A SearchCIO.

com E-book

NEXT-GENERATION

BI
INSIDE:

2
Business and
IT Must Align
on BI Strategy

5
Leveraging
Existing Tools
for Better BAM

9
Five Tips for a
New BI System

14Bringing
STRATEGIES
Business intelligence is critical to
Analytics Back
In-House
many initiatives. Therefore, CIOs need to
pay special attention to changes in the
business. Learn more about the latest BI
systems and how they can help meet the
changing needs of the business.

1 NEXT-GENERATION BI STRATEGIES • SEARCHCIO.COM

 Chapter 1

Business and IT Must

Align on BI Strategy
By Christina Torode

their own BI tool and strategy deci-

CHAPTER 1
Business and IT and the business sions, no connection between BI and
IT Must Align
on BI Strategy units must agree on business processes, and no gover-
nance over BI—or too much.
tools, strategy and “BI grew up departmentally … you
CHAPTER 2
Leveraging processes to achieve have 100 [users] moving independ-
ently. And then again, other organiza-
Existing Tools
for Better BAM business intelligence tions have the problem of centralized
success. BI that creates a bottleneck of users
CHAPTER 3 wanting their business needs met,”
Five Tips for a says John Van Decker, an analyst at
New BI System
Stamford, Conn.-based Gartner.
BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE (BI) remains a Yet despite any departmental, C-
CHAPTER 4 top investment priority for companies level or IT bureaucracy, BI initiatives
Bringing of all sizes, but there are disconnects are moving forward.
Analytics Back
In-House between these investments and the Business intelligence is the one and
business value derived. In fact, only only area Sappi Ltd., a global pulp and
15% to 20% of business users in paper company group based in Johan-
organizations that have a business nesburg, South Africa, is investing in
intelligence strategy are actually using from an IT perspective this year in
BI tools, according to Gartner Inc. North America.
Analysts and attendees at this “We have the tools in place, and we
year’s Gartner Business Intelligence need to prove the value of [BI] now,”
Summit pointed to a host of reasons says Peggy Griffith, area manager of
for this disconnect: a lack of partner- IT regional applications and BI out of
ship between IT and the business side South Portland, Maine.
of the house, users’ comfort with the Her company is consolidating four
tools they already know such as BI tools down to one—and proving the
spreadsheets, a fragmented corporate value of a business intelligence strate-
strategy with business units making gy in areas such as logistics and

2 NEXT-GENERATION BI STRATEGIES • SEARCHCIO.COM

 Chapter 1

inventory. “Too much inventory is an Using a number of BI tools, includ-

extreme expense,” Griffith says. “We ing SAP and Oracle, the IT team at
don’t need extreme real-time [infor- Allstate centralized customer com-
mation], but we need enough data to plaints so any approved user can drill
plan ahead.” down from a dashboard to a com-
Like Sappi, VWR International LLC,
a global laboratory supply and distri-
bution company based in West “We have a lot of data,
Chester, Pa., wants to connect users to
the right tools. “We have a number of
but we need to provide
CHAPTER 1
tools—SQL Server, SAP and so on,” smart data, or the
Business and
IT Must Align
says Erik Kunz, a BI architect at VWR. right data, to make
on BI Strategy “We have a lot of data, but we need to the right decisions.”
provide smart data, or the right data,
to make the right decisions.” —ERIK KUNZ,
BI architect, VWR International LLC
CHAPTER 2 The “right data” needs to be deter-
Leveraging
Existing Tools mined through a collective effort. IT is
for Better BAM “coming around … the business side
needs to come around, too, meet us
CHAPTER 3
halfway to figure out how to get the
Five Tips for a right data to the right people,” he says. plaint, even to the point of the com-
New BI System
Meeting halfway is not always real- plaint verbatim. Previously, the cus-
istic when IT and business users do tomer complaint data was put in a
CHAPTER 4 not see eye to eye, but there is hope database and queried ad hoc.
Bringing for those who start with a BI pilot. “It was a big ‘aha’ for business users
Analytics Back
In-House The obstacle for Allstate Insurance and IT to see how the two can work
Co. is similar to many when it comes together,” Acre says. “The lights went
to a BI strategy: Business users pro- on and now [business users] are ask-
claim they don’t need help, they are ing for new projects to the point that
happy with the analytical tools they’re we need to prioritize.”■
using and don’t want to learn new
ones, says Tim Acre, senior manager Christina Torode is a senior news writer for Search-
of BI at Northbrook, Ill.-based Allstate. CIO.com. Write to her at ctorode@techtarget.com.

BI TOOLS VS. MICROSOFT EXCEL SPREADSHEETS

In this SearchCIO.com podcast, our expert discusses the differences
between BI tools and Excel spreadsheets and how they can be used
together in the enterprise to gather and analyze data.

