Stellar Consulting Business Intelligence Blog

BI skills in demand

2012-01-20T10:13:00.024+13:00

Business Intelligence, Analytics, Data Warehousing and Project Management are skills in short supply, according to a number of recent articles looking at IT staffing trends for 2012.

Demand for these skills is expected to grow, as the recession eases.

According to Computerworld's annual Forecast survey, 29% of IT executives (the highest percentage in the past three years) plan to add staff during the first half of 2012, while 17% expect to reduce staffing.

The magazine surveyed more than 350 IT leaders in the United States during June.

Business Intelligence and Analytics

BI is included in Computerworld's list of nine hot IT skills for 2012, and staffing company Robert Half International's list of the five hottest technology jobs.

In New Zealand, Robert Half expects strong demand in the related area of Business Analysis.

Computerworld's survey found that 23% of IT executives plan to hire people with BI expertise in the next 12 months, up from 13% in the 2010 survey.

"The uptick indicates a shift from focusing on cost savings to investing in technology that provides access to real-time data, enabling better business decisions," writes Computerworld's Rick Saia.

Start-up headhunter Keith Cline sees Analytics as one of the five areas facing a talent shortage in 2010.

"Analytics is becoming a central hub across companies where everything (web, marketing, sales, operations) is being measured and each decision is supported by data," he wrote at inc.com.

"Thus, we are seeing a high level of demand for analytics and business intelligence professionals."

Megan Alexander, New Zealand General Manager of Robert Half, predicts that "decision makers will be looking for candidates who can drive business intelligence and will be prepared to invest in hiring the right people to deliver infrastructure change."

Data Warehousing

IT recruiters interviewed by CIO Magazine predict that mobile application developers - and, in particular, mobile game developers - will remain "the hottest commodity in IT" throughout 2012.

But mobile isn't the only area offering exciting opportunities. CIO's list of the six hottest IT jobs, published last month, also sees strong demand for data warehousing experts:

"Companies' desire to extract insights from the petabytes of data streaming into their back office systems is driving demand for data warehouse architects, analysts and developers," says CIO writer Meridith Levinson.

Eighteen per cent of executives in the Computerworld survey said they planned to hire IT staff with data centre skills in the next 12 months, down slightly from 21% in the 2010 survey.

Project Management

One of the five skills most in demand, according to Robert Half, Project Management is also on Computerworld's list of the top nine hot skills.

Computerworld notes that 44% of executives in its survey plan to hire project managers in the next 12 months, up slightly from 43% a year ago.

But a PM designation may not be enough to land every job:

"Big projects need managers, but they also need business analysts who can identify users' needs and translate them for the IT staffers who have to meet those needs and complete projects on time," writes Rick Saia.

He quotes John Reed, executive director of Robert Half Technology who says: "The demand has been more for business analysts than project managers, in other words, those who can help deliver projects rather than merely oversee and monitor them."

Opportunities abound

As a Business Intelligence consultant, I work with executives and managers who believe in basing their business decisions on solid data.

Managing and analysing that data are two of the biggest challenges most companies face. That's where good BI systems and great people come in.

"As we head out of a recession hiring managers will be looking for more analytical abilities," says Megan Alexander. "Those in senior roles who ‘sat tight’ during the recession have now been in the same role for 3-5 years and will be looking to up skill or are ready for a change.

"Candidates with the ability to analyse will be well placed in this market."

Here at Stellar, our 2012 pipeline reflects the strong demand seen by recruitment agencies. We currently have openings for Oracle and Microsoft BI developers, so if you think you've got what it takes to consult alongside New Zealand's best BI talent, get in touch!

Travis Barker, Consulting Partner

Top 5 trends in Business Intelligence

2011-12-29T08:33:00.016+13:00

As we load the bubbly into the fridge and get ready to celebrate the beginning of a new year, we thought it might be an opportune moment to reflect on the past year and compile some thoughts on emerging trends in Business Intelligence.

So, here's our view of the Top 5 BI trends.

1) BI is an "Every Unit Item"

If you're a CEO or other "CxO" level executive and you're not involved in a BI initiative of any kind, then it's time to "get with the programme"! We know your competitors are committing to BI so it's only a matter of time before they start grabbing your market share. Just give us a call and we can help you put things back on track in no time.

2) Mobility is all the rage

Adoption of mobile BI is happening at light speed in New Zealand. Top level executives at several of our customers have ditched their A4 documents and are using active BI reports on tablets at "the big table". Our customers are rolling out mobile BI apps to their customers so you'll be seeing some of them on your phone or tablet soon. The men and women in white coats at Stellar's R&D labs have done some amazing things with BI mobility tools and this is just the tip of the iceberg: we will see the death of paper reports in our lifetime.

