"Ten Leading Business Intelligence Software Solutions
By Thor Olavsrud May 5, 2010
The Business Intelligence software market is shaping up as a David vs. Goliath struggle. Behemoths like Microsoft, Oracle and IBM offer feature-rich BI suites along with their many other enterprise software products. Meanwhile, pure-play business intelligence software vendors -- such as MicroStrategy and Tableau -- have avid followers and are known for innovating around new features and quickly adjusting to the shifting marketplace.
Why is this important? Because Business Intelligence software is used to extract data from disparate sources -- spreadsheets, databases and other software programs -- inside companies and then analyze that business data to better understand a firm's internal and external strengths and weaknesses. A business relies heavily on this data. Bottom line: Business intelligence software enables managers to better see the relationship between different data for critical decision-making -- particularly opportunities for innovation, cost reduction and optimal resource deployment.
The list below includes ten industry-leading BI solutions, from vendors large and not-so-large. If you're looking for a bird's eye view of this rapidly evolving market, the following condensed portraits should help.
Business Intelligence Software: Ten Solutions
Note: This list is NOT ordered "best to worst." The question of what business intelligence software solution is best for a given company depends on an entire matrix of factors. This list is simply an overview of BI solutions, with the debate about quality left to individual clients.
SAP Crystal Reports
Crystal Reports is part of SAP's Business Objects portfolio of business intelligence software solutions. It allows users to graphically design interactive reports and connect them to virtually any data source, Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, Oracle databases, Business Objects Enterprise business views and local file system info
"PARC: Seeding Innovation"
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[pdf, 754 KB]
PARC (Palo Alto Research Center, Inc.) works closely with varied enterprises and new ventures to discover breakthrough business and technology concepts that solve real needs, and transform how enterprises deliver value to customers. PARC takes an agile,
multidisciplinary approach to open innovation
– by bringing together
physical, computer, biological, and social scientists who have the vision,
expertise, and instinct to convert groundbreaking scientific findings into
industrial-strength prototypes.
Incorporated in 2002 as an independent research business, PARC is celebrated for such innovations as laser printing, distributed computing and Ethernet, the graphical user interface (GUI), object-oriented programming, and ubiquitous computing. PARC is a wholly owned subsidiary of Xerox Corporation.
To inquire about working with PARC, please contact info@parc.com. [client services]
Les espaces numériques des bibliothèques ont pour mission de favoriser l'accès du grand public aux nouvelles technologies. Quels que soient l'âge et le niveau des utilisateurs, des ateliers et des rendez-vous individuels sont mis au point par les responsables tout au long de l'année.
Le Centre de Ressources des EPN (Espaces Publics Numériques) de Wallonie nous signale une belle initiative de leurs collègues des Espaces Publics Numériques de la Bibliothèque Municipale de Lyon. En effet, ces derniers ont publié des tutoriels sur le Web 2.0 et les réseaux sociaux. Disponibles gratuitement au format PDF, ces documents sont destinés à sensibiliser et former le grand public sur les nouveaux outils du Net.
In addition to Web 2.0 itself however, we have two more important enterprise software trends: Office 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0, coined by Ismael Ghalimi and Andrew McAfee respectively. Office 2.0 represents the increasing use of browser-based software in the office, while Enterprise 2.0 is more Web 2.0-ish in that it specifically describes the use of freeform, emergent, social software to conduct collaboration and share knowledge.
Specifically this means the fact that corporate information tends to be non-shared by default, that the easiest productivity tools to use are the ones that have very little collaboration built-in, and that the information that does exist is often impossible to find and is often structured in some formal, centrally controlled way.
Certainly, increased transparency, some loss of control over information flow, and outright abuse of low-barrier Intranet publishing tools gives enterprise IT and business leaders pause for thought.
And while some of it must remain under strict control, particularly in public companies, much of it is unnessarily — and usually to a fault — hidden, unreused, and unexploited.
Unexploited sources. Action: Implement a Wiki so as to share and keep up to date this wealth of information e.g. manuals, meeting agenda, minutes of meeting. This would act as the memory of the enterprise
Explain the reasoning behind retaining more knowledge, in making it public, searchable, and organizing it via tagging. Describe the benefits of being able to access much fresher and more up-to-date information elsewhere in the organization because their colleagues are managing more of their projects, tasks, and other work via social tools.
Provide useful templates for common activities and reference material such as projects, tasks, resource management, policies, procedures, standards, and so on. You still have to keep template layouts and template usage simple; excessive structure tends to kill the golden goose of contributions quickly. But a little basic structure goes a long way and prevents contributors from having to figure out how to structure all the white space and provide a simple layer of consistency.
