Top 10 blog posts of 2014

There was an interesting discussion last Friday on Howard Dresner's weekly #BIWisdom tweetchat about pre-packaged BI applications. Unfortunately, I couldn't be on the chat at the time but reviewing the conversation it felt like there is little belief that pre-packaged BI applications which you can just "plug in and use" are really viable, they came low on importance in Howard's most recent #WisdomofCrowds survey and most people on the chat seemed to worry about the need for customization.

During the past 10 years dashboards have evolved as business-users have become more sophisticated in their needs. We've witnessed a trend away from old-fashioned static at-a-glance dashboards towards interactive dashboards that are really more like BI applications. Users want answers to their immediate and follow-up questions and they want that information now.

20 years' ago when I first started my career in BI one of the most common projects I would get involved with was the replacement of Excel based reporting systems, with a "proper" BI system.

We are launching a new blog post series on the blog this week! Every Friday we will publish an interesting and exciting list to give you a different view on the world of business intelligence. Kicking it all off is our list of most influential women in business intelligence.

Cindi Howson of BI Scorecard has just published her annual "Successful BI Survey"* and the results are sadly all too familiar. Once again BI adoption is pretty much static at 22% (a little down on last year's 24%, but probably statistically flat).

Today, Timo Elliott at SAP tweeted that for BI: "nobody seems to agree with me, but it's not about the type of user, it's about tasks". Timo I do agree, and yes it all comes back to the BBC weather site again Although you can sub-divide BI a thousand different ways, the most important distinction (if you want to deliver successful BI) is between "analyst BI" and "end-user BI".

During the recent Qlik and Cloudera virtual Big Data event, Cindi Howson (@BIScorecard) tweeted "Yikes - 1001 data sources brought into one @qlikview app. More common is 30 ish #QCVirtual " Yikes, indeed!

Comparing Business Intelligence to weather web sites might seem a little odd, but I am convinced it is valid and more importantly highlights a path to the future for the way we use information in our organizations.

Is it just me or do SAP talk more about Lumira than all their other BI products put together ? If I am right, then it is a little odd because when I have talked to people at SAP the strong message I get is that Lumira is a tool targeted at analysts, and analysts, I would argue, are a small minority of the potential BI users in an organization.

@Xeradox recently tweeted: "Me wondering: Is #SAPLumira not the "natural" successor to #Xcelsius? #DesignStudio not feasable 4 end-users 2 create own dashboards IMHO " And, @DataIntel asked: "Who is the challenger to #SAP #Xcelsius? Lumira or DesignStudio? Can we build dashboards @ the speed of business change using current stack?"