claims. The CPM offerings bundled with pre-built analytics, reports, data models and the ETL populate the data from various source systems. This bundle is very appealing, especially to businesses that feel like they have not really exploited their corporate data into useful business information.

A few areas to watch this year:

• First, will IT push back on the CPM solutions because they bundle tools, both BI and ETL that may not be the tools they have standardized on?
• Second, will the CPM databases be seen as new data silos in the enterprise?
• Finally, will the vendors offering CPM solutions have the bandwidth and depth in their professional services organizations to deploy these solutions?

6. Mid-tier and smaller firms will start deploying data warehousing and business intelligence solutions. Thanks to better BI tools, more experienced people, and lower deployment costs, firms outside the Fortune 500 can start taking advantage of data warehousing and business intelligence.

Large firms can afford to experiment and learn along the way with new technologies and techniques, as they did with DW and BI projects. Smaller firms generally wait until experience grows and costs decrease before they start to widely deploy new technology and approaches.

The time for BI and DW projects has arrived! Along with BI and DW technology and approaches maturing, another boon for smaller firms is that Microsoft has increased its capabilities in this arena and will penetrate the market with lower priced products.

Next month, stay tuned for BI Vendor Trends for 2005.

There's Nothing Funny about "Funny" Data

But then something happens in user acceptance testing. Some "funny" data values appear, and you can't aggregate the data or drill down correctly. You find the data problem and get around it, but immediately hit another anomaly.

Pretty soon, the business users feel there is a severe data quality problem and your project goes from the stratosphere to crash-and-burn.

What happened?

» read the complete article, There's Nothing Funny about "Funny" Data

Data Integration Depends on Vigilant Data Modeling

The analogy most often used when discussing the need for a data modeling tool is that you would not build a house without a blueprint, so why would you build an application or database without one?

Data models become your blueprints for developing your data warehouse (DW), data marts (DMs), business intelligence (BI) application or corporate performance management (CPM) system. You need these blueprints to give you a clear picture of the business users' requirements and processes.

They also show business users that you understand what they asked for. You need these blueprints to design your databases, ETL processes and all the business logic (i.e., application code) used in your reporting and analytic applications. Without the blueprints, your application and database are destined to become the next lame duck legacy system that business users and project team members want to replace.

» read the complete article Data Integration Depends on Vigilant Data Modeling

Data Standards

Data integration framework (DIF) standards are really about best practices for deploying your entire project. In this article, we discuss several essential data standards.

» read the complete article Data Standards

White Paper Download

Athena IT Solutions is making the following white paper is available for you to download at no cost:

Ten Principles for Increasing the Business Value of Your Data Warehouse and Business Intelligence Investments

» white paper abstract and order form

About Athena IT Solutions

Athena IT Solutions provides data warehousing and business intelligence consulting services to help businesses increase the return on investment of their corporate data. Athena IT Solutions founder Rick Sherman has more than 17 years of business intelligence and data warehousing experience, having worked on more than 50 implementations as an independent consultant and as a director/practice leader at a Big Five firm. He founded Athena IT Solutions, a Boston-based business intelligence and data warehousing consulting firm and is a published author, industry speaker, instructor and consultant. He can be reached at rsherman@athena-solutions.com or (617) 835-0546.

© 2005 Athena IT Solutions