3) Technology lock-in is dead

In "the old days" a commitment to a single vendor often meant a lifetime of lock-in misery. Now you can say goodbye to vendor lock-in forever! We work with all the major technology stacks and have delivered solutions using pretty much every combination of technology platform so we know that tools from disparate vendors work together. If your techies say "we're committed to vendor ABC's architecture so we need to buy their XYZ BI products" you can tell them that's just a load of bollocks! :-)

4) The cloud is real

You've no doubt heard all sorts of buzz about cloud computing, and we're happy to report that the cloud works! At Stellar, we run our business on "the cloud"; our accounting, time-sheeting, resource planning, payroll processing, email, document management, and helpdesk are subscription-based software services based somewhere in the ether. We also know how to implement BI on the cloud. We are very excited about the Ultra Fast Broadband initiatives in play in New Zealand and have recently hooked up to a fibre local loop "fat pipe" so we can host BI applications that run at the speed of light. Just watch this space!

5) BI has never been less expensive

Back in the day, the entry level cost for BI was expressed in 7 or 8 digits. These days we are delivering discrete, robust, fully acceptance-tested, documented and supported solutions to delighted users for ridiculously small fees. When you know what you're doing, you know what your customer really wants and you do it right the first time. We are now able to deliver BI solutions for much less than you'd think.

So that's our take on the BI scene at the end of a successful 2011, and here's
to an even better 2012!

Happy New Year from the team at Stellar!

Photo credits:
Boardroom The River Club on Flickr
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Cloud fifikins on Flickr
Coins Cosmic_Flurk on Flickr

Merry Christmas from Stellar

2011-12-23T13:28:00.003+13:00

It's been a busy year at Stellar's world headquarters. It seems we've barely got into our stride for 2011 and all of a sudden it's the 23rd of December!

So we'd like to take this opportunity to thank our customers, partners and our team members for their support and offer our hearty 'Compliments of the Season' to you.

Whatever your religious persuasion, Christmas is a great time to kick back and relax, spend a bit of quality time with your family and close friends and reflect on the year that was. The team at Stellar is going to take time out to do exactly that and we'll be re-opening the office on the 9th of January to kick off our new year with a hiss and a roar.

So regardless of your plan for the holidays remember to drive carefully, be nice, wear sunscreen and most importantly, chill out and don't think about work too much!

Merry Christmas!

Grant, Travis, John & Grant

BI - More than just technology

2010-04-16T16:24:00.006+12:00

I was talking to the CFO of a medium/large Auckland-based organisation the other day about that organisation's experiences with Business Intelligence. He told me that the IS team had spent a fortune on purchasing one of the popular data visualisation packages which they proceeded to put on the shelf for a while, uninstalled. Why? Because the vendor offered a "never to be repeated price" at the end of its financial year.

As if this wasn't bad enough, along came a vendor selling a data extract tool who proposed to the IS department the installation of a quick prototype of a data warehouse to show how easy it was to build data warehouses. This resulted in the IS department buying the data extract tool and commissioning a project to deploy a data mart based on the prototype to the finance department, using the aforementioned state-of-the-art shelfware data visualisation tool to deliver a few neat dashboards and sexy cubes. The project took a little longer to do than the prototype suggested (note: they always do!) and the total cost came to several hundred thousand dollars but it was an ultra leading-edge architecture using the latest, greatest tools so it was going to delight the end user community.

Problem was, the end user community wasn't involved until near the go-live date. They had no input into any requirements analysis, they weren't involved in the selection of tools and their management had not been informed of this development until long after the purchasing decisions were made. In addition, several requirements brought on by recent changes in the industry were not incorporated into the solution by the IS people because they were too busy playing with cool technology to see what was happening at the industry coalface.

The result? The solution was ill-conceived, not fit for purpose, the insight being presented by the solution was not believed by those who make decisions with it and senior finance department management had no will to make it right because they had no involvement during its development and therefore no skin in the game. The finance guys just carried on with their manually produced Excel spreadsheets and the whizz-bang BI solution was shut down.

Needless to say, these guys are a little "BI Shy" now.

This story highlights a typical problem we see in the BI space - only a small fraction of the prerequisites of a successful BI project are addressed. In this case, the IS guys assumed that the latest BI technology was the sole requirement for a successful BI project. This is a very common misconception.

There is a whole lot more to BI than technology. Decisions need to be made not just with respect to technology, but more importantly with reference to business processes, data, and the people involved in a BI solution.

When it all boils down, we know from decades of experience that there are seven discreet requirements for a successful BI project. We refer to these as the Seven Essentials for BI Success:

Governance;
Engagement Model;
Delivery Model
Performance Insight;
Information Architecture;
Data Management;
and of course,Technology.

Over the next few posts, Stellar's BI experts will discuss the seven essentials for BI success in some detail, so stay tuned!

BI and Info Management Summit

2009-10-20T17:54:00.004+13:00

Save the date - Gartner has released preliminary details for next year's BI & IM summit - to be held in Sydney on 2-3 March 2010.

