This year I had the privilege of attending the Tableau Customer Conference with 1400 other raving fans. This is up from about 300 just a few years ago. Tableau is one of those companies doing it right and they’re being paid back with a growing base of loyal customers.

What Tableau does so well is that they make something so complex seem so simple yet so elegant—a description often bestowed upon Apple. Ted Cuzzillo, writer for Information Management, TDWI, and other publications actually said three years ago that “Tableau is the new Apple” and I wholeheartedly agree.

BI marketers use a lot of the same buzzwords to describe their products, including self service, rich applications, and agile. Most of the time, the difference between BI their products is shades of gray. With Tableau, those words come to life in full color

Tableau’s data visualizations, or “viz” as they are affectionately known as, go far beyond the standard bar and pie charts to include viz that make even the hardened critic, Stephen Few, proud. Some of these include line charts, scatter plots, heat maps, and Gantt bar charts. Where it becomes elegant, but still simple, is when Tableau is used to visualize data with not only shapes (lines, bars, circles), but colors and sizes as well.

A beautiful example of the combination of size, color, and directional lines is in the viz on Tableau Public that tells the story of 20 years worth of named hurricanes. The year’s hurricanes are laid out over a map, showing the start and end points, the path it took, the width of the line indicating wind speeds, and a different color used for each storm. It begins to blur the lines between life and art. In fact, you can find more of these or make your own on Tableau Public, Tableau’s free online version for public-use.

So, while many of the other BI players try to be all things to all users, Tableau continues to do what they do best—telling stories with data.

AMC - Content Marketing for BI and High Tech - Freelance Marketer for High Tech with a focus on BI

Last week I wrote about the TDWI Executive Summit vendor panel discussion on the Future of BI. It was a great chance to hear what was on the mind of the business executive audience and hear what vendors have to say. There were no surprises in the topics and really none in the responses. And, for the most part, the vendors did a good job remaining neutral and not turning it into a chance to advertise their own products.

Here are the rest of the topics discussed. To read part one, click HERE.

Open Source – Open source can be good when it is properly defined and broadly accepted. For example, Google Search and Apache are now commonplace in many organizations. It’s critical that the open source products have a good following and great support.

Data Virtualization – The trend towards data virtualization or federation seems to switch back and forth – much like the trend to centralize and decentralize. There seems to always be a need for virtualization, but the real need should be identified in the business requirements.

BPM and BI – There is a trend toward monitoring Lean improvements with BI. Lean methodologies can drive out the metrics which can then be used in process decision points, sometimes through predictive models. Be sure to use BI to communicate the value that the business process change will provide.

Data Integration – Data integration is still a challenge for many. It’s critical to understand your business needs on timing for getting data through the “ecosystem.” Couple the timing needs with your organization’s ability and decide whether batch, trickle, or real-time makes the best sense.

Collaboration – Many products are beginning to do a better job incorporating collaboration features. For example, SalesForce.com has their Chatter feature, much like a Facebook for the enterprise. Now Tibco is offering Tibbr, with features also similar to Facebook. User expectations will only continue to rise.

IT Roles – IT roles for BI will become more specialized. With BI becoming mission critical, support responsibilities become more important and will require a greater understanding and closer monitoring. Interesting side note is that LinkedIn did an internal study and found the job title with the most growth is “business analyst.”

It was another good conference with great networking opportunities. It was fun to get a chance to talk to business people from many different industries. While they each face similar challenges, their need for BI can be so different.

I was also encouraged talking to vendors who tell me that the conversations they had with attendees were much more detailed and serious, rather than “window shopping” types of conversations.

Looking forward to next time!

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Last week I had to opportunity to attend the TDWI conference on BI in Las Vegas. While TDWI actually holds four conferences every year, this first one of the year is always the largest. This year, things seemed to be hopping with over 750 attendees.

During the conference, I spent some time in the TDWI Executive Summit. The summit is meant to give executives who have some responsibility for BI a high-level overview of various topics of concern and interest. While the regular TDWI sessions (classes) are a half to full day, the Executive Summit presentations are generally an hour each.

