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Marge Breya on BusinessObjects Explorer #sapphire09

A small group of bloggers had the opportunity to sit around a table with Marge Breya to expand on what we saw during the press conference on BusinessObjects Explorer. She discussed how unstructured data has being elevated to first class status within SAP, with analytics and reporting tools that can lay over unstructured as well as structured data. Part of this involves parsing structure out of unstructured data through an appropriate semantic layer.

They’re also playing with things (that she couldn’t really talk about, although some customers have access) that provide much more of an hosted Web 2.0-type of experience. They’re working on Explorer On Demand, which allows you to upload spreadsheets and other file-oriented data, then do some analysis and visualization on your own data to get an idea of how valuable tools like this are. They handed out some test drive passes for this, so I may get a chance to play around with it some time soon. I expect that many organizations won’t want their data warehouse in the cloud, but this will at least give them a chance to try it out in a no-risk environment. They’re doing this with more of their BusinessObjects platform, where there’s a free version that allows for some starter functionality, then hope for it to go viral in terms of stepping up to paid on demand or on premise versions. That’s a pretty powerful model in the consumer space, although traditional enterprises may have a more difficult time adopting technology in this manner. Considering that the higher-end of Explorer is targeted at large organizations, this could be the biggest challenge.

Breya had some interesting background on product strategy as well, especially around how SAP had traditionally been doing OLAP-based business intelligence, and BusinessObjects didn’t have much in the way of OLAP, so the acquisition produced a minimum of overlap. Polestar, on the market for a couple of years as an ad hoc query tool, was retooled into Explorer for a million or so rows of data, and Explorer Accelerated, a software and hardware bundle, that can handle billions or rows.

She went on to talk about the ties between BI and BPM, and although she couldn’t talk about anything specific, there are some interesting things coming in terms of operational BI, monitoring and characterizing processes for the purposes of process improvement, as well as invoking analytics within processes for decision support.

In response to a question about the consumerization of SAP products, she promises us “an experience that will take decisioning to the next level, involving collaboration” in something that is just entering private beta now. I’m picturing a cross between Xbox Live and Vanilla Sky, which would be cool, but I still think that there are challenges to adoption of completely new user experience paradigms. Since SAP has a wide customer base in manufacturing and other industries with low margins and the requirement for constant product innovation, this may not be as much of a challenge as it would be verticals such as financial services and insurance.

We had a discussion about the cloud versus on premise as the location for data, with the underlying theme that it’s not an all or nothing proposition: while operational data may be behind the firewall, it makes much more sense to leave third-party benchmarking data in the cloud where it can be shared and frequently updated. The new generation of BI products from any vendor can’t be restrictive in their data sources, but have to be able to aggregate information from a variety of sources both inside and outside the firewall.

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2009 05 12 Sandy Kemsley BPM
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Business Rules Forum: James Taylor and Neil Raden keynote

Opening the second conference day, James Taylor and Neil Raden gave a keynote about competing on decisions. First up was James, who started with a definition of what a decision is (and isn’t), speaking particularly about operation decisions that we often see in the context of automated business processes. He made a good point that your customers react to your business decisions as if they were deliberate and personal to them, when often they’re not; James’ premise is that you should be making these deliberate and personal, providing the level of micro-targeting that’s appropriate to your business (without getting too creepy about it), but that there’s a mismatch between what customers want and what most organizations provide.

Decisions have to be built into processes and systems that manage your business, so although business may drive change, IT gets to manage it. James used the term “orthogonal” when talking about the crossover between process and rules; I used this same expression in a discussion with him yesterday in discussing how processes and decisions should not be dependent upon each other: if a decision and a process are interdependent, then you’re likely dealing with a process decision that should be embedded within the process, rather than a business decision.

A decision-centric organization is focused on the effectiveness of its decisions rather than aggregated, after-the-fact metrics; decision-making is seen as a specific competency, and resources are dedicated to making those decisions better.

Enterprise decision management, as James and Neil now define it, is an approach for managing and approving the decisions that drive your business:

  • Making the decisions explicit
  • Tracking the effectiveness of the decisions in order to improve them
  • Learning from the past to increase the precision of the decisions
  • Defining and managing these decisions for consistency
  • Ensuring that they can be changed as needed for maximum agility
  • Knowing how fast the decisions must be made in order to match the speed of the business context
  • Minimizing the cost of decisions

Using an airline pilot analogy, he discussed how business executives need a number of decision-related tools to do their job effectively:

  • Simulators (what-if analysis), to learn what impact an action might have
  • Auto-pilot, so that their business can (sometimes) work effectively without them
  • Heads-up display, so they can see what’s happening now, what’s coming up, and the available options
  • Controls, simple to use but able to control complex outcomes
  • Time, to be able to take a more strategic look at their business

Continuing on the pilot analogy, he pointed out that the term dashboard is used in business to really mean an instrument cluster: display, but no control. A true dashboard must include not just a display of what’s happening, but controls that can impact what’s happening in the business. I saw a great example of that last week at the Ultimus conference: their dashboard includes a type of interactive dial that can be used to temporarily change thresholds that control the process.

