Archive for the ‘Technology’ category

Big BI Fish in a Shrinking Pond?

June 15th, 2009

Timo Elliot has posted a rather nice visualisation of Gartner’s 2008 BI market share research as reported by Information Week.  Timo has, not surprisingly, used Xcelsius and although I’m not quite sure why IBM/Cognos is seemingly struggling to keep up with the pack (when Microsoft actually has the smallest share) it clearly illustrates the staggering 24% market share held by SAP/BusinessObjects.  Bear in mind that these vendors collectively have 64.5% of the market.

You can see Timo’s full post here, complete with a more readily interpreted, but not so pretty, bar chart

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Posted in Business Intelligence, Cognos, Technology

Newspapers and Universities

May 7th, 2009

Two very topical and interesting articles caught my eye today:

Decline of Colleges

What Colleges Should Learn from Newspapers’ Decline

newspaper

Some very interesting points and interesting discussions associated with both posts.  Are these issues unique to the US?  I don’t think so.  Carey asserts that “there is still time for universities to use technology to their advantage”.

To my mind that means BI and Data Warehousing will play a more significant role into the future of Australian and international higher education.  Its not just about plotting load and income and calculating attrition and retention.  Its about performance analytics, democratisation of data, smart and agile leadership and the shared value culture that Google CEO talks about.  That’s where the differentiation will be.

In 1997 the legendary management consultant Peter Drucker said, “Thirty years from now, the big university campuses will be relics. … Such totally uncontrollable expenditures, without any visible improvement in either the content or the quality of education, means that the system is rapidly becoming untenable.” Twelve years later, universities are bursting with customers, bigger, and (until recently) richer than ever before.

But the number of organizations that can — and are doing it online — is getting bigger every year. According to the Sloan Consortium, nearly 20 percent of college students — some 3.9 million people — took an online course in 2007, and their numbers are growing by hundreds of thousands each year. The University of Phoenix enrolls over 200,000 students per year.

Perhaps the higher-education fuse is 25 years long, perhaps 40. But it ends someday, in our lifetimes. There’s still time for higher-education institutions to use technology to their advantage, to move to a more-sustainable cost structure, and to win customers with a combination of superior service and reasonable price.If they don’t, then someday, sooner than we think, we’re going to be reading about the demise of once-great universities — not in the newspaper, but in whatever comes next.


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Posted in Higher Education, Technology

Are we there yet?

December 23rd, 2008

If we are to believe the latest 2008 McKinsey Annual IT Survey then our progress has been a little disappointing. These two charts show that we are spending too much time trimming our budgets and being compliant rather than being creative and working as a true partner within our IT organisations - in spite of us fully realising this.

McKinsey Survey Chart 1

I’m not so sure this is really the case in Australian higher education but it still signals a warning that there are endemic issues with getting great technology adopted at the coal face.

McKinsey Survey Chart 2

The survey finds that most executives (548 were polled) expect IT spending to decrease in 2009 - due to the worsening economic climate. Tellingly, in 2008 half the survey respondents expected IT spending to increase, this year the figure is only 23%.

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Posted in General, Technology

Getting High on Resolution

November 7th, 2008

One of the reasons for starting this blog was to share good ideas, things we can all do that save time and effort and energy.  Well…

Here is my suggested approach for maximising BI productivity gains through computer display technology:

  • Everyone in the BI/DW team should have a laptop/notebook computer
  • Everyone in the BI/DW team should have at least one external monitor at their desk
  • The BI/DW team room should have a ceiling-mounted projector and every team member workstation should be connected to it so they can instantly throw their issue/challenge/success/cool code/promote/whatever up there for all to see

What am I on about?

I was chatting with James in the office today and he told me that the BI team at a certain university work at desks with a single monitor :o  This struck me as incredible, I guess I have just become used to having multiple monitors and assumed everyone else had a similar setup.  Everyone in our BI team has at least one extra monitor, just about everyone in our IT department does and some people have a lot more.

I just googled ‘monitor’ and ‘productivity’ - there is a ton of casual research out there like this stating how much more you can increase your productivity and at less than $200 for a 19″ flat screen these days, why wouldn’t you?

montors

I’m not about to explain why you need to get another screen (that really should be obvious) but if for some reason this opportunity has escaped you then go and see your boss, right now.  Go on, you can finish reading this later.  They’ve got all those year end $ sloshing around at the moment so will be grateful for you showing them how for just a few dollars they can improve the productivity and happiness of their entire team, honestly!

So what if you have a laptop/notebook computer?  Even better - they already have an external monitor port on them so you don’t need to worry about fancy video cards.  Frankly, if you are a BI team member and you don’t have a laptop then I have other issues with you.  How are you supposed to develop and deliver capability for your business colleagues if your demonstrations require them to come to you?

So what about more monitors, what do you do when 2 isn’t enough?  Well now you’re thinking and here’s my tip of the day - if you have three 1280 x 1024 monitors side by side plus your original desktop (in my case 1920 x 1200) then you have a monstrous 5760 pixel-wide virtual desktop.  That’s what I’m running on a MacBook Pro and it is just great, plus I am totally mobile.

I’ll climb off my soap box now but if for some terrifying reason you find yourself as one of those people reading this from a single screen setup then please, please, do something about it, you will not look back (just left and right)…

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Posted in Technology, Workstations

A Place to Call Home

September 6th, 2008

Where should BI live within a university? Is it a Business thing, a Planning thing, an IT thing or something else entirely?

Of course there is more than a little bit of politics involved here. My personal view is that these days, BI is an IT thing but only in an organisation where IT is an informed, innovative, agile and responsible partner of the business itself. The days of the old-fashioned IT department, viewed as a overhead for everyone else to absorb are long gone in the commercial world but the impression at least still lingers in the public sector.

Forget traditional roles, what are the basic steps associated with rolling out BI content?

  • Requirements gathering, negotiation and definition
  • Designing the dimensional solution
  • ETL and associated database activities
  • Modelling and publishing the physical warehouse for BI
  • Developing reporting and analysis
  • Marketing, evangelising and training

Aside from the last one, aren’t these all IT activities? Don’t these all require skills present in any IT shop? Isn’t this what we do best?

A very high profile customer calls at the BI door. The VC and every other executive needs the content produced, the PVC’s, the faculty heads, the school heads, the administrative directors, they all rely on this information.

I say BI belongs in IT organisations, but modern IT organisations where IT is a strategic partner that is actively engaged in shaping and executing strategy, advising and guiding and not worrying too much about tradition.

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Posted in Business Intelligence, General, Higher Education, Technology