The challenge with discussing big data analytics is in cutting through the ambiguity that surrounds the term. People often focus on the 3 Vs of big data – volume, variety and velocity – which provides a good lens for big data technology, but only gets us part of the way to understanding big data analytics, and provides even less guidance on how to take advantage of big data analytics to unlock business value.
Read More
Topics:
Big Data,
Microsoft,
SAP,
SAS,
Excel,
designed data,
Operational Performance,
Analytics,
Business Analytics,
Business Intelligence,
Business Performance,
Cloud Computing,
Customer & Contact Center,
Financial Performance,
Governance, Risk & Compliance (GRC),
IBM,
Information Applications,
Location Intelligence,
Operational Intelligence,
Oracle,
SPSS
I’ve been using electronic spreadsheets for more than 30 years. I consider this technology among the 20th century’s top five most important advances in business management. Spreadsheets have revolutionized every aspect of running any organization. A spreadsheet (specifically, VisiCalc) was the original “killer app” that made business people feel the necessity to buy a personal computer.
Read More
Topics:
Sales Performance,
Supply Chain Performance,
Office of Finance,
Reporting,
enterprise spreadsheet,
Operational Performance,
Analytics,
Business Analytics,
Business Intelligence,
Business Performance,
Customer & Contact Center,
Financial Performance,
Information Applications,
Information Management,
Visualization,
Workforce Performance,
Risk,
benchmark,
Financial Performance Management
LucidWorks addresses the growing volume of information now being stored in the enterprise and in big data with two products aimed at the enterprise with search technology. Though you may not be familiar with LucidWorks (previously known as Lucid Imagination), the company has for many years contributed to Apache Lucene, an open source search project, and commercialized and supported for it for business.
Read More
Topics:
Big Data,
MapR,
Sales Performance,
IT Performance,
Operational Performance,
Business Analytics,
Business Intelligence,
Business Performance,
Cloud Computing,
Cloudera,
Customer & Contact Center,
Hortonworks,
Information Applications,
Information Management,
Operational Intelligence,
Search,
Strata+Hadoop
Profit Velocity Solutions’ PV Accelerator is an analytic application designed to enable capital-intensive companies to consistently achieve substantially wider margins and higher return on assets (ROA). Companies in industries such as specialty chemicals, building materials, integrated steel mills and silicon chip fabrication (to name just four) routinely fail to make the right decisions about pricing, production and sales management because they use analytic methods that, from an economic...
Read More
Topics:
Performance Management,
Sales,
Sales Performance,
Supply Chain Performance,
Human Capital Management,
Office of Finance,
PV Accelerator,
Operational Performance,
Analytics,
Business Analytics,
Business Performance,
Cloud Computing,
Financial Performance,
Price Optimization,
Profit Velocity,
Profitability,
Software,
S&OP
Business intelligence software is supposed to help businesses access and analyze data and communicate analytics and metrics. I have witnessed improvements to BI software over the years, from mobile and collaboration to interactive discovery and visualization, and our Value Index for Business Intelligence finds a mature set of technology vendors and products. But even as these products mature in capabilities, the majority lack features that would make them easy to use. Our recent research on ...
Read More
Topics:
Big Data,
Sales Performance,
Supply Chain Performance,
Mobile Technology,
Natural Language,
Business Technology Innovation,
IT Performance,
Operational Performance,
Business Analytics,
Business Collaboration,
Business Intelligence,
Business Mobility,
Business Performance,
Cloud Computing,
Customer & Contact Center,
Financial Performance,
Information Management,
Location Intelligence,
Operational Intelligence,
Workforce Performance,
Discovery
Business analytics have become mainstream in most organizations. Our latest research in technology innovation found analytics was the top-ranked technology in 39 percent of organizations. To deepen the sophistication of their analytics, businesses can add geographic context and maps to business intelligence applications to create what we call location intelligence. Applications and tools with a geographic and spatial context can help deliver new and deeper insights to business. Information...
Read More
Topics:
Sales Performance,
Social Media,
Geographic Information Systems,
GIS,
Location Analytics,
Spatial Data Quality,
Operational Performance,
Business Analytics,
Business Collaboration,
Business Intelligence,
Business Performance,
Cloud Computing,
Customer & Contact Center,
Information Applications,
Information Management,
Location Intelligence
One of the important lessons company executives should have learned over the past 15 years is that it’s dangerous not to do contingency planning, a subject that I’ve written about before. By this I mean real, think-outside-the-box contingency planning (not just extrapolating), which is especially important when doing long-range planning. The past decade or so has been punctuated by periods of elevated volatility in financial and product markets, and there’s a good probability it will occur...
Read More
Topics:
Big Data,
Planning,
Office of Finance,
Reporting,
Budgeting,
contingency,
currency,
driver-based,
Business Analytics,
Business Collaboration,
Business Performance,
Financial Performance,
Financial Performance Management,
Integrated Business Planning
Read More
Topics:
Big Data,
Splunk,
IT Performance,
Operational Performance,
Business Analytics,
Business Intelligence,
Business Performance,
Cloud Computing,
Customer & Contact Center,
Information Applications,
Information Management,
Machine data,
Operational Intelligence
Read More
Topics:
Office of Finance,
extended close,
US-GAAP,
XBRL,
Analytics,
Business Performance,
Financial Performance,
Governance, Risk & Compliance (GRC),
CFO,
compliance,
financial reporting,
SEC,
Digital Technology
IBM this week announced its pending acquisition of the Star Analytics product portfolio. Star Analytics is a privately held company that offers products designed to provide easy access to and integration with Oracle Hyperion data sources. While Star Analytics has a good product and solid references, it has lacked critical mass to support more effective sales and marketing efforts. Star Analytics’ strategic value to IBM lies in its ability to unlock data held in Oracle Essbase multidimensional...
Read More
Topics:
Reporting,
closing,
Essbase,
Hyperion,
Analytics,
Business Analytics,
Business Performance,
Cloud Computing,
Data Integration,
Financial Performance,
IBM,
Information Management,
Oracle,
Financial Performance Management,
Star Analytics,
TM1
MicroStrategy CEO Michael Saylor has a keen sense of where things are headed. He sees mobile and social as the two drivers of a world based largely in software. Last year I covered the announcements at the MicroStrategy events in Amsterdam and the vision Saylor put forth in his keynote speech. MicroStategy World 2013 last month finds the company delving into such diverse areas as identity management, marketing services and integrated point-of-sale applications. The uniting factor is mobile...
Read More
Topics:
MicroStrategy,
Mobile,
Sales Performance,
Social Media,
Customer Experience,
alert,
Mobile Intelligence,
Operational Performance,
Analytics,
Business Analytics,
Business Collaboration,
Business Intelligence,
Business Performance,
Cloud Computing,
Customer & Contact Center,
Location Intelligence,
Operational Intelligence
The electronic spreadsheet is among the top five most important advances in business management to come along in the last hundred years. It revolutionized almost all aspects of running an organization. It was the original “killer app” that made it necessary for people to go out and buy a personal computer. Yet our recent benchmark research project Spreadsheet Use in Today’s Enterprise confirmed advice we have been giving for the past decade: Spreadsheets are a fabulous tool but they have...
Read More
Topics:
Office of Finance,
Reporting,
enterprise spreadsheet,
Analytics,
Business Analytics,
Business Performance,
Financial Performance,
Visualization,
Risk,
benchmark,
Financial Performance Management
Read More
Topics:
Sales Performance,
Social Media,
Supply Chain Performance,
Human Capital Management,
Kenexa,
Learning,
Performance,
Recruiting,
Smarter Analytics,
Smarter Workforce,
Social Business,
Social Collaboration,
Operational Performance,
Business Analytics,
Business Collaboration,
Business Intelligence,
Business Performance,
Cloud Computing,
Customer & Contact Center,
Financial Performance,
IBM,
Workforce Performance,
Compensation
Taxes – both indirect (sales or value added taxes, for example) and direct (income taxes) – are one the largest expense items on the corporate income statement. In recent years it has become common for large and even midsize companies to automate their indirect tax management process, but direct tax management has remained a bastion of manual processes built on a heap of desktop spreadsheets. In previous blog posts I discussed this issue and the role of the tax data warehouse as a necessary...