James turned the floor over to Neil, who dug further into the agility imperative: rethinking BI for processes. He sees that today’s BI tools are insufficient for monitoring and analyzing business processes, because of the agile and interconnected nature of these processes. This comes through in the results of a survey that they did about how often people are using related tools: the average hours per week that a marketing analyst spends using their BI tool was 1.2, versus 17.4 for Excel, 4.2 for Access and 6.2 for other data administration tools. I see Excel everywhere in most businesses, whereas BI tools are typically only used by specialists, so this result does not come as a big surprise.

The analytical needs of processes are inherently complex, requiring an understanding of the resources involved and process instance data, as well as the actual process flow. Processes are complex causal systems: much more than just that simple BPMN diagram that you see. A business process may span multiple automated (monitored) processes, and may be created or modified frequently. Stakeholders require different views of those processes; simple tactical needs can be served by BAM-type dashboards, but strategic needs — particularly predictive analysis — are not well-served by this technology. This is beyond BI: it’s process intelligence, where there must be understanding of other factors affecting a process, not just measuring the aggregated outcomes. He sees process intelligence as a distinct product type, not the same as BI; unfortunately, the market is being served (or not really served) by traditional query-based approaches against a relatively static data model, or what Neil refers to as a “tortured OLAP cube-based approach”.

What process intelligence really needs is the ability to analyze the timing of the traffic flow within a process model in order to provide more accurate flow predictions, while allowing for more agile process views that are generated automatically from the BPMN process models. The analytics of process intelligence are based on the process logs, not pre-determined KPIs.

Neil ended up by tying this back to decisions: basically, you can’t make good decisions if you don’t understand how your processes work in the first place.

Interesting that James and Neil deal with two very important aspects of business processes: James covers decisions, and Neil covers analytics. I’ve done presentations in the past on the crossover between BPM, BRM and BI; but they’ve dug into these concepts in much more detail. If you haven’t read their book, Smart Enough Systems, there’s a lot of great material in there on this same theme; if you’re here at the forum, you can pick up a copy at their table at the expo this afternoon.

2008 10 29 Sandy Kemsley BAM
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Ultimus: Process optimization

Chris Adams is back to talk to us about process optimization, both as a concept and in the context of the Ultimus tools available to assist with this. I’m a bit surprised with the tone/content of this presentation, in which Chris is explaining why you need to optimize processes; I would have thought that anyone who has bought a BPMS probably gets the need for process optimization.

The strategies that they support:

  • Classic: updating your process and republishing it without changing work in progress
  • Iterative: focused and more specific changes updating live process instances
  • Situational/temporary: managers changing the runtime logic (really, the thresholds applied using rules) in live processes, such as changing an approval threshold during a month-end volume increase
  • Round-trip optimization: comparing live data against modeling result sets in simulation

There’s a number of tools for optimizing and updating processes:

  • Ultimus Director, allowing a business manager to change the rules in active processes
  • Studio Client, the main process design environment, which allows for versioning each artifact of a process; it also allows changes to be published back to update work in progress
  • iBAM, providing visibility into work in progress; it’s a generic dashboarding tool that can also be used for visualization of other data sets, not just Ultimus BPM instance data

He finished up with some best practices:

  • Make small optimizations to the process and update often, particularly because Ultimus allows for the easy upgrade of existing process instances
  • Use Ultimus Director to get notifications of
  • Use Ultimus iBAM interactive dials to allow executives to make temporary changes to rule thresholds that impact process flow

There was a great question from the audience about the use of engineering systems methodology in process optimization, such as theory of constraints; I don’t think that most of the vendors are addressing this explicitly, although the ideas are creeping into some of the more sophisticated simulation product.

2008 10 23 Sandy Kemsley BAM
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Ultimus: Reports and Dashboards

Chris Adams is probably now thinking that I’m stalking him: not only do I attend his first two technical sessions, but when he switches to the business track for this presentation, I follow him. However, I wanted to hear about their reporting and analytics capabilities, and he covered off reporting, dashboards, BAM, alerts and using third-party analytics.

Ultimus BPM SuiteHe started out with the underlying premise that you need to have governance over your business data, or your processes won’t be effective and efficient; in order to do that, you need to identify the key performance indicators (KPIs) that will be used to measure the health of your processes. This means both real-time monitoring and historical analytics.

Ultimus iBAM provides a real-time dashboard that works with both V7 and V8. Only in V8, there’s also email alerts when specific KPI thresholds are reached.

For offline reporting, they have three types:

  • Process reports, automatically created for process instance analytics
  • User reports, also automatically created for workload and user productivity
  • Custom reports that allow for filtering of the historical data, filtered by other business data

Reports can be viewed as charts as well as tabular reports; there is a third-party report generation tool invisibly built in (Infologistics?); Chris noted that this is the only third-party OEM component in Ultimus.