Wrapping up the third day of the summit was the vendor panel. The forum was open, allowing anyone in the audience to ask questions of the panel. What follow is a synopsis of the most popular items that were discussed. The comments are from the vendors and not necessarily my own opinions:

Mobile BI – Mobile BI must do more than put a computer screen on a mobile phone. While it has a great form factor and can combine additional contextual knowledge, such as current location, security factors need to be considered and there needs to be a consistent semantic layer across all modes of distribution, whether it’s a phone or a laptop.

Tool Consolidation – It’s very difficult to get the organization to agree to one tool, but you can get close. It’s important to make sure users have the tool they need but also important that there is interoperability across the tool suite. Additional thoughts are the ability for users to self-service their BI needs and to provide governance.

Cloud BI – It’s very early in the cloud BI space. The recommendation is to start with a specific project, especially one that might require external data such as sentiment data. It can make for a great exploration sandbox. Cloud BI must be a solution to a business need, not a shiny new trend to be embraced.

Social Media Data – Also known as social media analytics (SMA), this is definitely a new trend that has incredible value. It’s a great way to understand what people are talking about, looking at patterns in conversation. The discoveries can be surprising. For example, a hotel chain did a customer survey and found they have good results. But, when they looked at conversations on Trip Advisor they were surprised by the negative feedback with specific details.

Check back next week for the rest of the topics discussed in TDWI’s Future of BI vendor panel!



AMC - Content Marketing for BI and High Tech - Freelance Marketer for High Tech with a focus on BI

If you know me, you know I’m a very visual person. I learn by watching, I enjoy pictures so much I do photography in my spare time, and, the data geek in me loves infographics. So, I started poking around looking for some cool infographics and found some in the social media space.

Facebook

Paul Butler, part of Facebook’s data infrastructure team, took just 2% of Facebook’s user data (10 million records) and compiled this beautiful image that shows how we connect within our countries and around the world. While it looks a lot like a map of airline routes, its’ really a map of our human relationships.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is also demonstrating their use of the massive amount of data they’ve collected with Linkedin Maps. Only this time, it the infographic created is about you. LinkedIn’s new Maps feature builds an infographic that shows all of your connections, grouped together by color, and their connection to you is sized by how many shared connections you have between you. The hard part though, is figuring out just how they grouped your connections by color. You have to deduce that yourself.

Here’s a quick video about the maps.

And, here is my LinkedIn Map:

You can get your own LinkedIn Map here.

Twitter

Finally, here is a fun Twitter infographic by Hubspot. Did you know you can grade your Twitter account? The average score is 66%. This map shows how each state’s average compares to the national average. How is your state doing? Get your own grade here. (not bragging, but mine is 95!)

More connections, better networking

So, what does all this mean? First, that social media has connected us in ways never before possible. It’s given us access to people and their ideas that would have been impossible just a decade ago. Now it’s easy to hook up with like-minded people, building our community of friends, expanding our possibilities for finding a life partner, or furthering our business or career.

Social data, better understanding

For the first time in history, social data about human activities is being collected and archived. Social scientists are drooling to get their hands on it to study global trends of all kinds, like health issues, economic changes, and lifestyle habits.

Social media has significantly changed my life for the better, giving me access to people that have helped make my business successful. Has it changed yours in any way?

AMC - Content Marketing for BI and High Tech - Freelance Marketer for High Tech with a focus on BI

I watched the latest Hans Rosling talk on Ted Talks and it was as enlightening as it was entertaining. Professor Rosling has a wonderful way of captivating the audience and using visual data to tell a story.

This time, he highlights the ultimate scorecard – the United Nations (UN) scorecard of eight high level goals. Just in this initial view of eight images, you learn a lot about each goal. He continues the talk moving into a discussion of various metrics and the mistakes that can happen when you select the wrong metrics to compare, especially when you do so just to make the data say what you want it to say.

Enjoy the talk. I’m positive you’ll be smiling as you learn a few things. The ending left me saying, “Wow. Wow.” It’s powerful.