Read More
Topics:
ERP,
GRC,
Office of Finance,
audit,
finance transformation,
Tax,
Analytics,
Business Analytics,
Business Performance,
Financial Performance,
Governance, Risk & Compliance (GRC),
Information Management,
CFO,
Vertex,
FPM
The proper use of technology enables businesses to be more efficient. Our recent research into technology for business innovation found that 56 percent indicate innovative technology is very important, yet only 9 percent are very satisfied with theirs, showing plenty of room for improvement. As we enter 2013, businesses have more choices than ever for technology to improve business and IT. Our firm has identified six key technologies that give organizations significant competitive advantages:...
Read More
Topics:
Big Data,
Sales Performance,
Social Media,
Supply Chain Performance,
Mobile Technology,
Social Collaboration,
IT Performance,
Operational Performance,
Business Analytics,
Business Collaboration,
Business Intelligence,
Business Performance,
CIO,
Cloud Computing,
Customer & Contact Center,
Financial Performance,
Governance, Risk & Compliance (GRC),
Information Applications,
Information Management,
Location Intelligence,
Operational Intelligence,
Workforce Performance,
CMO,
COO,
CTO
Banking giant JP Morgan raised eyebrows in 2012 when it revealed that it had lost a substantial amount of money because of poorly conceived trades it had made for its own account. The losses raised questions about the adequacy of its internal controls, and broader questions about the need for regulations to reduce systemic risk to the banking system. At the heart of the matter were the transactions made by “the London Whale,” the name given to a JP Morgan’s trading operation in the City by its...
Read More
Topics:
Sales,
Sales Performance,
GRC,
Office of Finance,
error,
Operational Performance,
Business Analytics,
Business Collaboration,
Business Intelligence,
Business Performance,
Financial Performance,
Information Management,
Data,
controls
Actuate this week announced BIRT Analytics, and thereby puts itself firmly into supporting a range of business analytics needs from data discovery and visualization to a range of data mining and predictive capabilities that allows itself new avenues of growth. Actuate has long been a staple of large Business Intelligence deployments; in fact the company claims that ActuateOne delivers more insights to more people than all other BI applications combined. This is likely true, given that Actuate...
Read More
Topics:
Data Scientist,
Operational Performance,
Analytics,
Business Analytics,
Business Intelligence,
Business Performance,
CIO,
Financial Performance,
Information Applications,
Operational Intelligence,
Data Discovery,
commodity model,
Quinterian
SAP just released strong preliminary quarterly and annual revenue growth, which in many ways can be attributed to a strong strategic vision around the HANA in-memory platform and strong execution throughout the organization. Akin to flying an airplane while simultaneously fixing it, SAP’s bold move to HANA may at some point see the company continuing to fly when other companies are forced to ground parts of their fleets.
Read More
Topics:
Sales,
Sales Performance,
SAP,
Supply Chain Performance,
Business Objects,
Business Objects predictive analytics,
Crystal reports,
Operational Performance,
Visi,
Analytics,
Business Analytics,
Business Collaboration,
Business Intelligence,
Business Performance,
Cloud Computing,
Customer & Contact Center,
Financial Performance,
IBM,
Operational Intelligence,
Workforce Performance,
cognos insight,
SAP predictive analytics,
Sybase IQ
Human capital is most organizations’ largest investment and one of their largest differentiators against the competition. So it follows that those that take advantage of the compelling, game-changing technology now available in human capital management (HCM) will place themselves at a competitive advantage.
Read More
Topics:
Big Data,
Social Media,
HCM,
Human Capital Management,
Learning,
Office of Finance,
Social Collaboration,
Analytics,
Business Analytics,
Business Collaboration,
Business Intelligence,
Business Performance,
Cloud Computing,
Information Applications,
Information Management,
Workforce Performance,
CFO,
Compensation,
finance,
HR,
Talent Management,
Workforce Management
Managing the access, storage and use of data effectively can provide businesses a competitive advantage. Last year I outlined what the big deal is in big data, as the initial focus on the volume, velocity and variety of data – what my colleague Tony Cosentino calls the three V’s – is only one small piece of how organizations should evaluate this technology. The more balanced approach is to include what he calls the three W’s – the what, so what and now what, which shifts the focus to an...
Read More
Topics:
Big Data,
Master Data Management,
Predictive Analytics,
Sales Performance,
MDM,
Operational Performance,
Business Analytics,
Business Intelligence,
Business Performance,
CIO,
Cloud Computing,
Data Governance,
Data Integration,
Financial Performance,
Information Applications,
Information Management,
Location Intelligence,
Operational Intelligence,
Product Information Management
Did you catch all the big data analogies people used in 2012? There were many, like the refinement of oil analogy, or the spinning straw into gold analogy, and less useful but more entertaining ones, like big data is like a box of chocolates, or big data is like The Matrix (because “there’s no way Keanu Reeves learns Kung Fu in five seconds without using big data”). I tend to like the water analogy, which I’ll use here to have a little fun and to briefly describe how I see the business...
Read More
Topics:
Big Data,
Sales Performance,
Social Media,
Supply Chain Performance,
IT Performance,
Operational Performance,
Analytics,
Business Analytics,
Business Collaboration,
Business Intelligence,
Business Performance,
CIO,
Cloud Computing,
Customer & Contact Center,
Financial Performance,
Governance, Risk & Compliance (GRC),
Information Applications,
Information Management,
Location Intelligence,
Operational Intelligence,
Workforce Performance,
Data
Hi; pleased to meet you! I’m tremendously excited to be joining the team here at Ventana Research, and I’m looking forward to adding my experience, observations and opinions to this team of very talented industry analysts! Let me start by telling you a little about my background, and then why a chose to come to work here and what I will be covering at Ventana Research.
Read More
Topics:
Social Media,
Human Capital Management,
Market Research,
Office of Finance,
Business Collaboration,
Business Performance,
Cloud Computing,
Information Management,
Workforce Performance,
HR,
Talent Management,
Workforce Management
Most organizations see improving the effectiveness of sales as a way to increase productivity. Those organizations that take advantage of the latest sales applications and technology are finding themselves with a competitive advantage, but many organizations lack the time and resources to assess and deploy appropriate platforms. That’s a shame, since most sales organizations have plenty to improve in their selling, forecasting, incentives and planning according to our latest research on sales...
Read More
Topics:
Sales,
Sales Performance,
Marketing,
PIM,
Sales Compensation,
Sales Forecasting,
Operational Performance,
Business Performance,
Financial Performance,
CPQ,
CRM,
Product Information Management,
SFA
Read More
Topics:
Mobile,
Predictive Analytics,
Real-time,
Sales Performance,
SAP,
Supply Chain Performance,
ERP,
Operational Performance,
Analytics,
Business Analytics,
Business Collaboration,
Business Performance,
Cloud Computing,
Customer & Contact Center,
Financial Performance,
In-memory,
Workforce Performance,
CRM,
finance,
Social,
Business Suite,
Financial Performance Management,
HANA
Businesses always see a lag between when technology makes some advance possible and when a majority of companies actually adopt it. There’s even a longer lag between the emergence of an advance in a business process or technique and the time it takes to become mainstream. When we write our research agendas at the top of each year, we have to strike a balance between focusing on the new and different, which is still many years away from general acceptance, and the mainstream, which has been...
Read More
Topics:
Big Data,
Planning,
Predictive Analytics,
Sales Performance,
Governance,
GRC,
Office of Finance,
Budgeting,
close,
Operational Performance,
Analytics,
Business Analytics,
Business Collaboration,
Business Performance,
CIO,
Cloud Computing,
Financial Performance,
Governance, Risk & Compliance (GRC),
In-memory,
Workforce Performance,
CFO,
Risk,
CEO,
Financial Performance Management,
FPM
Revolution Analytics is a commercial provider of software and services related to enterprise implementations of the open source language R. At its base level, R is a programming language built by statisticians for statistical analysis, data mining and predictive analytics. In a broader sense, it is data analysis software used by data scientists to access data, develop and perform statistical modeling and visualize data. The R community has a growing user base of more than two million worldwide,...