If you’re using Crystal Reports or Cognos, Ultimus has now opened up and created connectors to allow for reporting on the Ultimus history data directly from those platforms; by the end of the year, they’ll add support for SQL Server Reporting Services as well.

There will be a more technical session on the reporting and analytics later today.

2008 10 23 Sandy Kemsley BAM
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Business Objects Summit closing Q&A

Jonathan Becher hosted a wrap-up Q&A with Doug Merritt, Marge Breya and Sanjay Poonen. I’ve consolidated the responses rather than attributing them to the individuals:

  • On reasons for Business Objects’ continued growth: major contributors include having the SAP sales force also selling Business Objects products, and expansion of the product suite to include GRC and EPM. Also, synergy of two leaders in different markets coming together to create something bigger than the sum of the parts.
  • On portfolio roadmap for products being sunsetted or merged (a.k.a. the stuff that I wasn’t allowed to blog about earlier): it’s probably accurate to summarize that some of the SAP BI products will be discontinued but the customers will be migrated to appropriate Business Objects products, and there will be a few products that are merged.
  • On the growth of on-demand BI, expect to see some of the Business Objects applications (as opposed to just the platforms) offered using a SaaS model, although there’s nothing definite being discussed here.
  • On the link between BI and business rules, which hasn’t really been mentioned explicitly today: operational BI is part of their portfolio, and they’re working on ways to integrate more closely with BPM, BAM and decisioning.
  • On open source: they’re not seeing stress from open source products so are working on making their current successful OEM strategy work for them rather than considering releasing open source products.

After the panel, Becher did a summary about closing the gap between strategy and execution, and the trends that are driving innovation in business intelligence:

  • Unified information, moving from structured information generated within the four walls of the organization, to structured and unstructured and internal and external information
  • Collaborative decisions, moving from individual contributors within functional silos, to teams collaborating and communicating across boundaries
  • Business network optimization, from point relationships with customers and suppliers, to a dynamic network of partners

Business Objects’ goal: to transform the way the world works by connecting people, information and businesses. A bit ambitious, but they believe that bringing together BI, EPM and GRC is truly transformational.

That’s it for the Business Objects Influencer Summit; I’m staying on here tomorrow for the SAP SME day and will continue blogging then.

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2008 08 12 Sandy Kemsley SAPevents Comments (1)

My favorite Business Objects executive quote of the day

“Oracle price-gouges customers even more than we do.”

Although Dennis disagrees with my recollection of the sentence structure.

Update: Dennis now agrees with me, and expands on the context.

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2008 08 12 Sandy Kemsley SAPevents Comments (0)

Fireside chat with Doug Merritt at Business Objects Summit

Keeping with SAP’s excellent blogger relations, a few of us bloggers had a chance for a quick chat with Doug Merritt about acquisitions in the space, the “walking dead” of BI vendors, popular BI applications, SaaS BI, go-to-market strategies, the transition to being part of SAP, new product segments, selling into big accounts versus mid-market, the challenges of distribution, and recent maintenance fee increases. Interesting stuff.

This is my first Business Objects event, and I’m still getting used to hearing the insiders refer to it as “bob-j” (presumably from the pre-acquisition ticker symbol).

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2008 08 12 Sandy Kemsley SAPevents Comments (0)

Business Objects Summit: Franz Aman on BI Platform

Franz Aman, VP of Product Marketing, gave us a product roadmap of the BI platform within Business Objects and SAP. Unfortunately, he declared the session as being under NDA, even though a lot of what he talked about had nothing to do with future product directions, so I can’t share it with you.

The true innovation, which I hope that I’m not breaking NDA to report on, is the use of a background gradient that goes from SAP yellow to Business Objects blue in the boxes that represent products jointly developed by SAP and Business Objects:

Secret SAP-Business Objects background

Shhhh…you didn’t see it here.

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2008 08 12 Sandy Kemsley SAPevents Comments (3)

Business Objects Summit: Sanjay Poonen

Moving from business intelligence to the applications that rely on business intelligence, we heard from Sanjay Poonen, SVP and GM of Performance Optimization Applications. He started off with the cycle that we saw earlier in the day, with insight being linked to execution and process optimization, and focused on the governance, risk and compliance aspects of this cycle.

EPM 7.0He sees business intelligence as a central contributor to EPM, GRC and ERP, and with SAP having a leadership position in all of these, they can provide a total application suite for the CFO. Their product portfolio includes both SAP and Business Objects offerings:

  • SAP Strategy Management
  • Business Objects Financial Consolidation
  • SAP Business Planning and Consolidation
  • SAP GRC Process Controls
  • Business Objects Profitability and Cost Management
  • SAP Spend Analytics

These tools are becoming more collaborative, since almost all situations involving EPM and GRC will require a degree of collaboration between different people within an enterprise, and pull in information from both internal and external sources to create a more complete view of an business situation.

