Higher Education CIO BI Pulse Survey
July 23, 2010 | Leave a Comment
Part of ASR’s educational practices’ mission is to help our clients and the higher education business intelligence (BI) community stay informed of the latest advances in business analytics, trends in the BI marketplace, and better practices. To that end, ASR Analytics is conducting a brief BI Pulse survey of educational institutions to assess how they are progressing on their BI initiatives. The resulting report will provide a high level view of BI practices and provide institutions a unique opportunity to benchmark their accomplishments.
As a former higher education CIO, I valued the input of my academy colleagues and respected their opinion because it was a source of accurate and relevant information. By completing this survey you will be providing your colleagues with the latest information on how members of the academy are cultivating their BI initiatives.
ASR would like to invite our CIO academy readers to please take the survey by clicking the following link: CIO BI Pulse Survey. Your participation is a vital part of the report development process, and serves as the foundation for an annual survey that will allow you to benchmark progress year-over-year. If your institution currently has a BI initiative, we would appreciate your feedback in this 5-minute survey. Please submit your response no later than Friday, July 30.
We would like to thank you in advance for taking the time to complete the BI Pulse survey. Your feedback is important to us. In appreciation for your time, we will provide you with a complimentary benchmark report as soon as it is published. Your individual responses will be kept strictly confidential, and data will only be published in aggregate. If you have any questions regarding this survey, please contact me at james.riha@asranalytics.com.
We look forward to hearing from you, and greatly appreciate your time and participation.
Sincerely,
James Riha, PhD
Director, ASR Analytics
Business Intelligence Initiatives Get an “A” for Effort and a “C” for Results
July 16, 2010 | Leave a Comment
There is almost universal agreement that the lack of appropriate, accurate and timely information is part of the reason why organizations and even entire nations got themselves into the recent economic mess. Many analysts also agree that business intelligence (BI), the process that transforms data into intelligence, now has the opportunity to help accelerate the economic recovery and aid these organizations and nations in dealing with the new global business complexities. According to a recent Ness BI Market Pulse Survey, BI initiatives continue to be front and center on most organizational business and IT agendas. The problem they found is that BI achievements are falling short of expected outcomes. For instance, according to the report, BI solutions have done a pretty good job of providing a view into the past (hindsight) such as access to planning and financial data. But they have been less successful in providing current performance information (insight) to improve decision-making or information on future conditions (foresight) such as future customer demand.
So what are organizations really doing with business intelligence and are they being successful?
According to the “The Ness Technologies Market Pulse Study on Business Intelligence” (BI), conducted in the fourth quarter of 2009 and published May 2010, BI initiatives just aren’t delivering the results that executives were expecting. The study indicates that results are lagging expected outcomes in 14 of 16 categories as depicted below.
©2010 Ness Global Industries
The largest and most frightening gap is in business agility and planning. Respondents indicate the reason for this discrepancy is that they have run into a number of key challenges. Not surprising, is that the most significant challenges are not technical ones. The top 5 challenges, in order of importance are: (1) lack of alignment with organizational strategy (over 50%); (2) lack of working partnership between business and IT (40%); (3) resistance to change (38%) ; (4) lack of executive sponsorship; and (5) lack of communication by the BI leadership team. This is supported by the fact that less than one-half of the survey respondents believe that those responsible for BI initiatives are in regular contact and coordinate plans (49%).
The two top technical issues include problems with the integration of data and persistence of data silos. Specifically, many organizations do not have a plan and have not resolved issues to integrate their isolated vertical data structures that are the cornerstone for establishing a centralized repository for the “Single Version of the Truth”. Respondents also listed the lack of a strong data governance initiative as contributing to this last issue.
But despite these results, it looks like organizations are committed to the potential payoff of BI. Major North American organizations report an increase in there BI fiscal year 2010 budgets and they anticipate that this allocation will increase in fiscal year 2011 as well.
The planned actions that organizations plan to take or investigate include the following:
Organizational Initiatives
- Ensure that BI is aligned with the organization’s strategy
- Appoint an executive to “own” the BI program, communicate regularly with stakeholders, and assemble a seasoned team, from both Business and IT groups, with the skills to get the job done.
- Set clear objectives and develop an overall BI roadmap that concisely defines what data is needed and how it should be delivered.
- Implement the program in short, phased initiatives that quickly deliver ROI to stakeholders
Technical Initiatives
- Data Silos and integration
- Data Governance
Next-Generation BI Toolset
- Predictive analytics
- In-memory processing
- Software as a service (SaaS)
The technical and next-Generation Initiatives are also consistent with the findings published in Information Week (August 29, 2009) and CIO Magazine (February 2010).
BI Pulse Survey
Would you like to learn how members of the academy are doing with their BI initiative?