Read More
Topics:
Big Data,
SAS,
IT Performance,
Operational Performance,
Business Analytics,
Business Intelligence,
Business Performance,
Cloud Computing,
Information Management,
Operational Intelligence,
SPSS
In today’s competitive markets, many organizations recognize that customer service represents an opportunity to differentiate themselves from their competition. However, our research into the agent desktop shows that providing excellent customer service is a real challenge in many areas, starting with managing the channels of communication required to offer customers a choice in how they interact with the company. My research into customer and contact centers shows that over the last 18 months,...
Read More
Topics:
Sales Performance,
Customer Analytics,
Customer Experience,
Voice of the Customer,
Operational Performance,
Analytics,
Business Performance,
Customer & Contact Center,
Customer Service,
Call Center,
Contact Center,
Contact Center Analytics,
CRM
Happy New Year to all my readers and followers. I hope everyone has gotten some rest and is ready for a great 2013. 2012 was a busy year in which we saw a critical inflection point, where an elevated focus on new methods and innovative technological approaches such as big data, business analytics, business and social collaboration, cloud computing, mobile technology and social media become part of the mainstream business and IT dialogue. These technologies are beginning to be part of or...
Read More
Topics:
Big Data,
Sales Performance,
Social Media,
Supply Chain Performance,
Market Research,
Mobile Technology,
Social Collaboration,
IT Performance,
Operational Performance,
Business Analytics,
Business Collaboration,
Business Intelligence,
Business Mobility,
Business Performance,
CIO,
Cloud Computing,
Customer & Contact Center,
Financial Performance,
Information Applications,
Information Management,
Location Intelligence,
Operational Intelligence,
Workforce Performance,
Technology
Ventana Research has been researching and advocating operational intelligence for the past 10 years, but not always with that name. From the use of events and analytics in business process management and the need for hourly and daily operational business intelligence, but its alignment with traditional BI architecture didn’t allow for a seamless system, so a few years later the discussion started to focus around business process management and the ability of companies to monitor and analyze BPM...
Read More
Topics:
Big Data,
SOA,
Supply Chain Performance,
business activity monitoring,
business process monitoring,
IT Performance,
Operational Performance,
Analytics,
Business Analytics,
Business Intelligence,
Business Performance,
Complex Event Processing,
Customer & Contact Center,
Operational Intelligence,
Service Cloud
As I’ve noted before, it’s common for CFOs of companies that are transitioning from being a small to a midsize business (that is, when they grow past about 100 employees) to find that the entry-level accounting package that they have been using no longer fits their needs. This software may be inexpensive to purchase and easy to use but it lacks many of the customization and business process management capabilities that become increasingly important as organizations grow. The transition from...
Read More
Topics:
Planning,
Salesforce.com,
ERP,
Human Capital Management,
Office of Finance,
Reporting,
close,
closing,
Operational Performance,
Business Performance,
Cloud Computing,
Financial Performance,
Workforce Performance,
Financial Performance Management,
FinancialForce.com
Ventana Research does benchmark research that assesses the maturity of organizations across four dimensions: people, process, information and technology. We examine business issues along those dimensions because we recognize the interconnected relationships among them. Especially in larger companies, data issues such as accuracy and accessibility are often a root cause of poor performance of a core function. It may be a factor in such areas as poor customer service, sales execution or...
Read More
Topics:
Big Data,
Planning,
Sales Performance,
Supply Chain Performance,
Office of Finance,
Reporting,
Budgeting,
driver-based,
Operational Performance,
Business Performance,
Customer & Contact Center,
Financial Performance,
Workforce Performance,
Financial Performance Management,
Integrated Business Planning
This is the third in a series of blog posts on what CEOs (and for that matter, all senior corporate executives) need to know about IT and its impact on running a business. The first covered the high-level issues. As I noted, it’s not necessary for a CEO to be able to write Java code or master the intricacies of an ERP or sales compensation application. However, CEOs must grasp the basics of IT just as they must understand basic corporate finance, the production process and – at least at a high...
Read More
Topics:
Planning,
Predictive Analytics,
Sales,
Sales Performance,
Customer,
Human Capital Management,
Office of Finance,
Budgeting,
close,
closing,
PRO,
Operational Performance,
Analytics,
Business Analytics,
Business Performance,
Customer & Contact Center,
Financial Performance,
Information Management,
CFO,
CEO,
FPM,
Profitability,
SPM
Quantrix recently unveiled Quantrix 5, an updated version of its financial modeling software designed to fill the gap between spreadsheets and business intelligence (BI) systems. Quantrix provides users with many of the capabilities of an enterprise system and addresses shortcomings of desktop spreadsheet software without requiring extensive training.
Read More
Topics:
Big Data,
Planning,
Sales,
Sales Performance,
Supply Chain Performance,
FP&A,
Office of Finance,
Reporting,
Budgeting,
Quantrix,
Operational Performance,
Analytics,
Business Collaboration,
Business Performance,
Cloud Computing,
Information Management,
Workforce Performance,
FPM
Increasingly, global financial markets compete on speed, so much so that high-speed trading capabilities have become a performance differentiator for the largest financial services firms and some investment funds. Transmitting messages with quotes, prices and trade data is a core capability for currency dealers. Informatica recently introduced Ultra Messaging, which is designed to offer global currency traders an efficient, high-throughput, lower-latency (that is, faster) and more secure method...
Read More
Topics:
Sales,
GRC,
credit,
currency,
LAN,
Operational Performance,
Business Performance,
Financial Performance,
Informatica,
finance,
WAN
I recently returned from Sweden, where QlikTech International hosted its annual analyst “unsummit.” Much of the information I was exposed to was under NDA, so I cannot talk about it here. What I can discuss, and what in many ways may be more interesting and more important, is the company’s focus on culture and philosophy.
Read More
Topics:
Big Data,
Data Visualization,
QlikView,
Tableau,
Google,
discovery analytics,
exploratory analytics,
Operational Performance,
Analytics,
Business Analytics,
Business Collaboration,
Business Intelligence,
Business Performance,
Cloud Computing,
Customer & Contact Center,
Information Applications,
Location Intelligence,
Operational Intelligence,
Workforce Performance,
Impala,
big query,
Qliktech
When they were first introduced three decades ago, electronic spreadsheets provided a major advance in corporate planning compared to the paper spreadsheet-and-adding-machine systems they replaced. However, time passes and, as our research shows, desktop spreadsheets often hamper productivity because they were designed for personal productivity, not for managing repetitive, collaborative, enterprise-wide processes such as financial planning. The finance organization at the University of Central...
Read More
Topics:
Big Data,
Planning,
Human Capital Management,
Office of Finance,
Reporting,
Budgeting,
driver-based,
Operational Performance,
Business Performance,
Cloud Computing,
Financial Performance,
Workforce Performance,
Financial Performance Management,
Integrated Business Planning
Business software is beginning to undergo a design revolution comparable to the seismic shift from the green screen to the graphical user interface (GUI) that began in the mid-1980s. Three forces are at work. One is the retirement of large numbers of members of the baby-boom generation and the rise of a generation that grew up with computers and computer games from a young age. Also, software and technology vendors have been recognizing the need to “consumerize” business applications as mobile...
Read More
Topics:
Big Data,
Sales Performance,
Salesforce.com,
Supply Chain Performance,
OpenWorld,
Operational Performance,
Business Performance,
Cloud Computing,
Customer & Contact Center,
Financial Performance,
Oracle,
Workforce Performance,
Dreamforce,
finance,
Tidemark,
Business,
design,
development,
GUI
Effective planning has always been a challenge for companies, and it’s all the more so today. Even when companies deploy dedicated planning applications, they often do not or cannot use them to full advantage. I had a chance to learn more about 3M Corp. use of business planning in our recent 2012 Leadership Awards, who is the diversified global manufacturer of consumer and industrial products, several years ago acquired a dedicated planning application, but because the system could not scale to...