The enterprise has not caught up, largely because most enterprise information doesn't allow a hyperlink structure, and links aren't encouraged very much when it does
setting up blog and wiki directories as well as good enterprise search based on link ranking (which is what Google does to make the right information come up in the first few pages of search results.)
Provide your own search engine in the tools only if you must.
, the real issue, day in and day out, with getting Enterprise 2.0 to take off is to educate, evangelize, demonstrate, and most importantly, evolve the interface and structure of your tools until you pick the right formula that resonates with your audience.
This boils down to having some form of moderation, either human or automated, to ensure that the level of discourse remains at some bare minimimum acceptable standard.
A high-profile executive sponsor that obviously uses the tools can also help in a big way.
Triggering an Enterprise 2.0 ecosystem quickly is likely an early activity driver. This can mean a lot of things but the link structure of Web tools allows information to quickly flow, circulate, and mesh together. You can leverage this in a almost infinite number of ways to drive user activity, interesting content, create awareness of what the company is "thinking", and more.
For example, create a blog for every employee in the company and mail the link to them with instructions on how to use it.
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Create a social bookmarking site for the enterprise where everyone can see what is being bookmarked by everyone else that day.
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Create an internal Wikipedia that contains a seperate copy of all Intranet content and let users edit away.
> The possibilities are endless and provide a much greater number of "entry points" where people can get started with these tools.
The problems will be with the business culture, not the technology.
For example, create a blog for every employee in the company and mail the link to them with instructions on how to use it.
Create a social bookmarking site for the enterprise where everyone can see what is being bookmarked by everyone else that day.
Create an internal Wikipedia that contains a seperate copy of all Intranet content and let users edit away.
Allowing the output of SQL queries to be inserted into wikis when they load, calling Web services or using Flash badges that access data resources can turn Enterprise 2.0 tools from pure knowledge management into actual hybrids of software and data
And the reverse should be true as well, getting data back out into traditional tools including Office documents, PDFs, and XML must be easy to inspire trust and lower barriers to use.
Right now, your company has 21st-century Internet-enabled business processes, mid-20th-century management processes, all built atop 19th-century management principles. (Gary Hamel – The Future Of Management)
Cette étude visait à démontrer que la culture d’entreprise ne pouvait pas être la même dans toutes les filiales car elle ne faisait nullement disparaître la culture nationale ; dans le meilleur des cas, elle se juxtaposait à elle.
Dans le cadre de cette étude, Hofstede mesure les distances hiérarchiques des différentes filiales. Pour un indice médian de 57, il mesure des distances hiérarchiques faibles dans les pays scandinaves (moins de 31) et anglo-saxons (moins de 40) et élevé en France (68).
Dans cette même étude, Hofstede mesure le contrôle d’incertitude.Le contrôle faible suppose davantage d’acceptation des situations comme ambiguës, réversibles dans leurs malheurs et leurs bonheurs. Les personnes sont acceptées comme pouvant changer d’humeur et de décision. Le contrôle fort veut s’appuyer sur des bases assurées qui peuvent aller de précautions concrètes à des précautions juridiques voire religieuses. Le contrôle fort est très en rapport avec le développement de la culture scientifique et techniqueEncore une fois, la France se classe en haut du tableau avec un contrôle fort de l’incertitude (un score de 86) tandis que les pays anglo-saxons ou nordiques affichent des résultats faibles attestant d’un contrôle faible de l’incertitude.
la primauté de la hiérarchie va à l’encontre des valeurs ayant emergé de la culture collaborative internet
Depuis au moins dix ans, la France est en retard sur les principaux pays de l’OCDE en matière de développement du télétravail (notamment dans l’administration), quelles que soient les sources ou les approches statistiques. Dans les pays scandinaves et anglo-saxons notamment, il concerne deux à trois fois plus de salariés.
ce détail a un coût. Cisco a ainsi publié un rapport intitulé the The Economics of Collaboration, et dans lequel l’entreprise explique comment en mettant en oeuvre des outils collaboratifs et en facilitant la mobilité des employés avec entre autres une démocratisation du télétravail, celle-ci a obtenu des résultats étonnants :
Cisco IBSG analysis shows that Cisco realized net benefits of $691 million/year through its Web 2.0 and visual collaboration investments in FY08. (…) These benefits represent a 4.9 percent productivity increase for Cisco. We believe this is just the beginning of the value creation we will see around the new collaborative web.
These solutions achieve their remarkable benefits by removing the costs and inefficiencies with which our employees have been struggling. Eliminating these inefficiencies not only brings financial benefits to the company; it also increases employees’ work/life balance, reduces stress and fatigue from extensive travel, and increases job satisfaction.