Thank you for visiting my blog. I am a Cofounder & Technical Advisor here at the BeyeNETWORK. Having covered the business intelligence and data warehousing industry for more than 15 years, I'm looking forward to a more interactive form of communication with all of you. Please share your comments and thoughts!
Shawn Rogers has more than 19 years of hands-on IT experience with a focus on Internet-enabled technology. In 2004 he cofounded the BeyeNETWORK and held the position of Executive Vice President and
Editorial Director. Shawn guided the company's international growth strategy and helped the BeyeNETWORK grow to 18 web sites around the world making it the largest and most read community covering
the business intelligence, data warehousing, performance management and data integration space.
Today he continues his relationship with the Network in the capacity of Technology Advisor and remains a partner in the firm.
Prior to Cofounding the BeyeNETWORK Shawn was Internet Business Development Director at Thomson Media (now SourceMedia), President of Achieve Communications and a partner at DMReview magazine (now
Information Management) where he was Vice President as well as Publisher and Editorial Director of DMReview.com a leading business intelligence and data warehousing web site.
A great opportunity to share your experiences with the community and to receive a free copy of some great research on the "Organization of Business Intelligence - Managing, Budgeting and Benefits of Business Intelligence Initiatives".
This research is provided by the BeyeNETWORK partners in Germany and will provide a global perspective on the topics.
Business Intelligence is usually strongly focused on the technical implementation and challenges involved. However, organizational challenges need to be addressed as well.
This research examines how business intelligence initiatives are managed and budgeted and what the benefits of such initiatives are.
Sometimes I feel like I live in an echo chamber this can be good or bad depending. The business intelligence and data warehouse community has been my home for over 15 years. So I guess that I shouldn't be surprised that from time to time I make assumptions based on my experiences. The other day a client asked me how popular the search term Business Intelligence was compared to Data Warehouse. My assumption.....BI would beat DW but they were both popular. According to the Google index over 54 million web pages contain at least one of these terms. I was half right. Business Intelligence did beat data warehouse but both are far from popular.
As you can see the two terms collided in late 2005 and business intelligence has held the top position ever since. The interesting thing is the decline. Its clear these terms are on their way out so it makes you wonder what term is leading the way.
I tried Performance management, MDM, Balanced Scorecard, Decision Support, Operational Data, even Enterprise 2.0 but none of them surpassed Business Intelligence. And then......
Yep, Analytics is hot, very hot and it got hot two full years before Tom Davenport published "Competing on Analytics".
So here's my last data tidbit of the day you can file this under things that make you go hmmmmmm. US based technology professionals have made up a very small percentage of users who search for these terms.
Many of you have utilized the highly respected OLAP Report over the past 15 years when making vendor selections or researching the market. Keeping with the times The OLAP Report has a new name -- The BI Verdict -- and has now moved to a new Web site at www.bi-verdict.com
In the interest of being transparent I have to saw that I partner with the company who produces this product but for years prior we have had access to the research and found it to be some of the best in the business. The BI Verdict is produced by BARC's team of experienced business intelligence software analysts and industry guru Nigel Pendse.
The new version of the site offers a low-priced starter-level subscription -- entitled The BI Market Guide -- giving you access to an exclusive area of The BI Verdict Web site.
The BI Market Guide is designed to steer you through the early stages of your tool selection project. With an overview of the BI market, advice on selecting BI software and product strategy guides to some of the major vendors, it will help you:
Get your BI software selection project up and running in the right direction
Gain an understanding of the flavors of BI software available
Find out which products are suited to your requirements
Benefit from proven advice on how to run a successful project
Save time and money by taking the advice of vendor-independent experts
If you decide to upgrade to a full subscription of The BI Verdict, you will benefit from a special upgrade price.
We get to attend some very interesting events through the BeyeNETWORK as a matter of fact I am typing this blog post from the 37th floor of Caesars Palace in Las Vegas where I am attending the IBM Information On Demand Event and the SAS Premier Leadership Conference both are great events.
In a couple weeks the Network is helping to sponsor a very unique event in Boulder Colorado called the Defrag. The event focuses on topics such as:
Business Intelligence
Business Process Management
Social Computing and Analytics
Next-level Discovery
Enterprise 2.0
Next-Gen Email
The Semantic Web
Social Media Monitoring and
Engagement
The list of topics and speakers is fantastic and I have 1 Free Conference Pass to give away. So.....if you are interested and can guarantee that you are available to attend send me an email and I will do a random drawing on Friday of this week. (This pass doesn't include airfare or hotel) The event is November 11th and 12th and the free pass is valued at $1,495
OMG! Are you sitting down? Yes that's right my favorite airlines looks to be getting its act together and I couldn't be happier. If you follow me on Twitter "@shawnrog" you know I fly often and I fly United. Over the past 7 months I have traveled 17 times for a total of 72
days, 68,040 miles to 28 cities in 6 countries most of this has been on
United. Unfortunately, my travels result in posts that look like the one below:
United is testing a new Non-stop service from Milwaukee to Chicago -
This past week I experienced a mechanical coming home from San Diego and this is what showed up in my email prior to landing. Yes that's actual customer service folks!