Read More
Topics:
Big Data,
Planning,
Sales Performance,
Supply Chain Performance,
Human Capital Management,
Office of Finance,
Reporting,
Budgeting,
driver-based,
Operational Performance,
Business Performance,
Customer & Contact Center,
Financial Performance,
Workforce Performance,
Financial Performance Management,
Integrated Business Planning
As a market research practitioner and a technology industry analyst covering big data and business analytics, I enjoyed listening to other analysts discuss the market research industry in a webinar. My own research augments and sometimes contrasts with that of the webinar participants.
Read More
Topics:
Market Research,
Marketing Planning,
Business Intelligence,
Business Performance,
Customer & Contact Center,
Operational Intelligence
We recently completed our benchmark research on next-generation business intelligence. Ventana Research looks as next-generation BI as a function of traditional BI that is converging with new technologies such as mobility, collaboration and cloud computing. Just a few years ago business intelligence might have been considered a mature category with incremental growth, but now it’s growing in new directions and it’s difficult today to call business intelligence mature.
Read More
Topics:
Mobile,
Sales Performance,
Social Media,
Supply Chain Performance,
Operational Performance,
Analytics,
Business Analytics,
Business Collaboration,
Business Intelligence,
Business Performance,
Cloud Computing,
Collaboration,
Customer & Contact Center,
Financial Performance,
Operational Intelligence,
Workforce Performance
IBM Watson blends existing and innovative technology into a new approach called cognitive computing. At the simplest operational level it is technology for asking natural language-based questions, getting answers and support appropriate action to be taken or provide information to make more informed decisions. The technology relies on massive processing power to yield probabilistic responses to user questions using sophisticated analytical algorithms. A cognitive system like Watson accesses...
Read More
Topics:
Sales Performance,
Supply Chain Performance,
Machine Learning,
IT Performance,
Operational Performance,
Business Analytics,
Business Intelligence,
Business Performance,
Customer & Contact Center,
Financial Performance,
IBM,
Information Management,
Workforce Performance,
Cognitive Computing,
Expert Systems,
IBM Watson
Earlier this year we published our Trends in Developing the Fast, Clean Close benchmark research findings. The most significant was that, on average, it takes longer for companies to close their books today than it did five years ago. In 2007, nearly half (47%) we closing their quarters within five or six days, but now only 38 percent can do it as quickly.
Read More
Topics:
Office of Finance,
close,
closing,
Consolidation,
Controller,
effectiveness,
XBRL,
Business Performance,
Financial Performance,
CFO,
Data,
Document Management,
Financial Performance Management,
FPM
GoodData has been around since 2007, but it has seen especially explosive growth in the last year due to the fast adoption of cloud Business Intelligence. In a recent meeting, Roman Stanek, the company’s CEO, told me GoodData has more than 6,000 customers, and that many of these are household names. Given that he publicly stated a customer base of around 2,500 last year, it appears that the company’s growth is on an exponential curve. This momentum is attracting significant investment in the...
Read More
Topics:
Sales Performance,
Operational Performance,
Business Analytics,
Business Intelligence,
Business Performance,
Cloud Computing,
Customer & Contact Center
Big data was big news in 2012 and probably in 2013 too. The Harvard Business Review talks about it as The Management Revolution. The Wall Street Journal says Meet the New Boss: Big Data, and Big Data is on the Rise, Bringing Big Questions. Given big data’s popularity in the press, you might think that the technology market is only about big data and how companies use the vast and growing amount of data now available to organizations. While this technology can provide a significant opportunity,...
Read More
Topics:
Big Data,
Data Warehousing,
Predictive Analytics,
Social Media,
Harvard Business Review,
Wall Street Journal,
IT Performance,
Operational Performance,
Business Analytics,
Business Collaboration,
Business Intelligence,
Business Performance,
CIO,
Cloud Computing,
Customer & Contact Center,
Financial Performance,
Information Management,
Technology Innovation,
Strata+Hadoop
To maximize the potential of their investments, businesses must manage product information, yet for many businesses product information is scattered and duplicated in many systems, which leads to duplication of effort, incorrect information about product descriptions and prices and improper tracking of products, all of which increase costs and waste time. At the same time, for marketing products and streamlining their distribution through sales channels, making product information accessible to...
Read More
Topics:
Master Data Management,
Sales,
Sales Performance,
Supply Chain Performance,
Operational Performance,
Business Performance,
CIO,
Customer & Contact Center,
Information Management,
Commerce,
Product Information Management
Since the early ’80s, when I personally experienced the transition from written time cards to cards for swiping on a time clock at a grocery retailer I worked at, I have been interested in the software and technology of workforce management. That gives me a perspective not many analysts can match when it comes to transitioning to new technology to help organizations manage and engage workforces. Ventana Research recently completed benchmark research on next-generation workforce management,...
Read More
Topics:
Mobile Technology,
Social Collaboration,
Operational Performance,
Business Performance,
Workforce Performance,
Workforce Analytics,
Workforce Management
I recently started a series of blog posts on what CEOs (and for that matter, all senior corporate executives) need to know about IT. The first covered the high-level issues. As I noted there, it’s not necessary for a CEO of a company to be able to write Java code or master the intricacies of an ERP or sales compensation application. However, CEOs must grasp the basics of IT just as they must understand basic corporate finance, the production process and – at least at a high level – the...
Read More
Topics:
Big Data,
Mobile,
SaaS,
Sales Performance,
Social Media,
Supply Chain Performance,
Customer,
ERP,
Operational Performance,
Business Analytics,
Business Collaboration,
Business Performance,
Cloud Computing,
Complex Event Processing,
Customer & Contact Center,
Financial Performance,
In-memory,
Information Management,
Workforce Performance,
CFO,
CEO,
PaaS
I’ve been examining how corporations plan and budget for more than decade. One clear pattern that has emerged is the difficulty that using desktop spreadsheets imposes on the process. Ventana Research recently published findings from our trends in business planning benchmark research, and the research once again confirms this observation. It shows that companies that use dedicated applications are consistently more satisfied (and much less dissatisfied) with the software they use than users of...
Read More
Topics:
Big Data,
Planning,
Sales Performance,
Supply Chain Performance,
Office of Finance,
Reporting,
Budgeting,
driver-based,
Operational Performance,
Business Performance,
Customer & Contact Center,
Financial Performance,
Workforce Performance,
Financial Performance Management,
Integrated Business Planning
Many people enjoy mystery stories or crime thrillers; in the same vein of savoring the whodunnit and howdunnit, I like a good accounting scandal. My fascination with cooking the books started when I was young with the “great salad oil swindle”, which wound up causing losses in excess of $1 billion in today’s money and even threatened a Wall Street collapse. This disaster was averted by the assassination of President Kennedy, which kept markets closed on Monday, November 25, 1963, and gave the...
Read More
Topics:
Fraud,
Governance,
GRC,
Office of Finance,
audit,
IFRS,
Business Performance,
Financial Performance,
Governance, Risk & Compliance (GRC),
Hewlett Packard,
Meg Whitman,
SEC
The technology ecosystems are expanding rapidly and the use of big data and cloud computing challenge organizations to process information efficiently and deliver consistent high-quality data. To address these issues, Informatica has introduced two new offerings.
Read More
Topics:
Big Data,
Social Media,
Operational Performance,
Business Analytics,
Business Performance,
Cloud Computing,
Data Integration,
Informatica,
Information Applications,
Information Management,
Strata+Hadoop
Tableau Software is growing fast. Tableau has taken a “land and expand” strategy that drives what they call the democratization of analytics within organizations. Tableau has enjoyed first mover advantage in the area of exploratory analytics called visual discovery, a growing type of business analytics that allows companies to easily visualize data in a descriptive manner, but the company is facing competition as deep-pocket companies such as IBM, SAP and others become more aggressive in the...
Read More
Topics:
Big Data,
Data Visualization,
Sales Performance,
Tableau,
Google,
discovery analytics,
exploratory analytics,
Operational Performance,
Analytics,
Business Analytics,
Business Collaboration,
Business Intelligence,
Business Performance,
Customer & Contact Center,
Operational Intelligence,
Impala,
big query
Business analytics has become the highest ranked technology innovation, according to our benchmark research on business technology innovation, but a lack of trained resources and inefficient technology have hampered the best of organizations when they attempt to roll out analytics. Our benchmark research on business analytics in 2012 found that the majority of analysts in organizations spend more of their time on data-related activities than on analytic tasks, and our 2013 research on business...