3 NEXT-GENERATION BI STRATEGIES • SEARCHCIO.COM

 Chapter 2

Leveraging Existing
Tools for Better BAM
By Christina Torode

functionality—which users call busi-

CHAPTER 1
Business and CIOs are using ness activity monitoring (BAM), oper-
IT Must Align
on BI Strategy existing BI and ational business intelligence (BI) and
event-driven software.
monitoring tools Some CIOs and analysts suggest
CHAPTER 2
Leveraging to provide users a range of solutions, including data
streams integrated in Microsoft
Existing Tools
for Better BAM with real-time SharePoint, mobile data integrated
data. with business intelligence portals and
CHAPTER 3 modestly priced monitoring tools.
Five Tips for a Business activity monitoring can
New BI System
analyze large-volume transactions
WITH SO MANY up-and-coming virtual down to the second, or even fractions
CHAPTER 4 desktop technologies available, there’s of a second, but costs from $300,000
Bringing no better time to try them as you re- to $500,000 for software, with an
Analytics Back
In-House centralize desktops during a refresh additional 20% cost for maintenance,
cycle. Are you worried about how says Bill Gassman, a research director
users will react to the possibility of at Stamford, Conn.-based Gartner Inc.
losing their local computers? Do you Plus, the closer you get to real time,
know that you can’t afford to continue the more you have to upgrade your
managing desktops as you have in the infrastructure and change business
past? processes so you can use that data
Analyzing business activity data in effectively.
closer to real time, whether to identify Thus, “Companies often start off a
and reduce cost centers in a given day lot smaller than that, and they can do
or monitor customer response to a some very simple projects with the BI
new marketing campaign, is helping tools they already have,” Gassman
businesses respond to the economic says.
recession. And some CIOs are utiliz- Take Euro Disney SCA, which used
ing existing investments to add this FTP, an existing BusinessObjects por-

5 NEXT-GENERATION BI STRATEGIES • SEARCHCIO.COM

 Chapter 2
tal and scanners placed around the
park to display, in 15-minute intervals,
where visitors were gathering, Gass-
man says. This real-time business
activity monitoring approach, with
BusinessObjects portal views dis-
played in employee workroom areas,
allowed employees to see where they
were most needed. Alerts were also
sent to employee mobile devices
CHAPTER 1
when ride lines became too long.
Business and Such projects have immediate pay-
IT Must Align
on BI Strategy backs in terms of better customer
service, which is why tactical projects
are popular right now, says Colin
CHAPTER 2 White, president and founder of con-
Leveraging
Existing Tools sulting firm BI Research in Ashland,
for Better BAM Ore.
“The biggest growth area for opera-
CHAPTER 3
tional BI is using it for short-term cost-
Five Tips for a benefit projects. People are focused
New BI System
on tactical projects that address spe-
cific business units and performance
CHAPTER 4 cost centers,” he says. Operational BI
Bringing is also used in fraud detection and risk
Analytics Back
In-House analysis.
That was the case at a national
record store, which set up a system
to monitor cashiers because manage-
ment suspected some workers were
giving friends steep discounts,
Gassman says. As cashiers sold mer-
chandise, the transactions from their
point-of-sale (POS) terminals, includ-
ing discount percentages, were col-
lected and aggregated across 12
stores on a SharePoint server for
management to view.
Over time, the store morphed the
practice from fraud detection to real-
6 NEXT-GENERATION BI STRATEGIES • SEARCHCIO.COM
time sales monitoring, integrating the
POS sales data on the SharePoint por-
tal with information from store scan-
ners that counted the number of cus-
tomers coming into the record stores.
Employees could look at a SharePoint
portal in the backroom and see, for
example, that the Boston store had a
60% conversion rate (turning people
walking in the door into paying cus-
tomers); Chicago had a rate of 30%;
and Seattle 60%.
“Employees turned this into a con-
test, and management let employees
experiment with placement of mer-
chandise, putting the top 10 DVDs in
the front versus the back of the store,
for example, and then they would
check data to see how that worked,”
Gassman says. “It turned into an infor-
mation democracy.”
A level information playing field is
also under way at WildBlue Commu-
nications Inc., a satellite broadband
service provider in Greenwood Village,
Colo., with 400,000 subscribers.
CIO Mike Casullo wants to elimi-
nate paper reports and give everyone
in the company access. “We are corre-
lating data in different [display] for-
mats from the bottom up, so the CEO
receives the same data as everyone
else,” Casullo says.
To monitor a range of data, from IT
systems performance to customer
performance, the application develop-
ment team started building monitor-
ing capabilities into its custom appli-
cations. WildBlue also recently
invested in HQ Enterprise, a business
 Chapter 2
service monitoring tool developed by
Hyperic Inc. that monitors Web appli-
cation infrastructures, including oper-
ating systems, virtual machines, appli-
cation servers, Web servers,
databases, messaging servers and
authentication systems.
The Hyperic enterprise edition,
called HQ Enterprise, starts at $300
per production server and $200 for
CHAPTER 1
nonproduction servers and network
Business and devices per year. Volume discounts
IT Must Align
on BI Strategy start at 25 servers and prices include
support, upgrades and new releases,
according to a Hyperic spokeswoman.
CHAPTER 2 “Gathering data is something I live
Leveraging
Existing Tools and breathe every day,” Casullo says.
for Better BAM “If you buy or develop a product for
$50,000, how do you know it’s doing
CHAPTER 3
what it’s supposed to do? The only
Five Tips for a way to do that is with some type of
New BI System
monitoring … and if you can deliver
data first [on the performance of a
CHAPTER 4 product], before the business asks
Bringing for it, you win.”
Analytics Back
In-House
WHERE BAM MEETS BPM
There are other ways to get more
bangs from bucks already spent on
business intelligence and other soft-
ware investments, such as speeding
up the refresh or update cycles of the
data warehouse for closer to real-time
monitoring. CIOs can also tap enter-
prise application integration products
that are already installed, such as
products developed by IBM, Oracle
Corp. and Tibco Software Inc. These
products have analytic capabilities
7 NEXT-GENERATION BI STRATEGIES • SEARCHCIO.COM
within their application integration,
BI and operational software products,
as well as BAM capabilities via
service-oriented, workflow and
business process management (BPM)
functionalities, White says.
The real value from business activity
monitoring comes from combining it
with BPM suites, because monitoring
what’s happening in your business
processes can prevent problems or
detect them early. “BAM is most val-
uable when it is combined with pro-
cesses, and you don’t need a process
orchestration engine to have BAM,”
Gassman says.
Some BPM suite vendors are broad-
ening their offerings to include busi-
ness activity monitoring, Gassman
says. These include IBM, Software AG
and Progress Software Corp., with its
Apama tool for building event-driven
applications.
A growing number of BI application
vendors such as IBM Cognos, SAP
BusinessObjects and Oracle Hyperion,
as well as data warehouse vendor Tera-
data Corp., are developing appliances
for BI applications that include real-
time operations monitoring, White
says. This gives companies a com-
bined hardware and software solution
that is easier to set up and put into
production on low-cost hardware, ver-
sus installing operational BI applica-
tions that require high-performance
hardware and software, White says. ■
Christina Torode is a senior news writer for Search-
CIO.com. Write to her at ctorode@techtarget.com.
 Chapter 3

