Business is moving at the speed of light. Everyone wants to know what is happening in real-time. The macro strategy is all about making micro adjustments based on sophisticated modeling and analysis of terabytes of transaction data — data from consumer transactions, financial transactions, and social transactions — and all of them together. This isn’t happening in every industry, but in enough: businesses across the entire supply chain of consumer products (think product shelf placement that changes daily), financial services (think real-time credit adjustment), health care (think drug interaction reporting), transportation (think air fares that change by the minute) and more.

Data aggregators are making this data available via the cloud — and the same or other companies are providing the massive computational capability to slice, dice, model, and predict. Tables of numbers are good for basic output, but advanced Read more …

This month, Cutter unveiled its redefined BI practice, Data Integration, BI & Collaboration. I know it’s a mouthful, so let’s just call it “DBC” for short. As the new Practice Director, my aim is to shape this practice to best address your needs, but more importantly to continuously adapt as your needs change. I also suspect you are looking for Cutter to assist you in staying aware of emerging ideas and trends that might benefit your organization. Please consider this post an open invitation to join an ongoing dialogue that will help me shape this practice appropriately. I hope you’ll share your questions, ideas, and feedback to make this venture a success.

The practice name conveys the fact that traditional BI, the organization and reporting of corporate operational data, is no longer the competitive Read more …

With 2009 looming large, ugly and just around the corner, it’s time for the obligatory prognostications. Boy is this difficult… Hmmm. What will next year bring? Any wild guesses?

Rather than focus on the dark clouds, I am going to first look for the silver lining ahead.

Trend 1: Firms will try to remove redundant islands of business process and technology. Already system integrators and enterprise vendors are polishing their CFO pitches. In 2009, big vendors won’t be selling the CIO. They will be selling the person telling the CIO to cut budgets. 2009 may be the year that companies try to get a leg up on business process and enterprise system consolidation to further reduce the cost of IT and the cost of inefficient business processes. Maybe it will be déjà vu all over again as we may Read more …