Read More
Topics:
Big Data,
Sales Performance,
Social Media,
Supply Chain Performance,
Narrative Science,
Operational Performance,
Business Analytics,
Business Collaboration,
Business Intelligence,
Business Performance,
CIO,
Cloud Computing,
Customer & Contact Center,
Financial Performance,
Information Applications,
Information Management,
Workforce Performance,
Expert Systems,
Digital Technology
Read More
Topics:
Sales Performance,
Social Media,
Supply Chain Performance,
IT Performance,
Operational Performance,
Business Intelligence,
Business Performance,
CIO,
Customer & Contact Center,
Financial Performance,
Information Applications,
Information Management,
Location Intelligence,
Operational Intelligence,
Twitter,
Workforce Performance,
CMO,
COO,
Industry Analyst,
Technology Vendors
Read More
Topics:
Sales Performance,
SAP,
Social Media,
Supply Chain Performance,
Peoplefluent,
Planview,
Research,
Splunk,
IT Performance,
Operational Performance,
Business Analytics,
Business Collaboration,
Business Intelligence,
Business Performance,
CIO,
Cloud Computing,
Customer & Contact Center,
Financial Performance,
IBM,
Information Applications,
Information Management,
Location Intelligence,
Operational Intelligence,
Workforce Performance,
Ceridian,
CFO,
CMO,
COO,
Datawatch,
Saba,
Technology
The business/IT divide is a barrier that prevents most companies from achieving their true performance potential. The divide has remained a constant impediment since the dawn of business computing six decades ago. It’s not necessary for a CEO of a company to be able to write Java code or master the intricacies of an ERP or sales compensation application. However, that CEO must master the basics of IT just as he must understand basic corporate finance, the production process and – at least at a...
Read More
Topics:
Big Data,
Performance Management,
Sales Performance,
Supply Chain Performance,
Human Capital Management,
competition,
executive,
Operational Performance,
Business Performance,
CIO,
Cloud Computing,
Customer & Contact Center,
Financial Performance,
In-memory,
Workforce Performance,
CFO,
IT,
CEO,
FPM
Mobile technology continues to advance weekly, with new software releases and new versions of devices. Though it has been in the headlines frequently in recent weeks, can Microsoft really change the mobile technology dynamics in the business world?
Read More
Topics:
Microsoft,
Sales Performance,
Google,
Microsoft Windows Phone,
IT Performance,
Operational Performance,
Business Intelligence,
Business Performance,
Cloud Computing,
Customer & Contact Center,
Financial Performance,
Information Applications,
Information Management,
Workforce Performance,
Digital Technology
People have been complaining about the budgeting and planning processes in their organizations for decades. If you’re old enough, you may recall President Carter’s failed attempt to use something called zero-based budgeting to impose discipline in federal outlays. (In his first year in office the federal government reported a whopping $54 billion deficit.) Some complaining is almost inevitable, but some reflects the one-way nature of the process. People spend time on creating a budget and don’t...
Read More
Topics:
Big Data,
Planning,
Sales Performance,
Supply Chain Performance,
Office of Finance,
Reporting,
Budgeting,
driver-based,
Operational Performance,
Business Performance,
Customer & Contact Center,
Financial Performance,
Workforce Performance,
Financial Performance Management,
Integrated Business Planning
TribeHR has brought to market an HR application suite that uses social collaboration to empower workers and managers to perform tasks that might once have been done mostly by HR professionals, or not done at all. The software-as-a-service-based TribeHR application helps businesses with fewer than 500 employees with recruiting, applicant tracking, onboarding, performance and goal setting, and time and vacation management – but with a twist. By using social collaboration as a foundation for its...
Read More
Topics:
Performance Management,
Human Capital Management,
Recruiting,
Social Collaboration,
Operational Performance,
Business Collaboration,
Business Performance,
Cloud Computing,
Workforce Performance,
Hiring,
HR,
TribeHR
Organizations engage in a range of forward-looking activities. Sales organizations have pipelines to forecast sales. Manufacturing organizations set and reset demand plans and near-term production schedules, often in response to longer-term production plans that determine what they will make and where and how they will make it. Logistics people plan inbound and outbound shipments. Marketing departments plan advertising and promotion campaigns. HR departments project staffing requirements and...
Read More
Topics:
Big Data,
Planning,
Sales Performance,
Supply Chain Performance,
Office of Finance,
Reporting,
Budgeting,
driver-based,
Operational Performance,
Business Performance,
Customer & Contact Center,
Financial Performance,
Workforce Performance,
Financial Performance Management,
Integrated Business Planning
The idea of devising and using maturity assessments to improve business performance has been a staple of management, functional and strategic consultants for decades. It’s based on two unassailable principles. One is the general assertion that companies differ in their ability to do anything along a range from nonexistent to advanced. The second is that at any time it’s possible for a knowledgeable individual to construct a scale of competence for some business function from least to most...
Read More
Topics:
Performance Management,
Sales Performance,
Social Media,
Supply Chain Performance,
Customer Experience,
Governance,
IT Performance,
Operational Performance,
Business Analytics,
Business Collaboration,
Business Intelligence,
Business Performance,
Cloud Computing,
Customer & Contact Center,
Financial Performance,
Governance, Risk & Compliance (GRC),
Information Applications,
Information Management,
Location Intelligence,
Operational Intelligence,
Workforce Performance,
benchmark,
FPM
Read More
Topics:
discovery tools,
exploratory analytics,
Operational Performance,
Business Analytics,
Business Collaboration,
Business Intelligence,
Business Performance,
Financial Performance,
Operational Intelligence,
Cognos,
cognos enterprise,
cognos express,
cognos insight
Ventana Research has just released the 2012 Value Index for Business Intelligence, in which we evaluate the competency and maturity of vendors and products. Our firm has been researching this software category for almost a decade. Our latest benchmark research in business intelligence found that new technology advancements in business intelligence are critical to its future; more than two-thirds of organizations will use BI on mobile technology in the next year, and more than a fifth will do so...
Read More
Topics:
Microsoft,
MicroStrategy,
Pentaho,
QlikView,
Sales Performance,
SAP,
SAS,
Social Media,
Supply Chain Performance,
IT Performance,
Jaspersoft,
Operational Performance,
Analytics,
Business Analytics,
Business Collaboration,
Business Intelligence,
Business Performance,
Cloud Computing,
Customer & Contact Center,
Financial Performance,
Governance, Risk & Compliance (GRC),
IBM,
InetSoft,
Information Applications,
Information Builders,
Information Management,
Location Intelligence,
Operational Intelligence,
Oracle,
Tibco,
Workforce Performance,
arcplan,
LogiXML,
Spago Solutions
Unlike other recent conferences that seem to focus almost exclusively on cloud computing, this week’s Teradata Partners Conference emphasized big data and analytics. The vision that Teradata lays out is one in which new technologies such as Apache Hadoop live side by side with more traditional enterprise data warehouses (EDW) and companies have the flexibility to define their own approaches to BI tools. This approach, at least in the near and medium terms, makes a lot of sense, and is backed by
Read More
Topics:
Big Data,
IT Performance,
Operational Performance,
Analytics,
Business Analytics,
Business Intelligence,
Business Performance,
Customer & Contact Center,
Information Applications,
Information Management,
Operational Intelligence,
Teradata Aster
SAP has inaugurated a new series of business applications it calls Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) OnDemand as a cloud-based subscription service. The applications are part of SAP’s EPM version 10 suite, which it introduced last year. It’s a first step in what is likely to be a portfolio of general-purpose, lightweight and relatively low-cost apps designed to be used on mobile devices. Using HANA on the back end, the applications can deliver high performance in accessing masses of...
