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Lyndsay Wise

Hi and welcome to my blog! I look forward to bringing you weekly posts about what is happening in the world of BI, CDI and marketing performance management.

About the author >

Lyndsay is the President and Founder of WiseAnalytics, an independent analyst firm specializing in business intelligence, master data management and unstructured data. For more than seven years, she has assisted clients in business systems analysis, software selection and implementation of enterprise applications. Lyndsay conducts regular research studies, consults, writes articles and speaks about improving the value of business intelligence within organizations. She can be reached at lwise@wiseanalytics.com.

Editor's Note: More articles, resources, news and events are available in Lyndsay's BeyeNETWORK Expert Channel on Business Intelligence for the Mid-Market. Be sure to visit today! Also, meet, discuss and receive advice from Lyndsay by visiting her Mid Market BI BeyeCONNECT community.

Every now and then I speak with vendors' customers to get a different take on solutions being used and what companies really think about products that are marketed with only a positive spin. I also enjoy hearing about the business benefits and value mid-market companies are achieving through their use of BI. As a bonus, I hope to get some insight into any snags or negatives about the product or overall BI project - which customers generally like to share once they start talking.  The negatives are a great tool that can be used to provide insights to other companies evaluating solutions in the market place and help them learn from other companies BI initiatives.

In this case, my "victim" of sorts, was Anna's Linens, a retailer focusing on home fashions with over 258 stores across the United States.  They are a mid-market company and have been using SAP Business Objects Edge BI for a couple of  years. And to my disappointment (even though I'm glad that they are getting a lot of benefit out of their solution), their Crystal use has been nothing but positive - very positive actually!

While transitioning from being a regional to a national retailer, Anna's Linens needed to consolidate information across various locations. Their goal was to find a way to look at marketing, store operations, and merchandising data holistically.  Additional considerations included the viability and current install base of a vendor, product ease of use, and the ability to deploy to multiple users within the organization. Once choosing SAP Business Objects Edge BI, the implementation was seamless and several reports were developed with the goal of creating a single view of operational data and moving away from data silos that existed within the organization (specifically in relation to marketing, store operations, and merchandising) . Anna's Linens was able to extract data and create analytics that provided additional insights into sales, customer conversions, and the effectiveness of advertising specific products.  In addition, due to the new visibility and centralized view of overall performance, Anna's Linens implemented traffic counters to identify foot traffic and its relation to customer transactions, units per transaction, marketing performance, etc.

Overall, Anna's Linens provides a great example to other mid-market retailers of the advantage of implementing BI. For some reason, retailers have generally remained behind the curve on BI adoption but are slowly beginning to understand the immense value of data. But beyond simply implementing BI, retailers need to understand how data visibility can be tied to continual improvement and how to relate sales data to actual performance.  In Anna's Linens' case, they have taken BI to the next level by enabling each department in the company to develop their own metrics - for instance, the measurement of customer service levels - and by creating a cross-functional steering committee to help build and manage BI reports and processes within the organization.

For a mid-sized retailer, Anna's Linens provides a good example of how other companies can take advantage of analytics within their organizations to gain broader insights into performance and to create a cohesive view of operations and customer focused data.


Posted February 5, 2010 9:19 AM
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Earlier this week I had a briefing with Visual Mining to learn about their new release, NetCharts Performance Dashboards (NCPD) 2.0. Aside from being impressed with their demo, one of the things that I noticed was their focus on the business user. Their key target is mid-market CFOs, but with that comes the realization that in order for dashboards to be successful within mid-sized organizations, they need to be easy to use, to develop, and to customize at the individual user level.   Otherwise they defeat the purpose and can’t provide great business value to business users. In addition, they back their new solution with a risk free money back guarantee.   This means that in addition to providing a dashboard solution that is easy to interact with, they are giving mid-market companies a way to engage in dashboard deployments without the risk inherent in a high cost project with variable returns.

Due to the increase in free software offerings that give companies free access to software, solution providers are starting to develop alternative ways to compete with these free offerings while giving future customers added value.   Mid-market companies are now able to evaluate solutions and deploy dashboards or business intelligence solutions without having to worry about failed projects and wasted budget allocations. Overall, it is interesting to see the increasing focus of dashboard design that targets business users as well as provides dollar value to the overall organization.   This combination will help the role of dashboards expand within the organization both in terms of usage and popularity.


Posted January 26, 2010 4:27 PM
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Last week Jaspersoft announced their latest release 3.7 and Enterprise addition.   Overall, the expansion of Jaspersoft’s Enterprise addition to the mix of traditional open source BI highlights the direction of the BI market overall. Companies are starting to look for alternative solutions that provide strong features and functionality but that do not require large implementation and maintenance costs (in comparison with some traditional BI offerings).   Although open source continues to remain free for the developer community, because of the ability to develop solutions more quickly, open source BI providers are starting to focus on commercial offerings to give companies the benefits of continual improvements to solutions and easy maintenance. And on the side of organizations, many are beginning to evaluate open source BI within the mix of their overall business intelligence software evaluations.

