THE DATA DOWNLOAD

Topics: Collaboration, Business Intelligence, Blog, Pervasive BI

Collaborative BI Unlocking the Future

By: Steve Dine

I was recently invited to the corporate offices of Lyzasoft for an inside look at their new 2.0 release.  Aside from the impressive advances in charting and visualizations, I was especially blown away by their augmentation of collaboration features to their shared portal, called Lyza Commons.  They provide a web environment that allows authorized users to search, bookmark, combine, create, tag, share, comment, rate, relate, and interact directly with intelligence content in the form of blogs, microblogs, charts, tables, dashboards, and collections.  More simply put, they enable the development and growth of analytic communities.

Topics: Collaboration, Business Intelligence, Blog, Pervasive BI

Cloud Business Intelligence: Is it a Good Tool for All Projects?

In recent months, I've read numerous blog postings, tweets, articles and interviews from business intelligence pundits that have denounced the viability of BI in the cloud or cloud business intelligence.  They point to data volumes, security concerns, lack of control, network reliability and bandwidth as factors that deem the concept unfathomable.  While each one of these issues can be a show stopper for a BI project, they are not roadblocks for all business intelligence projects.  What's most baffling to me is that I've reached out to many of these critics and I've yet to find one that has any actual experience working in the cloud.

Topics: Collaboration, Business Intelligence, Blog, Pervasive BI

Pervasive BI. Are we closer than we were 10 years ago?

By: Steve Dine

One of the topics that still seems to garner a great deal of attention is "pervasive BI".  Just like Henry Ford's vision of a car in every driveway, the BI vendors envision a license for every employee.  Don't get me wrong, I'm at the front of the parade when it comes to increasing the BI footprint in today's organizations.  However, I think that we still have a long way to go in large part because it seems that the more things change, the more they stay the same.  For example, we learned a long time ago that data without context is just data.  Yet, it seems that most of today's BI applications lack all but the most rudimentary metadata capabilities.  It is a challenge to import the business and technical metadata, maintain it and expose it to the users.  How will BI become pervasive if we can't enable users to become more self-service?