Read More
Topics:
Big Data,
Performance Management,
Sales Performance,
SAP,
Supply Chain Performance,
Office of Finance,
expense,
Operational Performance,
Analytics,
Business Analytics,
Business Collaboration,
Business Performance,
Cloud Computing,
Customer & Contact Center,
Financial Performance,
Workforce Performance,
Business Applications,
FPM,
HANA
At the SAP TechEd conference in Las Vegas this week, the global software giant unveiled the latest versions of its technology, platforms and applications across the cloud, mobile and on premises. SAP executive Vishal Sikka followed up in person to his written response to the statements Oracle CEO and Chairman Larry Ellison made at Oracle OpenWorld on the limited nature of SAP’s HANA in-memory computing technology. Sikka presented a SAP HANA server with 100 terabytes of DRAM processing 1...
Read More
Topics:
SAP,
Operational Performance,
Business Analytics,
Business Intelligence,
Business Performance,
CIO,
Cloud Computing,
Information Management,
SAP HANA,
SAP NetWeaver
There weren’t any headlines (or even many tweets) about Oracle Fusion Financials emanating from this year’s Oracle OpenWorld (#OOW12) conference. Maybe that’s by design, because it’s not in Oracle’s best interest to kick up a lot of dust about ERP migration. The financial applications software market is mature, and market share leaders such as Oracle have less interest in getting customers to upgrade than they did a decade ago. For a software vendor with a large installed base, cashing rich...
Read More
Topics:
Performance Management,
ERP,
Office of Finance,
financial,
Business Performance,
Cloud Computing,
Financial Performance,
Oracle,
Workday,
JD Edwards,
PeopleSoft
I had the opportunity last week to visit PivotLink in the Bellevue, Washington, office that houses the company’s development team and marketing leadership to see its software. After taking the helm a little more than a year ago and putting a new team in place, CEO Bruce Armstrong has positioned the company above the fray of the crowded business intelligence software set. The company has smartly moved into the retail space with user-friendly tools that should appeal to mid-tier retailers and...
Read More
Topics:
Retail Analytics,
Sales Performance,
Operational Performance,
Analytics,
Business Analytics,
Business Intelligence,
Business Performance,
Cloud Computing,
Customer & Contact Center,
Location Intelligence
During its annual industry analyst summit this week, human capital management software vendor SumTotal Systems introduced new heads of finance, marketing and sales, and talked about expanding operations in Europe and Asia-Pacific – all part of a business growth strategy that I am sure the company’s private equity owner is expecting. While I wrote about the company earlier this year, SumTotal now says it has signed up 85 new customers so far in 2012 for its human capital management suite, and...
Read More
Topics:
Social Media,
Human Capital Management,
Mobile Technology,
Recruiting,
Social Collaboration,
Business Analytics,
Business Collaboration,
Business Performance,
Cloud Computing,
Workforce Performance,
Talent Management,
Workforce Management
Our benchmark research into retail analytics suggests that only 34 percent of retail companies are satisfied with the process they currently use to create analytics. That’s 10 percent fewer businesses satisfied than we found for all industries combined. The dissatisfaction is being driven by underperforming technology that cannot keep up with the dramatic changes that are occurring in the retail industry. Retail analytics lag those in the broader business world, with 71 percent still using...
Read More
Topics:
Big Data,
Retail Analytics,
SaaS,
Sales Performance,
Social Media,
Operational Performance,
Business Analytics,
Business Collaboration,
Business Intelligence,
Business Performance,
Cloud Computing,
Collaboration,
Operational Intelligence
This week I’m at the 2012 HR Technology Conference (Twitter: #HRTechConf) where the scene is more than cool – it is hip. In the past several years technology for human resources – now more often called human capital management – has transformed from administrative software to applications anyone in the workforce can use to access information about their company, job, goals, performance, pay, benefits and even what they can do to advance in the organization. HR technology is embracing the six...
Read More
Topics:
Sales Performance,
Social Media,
Supply Chain Performance,
Human Capital Management,
Mobile Technology,
Social Collaboration,
Operational Performance,
Business Collaboration,
Business Performance,
Cloud Computing,
Customer & Contact Center,
Financial Performance,
Workforce Performance,
HR,
Talent Management
Unless you have some combination of a very strong credit rating, a high income-to-debt payment ratio and a relatively low loan-to-value ratio, it’s not especially easy to refinance a mortgage these days. That’s a shame, because there are plenty of people who have stayed current in meeting their credit obligations and whose mortgages are comfortably below current market value who could benefit from today’s record low interest rates. One major reason they can’t refinance is the collapse of...
Read More
Topics:
Office of Finance,
XBRL,
Analytics,
Business Analytics,
Business Performance,
Financial Performance,
finance,
capital markets
At Oracle OpenWorld this week I focused on what the company is doing in business analytics, and in particular on what it is doing with its Exalytics In-Memory Machine. The Exalytics appliance is an impressive in-memory hardware approach to putting right-time analytics in the hands of end users by providing a full range of integrated analytic and visualization capabilities. Exalytics fits into the broader analytics portfolio by providing support for Oracle BI Foundational Suite including OBIEE,...
Read More
Topics:
Big Data,
SAP,
exadata,
Analytics,
Business Analytics,
Business Intelligence,
Business Performance,
Exalytics,
IBM,
Oracle
Read More
Topics:
Big Data,
Sales Performance,
Social Media,
Supply Chain Performance,
Market Research,
Research,
IT Performance,
Operational Performance,
Analytics,
Business Analytics,
Business Collaboration,
Business Intelligence,
Business Performance,
CIO,
Cloud Computing,
Customer & Contact Center,
Financial Performance,
Governance, Risk & Compliance (GRC),
Information Applications,
Information Management,
Location Intelligence,
Operational Intelligence,
Workforce Performance,
CMO,
Industry Analyst,
Influencers,
Technology Vendors
Salesforce.com’s recent Dreamforce user conference got me wondering about how far the market for cloud-based software has come. To answer that question, I looked to our own research. For the past several years Ventana Research has routinely asked participants in its benchmark research what preference, if any, they have for deploying software they use to support the activity we are benchmarking. The choices we offer are on-premises, software as a service (SaaS – that is, in the cloud), hosted on...
Read More
Topics:
SaaS,
Sales,
Sales Performance,
Salesforce.com,
Supply Chain Performance,
Operational Performance,
Business Performance,
Cloud Computing,
Customer & Contact Center,
Financial Performance,
Workforce Performance,
Software
I attended Oracle’s annual OpenWorld conference this week. The company claims it holds the world’s largest technology conference, with 50,000 attendees and a million people viewing sessions online. It was a great opportunity to get close to the Oracle Fusion Applications, which the company presented as proven and ready, with customers using them on-premises and in private and public cloud computing usage methods. In keynotes from executives Larry Ellison, Mark Hurd and Thomas Kurian and...
Read More
Topics:
Sales,
Sales Performance,
Salesforce.com,
SAP,
Social Media,
Mobile Technology,
Social Collaboration,
Operational Performance,
Business Analytics,
Business Collaboration,
Business Intelligence,
Business Performance,
Cloud Computing,
Customer & Contact Center,
Information Management,
Oracle,
Workforce Performance,
CRM,
SFA,
Workday,
Workforce Analytics
Two key themes that emerged from Larry Ellison’s Sunday night keynote at this year’s Oracle OpenWorld were faster processing speed and cheaper storage. An underlying purpose to these themes was to assert the importance of Oracle’s strategic vertical integration of hardware and software with the acquisitions of Sun. I try to view technology keynotes like this from the perspective of a practical business user. Advancements such of these are important because enhancing the performance and...
Read More
Topics:
Big Data,
Customer Experience,
executive,
IT Performance,
Business Analytics,
Business Performance,
Data Management,
Financial Performance,
In-Memory Computing,
Information Management,
Business Process Management,
Data,
FPM
Informatica is a Hot vendor when it comes to our Value Index for Data Integration. When it comes to meeting the business need for consistent and high-quality product information, Informatica just raised its prospects with its announced takeover of Heiler Software. Until now, Informatica has lacked a product information management (PIM) offering. Germany-based Heiler Software, whose presence has continued to grow in Europe and North America, was recently ranked as a Hot Vendor in our Value Index...