Here are some of the highlights of Jaspersoft’s announcement:

  • configurable in-memory, allowing end users/IT to define where the processing gets done
  • new features including partial pivots, advanced sorting, dynamic slicing and filtering, etc.
  • advanced visualizations and animations using Adobe PDF and HTML
  • extended Web services
  • online/hosted context sensitive help

Posted January 18, 2010 3:52 PM
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This month Dashboard Insight has devoted their month to new dashboard and BI solutions and technology for 2010. In general, many people start off the year by looking ahead, or even back, and trying to surmise what will be.   Here is some interesting content that has already been developed that is related to upcoming trends and what the market has in store for companies this year:


Posted January 12, 2010 3:43 PM
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At the end of every year, predictions are made and trends are identified setting the tone for the upcoming year.   Within business intelligence applications there are always changes because of the advancements in technology – i.e. mobile, social media, processing speed, storage, etc. All of these items will continue to affect BI moving forward.   Aside from the increase in performance, because of the increasing ease of development, price points will also become more diversified as vendors with offerings with lower price points continue to make inroads into the market and expand their offerings. For the mid-market this will be very beneficial…

Moving forward, WiseAnalytics will continue to cover the mid-market – looking at what companies are doing, what solutions are available, and particularly the value associated with BI for mid-market organizations. In addition, a continued emphasis will be placed on dashboards and data visualization in terms of how they are being used and vertical applications and data visualization design.

Overall, next year promises to be very interesting for those looking at the dashboard market or who are focused on BI for small and mid-sized businesses.


Posted December 28, 2009 12:54 AM
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One of the fastest growing types of BI adoption is through Software as a Service solutions.   Organizations are looking at SaaS and comparing potential solutions to other in-house options. This means that more competition exists for solution providers as in the past companies looked at one type of solution over the other.   Now, the market place is saturated with many types of solutions and business applications without the clarity of which products are directly in competition or complementary to one another.   In addition to companies being confused over the types of solutions best suited to meet their business needs, solution providers are looking at SaaS providers and the use of on demand solutions in general as a new competitive factor within the overall BI market landscape.

Approaches to identifying how organizations are adopting SaaS include online surveys posted by vendors not within the SaaS space, such as the Klipfolio SaaS survey aimed at identifying how organizations are adopting SaaS.   It will be interesting to see in the next year or so whether SaaS adoption and services offered will increase within the BI space.


Posted December 2, 2009 9:17 PM
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Posted November 30, 2009 2:59 PM
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On Thursday November 19th at 11am PT/2pm ET I will be participating in a Webinar with Actuate. The presentation will discuss the importance of this new way of applying BI through:

  • an overview of traditional BI and the drivers that are shifting the way BI is applied within organizations
  • trends in the industry that support these changes
  • how this affects end users
  • how newer applications are being used within the organization (i.e. RIA, expansion of open source, diversity in deployment and interaction)
  • what this means in terms of scalability and overall end user experience
  • how organizations are applying these changing technologies

Here is the link to register:

BIRT: Transforming Business Intelligence to Rich Information Applications


Posted November 17, 2009 5:59 PM
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Here is a link to the recording of yesterday’s beyeconnect chat that took place to discuss the costs associated with free BI:

Luckily organizations can take advantage of free software offerings and get their feet wet and explore different business intelligence solutions.   However, when looking at free solutions it becomes important to remember that depending on the type of solution,   internal infrastructure and development are required to get the system up and running.   For the purpose of the presentation, I used five examples of solutions that are offering different types of free BI offerings (in alphabetical order!):

Each offers something different and depending on what the business goals of the organization, it might make sense to try a free solution, or compare them, to help identify what works for the company.


Posted November 10, 2009 10:09 PM
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On Monday November 9th at 12pm ET, there will be a chat hosted by BeyeConnect regarding the real cost of free BI. I will be conducting a brief presentation based on the fact that:

Many BI vendors offer free trials of their software and some even offer free versions of their offerings.   Open source provides one such example, with general source code being available for download.   But what does free really mean?   Even though software might not cost anything, there are development, implementation, and maintenance costs that can lead something originally considered free to actually become quite an investment.

The presentation will discuss aspects that need to be taken into account when evaluating so-called free BI offerings, such as:

  • implementation and overall interoperability
  • required support costs
  • customization
  • licensing limitations

After the general presentation, we will have a discussion and interactive chat – I hope to see you there.


Posted November 5, 2009 7:03 PM
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