Research Report: Universities Offering BI and Analytics Degrees

In early 2013, Steven Crofts, Director of Marketing for StatSlice Systems, posted a question on various BI, Analytics and Data Warehousing LinkedIn™ Groups, asking what group members knew was being offered in universities and colleges—either locally or from their alma mater(s).

There was a large response with many good details on what universities were doing. It prompted us to dig deeper and to build a master list based on the responses from the LinkedIn™ Groups and our own subsequent research.

Hadoop Business Case: A Cost Effective Queryable Data Archive/Storage Platform

Big Data’s open source solution Hadoop is not just a super-sized database. Hadoop’s cost per terabyte is much less than high end data warehouse database server like Teradata and Oracle’s Exadata. Hadoop’s storage costs are also substantially less than many high and mid-level storage area network (SAN) solutions.

Survey Results: Seven Strategic BI Mistakes

A few months ago we published a popular article that presented some of the top mistakes organizations were making in business intelligence and analytics implementations After that article was published, I decided to post a question to a few of my favorite LinkedIn groups and ask the group members what business intelligence mistakes they could add to the discussion. The response was outstanding and I summarized their comments into the seven categories and published as an article. I made their contributions anonymous and edited them for grammar, flow, and clarity, but the article is the result of dozens of responses from a bunch of very savvy business intelligence professionals.

Gartner says BI software spending to hit over $17 billion by 2016

According to new analysis reported recently by Gartner, Inc. (NYSE: IT), the world-wide market for Business Intelligence (BI) software will hit $13.8 billion in 2013, but the pace of growth will be slower than in prior years. Total spending will rise to $17.1 billion by 2016, the report adds. Compared with 2011 growth of 16 percent, 2013 and the coming years are expected to be slower, with growth in the high single digits.

Five BI and Analytics Takeaways from Gartner Summit 2013

A few of the StatSlice team visited the Gartner BI Summit that was recently held here in the Dallas area. It was very well attended and had a great “buzz.” This writeup, written by Thamina Christsensen on the Smart Data Collective, summarized some key points well. To see her blog, click here.   1. Old […]

A Fool with a Tool is Still a Fool

It makes sense that business users would want to do their own analytics and business intelligence (BI) without a lot of IT intervention and support? But how is it going out in the real world? I recently asked for some self-service BI success stories through several active LinkedIn™ Groups, and the responses were interesting and high volume. My report from this informal discussion is now available. Practitioner quotes are used with permission.

Developing a Business Analytics Roadmap

Over the last few years IT industry analysts have pointed out that business intelligence is at or near the top of priority lists for many CIOs. Executives want it because they believe it will have a positive impact on business results.

The concept of business analytics as a component of business intelligence has recently come front and center. Technology and constantly improving people skills have resulted in many categories of business analytics that are changing the way businesses look at critical performance indicators in their company.

No matter how you look at it, there needs to be business and technology strategies in place to help govern, assess, and build successful business analytics roadmaps. If you are not sure how to proceed, you are not alone. It is not an easy task to design and implement a successful analytics-driven enterprise. Creating a well thought-out roadmap to bridge the gap between information and analytics can be daunting. The challenge lies in accessing your data and turning it into a tool for competitive advantage.

Summary of the new BI Congress survey: The State of BI/BA in Academia 2012

A good friend and associate over my years in this business has been Dr. Barbara Wixom, an associate professor of IT in the McIntire School of Commerce at the University of Virginia and a research affiliate at the Center for Information Systems Research at MIT’s Sloan School of Management. She, along with several other academic leaders, and with sponsorship from several organizations, have just released a new research project entitled The State of Business Intelligence and Business Analytics in Academia 2012. The entire report is not yet available except through the sponsors, but Dr. Wixom forwarded me a copy and I would like to summarize what I think are some interesting findings.

Heard Around the Water Cooler

What do you mean we don’t have that data in our new data warehouse? Every Friday I meet with the key BI stakeholders for one my clients.  In those meetings we discuss current issues, questions and concerns within the BI team.  We also explore any new issues that someone has discovered and talk about new […]

8 Principles That Can Make You an Analytics Rock Star

Bernard Wehbe, Managing Partner and Co-Founder of StatSlice Systems, was published on Feburary 6, 2013, in The Data Warehousing Institute’s (TDWI) BI This Week newsletter. The article gives you some guiding principles to make you an analytics rock star in your company.

What’s Your Favorite Analytics Term?

I was not expecting the big response I recently when I posted a question to about a dozen LinkedIn Groups that span the analytics/business intelligence market. I was looking for a “branding idea” to describe analytics where near instantaneous visibility of meaningful analytic data and key metrics could be broadcast to a wide audience of corporate users, including web-based intranet views and to mobile devices.

Name That Analytics!

What happens when executives want to actually increase key metric visibility in the form of having monitors all throughout an organization where targeted employees (maybe even all employees) can see what’s happening in the company, right now? What kind of analytics is that?

Big Data in the Enterprise

When evaluating Big Data applications in enterprise computing, one often-asked question is how does Big Data compare to the Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW)? What does Big Data bring to the organization that the EDW cannot handle?

This article by Fred Zimmerman presents a technical and business discussion on the Big Data question. The technical discussion assumes familiarity with data architecture. The business discussion draws some conclusions about the actual application of Big Data in the enterprise.

Data Analytics Will Fail If Execs Ignore the Numbers

Articles that talk about an executive’s use of analytics always grab my attention. Being in the consulting business, we have seen the good, the bad and the ugly. This articles talks about how execs should really use analytics…

Data Analytics Rising as Top Priority for Tech Hiring, Dice Reports

We have been doing some writing lately about the talent pool shortage in the BI and Analytics space and will be widely publishing a white paper on the topic in late January 2013. Based on our research, it is clear there is a talent shortage…