Read More
Topics:
Sales Performance,
Supply Chain Performance,
MDM,
PIM,
Operational Performance,
Business Performance,
CIO,
Customer & Contact Center,
Data Governance,
Financial Performance,
Information Management,
Product Information Management
IBM acquired SPSS in late 2009 and has been investing steadily in the business as a key component of its overall business analytics portfolio. Today, SPSS provides an integrated approach to predictive analytics through four software packages: SPSS Data Collection, SPSS Statistics, SPSS Modeler and SPSS Decision Management. SPSS is also integrated with Cognos Insight, IBM’s entry into the visual discovery arena.
Read More
Topics:
Predictive Analytics,
Social Media,
IT Performance,
Operational Performance,
Business Analytics,
Business Collaboration,
Business Intelligence,
Business Performance,
Customer & Contact Center,
IBM,
Workforce Performance,
SPSS
Effective capital planning and capital investment are vital to a company’s long-term success. The choices a company makes – how much to invest and in which facilities or projects – have a profound effect on its long-term success. For that reason, companies take pains to ensure that these decisions support their long-term strategies and are made as rationally as possible. Because Ventana Research is frequently involved in software acquisition discussions, return on investment is a topic we...
Read More
Topics:
Planning,
Office of Finance,
Reporting,
Business Analytics,
Business Performance,
Financial Performance,
finance,
capital budget,
capital spending,
FPM
Exactly what is the relationship between workforce analytics and big data? Most of the use cases for big data seem to revolve around marketing, social media and customer service initiatives where unstructured data sources reveal big value. Our research into big data analytics suggests a prime benefit of big data is in the ability to retain and analyze larger amounts of data and to increase the speed of analysis. However, workforce analytics does not suffer from an overwhelming amount of data,...
Read More
Topics:
Big Data,
Human Capital Management,
Business Analytics,
Business Intelligence,
Business Performance,
Cloud Computing,
Financial Performance,
Workforce Performance
Salesforce is a global software-as-a-service (SaaS) company to be reckoned with. The swarming crowds at its Dreamforce event last week were estimated to exceed 90,000. The company is rapidly growing an ecosystem that includes Sales, Service and Marketing Clouds; Force.com for building applications; and Data.com for storing data in the cloud centrally for use across Salesforce products. It is also focusing on social computing, as I outlined at the beginning of the event. Hundreds of Salesforce...
Read More
Topics:
Master Data Management,
Sales Performance,
Salesforce.com,
Social Media,
SnapLogic,
Zyme Solutions,
IT Performance,
Operational Performance,
Business Analytics,
Business Intelligence,
Business Performance,
CIO,
Cloud Computing,
Customer & Contact Center,
Data Governance,
Data Integration,
Governance, Risk & Compliance (GRC),
Informatica,
Information Builders,
Information Management,
Data,
data integrity,
database.com,
Kapow
I was at the Salesforce.com Dreamforce conference this week to hear about the latest advancements from the cloud computing software giant. Salesforce has helped revolutionize cloud computing for business, and its social media and collaborative technologies help advance business processes in sales, customer service and improve the interactions between employees, partners and customers. Salesforce has made great advancements in cloud, social and mobile technology, as I have assessed and my...
Read More
Topics:
Big Data,
Predictive Analytics,
QlikView,
Sales Performance,
Salesforce.com,
Social Media,
Gooddata,
SnapLogic,
Operational Performance,
Analytics,
Business Analytics,
Business Collaboration,
Business Intelligence,
Business Performance,
Cloud Computing,
Customer & Contact Center,
Financial Performance,
InetSoft,
Information Applications,
Information Management,
KXEN,
Operational Intelligence,
Cloud9 Analytics,
Domo,
Information Builder iway,
Roambi
With more than 90,000 attendees registered and 100,000 more expected to watch via live stream on Facebook, Salesforce.com’s Dreamforce is the biggest technology event of this year. The conference kicked off yesterday morning with MC Hammer letting the packed house know that it was “Chatter time” and leaving little doubt about the theme of the Marc Benioff’s keynote speech: Social. Citing numbers from McKinsey and IBM, Benioff suggested that social adds $1.3 trillion to the economy and that CEOs...
Read More
Topics:
Big Data,
Mobile,
Sales Performance,
Social Media,
IT Performance,
Operational Performance,
Analytics,
Business Intelligence,
Business Performance,
Cloud Computing,
Customer & Contact Center,
Location Intelligence,
Workforce Performance,
Social
I cover the meat-and-potatoes aspects of corporate computing. I also pay attention to the special needs of midsize companies (by our definition, those with between 100 and 999 employees), which are unlike those of either small business or large corporations. After attending this year’s Dreamforce conference, Salesforce.com’s annual user meeting held this week in San Francisco, I can appreciate how difficult it is for executives and people who work in back office functions to cut through the...
Read More
Topics:
Sales,
Sales Performance,
Salesforce.com,
Social Media,
ERP,
Office of Finance,
CRM customer service,
SMB,
Business Performance,
Cloud Computing,
Customer & Contact Center,
Financial Performance,
Dreamforce,
finance,
Security,
FPM
Thinking about big data and the swirling world of analytics that surrounds it can be overwhelming. Broad-based organizational and technological changes are driving a new industrial constitution built on time-to-value and closed-loop systems of organizational and machine learning. As I analyze our next-generation business intelligence benchmark research results, I see trends in collaboration and mobile technology that will have a profound impact on business for generations to come. Given these...
Read More
Topics:
Big Data,
Operational Performance,
Analytics,
Business Analytics,
Business Intelligence,
Business Performance,
Customer & Contact Center,
Information Applications,
Information Management,
Location Intelligence,
Operational Intelligence
The annual Salesforce.com Dreamforce conference (Twitter: #DF12), just underway, may be the largest software conference ever, with attendance, physically and on the Internet, expected to be 90,000. Certainly, as one of the largest software events of 2012, this conference will be heavily covered via social media, while under the roof of the Moscone Center and surrounding hotels Salesforce will be demonstrating the power of using social media concepts in the enterprise and combining those...
Read More
Topics:
Sales Performance,
Salesforce.com,
Supply Chain Performance,
Research,
SFDC,
Operational Performance,
Business Analytics,
Business Collaboration,
Business Intelligence,
Business Mobility,
Business Performance,
Cloud Computing,
Customer & Contact Center,
Financial Performance,
Information Applications,
Information Management,
Operational Intelligence,
Workforce Performance,
Dreamforce
I attended Taleo World to see how well Oracle is integrating Taleo after acquiring the company in 2012. I assessed the announcement by Oracle earlier this year; it was clear then that Oracle needed to make this acquisition to boost its cloud computing and talent management efforts. In the three-hour keynote session, a business overview and software demonstrations indicated what Oracle has in store for the applications and how it plans to fuse its applications and technology to add value to...
Read More
Topics:
Social Media,
Human Capital Management,
Recruiting,
Business Analytics,
Business Collaboration,
Business Performance,
Cloud Computing,
Financial Performance,
Oracle,
Workforce Performance,
HireVue,
Hiring,
HR,
JobVite,
Talemetry,
Taleo
As I listened to the keynote address at, conf2012, the annual Splunk user conference, my initial impression was that the company was spreading itself too thin. The company highlighted four rather formidable areas of organizational focus: Enterprise 5.0, the company’s flagship data platform, which is now in beta; Development, which is support for building applications and integrating Splunk within the broader IT infrastructure; Content, the continued development of core applications and use...
Read More
Topics:
Big Data,
Splunk,
data fabric,
IT Performance,
Operational Performance,
Analytics,
Business Analytics,
Business Intelligence,
Business Performance,
Cloud Computing,
Customer & Contact Center,
Operational Intelligence,
Digital Technology
Ventana Research has just released the 2012 Value Index for Data Integration, in which we evaluate the competency and maturity of vendors and products. Our firm has been researching this software category for almost a decade. Our latest benchmark research in information management found that data integration is a critical component of information management strategies, according to 55 percent of organizations. Our benchmark research on organizations using this software not only uncovers best...
