Business Intelligence

Advice and opinion about the strategies, technologies and products that allow you to turn your enterprise data and knowledge into a powerful strategic weapon. Topics range from master data management strategies to CRM solutions.

A Business Architecture Approach to Building a Mobile Strategy

Mike Rosen | Jan 29, 2013 No Responses

Jan 292013

Although mobile computing is not new, there has been a lot of discussion lately about it, and about having an effective mobile/social strategy. The first question we need to ask is: what should your mobile strategy be? Of course, this ought to be related to your business strategy, but we still have to dig into a lot of details and answer a lot of questions to properly formulate the strategy, perform a cost/benefit analysis, and create a roadmap and plan. So how can we go about investigating this? It should come as no surprise that I would suggest business architecture as an approach. The first step would be to identify the stakeholders that you are …

The Growing Role of Tablets in Corporations

Curt Hall | Jan 15, 2013 2 Responses

Jan 152013

The Growing Role of Tablets in Corporations

There has been a lot of discussion about the need for organizations to adopt tablet devices (e.g., iPad, Android-based, PlayBook) to enable their employees to communicate via email, participate in mobile conferencing, and to access, view, and interact with corporate data via reports, dashboards, and other functionality while on the go. Cutter Consortium conducted a survey in 2012 that polled 69 end-user organizations about their mobile technology practices and adoption plans, including the use of smartphones and tablets and issues associated with the development, deployment, and support of mobile devices and end users. According to the survey, almost half of organizations surveyed currently view the use of tablets as a strategic priority to have, while …

Where Organizations Are Using Tablets

Curt Hall | Dec 10, 2012 No Responses

Dec 102012

Cutter Consortium recently (Q4 2012) conducted a survey that polled 69 end-user organizations about their mobile technology practices and adoption plans, including the use of smartphones and tablets and issues associated with the development, deployment, and support of mobile devices and end users. The survey revealed that the main domains and applications in which organizations are using or plan to use tablets (in order of popularity/importance) include: Executive/management — to facilitate mobile communications and to support dashboards and other tools for measuring and managing product/company performance and the like. Sales, service, and support (i.e., CRM) — these are the main customer-facing domains and they tend to be very time sensitive, thus demanding rapid responses to …

The Business of Understanding

Roger Evernden | Nov 20, 2012 No Responses

Nov 202012

Contrary to popular belief, the term “information architecture” is not synonymous with designing and structuring websites or developing an Internet-based information base. The phrase was first introduced in 1975 by Richard Saul Wurman, who is probably best known for founding TED Conferences and TEDTalks. When he introduced this concept, Wurman was thinking of information in a broad sense. He was one of the first to recognize that modern technologies were likely to produce “a stream of bytes that leaves us inundated with data but starved for the tools & patterns that give them meaning. In reality there has not been an information explosion, but rather an explosion of noninformation, or data that simply doesn’t inform” (Information …

Cloud Computing Standards: Talk About Interoperability…

Mitchell Ummel | Oct 9, 2012 No Responses

Oct 092012

The analogy between the evolution of the electric energy industry and cloud computing is oftentimes used, and for good reason. It’s likely the most applicable predictor of where this industry is heading over the next 10-20 years. Although slight regional variances exist, it’s generally the case that I, as a consumer of electric power, can plug in my appliance anywhere in the world and expect it to work efficiently, safely, and reliably. Standards for voltage regulation, plug/outlet design, and circuit protection are mature and widely embraced, and the electric appliance industry can compete, and innovate, on a level playing field for the benefit of consumers worldwide. The clock radio in my office is one of …

What Does SoLoMo Mean to the Enterprise?

Brian Dooley | Sep 25, 2012 No Responses

Sep 252012

Social networking, mobility, and analytics are among the key topics for the enterprise today, as companies attempt to leverage social networks for insights, provide on-the-road access to data, and integrate an increasing realm of data into the diversified range of analytics possibilities provided by Big Data. Each of these areas is of growing importance to corporate marketing strategies and internal efficiency. But the confluence of social, mobile, and analytics is creating some important trends in its own right. As we explore in a recent Executive Update (see “SoLoMo Analytics“), many of these revolve around the growing combination of social, local, and mobile — often called “SoLoMo” — that has become a key emerging ecosystem of consumer behavior …

Turning Big Data into Big Benefits

Christine Generali | Jul 10, 2012 No Responses

Jul 102012

With a deluge of data coming in from so many different channels, organizations more than ever need to rein in and come up with a strategy for managing this “big data” to stay competitive. But what’s the best data analytics solution? The upcoming Cutter IT Journal with Guest Editor Ralph Hughes invites practical advice and insight on how to manage big data and capitalize on it for enterprise success. If you are experienced with the benefits of big data technologies, have experienced the drawbacks of modern big data implementations or the drawbacks of earlier technologies, or are skeptical of big data as a whole, we would like to hear from you. Proposals of interest are …

Future CMS Plans

Steven Kursh | Jul 3, 2012 No Responses

Jul 032012

To help us learn more about what organizations are doing in a critical area of mobile commerce — content management — Cutter conducted a survey late last year examining mobile devices, marketing, and content management systems (CMSs). This Cutter Edge explores some of those results. We asked respondents to think about how important it is for their organizations to have a significant mobile presence (i.e., a high level of usability on mobile devices) over the next 12 months. Just over 70% report that having a significant mobile presence over the next year is very or somewhat important. Among those respondents who voiced their opinion as “minimal” or “not at all,” most were primarily from the enterprises with …

Getting Data Integration Out of the Mud with Hypernormalized Data Designs

Ralph Hughes | Feb 28, 2012 5 Responses

Feb 282012

It still amazes me how many enterprise data warehousing/business intelligence (DW/BI) projects struggle, often to the point of paralysis, with the “Inmon/Kimball” debate. This impasse revolves around whether a DW/BI program should insist upon routing all information through a complex, third normal form (3NF) data layer or take it straight to a user-intelligible star schema repository from where it can be reported more or less directly. It’s easy to fault the 3NF for more than doubling the complexity, expense, and data latency of a DW/BI project, but also for being of zero direct value to the project sponsors and their stakeholders. On the other hand, projects that deliver data immediately to star schemas can quickly …

2012 Will Bring an Explosion of Interest in Social Analytics, Social Business Intelligence

Ken Collier | Dec 20, 2011 No Responses

Dec 202011

2012 Will Bring an Explosion of Interest in Social Analytics, Social Business Intelligence

I predict that 2012 will bring in an explosion of interest in Social Analytics, Social Business Intelligence, and the use of post-relational database technologies like Hadoop/HBase. In 2011 the world observed the power of social media outlets like Twitter, Facebook, blogs, and others on Middle Eastern human rights movements; corporate greed and customer service snafus; and the most recent Occupy Wall Street movement. In 2012 organizations will be exploring how they can glean valuable and actionable information from all of this unstructured, publicly available, and passionate information. [Editor's Note: This post is part of the annual "Cutter Predicts ..." series, compiled at the Cutter Consortium website.]

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