AMC - Content Marketing for BI and High Tech - Freelance Marketer for High Tech with a focus on BI

As many of you know, I have a keen interest in the environment. (Don’t even get me started on the whole global warming (weirding) topic!) I’ve often written about corporate sustainability and am enjoying the work I’m doing with Honeywell on marketing their energy management solutions.

In doing that work, and some work for one of my other clients, Verizon Business, I’ve been able to learn a lot about energy, including the new “smart grid.” With smart grid, energy distribution will be more of a two-way, with producers of all sorts selling energy through a new, open market. We’re starting to see this already as consumers who install solar panels can sell their excess energy back to their utility.

More importantly, communication between the energy provider and consumer will also be two-way. Information will be passed back and forth that will monitor usage, and can even instruct energy-consuming devices to reduce power or turn off when demand reaches critical peaks.

GTM Research

The amount of information that will be captured through new smart meters will be astounding. With meter readings every five minutes and some utilities storing as much as 36 months of data, we could be talking about exabytes of data, a million terabytes!

A new concept is born—meter data management (MDM). “MDM creates an opportunity for utilities to build intelligent applications across the enterprise, but they need to adopt modern system designs including service oriented architectures to do this,” says Chet Geschickter, a Smart Grid analyst at GTM Research.

You can be sure that some vendors have already anticipated the need to manage this large volume of data for analysis and reporting. Both SAP and Oracle have entered the space and are really the only BI players in the top 11 according to the new GTM Research report. As BI vendors look for the next “killer app,” this is one to consider, as it’s a natural problem for business intelligence to solve, especially since the market is predicted to grow 300% by 2014.

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SAP just released their 2009 Sustainability Report and I must say I am impressed. They have really raised the bar for corporate sustainability reporting (CSR). Not only are they one of the top reports in the BI and even the software vendor category, but they’re report is top of the line for all CSR reports.

It opens with a video message from the CSO (Chief Sustainability Officer) Peter Graf, who reports directly to both of the SAP CEOs. His two-minute message gives a high-level overview of their strategy and progress toward sustainability. SAP’s 2009 report takes sustainability reporting to a whole new level by including video clips, interactive metrics in dashboards, and allowing readers to leave comments and feedback. You can see an 7.5 minute overview video here. It was a little hard to find, but I finally found it in the bottom menu, far right under Take a Tour.

SAP is wise, taking a two-pronged approach to sustainability. Not only do they support sustainability internally, through both environmental and social measures, but they also help their customers meet sustainability goals through the solutins they offer. It’s exactly what I’d expect of any BI company.

With this in mind, their report is broken down into three sections: Performance (internal), Solutions (external), and Feedback (engaging readers and stakeholders).

Performance – Each major objective, along with supporting objectives has interactive dashboards that offer filters to explore the data and timeline sliders to change data parameters. For example, the carbon footprint dashboard by default shows the world view but that can be changed to show just EMEA or US. The charts can be switched between pie charts and bar graphs. They even offer quarterly results in addition to the annual report. Finally, you have a choice to download to Excel or print. Nice way to show off their own product functionality.

Solution – SAP has structured their solutions to help companies drive profitability through sustainability. Take a look at their sustainability map which covers most all potential sustainability requirements for an organization. By offering solutions that cover business process management along with metrics and reporting, SAP breaks down the barriers to entry on sustainability programs for their customers. They even include a few case study examples you can read.

Feedback - Sap interviewed hundreds of stakeholders, including customers, employees, shareholders, NGO’s, partners, and analysts, to best understand their priorities for SAP. You’ll see the results in their materiality matrix, where bio diversity was ranked lowest and areas like green house gasses and employee satisfaction ranked highest. You can even create and submit your own materiality matrix and contribute to SAP’s sustainability priorities. It’s a great example of what companies managing sustainability programs should do on a regular basis.

You will also find the unedited letter from their strategic advisory panel that applauds SAP’s efforts, and you see their Assurance Report from KPMG auditors. SAP follows the GRI guidelines and was rated an A+, the highest rating available.

If you’re still new to corporate sustainability and wonder just what a good report should look like, I encourage you to head out and take a look at SAP. They’re truly setting the bar.