Read More
Topics:
Big Data,
Master Data Management,
Microsoft,
Pentaho,
Sales Performance,
SAP,
SAS,
Social Media,
Supply Chain Performance,
Talend,
SnapLogic,
IT Performance,
Operational Performance,
Business Analytics,
Business Collaboration,
Business Mobility,
Business Performance,
Cloud Computing,
Customer & Contact Center,
Data Governance,
Data Integration,
Financial Performance,
Governance, Risk & Compliance (GRC),
IBM,
Informatica,
Information Applications,
Information Builders,
Information Management,
Location Intelligence,
Oracle,
Workforce Performance,
Syncsort
Budget season is about to open at most companies that operate on a calendar year, so this is probably as good a time as any to rethink the process. Almost all companies will undertake the construction of a budget this year the same way they did it last year, despite widespread complaints that it is a monumental waste of time. One major reason why budgeting never changes is that it isn’t important enough to be worth serious rethinking. Another reason is that too many vested interests are aligned...
Read More
Topics:
Big Data,
Planning,
Sales Performance,
Office of Finance,
Reporting,
Budgeting,
Controller,
Operational Performance,
Business Performance,
Financial Performance,
CFO,
Compensation,
cash management,
FPM,
Integrated Business Planning
If you’re considering purchasing a financial performance management (FPM) suite, you shouldn’t overlook a recent entrant in the category, Tagetik (which sort of rhymes with “magnetic”). The company, which was founded in 1986 and is based in Lucca, Italy, began by focusing mainly on Europe, but has extended its efforts in the United States in the past two years. Tagetik 4.0 is an elegant implementation of a financial performance management suite running on Microsoft’s SharePoint infrastructure.
Read More
Topics:
Big Data,
Planning,
Office of Finance,
Reporting,
Budgeting,
close,
Consolidation,
Controller,
SharePoint,
XBRL,
Business Analytics,
Business Collaboration,
Business Performance,
Dashboards,
Financial Performance,
Workforce Performance,
CFO,
Tagetik,
FPM
Jaspersoft Business Intelligence Suite competes in the open source and broader BI market. Its customer base is mostly in the small and midsized business and OEMs and SaaS providers who can embed Jaspersoft code directly into their offerings. Earlier this summer, the company introduced Jaspersoft 4.7, which features advancements in interactive reporting, big data access and mobile business intelligence for Android. The 4.7 release brings interactive features such as segmenting and filtering,...
Read More
Topics:
Big Data,
Mobile,
Jaspersoft,
Operational Performance,
Analytics,
Business Intelligence,
Business Performance,
Cloud Computing,
Customer & Contact Center,
Information Applications
I had a refreshing call this morning with a vendor that did not revolve around integration of systems, types of data, and the intricacies of NoSQL approaches. Instead, the discussion was about how its business users analyze an important and complex problem and how the company’s software enables that analysis. The topic of big data never came up, and it was not needed, because the conversation was business-driven and issue-specific.
Read More
Topics:
Big Data,
Datameer,
Predictive Analytics,
Sales Performance,
Supply Chain Performance,
Planview,
SuccessFactors,
Operational Performance,
Analytics,
Business Analytics,
Business Intelligence,
Business Performance,
Customer & Contact Center,
Financial Performance,
IBM,
Information Management,
Operational Intelligence,
Workforce Performance,
PivotLink
One of the community groups to which I donate my time is an organization that puts on a Concours d’Élegance – a vintage car show. Such Concours date back to seventeenth-century France, when wealthy aristocrats gathered to see who had the best carriages and most beaudacious horses. Our Concours serves as the centerpiece to a broader mission of raising money for several charities. There a many such events in the United States and elsewhere, but this one, which has been held every year since 1956,...
Read More
Topics:
Big Data,
GRC,
IT Performance,
Operational Performance,
Business Analytics,
Business Intelligence,
Business Performance,
CIO,
Financial Performance,
Information Management,
Operational Intelligence,
CFO,
finance,
Talent Management,
FPM
IBM has announced its intention to acquire Kenexa as part of IBM Smarter Workforce initiative and social business software division. It’s a billion-dollar-plus investment to bolster IBM’s social business and give the company more depth in the human capital management software market that comprises human resources, talent management and workforce management. A lot of surface-level analysis I’ve seen on this announcement is not worth reading, but the deeper review below may help Kenexa and IBM...
Read More
Topics:
Sales Performance,
Social Media,
Supply Chain Performance,
Human Capital Management,
Kenexa,
Recruiting,
Operational Performance,
Business Collaboration,
Business Performance,
Cloud Computing,
Customer & Contact Center,
Financial Performance,
Governance, Risk & Compliance (GRC),
IBM,
Workforce Performance,
Talent Management
Our research consistently finds that defects in data are the root cause of a wide range of problems encountered by modern corporations. The magnitude of the problem correlates with the size of the company: Big companies have bigger headaches than midsize ones. Data issues diminish productivity in every part of a business as people struggle to correct errors or find workarounds. Issues with data are a man-made phenomenon, yet companies seem to treat bad data as some sort of force of nature like...
Read More
Topics:
Big Data,
Predictive Analytics,
Sales Performance,
Supply Chain Performance,
GRC,
IT Performance,
Operational Performance,
Business Analytics,
Business Intelligence,
Business Performance,
CIO,
Customer & Contact Center,
Financial Performance,
Information Management,
Operational Intelligence,
Workforce Performance,
CFO,
finance,
FPM
Midsize businesses “pay” for their use of entry-level accounting systems by not having the essential information they need readily available and by using up valuable time that could be better spent generating business, finding issues or responding to opportunities sooner or simply enhancing the efficiency of the organization. Nevertheless, the transition from an entry-level accounting package such as QuickBooks to an on-premises system can be daunting for companies whose entry-level software no...
Read More
Topics:
Sales Performance,
Customer Experience,
ERP,
Office of Finance,
end-to-end,
finance cloud,
Business Performance,
Cloud Computing,
Financial Performance,
Business Process Management,
CFO,
finance,
accounting software,
business process execution,
financial systems,
FPM
A study by the McKinsey Global Institute published earlier this year suggests a coming shortage of more than 140,000 workers with deep analytical skills and a shortage of more than 1.5 million data-literate managers. I’m not sure how the study defined these roles, but I’d guess that those with deep analytic skills are those folks building the complex models, and the data-literate managers are those executives, middle managers and analysts who interpret the results and use the models to help...
Read More
Topics:
Big Data,
Data Scientist,
Predictive Analytics,
Sales Performance,
IT Performance,
Operational Performance,
Analytics,
Business Analytics,
Business Collaboration,
Business Intelligence,
Business Performance,
Cloud Computing,
Customer & Contact Center,
Operational Intelligence,
Workforce Performance
In my last rant, on business analytics and the pathetic state of dashboards, I pointed out significant flaws in business intelligence software created by technology providers and in how it is being deployed by business and IT. Now I want to follow up with some insight on disconnects to a critical asset that is essential to the success of business analytics. I mean key performance indicators (KPIs), a term used in inaccurate ways that have diminished the value of the concept for business.
Read More
Topics:
Sales Performance,
Social Media,
Supply Chain Performance,
Sustainability,
KPI,
IT Performance,
Key Performance Indicators,
Operational Performance,
Business Analytics,
Business Collaboration,
Business Intelligence,
Business Performance,
Cloud Computing,
Customer & Contact Center,
Financial Performance,
Governance, Risk & Compliance (GRC),
Information Applications,
Information Management,
Location Intelligence,
Operational Intelligence,
Workforce Performance
Over the last several months, my colleague VP and Research Director Tony Cosentino and I have been assessing vendors and products in the business intelligence market as part of our upcoming Value Index. Tony recently wrote about the swirling world of business analytics, covering many of the dynamics of this industry. He and I have been reviewing the breadth and depth of over 15 of these vendors using our Value Index methodology, which examines the products closely in terms of usability,...
Read More
Topics:
Sales Performance,
Supply Chain Performance,
Operational Performance,
Analytics,
Business Analytics,
Business Collaboration,
Business Intelligence,
Business Performance,
CIO,
Cloud Computing,
Customer & Contact Center,
Dashboards,
Financial Performance,
Governance, Risk & Compliance (GRC),
Information Management,
Location Intelligence,
Workforce Performance,
Expert Systems