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
iPad liewcf on Flickr
Padlock außerirdische sind gesund on Flickr
Cloud fifikins on Flickr
Coins Cosmic_Flurk on Flickr

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

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.

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

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

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!

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.