On behalf of all of us here at United, I want to express my sincere apologies
for the experience you had on Flight 342 on August 6, 2009.
At United, we take pride in being a reliable part of your travel plans. Your
satisfaction and business mean a great deal to me, I would like to invite you
to visit the following website to select a token of our appreciation.
Please have your flight information handy when you visit the site.
Family members who traveled together using the same email address should access
the site individually.
Thank you for your time. Your satisfaction is important to us and we look forward
to serving you better in the near future.
Sincerely,
Sherri Hermance
United Airlines
Customer Relations
I have to admit I was stunned!! I went home and followed the instructions and received this:
Dear Mr Shawn Rogers,
Thank you for accepting our token of appreciation.
We
appreciate hearing from our guests. It helps give us an opportunity to
make significant service improvements. Our goal is to create the
highest level of guest satisfaction within the airline industry.
Thank you for your time. Your satisfaction is important to us and we look forward to serving you better in the near future.
Sincerely,
Customer Relations
Congratulations United!!!! Keep this up and I just might have to blog about business intelligence and data warehousing again. Thank you for treating me like a customer.
If you read my blog or twitter feed you know I am a unhappy United Airlines Premier Executive customer and from time to time I share my concerns and stories about how bad flying them has become. But I can't claim to have ever been very creative about my posts and certainly not as funny as this video.
Truly great moments in business come around very seldom. If your present when one occurs its something you remember. I was there when my business partner Ron Powell returned from a trip after meeting Bill Inmon and it changed the course of our magazine's coverage leading us down a very successful path. I can't help but wonder if the same is true of the bad ideas do we really take notice? Or do they happen so often that they have become common place?
Can you imagine being in the meeting when someone suggested the following:
I have a new way to increase profitability lets lie to our customers and tell them we'll deliver our service (insert hotel room or seat on a plane here) lets reinforce the lie by issuing a confirmation number that we know in the end has no real meaning. But in the background we'll actually sell more of the rooms or seats than we actually have. We can call it "over booking" this way it will have an official sounding term and the customers will just except it as policy. We can insure our plane/hotel is full and we'll increase profitability. Now I realize we'll probably screw up client business trips and family vacations but heck we'll all get rich so who cares!
At some point this conversation took place at companies like Frontier Airlines (who minutes ago informed me that my flight was over booked and Hilton hotels who simply didn't have a room for my family this past weekend after booking well in advance and calling to confirm from the road the same day as the reservation. The conversation wasn't as satirical as my version but bottom line these polices exist so why didn't some MBA educated professional jump up during this meeting and scream ARE YOU KIDDING ME THIS IS THE DUMBEST THING I'VE EVER HEARD! Because some companies are driven by greed not service.
I take a simple stance on how I run my business. I try to deliver what we promise, we don't lie to our clients and we do most of our business based on relationships. We've been successful and by most accounts we are respected by our peers so it makes me wonder how policies like the one above even make it into a meeting let alone are actually acted upon.
Overbooked....its a good thing.....if your a hotel chain or an airline.
I was listening to my favorite podcast program today (This Week in Tech - TWIT 183) and writer, new media expert Corey Doctorow put a fine point on how media is evolving. He talked about the way that technology can force a chasm and then perhaps acceptance. And that the old media delivery systems tend to get folded into the new. The first published newspaper was the The Boston News-Letter, a weekly which debuted in 1704 I'm not sure how it performed from a financial perspective but it did spawn an industry that is now evolving away from its roots landing publications online or on devices like the Amazon Kindle and iPhone.
Perhaps the future of newspaper may in fact parallel that of other media that came before it like opera and poetry which are generally not a profitable today and in the case of Opera are often funded by the wealthy. In a future world the idea of a viable newspaper model may be something printed on a expensive cloth, ironed by the butler and delivered to the rich weirdo in the penthouse.
I think it draws an interesting parallel to what is happening in our industry. The old delivery systems are getting folded into the new. Early on reporting seemed to have significant value it didn't even need to be pretty it was just great to have. Reporting, while still valuable is giving way to Performance Management and the ability to respond verses observe this is the value many companies need from BI today. The systems of today are focusing on mass adoption, A-ha moments that allow users to deep dive and explore and added value from unstructured and semi-structured sources not previously part of the equation. What are these technologies going to fold into? Is it Real-time access, SaaS, Embedded Business Intelligence, Open Source? Which of these will force the irrefutable chasm that will spawn the next age of business intelligence?
So the question remains, is the business intelligence system you have today best suited for rich weirdo's?
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