Next week, ASR will be sending out a survey to take the BI pulse of the higher education community. By completing the survey (5 minutes) you will be providing your colleagues with the latest information on how members of the academy are cultivating their BI initiatives. We look forward to your cooperation.
Frustrated with IT But Still Wanting a BI Solution?
July 13, 2010 | Leave a Comment
The volume of structured data, contained in transaction systems generated by organizations, is at an all time high and will continue to increase. This structured data, however, now needs to be combined with the unstructured data that represents the majority of corporate data and the new social network data. More importantly, knowledge workers and decision makers want this data accessible and made available for analysis. Additionally, much of the unstructured data is already is in the hands of the departmental knowledge workers, but they lack the tools to use it.
Business Intelligence Platform selection has traditionally required the approval of two groups at once, Information Technology (IT) and the departmental knowledge workers, which has always made purchasing and implementing a business intelligence (BI) platform a tricky thing to do. Anyone reading this can probably relate to the tension you’ve observed between your IT department and departmental end-users. Trying to get consensus and agreement on a new platform, typically dead in the middle, takes time and normally leads to some sort of compromise. But the new economic conditions are forcing IT and knowledge workers to look at different approaches for BI.
The new economic realities are driving CIO’s to look at lower cost solutions that provide the additional analytical capabilities demanded by knowledge workers. See my last post for additional information. But the knowledge workers can no longer wait and their increasing frustration appears to be fueling a growing bifurcation with central IT over the nature and future of BI. Specifically, IT led/managed BI versus departmental led/managed BI. Pressured by the new economic realities, the need to cut costs, the need for more information and analytics, and the need to quickly demonstrate business value is pushing the knowledge workers to look past central IT to address their unmet needs. The perceived benefits of improved analysis and decision making are so compelling that the knowledge workers are making the choice towards SaaS/Cloud, despite the risk of creating new fragmented silos of applications and tools.
What makes SaaS/Cloud so compelling?
SaaS/Cloud BI’s key selling points, the ones that are getting the knowledge workers to open their wallets include: (a) the ability to get a BI solution with an almost total lack of IT involvement; (b) little or no upfront cap-ex expenditures for the solution; and (c) op-ex based subscription model that allows you to pay-as-you-go (subscription fee per month instead of a large annual license fee).
Is the future of BI in the Cloud? I‘d like to hear your comments.
I would like to remind our readers that this blog is not just about ASR, nor is it about any specific vendor , infrastructure or solution– it’s a forum for “us” to express thoughts and ideas about the nature and state of business intelligence (BI). I say “us” because a blog is only a one-sided conversation unless there is input from you. Keep the comments coming and make this a repository for industry awareness and better practices. Also, feel free to ask questions or let me know if there are special topics that are interest to the ASR community, and we will try to find the answers for you.
CIO’s’ Top 5 Technology and Business Priorities for 2010
July 8, 2010 | 1 Comment
Recently, Gartner released its 2010 survey of chief information officers (CIO) priorities. The survey of 1,560 CIO’s notes that “2009 was the most challenging year for CIO’s in the corporate and public sectors as they faced multiple budget cuts, delayed spending and increased demand for services with reduced resources”. Gartner also notes that “CIO’s have suffered through a difficult budget tightening period, with budgets essentially cut back to 2005 levels”, but Gartner predicts that budgets will stabilize or grow slightly this year.
Listed below are the top five technology and business priorities for 2010 in order of importance.
Top 5 Technology Priorities
- Virtualization
- Cloud computing
- Web 2.0
- Networking, voice and data communications
- Business intelligence
Top 5 Business Priorities
- Business process improvement
- Reducing enterprise costs
- Increasing the use of information/analytics
- Improving enterprise workforce effectiveness
- Attracting and retaining new customers
Collectively, the respondents indicate that there main focus is on business process improvement and increased use of information. Specifically, the use of business intelligence (BI) solutions, cloud computing and virtualization technologies. Additionally, the findings indicate that business expectations and CIO strategies appear to be in alignment.
Traditionally, technologies like virtualization and cloud computing have been used to enable organizations to get out from under a front-loaded heavy capital investment. Paradoxically, Business Intelligence solutions have traditionally required a front-loaded heavy capital investment (CAPEX) that can initially limit the agility and flexibility of both IT and the business. Additionally, given the cutbacks in organizational budgets, the only new funds available for IT investment and process improvement come from reductions in organizational costs, which are typically operational budgets (OPEX).
Gartner also notes that CIO’s are prioritizing “technologies that can be implemented quickly and without significant upfront expense, instead of investing millions of dollars to get millions in benefits, with these technologies, up front investments are measured in thousands of dollars to get those same benefits.”
Should CIO’s and the business leaders be looking at BI as a Service to resolve the paradox?
What are your thoughts?