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2008 08 12 Sandy Kemsley SAPevents Comments (0)

Business Objects Summit: Marge Breya on product portfolio

Marge Breya, EVP and BPM of the Business Intelligence Platform group, gave us a whirlwind briefing on the product portfolio, which is made up of Business Objects assets, some SAP assets, and new products being built jointly:

  • Governance, Risk, Compliance (GRC), where they hold the overall #1 position worldwide with a 21% market share
  • Enterprise Performance Management (EPM), made up of financial performance management (#2 with a 20% share) and operational performance management (#1 with a 23% share), the latter of which includes both standalone and embedded components
  • Information Discovery and Delivery, made up of query, reporting and analysis (#1 with a 24% share) and advanced analytics (just introduced)
  • Enterprise Information Management (#4)

Not surprisingly, they are pursuing a complete integrated stack with other SAP products, but they also integrate with products from Oracle, IBM, Microsoft and independent application and database vendors.

She then introduced John Mayer, director of consulting and testing services at Apotex Group (a pharmaceutical firm), to discuss their use of the products: they’re a big SAP user, and are also using Business Objects in several areas. They’ve been giving the end users tools that they can use to have a view into the corporate data for ad hoc queries, and having seen the value of that, it’s spreading across the organization and helping to drive their data warehouse initiative. IT keeps overall design control over the universes and databases — you don’t really want users doing this since they may not understand the implications of, say, searching on a multi-million record table using an unindexed field — but the users create their own queries and reports.

Breya continued with the message of making this easier for the not-so-technically-minded to create their own queries, reports and dashboards. Their intelligence platform puts a semantic layer over the messy technical stuff (metadata management, master data management, etc.), and creates a common services infrastructure for finding and using those information components as services from the analysis and reporting layer.

They have a large suite of information consumption tools in that query, analysis and reporting layer:

  • Crystal Reports (production reports with drillable visualization)
  • BI Widgets
  • BI Mobile
  • Polestar
  • Web Intelligence (ad hoc reporting and analysis)
  • Text Analytics
  • Voyager (OLAP advanced analysis)
  • Predictive Workbench (advanced statistical analysis)

Today, they’re announcing a new product in that suite: Xcelsius Present, a data visualization tool. From today’s press release:

Xcelsius PresentXcelsius Present is a data-visualization tool that transforms ordinary, static Microsoft Office Excel spreadsheets into captivating visuals and allows business users to share them via Microsoft PowerPoint or Adobe™ PDF files. Through interactive data visualizations and a simple, point-and-click interface, Xcelsius Present enables business users to create professional-looking visuals in just minutes, resulting in engaging experiences for presenters and audiences alike. Using interactive graphics – including dials, charts and gauges that clearly convey business cases and demonstrate “what if” scenarios – business professionals can involve, inform and persuade their audiences in meaningful ways with stunning visualizations.

This is a sub-$200 product, aimed at a broad range of business users who want to add some nice visualizations to their spreadsheet data, but there’s probably also a consumer market for this as well; in fact, one of their online demos is a college cost calculator.

They’re also announcing Crystal Reports Basic for SAP Business One, allowing for easily customizable drillable reporting on SAP Business One data that can be shared with others.

She quickly coverred their data services portfolio, which provides all the usual data management functions but also data federation and management of unstructured data such as RSS feeds.

They provide on-premise solutions, but also have more than 125,000 subscribers for their SaaS BI offerings.

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2008 08 12 Sandy Kemsley SAPevents Comments (0)

Business Objects Summit: Partner Panel

Narina Sippy, SVP and GM of GRC at Business Objects, hosted a panel of three major partners: Lee Dittmar of Deloitte, Glenn Gutwillig of Accenture, and Dan Miller of IBM GS. Inevitably, this started with the “mine’s bigger than yours” comparisons, because apparently when it comes to Business Objects professional services practices, size does matter.

The most interesting part of the discussion was in response to an audience question about whether it’s possible to reach the nirvana of enterprise-wide information access and sharing, or if we’re stuck with unintegrated silos of information within enterprises. The panel felt that the leaders in moving to enterprise-wide integrated information management will gain such a competitive advantage — compliance, internal collaboration and other benefits — that it will force the rest of the market along quickly behind it.

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2008 08 12 Sandy Kemsley SAPevents Comments (0)

Business Objects Summit: Day 1 Keynote

I’m here in rainy Boston at the Business Objects Influencer Summit, which was kicked off with Jonathan Becher, SVP of Marketing for Business Objects. It’s a very process-oriented message (which explains why I’m here): using business intelligence to drive process efficiency, improve insight to close the gap between strategy and execution, and add flexibility to create new business processes that align operations to strategy.

