Jim Ward, President and CEO of Brainsell (www.brainsell.net) released a short but insightful assessment of his take on Business Intelligence recently. In the September 2010 edition of his Sage 90 and 200 newsletter he speaks of BI evolving from a “nice feature to necessity”. In it he makes reference to the possibility of changing BI into […]

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I feel like I have been banging this drum forever but still it amazes me how people get so confused about BI, or they don’t believe it has any worth to their organization, or they are scared about the levels of skills required, or they think they have to have a Wall Street sized budget, […]

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There is always a rich debate around what actually constitutes or defines BI and the one argument that is always raised is that BI can only tell you what has happened historically in a business and fails to tell you what will happen in future. The starting point is to acknowledge that BI is not […]

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I thoroughly enjoyed an article by Gary Cokins, Manager, Performance Management Solutions at SAS, titled ‘Economist or Iconomist’ where he concludes that, ” in twenty years from now will we look back at the last half century and observe there were six IT eras: mainframes, minicomputers, PCs, ERP, the Internet, and now analytics? Forecast, predictive model, or […]

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I’m not one that typically uses public platforms to vent personal frustrations but when I see senseless bureaucracy I can’t let it go without comment and I have witnessed new levels of bureaucratic bone headedness by way of applying to the Canadian government to open a regional office in Vancouver, British Columbia as a base […]

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I recently read an excerpt from a book by Bill Quain titled, PRO-SUMER POWER! In it he postulates that “If the Internet were nothing more than a way to send e-mail, it would rank as one of the greatest inventions in history.” There is no dispute that the internet has fundamentally changed the way we communicate, with […]

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In a recent BBC debate intended to gather opinion from leading technologist’s about the future of technology there appeared to be a number of common themes. Primarily the internet will be an easily accessible and relatively low cost network of billions of devices dominated by high powered instant access mobile devices. Interestingly, there appears to […]

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Why is BI currently so topical for business owners and executives in mid-size organisations? Can Excel be considered a part of the picture in defining the perfect BI solution? The BI industry is heavily laden with technical concepts such as Meta Data, Data Marts, Data Warehouses, EUQR, OLAP, Dashboards, Scorecards, Advanced Visualisation, Predictive Modelling… and thanks to […]

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Having being a supplier of Business Intelligence and reporting solutions for small and medium sized companies for most of the last decade, I feel there are a lot of interesting trends, discoveries and behaviors to share both from a customer and a vendor perspective. This week let’s take a look at Excel as a Business […]

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