Business Intelligence and Performance Management will play a significant role in helping your organisation identify and understand the potential impact of the new world order (post-global credit crisis), providing the vital insight thathttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif business leaders will find invaluable.

New ways of using BI, coupled with the increasing sophistication of analytic applications and the emergence of mash-ups, offer huge potential for IT to help build the business in this new world.

However, while BI offers significant potential in supporting the business, obstacles still abound: unengaged business sponsors; lack of business user involvement; fragmented information silos; BI toll proliferation; poor data integrity coupled with poor quality and inconsistency; skills gap; low adoption rates amongst business users.

Full details available on Gartner.com

BI - the Key to Competitiveness

2009-10-11T17:47:00.005+13:00

A recent survey of more than 2500 CIOs worldwide shows that Business Intelligence and Analytics top the agenda when it comes to boosting corporate competitiveness.

The comprehensive study, conducted by IBM earlier this year, compares how fast-growth companies use technology compared with lower-growth companies.

83% of respondents indicated that Business Intelligence and Analytics were key to boosting corporate competitiveness - making BI the most popular initiative across the entire survey group.

Read the full article on Forbes.com

BI Tool Shootouts - A Waste of Time?

2009-09-18T15:42:00.006+12:00

Having just put the phone down after talking to a customer about a product evaluation process, I thought I'd share a few thoughts on BI Product Evaluations or "Shootouts". Many companies in New Zealand have dedicated a fair swag of resource to this process over the years, so here are our considered thoughts.

There are two things about BI Tool Evaluations we feel should be highlighted:

1) They shouldn’t take too much time and their outcomes shouldn’t be a deal breaker for the project.

2) They must be heavily oriented toward the end user community, as they are the ones who will be actually using the tools, not the IT people.

It amazes us when IT shops spend several man years evaluating BI tools on behalf of and in isolation from their end user community. If the entire solution was going to be developed in this tool, and the solution was only allowed to use features that were provided by this one tool for ever more, then fair enough. In reality though, with an open BI architecture in place, there is more than one way to skin the proverbial cat. No end to end solution should ever be entirely developed within one product’s development realm.

Here’s Stellar’s editorial comment on tools evaluations: Don't waste too much time on tool evaluations. While the arcane mechanics of each tool are being dissected by technical people in white coats, the end user business community is demanding a solution to their problems "right now" before their window of business opportunity closes. So whatever you do, make sure these guys get involved early and buy into the tools chosen.

Tools evaluations should be done once the BI technical architecture is established and understood. We have seen several examples of tools being selected to perform roles that they are not really capable of doing. If they were evaluated against a mature BI architecture backdrop, where these roles are clearly documented, these mistakes would not have happened.

The BI Tool segment of the IT industry is churning out some great products. In its proper role, virtually any BI Tool today is rock solid and can provide 80 to 90 percent of the functionality required by the average kiwi company. There are some “horses for courses” situations to be sure, where one tool stands out above the others in a particular role, but as a general rule, they are all pretty good these days.

Give us a holler if you need help – remember, we are 100% product independent!

Looking Past the Flash of Dashboards

2009-09-14T10:31:00.008+12:00

We've been receiving a lot of interest lately from customers wanting to construct "Executive Dashboards". I guess this stems from a growing need by upper level management to more effectively monitor core business performance in the wake of the global credit crisis. Whatever the case, the need for greater visibility and awareness of key performance metrics are driving renewed interest in executive dashboards.

Dashboards are certainly nothing new. You'll find a plethora of information about them on the Internet and in various textbooks, and you're probably well aware of the various whiz-bang applications available on the market for constructing fancy visualisations. Unfortunately, when it actually comes to designing something meaningful for executive management, the message can often get lost in the over exuberant use of dashboard gadgetry... resulting in an overpowering visual experience for users.

In response to the rising demand for executive dashboards from customers Stellar's resident dashboard specialist - Chris du Toit - has put together an excellent discussion paper to draw attention to fundamental design considerations for effective dashboard creation. If you're currently constructing an executive dashboard, or thinking about it, Looking Past the Flash of Dashboard Design will help to refocus your efforts on what is and isn't important, which of course will help you to fulfil your greater goal of providing an effective platform for delivering business insight to management.

Recession-Proof BI

2009-09-03T18:00:00.002+12:00

IT budgets are not immune to the recession, having come under pressure as cost-cutting measures sweep through organisations, but the market for Business Intelligence tools is thriving despite the deflationary times.

MIS100 organisations list Business Intelligence as one of their top-priorities over the coming year. Effective BI implementations are crucial for providing decision makers with the information needed to steer their organisations through the current turbulence and lessen the effects of the recession.

Accordingly, CIOs are being asked by their organisations to improve and make the most out of their BI implementations.

Read the full article on CIO New Zealand