He was joined by Doug Merritt, EVP and GM of Business User Global Sales (moving from a product role), who continued with the message of how total insight allows organizations to optimize business performance. He discussed a number of customer case studies, focusing on how their easy-to-use end-user tools are being used to solve real business problems.

He also showed the strong tie-in between business intelligence to core SAP systems: insight, strategy and decisions feeding into monitoring, process refinement, process execution and events.

It’s only been just over six months since Business Objects’ acquisition by SAP, a period when most acquired companies take a bit of a dip in sales, but they’ve managed to keep their numbers on an upward growth path.

Becher then introduced Dr. Robert Kaplan from Harvard Business School and Palladium Group, inventor of such business strategy and measurement concepts as balanced scorecard and activity-based costing. We’ve also been given a copy of his book, The Execution Premium — Linking Strategy to Operations for Competitive Advantage, which I look forward to reading. He walked us through the main concept in the book: closed-look cycle that links strategy and operations:

  1. Develop the strategy
  2. Translate the strategy
  3. Align the organization
  4. Plan operations
  5. Execution
  6. Monitor and learn
  7. Test and adapt

In the middle of this cycle are the strategic plan (e.g., balanced scorecard) and the operating plan (e.g., forecasts, budgets, dashboards), with links to the several steps in the cycle that either create the artifacts of the plans or are informed by those artifacts, as well as interacting with each other.

Sep 2 and 3 represent the creation of the balanced scorecard, and translating that into operational improvement programs (step 4) is a new focus in Kaplan’s book. And here we are again, talking about process — since that’s what step 5 is all about — and how balanced scorecard helps to determine which processes have the most impact on a business’ performance, and are therefore the ones that should be the focus of process improvement efforts.

Becher took us back around the cycle, showing how Business Objects is applied at each of those steps (except execution), which provided an interesting perspective on the different roles of Business Objects within cycle that we in the BPM world know as design-execute-monitor-optimize.

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2008 08 12 Sandy Kemsley SAPevents Comments (0)

TUCON: BPM with Spotfire Analytics

Lars Bauerle and Brendan Gibson of TIBCO showed us how Spotfire analytics are being integrated with data from iProcess to identify process improvement. I hadn’t seen Spotfire in any detail before the demo that I saw on Tuesday, and it’s a very impressive visualization and analysis tool; today, they showed iProcess process runtime data copied and pasted from Excel into Spotfire, but it’s not clear that they’ve done a real integration between the iProcess process statistics and Spotfire. Regardless, once you get the data in there, it’s very easy to do aggregations on the fly then drill into the results, comparisons of portions of the data set, and filtering by any attributes. You can also define KPIs and create dashboard-style interfaces. Authoring and heavy-duty analysis are done using an installed desktop application with (I believe) a local in-memory engine, but light-weight analysis can be done using a zero-install web client and all analysis done on the server.

In addition to local data, it’s possible to link directly from enterprise databases into the Spotfire client, which effectively gives the Spotfire user the ability to do queries to bring data into the in-memory engine for visualization and analysis — in other words, there doesn’t appear to be any technical barriers to establishing a link to the statistics in an iProcess engine. They showed a model of data flowing from the iProcess server to a data mart, which would then be connected to Spotfire; realistically, you’re not going to let your analytics hit your production process engine directly, so this makes sense, although there can be latency issues with this model. It’s not clear if they provide any templates for doing this and for some standard process analytics.

They did a demo of some preconfigured analytics pages with process data, such as cases in progress and missed SLAs, showing what this could look like for a business manager or knowledge worker. Gibson did refer to "when you refresh the data from the database" which indicates that this is not real-time data, although it could be reasonably low latency depending on the link between iProcess and the data mart, and client refresh frequency.

Then, the demo gods reared their heads and Spotfire froze, and hosed IE with it. Obviously, someone forgot to do the animal sacrifice this morning…

They went to questions while rebooting, and we found out that it’s not possible to stream data in real-time to Spotfire (as I suspected from the earlier comments); it needs to load data from a data source into its own in-memory engine on a periodic basis. In other words, you’re not going to use this as a real-time monitoring dashboard, but as an advanced visualization and analytics tool.

Since this uses an in-memory engine for analytics, there are limitations based on the physical memory of the machine doing the processing, but Spotfire does some smart things in terms of caching to disk, and swapping levels of aggregation in and out as required. However, at some point you’re going to have to consider loading a subset of your process history data via a database view.

There was a question about data security, for example, if a person should only be able to drill down on their own region’s data; this is done in Spotfire by setting permissions on the queries underlying the analysis, including row-level security.

iProcess Analytics is being positioned as being for preconfigured reporting on your process data, whereas Spotfire is positioned for ad hoc analysis and integration with other data sets.

Spotfire could add huge value to iProcess data, but it appears that they don’t quite have the whole story put together yet; I’m looking forward to seeing how this progresses, some real world case studies when customers start to use it, and the reality of what you need to do to preprocess the ocean of process data before loading it into Spotfire for analysis.