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Yesterday, I went to a luncheon put on by Qlikview at the Seattle Yacht Club. I love these vendor luncheons, not because of the free lunch (though it was delicious), but to keep up on the BI industry and hear first hand from other BI users and managers.

I really didn’t know much about Qlikview. Oh, I’ve heard the name now and then but still hadn’t heard anything of substance. Turns out they’ve actually been around since the 1993 and have been headquartered in the US since 2005. And, last year IDC named them as the fastest growing company for three years running—which is probably where I heard about them.

They have a nice reporting and analysis product that replaces the need for cubes and their associated processing time. Because all of the data for a particular subject area (created by IT) is in memory, users are not limited to a predefined hierarchy and can move around through the data very quickly. Ok, that’s very cool.

As for marketing, they seem to be doing most things right. They have a very robust website, including lots of available educational resources like white papers, analyst reports, a blog, webinars, and several “how-to” videos. They’re also good at promoting their community with an active Twitter account (@qlikview), a very busy forum, user groups, and even a wiki.

Finally – be still my heart – they even have a corporate social responsibility program. Currently, I only see that they will offer grants for free product, hosting, and training to selected non-profits. It’s a start, though I think they can do much more here.

So my BI friends, have you run across vendors that you should have known but didn’t? Why do you think that is?

AMC - Content Marketing for BI and High Tech - Freelance Marketer for High Tech with a focus on BI

As some of you already know, I’m quite interested in the linkage between corporate sustainability, also known as corporate social responsibility or CSR, and business intelligence. There’s a very logical place for BI teams, processes, and technologies in CSR.

CSR wraps the traditional, profit-making business efforts in ways that reduce their impact on both the environment and society. This is often referred to as the triple-bottom line-balancing financial, social, and environmental ROI.

Each company’s sustainability goals will be unique. Manufacturers may look at reducing fuel consumption through optimizing shipping routes. Hoteliers may look both at recycling guest waste and hiring from the local community. Builders may look to use more renewable building materials.

The Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) was formed to create a common framework for companies to report voluntary reporting of economic, environmental, and social activities. It doesn’t specify what to report, but rather how to report. The GRI has adopted strategies to promote standards and provide assurance to stakeholders. These include consultation panels, internal audits, and independent reviews.

Though CSR metrics are not always easy to measure, companies should make sure the metrics they gather are both suitable and available. The metrics should be objective, relevant, complete, and consistently measurable.

Today, many large, well-known companies are producing annual corporate sustainability reports. These are actually done in a very similar fashion to the “annual report.” Companies use these reports to inform shareholders and communicate with the public to:

• Demonstrate their interest in the environment, their employees, and the communities they serve
• Show their commitment to human rights and fair labor policies
• Promote transparency with employees, shareholders, government regulators, and NGOs
• Enhance or protect their brand or reputation
• To grow shareholder value

Some of the companies reporting include Nike, PepsiCo, McDonald’s, AT&T and Intel. There are even more in the GRI featured report list. Take a look at some of these reports. I think you’ll find them fascinating and you’ll see the depth in which they’ve been able to establish metrics for CSR.

As a BI practitioner, consultant, or vendor, it’s time to start planning how you can support CSR. Are you being given a seat at the table? Can you help the CSR team think differently about gathering data for hard-to-measure metrics? Perhaps a CSR scorecard is in order to provide ongoing visibility.

More companies are realizing they can no longer selfishly think only of their profits. Stakeholders are beginning to demand they reduce their impact on the environment and contribute to social justice both with employees and the community.

What will be your role?

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Came across this stunning TED video that demonstrates scientific data in both 3-D and audio. It’s not only functional but beautiful as well. Increasing the way we sense, perceive, and interact with data is brilliant. Is this the future of BI?

Having watched the video, I find a renewed appreciation for the super intelligent minds out there. The video showed just how complex data can be and I wonder if we can do something similar with our BI tools one day. Do we need super intelligence to understand our data?

AMC - Content Marketing for BI and High Tech - Freelance Marketer for High Tech with a focus on BI