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2008 05 01 Sandy Kemsley BPM
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TIBCO Analyst Summit: Spotfire

Christopher Ahlberg, founder of Spotfire and now president of TIBCO’s Spotfire division, discussed Spotfire’s capabilities and what’s been done with integrating Spotfire into other TIBCO products.

Timely insights — the right information at the right time — is a competitive differentiator for most businesses, and classic business intelligence just doesn’t cut it in many cases. Consumer applications like Google Finance are raising the bar for dynamic visualization techniques, although most of them are fairly inflexible when it comes to viewing or comparing specific data in which you’re interested. In other words, we want the data selection and aggregation capabilities of our enterprise systems, and the visualization capabilities of consumer web applications. Ahlberg sees a number of disruptive BI technologies transforming the platform — in-memory processes, interactive visualization, participatory architecture, mashups — and starting to be able to link to the event-driven world of classic TIBCO.

He did a demo of copying and pasting the contents of a spreadsheet directly into Spotfire, which automatically used the column headers as metadata and created a scatterplot. He filtered and colored the chart dynamically, set thresholds and played around with the data to show what could be extracted from it, then showed a pre-built dashboard of charts that still allowed quite a bit of interactivity in terms of filtering and other view parameters. He also showed a mashup between Spotfire and Microsoft Virtual Earth that allowed a subset of the data to be selected in Spotfire, causing a shortest route between the geographic location corresponding to the data points to be plotted on Virtual Earth.

This puts a much more configurable face on standard analytics, not just in display parameters but also in area like selecting the dimensions to be compared on the fly rather than having them pre-defined in OLAP cubes. Since TIBCO is focused on real-time event processing, the logical step is to see how those events can be visualized in Spotfire: instead of just raising an alert to someone, give them a view of the analytical context behind the alert that makes it easier to close the loop on problem resolution. They’ve packaged this as Spotfire Operations Analytics, which fits most closely into a LEAN Six Sigma manufacturing environment.

There’s a session on Thursday about BPM with analytics which I’ll likely attend to see what they’re doing in that area.

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2008 04 29 Sandy Kemsley TUCON Comments (1)

ProcessWorld 2008: Maureen Fleming, IDC

Maureen Fleming of IDC spoke in the Process Intelligence and Performance Management track on process measurement, and how it’s used to support decisions about a process as well as having an application context. She defines strategic measurement as guiding decisions about where to focus across processes, providing information on where to improve a process, and supporting fact-based dispute arbitration.

She showed a chart of timeliness of measurement versus complexity:

  • Simple and timely: measure and spot-check performance within a process
  • Simple and time critical: need for continuous measurement and problem identification within homogeneous processes
  • Complex and timely: regular reporting to check performance across heterogeneous process islands
  • Complex and time-critical: need for continuous measurement and problem identification across heterogeneous process islands

Leading enterprises are moving towards more complex measurement. I’m not sure I agree with her definition of “timely”, which seems to be used to mean “historical” in this context.

She breaks down measurement tools by the intention of the measurement system: what happened (process intelligence and reporting)/what will happen(analytics, complex event processing)/what is happening (BAM)/why it is happening (root cause analysis))/how we should respond (intelligent process automation).

She went through IDC’s categorization of BPMS — decision-centric automation (human-centric), sensing automation (integration-centric and complex event processing), and transaction-centric automation (integration-centric) — and discussed the problem of each BPMS vendors’ individual BAM creating islands of process measurement. Process metrics from all process automation systems need to feed into a consolidated process measurement infrastructure: likely an enterprise process warehouse with analytics/BAM tied to that more comprehensive view, such as ARIS PPM.

She discussed KPIs and how the goals for those KPIs need to consider both business objectives and past performance: you can’t understand performance variations that might occur in the present without looking at when and why they occurred in the past.

Although her presentation mostly focussed on process measurement, the Q&A was much more about sense and respond: how to have specific measurements/events trigger something back in the process side in order to respond to an event.

2008 02 15 Sandy Kemsley ARISProcessWorld
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Webinar: The New Paradigm for Business Intelligence – Collaborative, User Centric, Process Embedded

I’m watching this webinar featuring Don Tapscott of New Paradigm and Katrina Coyle of Molson Canada, sponsored by SAP.

Tapscott spoke first, and started with a reworked version of the same presentation that I saw last June at the Enterprise 2.0 conference, covering the four basic drivers for change: web 2.0, the net generation, the social revolution, and the economic revolution. He went on, however, to talk about the changing face of business intelligence: moving from cost-cutting to a focus on growth and creating relationships with customers and partners. There’s a number of factors at play:

  • Simplifying BI from a tool for tech-savvy power users to a visual, interactive tool for business decision makers
  • Making it easier to filter out the relevant data for making decisions rather that being confronted with a sea of data (a foundation of automated decisioning and complex event processing)
  • Providing interactive and iterative tools rather than creating standard reports through batch processes
  • Integrating with business processes for automated decisioning rather than just one-way periodic reporting

He sees more of this in the future: simpler interfaces to allow more people to participate in BI, new visualization techniques, better integration with other technologies, and support for harnessing the collective intelligence of participants.

I love that Tapscott’s using the term “BI 2.0″, which I first used in early 2006 to refer to the entire field of analytics in the face of a new batch of terms that seemed determined to relegate BI to refer only to periodic, one-way reporting.

We were then treated to a 24-slide presentation by Lothar Schubert, Director of Solution Marketing for SAP NetWeaver. Although he provided coverage of the landscape and history of BI, this could have been a bit shorter since we were left with only about 10 minutes for the customer case study.

Next up was Katrina Coyle, BI Team Manager for Molson, discussing their complex business environment — partnerships, acquisitions, multiple geographic locations with different go-to-market strategies, changes to consumer preferences — and how a single version of the truth through BI is absolutely necessary in order for them to continue to build their brand successfully.

Molson has been pushing innovation in their products and through social networking, but also through information using BI. This greatly improves information quality and timeliness throughout their supply chain, which in turn changes their physical loading and shipping practices. Problems in the supply chain are identified as they occur, and less time is spent managing the information and reporting.

You can see a replay of the webinar at the first link above.

2008 01 09 Sandy Kemsley Enterprise 2.0 Comments (0)

More BI consolidation

Various sources this morning report that IBM is buying Cognos for $4.9B, or $58/share. As a stockholder, I just hope that’s $CDN. :)

2007 11 12 Sandy Kemsley Comments (0)

Webinar on Enterprise Decision Management tomorrow

After attending the Business Rules Forum last week, either I’m more aware of related events or I’m on more mailing lists for rules/decisioning vendors. In either case, Fair Isaac is putting on an Introduction to Enterprise Decision Management webinar tomorrow at 2pm Eastern. From their description of the event:

Learn how your organization can automate and improve decisions by:

  • Taking control of your decisions and make them a corporate asset
  • Separating operational decisions from processes and systems for maximum agility
  • Using business rules management systems to ensure decision consistency and speed
  • Applying different kinds of analytics – descriptive, predictive and decision – to make more precise and profitable decisions

It’s free, just sign up online.

2007 10 29 Sandy Kemsley BRM Comments (0)

Smart Enough Systems

I’m sure that James Taylor has almost given up on me ever writing a book review of Smart Enough Systems: I wrote a brief advance review back in April that’s printed in the book, but nothing since it was released. This week, I’ve been immersed in business rules and decisioning, and had a chance to finally meet James face-to-face after a couple of years of emailing back and forth. Also, James’ situation has changed since the book was released: he’s left Fair Isaac and is now an independent, working (I think) with his co-author, Neil Raden. Neil, who I met very briefly this week, is an independent consultant and analyst who’s been focussed on business intelligence for quite a while; James refers to his work as “BI 2.0″ (a term that I think that I invented here in early 2006). The two of them met through James’ blog and started the conversation about how someone needed to write a book about this crossover area between business rules and business intelligence.

Just to get started, here’s my pre-release review:

Taylor and Raden’s central manifesto highlights that it’s critical to embody more intelligence in today’s business decision-making and have consistent, automated decisioning built into business processes in order to remain agile and competitive in today’s fast-moving market. They take you through the core concepts of enterprise decision management (EDM), dive into the underlying technologies, then address how to integrate EDM into your business processes to create your own Smart (Enough) Systems.

By focusing on operational decisions that contribute to corporate strategy, Smart (Enough) Systems provide the ability not only to create agile business processes, but to have these processes be self-learning based on historical results. Instead of simply capturing operational process statistics in a data warehouse for later analysis, Smart (Enough) Systems use that knowledge to inform the business rules and allow them to adapt their guidance of the decision-making process. By extracting the decisions from legacy applications, static enterprise applications and manual procedures, and managing them within a shared enterprise decision management system, operational decisions can be applied consistently — and modified easily for processes in flight — across the enterprise.

What I like about the book is that it provides an overview that will get business people interested in the topic, as well as providing a practical guide to getting started. There’s a lot of books focussed on analytics and business rules already, but most of them assume that you already know what you’re going to do with these technologies; in many cases, it’s hard to discover the right decisions on which to focus, since some things are more important than you may have originally perceived when starting a project.

As I heard this week, there’s still a strong tendency to sell rules technology to IT as a way to implement systems fast and cheaper, instead of selling decisioning to the business as a way to solve business problems. For the most part, decisions in business processes are unconsciously relegated either to a developer coding them into an application, or to a front-line worker executing them on an ad hoc basis. Decisions, and the rules that underlie them, need to be made explicit: therein lies the path to both compliance and agility. I joked yesterday about Jan Venthienen’s presentation that he’d like to reduce all processes to a single activity and have all business logic in a rule set, but there’s definitely value in what he’s saying: we need to seek out the decisions in processes, capture the ever-changing business rules that are embedded within them, and move these out of the processes and into rules/decisioning systems. The reality is that process maps don’t change all that often if the decisions and business rules are stripped out of the processes: most business agility is based on rule changes, not process changes, especially for high-volume core transactional processes. However, since we often code rules directly into the business processes — making these processes some combination of processes and decision trees — we perceive the need to be that of changing processes rather than changing rules. And so (and I’ll be totally blackballed in the BPM community for this particular blasphemy), the entire BPM industry has focussed on building tools that allow for easy modification of process maps by the business, when maybe they really should have been focussed on pushing their customers towards the integration of business rules for decisioning in order to greatly reduce the need to modify process maps.

Climbing off my soapbox for a moment and returning to James and Neil’s book, they focus on a key benefit of this sort of smart decisioning in operational processes, which is the ability to replace the “irreplaceables”, such as insurance underwriters, before all the boomers take their knowledge and retire to Palm Beach. This greatly controls risk: not just the risk of the workers leaving, but the risk of bad or inconsistent decision-making. By allowing decisions to become more personalized based on the customer and scenario, this can also provide the ability to be more customer-centric, as well as agility in the face of changing regulations and market conditions.

They see a number of roadblocks to this sort of smart decisioning at the operational level:

  • Everyone is focussed on strategic issues and not taking their operations seriously; however, the aggregate effect of a small but poor decision on millions of operational transactions is, in fact, strategic. In other words, execution matters.
  • Business and IT have an antagonistic relationship. This is often blamed on IT being arrogant and not allowing the business to participate in technology initiatives, but there’s also some amount of the business not wanting to take responsibility since that means that they can’t blame IT if something goes wrong.

The ideas that James and Neil put forward in their book are a great place for business and IT to start collaborating on how to make smart enough systems.

You may also want to listen to the interview that Scott Sehlhorst did with James back in June (I know, I know, when the book was actually released).

2007 10 25 Sandy Kemsley BRM Comments (1)

BRF Day 2: Business Rules and Business Intelligence Make Great Bedfellows

David Straus of Corticon gave an engaging presentation about BR and BI, starting with the Wikipedia definitions about each, then characterizing BI as “understanding” and BR as “action” (not unlike my statement that BI in BPM is about visibility and BR in BPM is about agility). He started with the basic drivers for a business rules management system – agility (speed and cost), business control while maintaining IT compliance, transparency, and business improvement (reduce costs, reduce risk, increase revenue) — and went on to some generalized use cases for rules-driven analysis:

  • Analyze transaction compliance, i.e., are the human decisions in a business process compliant with the policies and regulations?
  • Analyze the effect of automation with business rules, i.e., when a previously manual step is automated through the application of rules
  • Analyze business policy rules change (automated or non-automated)

He walked through a simplified claims scenario, where the claims agent is not replaced with rules but still makes a decision in the process, but their decision is compared against a decision made by a rules system and any discrepancies are investigated. In other words, although there’s still a person making the decision in the process, the rules system is acting as a watchdog to ensure that their decisions are compliant with the corporate policy. After some time, there can be some analysis of the results to detect pattens in non-compliance: is it an individual agent that’s causing non-compliance, or a particular product, or are the rules not aligned with the requirements? In some cases, the policies given to the agents are actually in conflict, so that they have two different “right” answers in some cases; in other cases, agents may have information that’s just not represented in the rules. By modeling the policies in a business rules system, these conflicts can be driven out to establish integrity across the entire set of rules. This can also be used in cases where an organization just isn’t ready to replace a human decision with a business rules system, in order to validate the rules and compare them to the human decisions; this can establish some trust of the decisioning system that may eventually lead them to replace some of the human decisions with automated ones to create more consistent and compliant decisions.

David had a number of case studies for this combination of rules and analytics, such as investment portfolio risk management, where mergers and acquisitions in the portfolio holdings may drive the portfolio out of compliance with the underlying risk profile: information about the holdings is fed back through the rules on a daily basis to establish if the portfolio is still in compliance, and trigger a (manual) rebalancing if it is out of compliance.

By combining business intelligence (and the data that it’s based on) and business rules, it’s also possible to analyze what-if scenarios for changes to rules, since the historical data can be fed through the new version of the rules to see what would have changed.

He’s challenged the BI vendors to do this sort of rules-based analysis; none of them do it now, but it would provide a hugely powerful tool for providing greater insight into businesses.

There was a question from the audience that led to a discussion about the iterative process of discovering rules in a business, particularly the ones that are just in people’s heads rather than encoded in existing systems; David did take this opportunity to make a plug for the modeling environment in their product and how it facilitates rules discovery. I’m seeing some definite opportunities for rules modeling tools when working with my customers on policies and procedures.

2007 10 24 Sandy Kemsley BRM
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