Five Tips for

A New BI System
By Linda Tucci

should give users new capabilities and

CHAPTER 1
Business and Business intelligence help build an “information-centric”
IT Must Align
on BI Strategy continues to top enterprise.
BI done right is expensive and com-
many CIOs’ agendas. plex. Two analysts who chew on BI
CHAPTER 2
Leveraging But they’ll have to issues for a living offer up five ques-
tions to ask about your current strate-
Existing Tools
for Better BAM look at BI differently gy before you take on a new BI initia-
moving forward. tive.
CHAPTER 3
Five Tips for a
Leading analysts
New BI System
offer five pointers HOW GOOD IS THE DATA?
Unfortunately, data management
CHAPTER 4
for getting it right. strategies, unlike fancy interfaces or
Bringing distributed computing, have gotten
Analytics Back
In-House the short end of the stick for the last
10 years, says Chris Howard, an ana-
NO ONE WOULD call business intelli- lyst at Burton Group Inc. in Midvale,
gence (BI) a new star in the technolo- Utah.
gy lineup like, say, cloud computing. “Data management is complicated
But technical advancements that let because data in most large enterpris-
users build their own reports without es is such a mess. It is easy enough to
the mediation of IT experts, an explo- generate reports, but data without
sion in data and, yes, an economy in effective data management is rarely
recession, have conferred A-list status information in the larger sense,” he
on BI systems. The BI solution of says. “If the intention with BI is to
tomorrow, however, is not made up of drive business decisions, then the
the disparate tools and dysfunctional data exposed by BI must be of high
processes that have torpedoed many integrity.” He says in his view, the
a BI effort in the past. A BI system aim should be to get as much data

9 NEXT-GENERATION BI STRATEGIES • SEARCHCIO.COM

 Chapter 3
exposed to XML as possible and run
XQuery on top of it.
But, he adds, you don’t have to per-
fect data management to start on BI.
“It’s not like you have to eat all the
peas on your plate before you move
to the turkey.”
Poor data quality will lead to poor
decisions, Hostmann agrees. Organi-
zations must establish a process or
CHAPTER 1
set of automated controls to identify
Business and data quality issues in incoming data
IT Must Align
and to block low-quality data from
on BI Strategy
entering the data warehouse. Imple-
ment the process using custom code,
CHAPTER 2 data quality technology, paged data
Leveraging
integration tools or a combination of
Existing Tools
for Better BAM these.
Remember, data quality cannot be
CHAPTER 3
solved by the IT department with a
Five Tips for a tool. Bill Hostmann, an analyst at
New BI System
Stamford, Conn.-based Gartner Inc.,
says business users must be engaged
CHAPTER 4 to determine what is “good enough”
Bringing in terms of data quality. And don’t
Analytics Back
In-House mistake data accuracy for relevance.
That leads to the next big uh-oh.
IS THE DATA TRANSPARENT?
Whipping data into shape means hav-
ing expert data modelers who also
double as “great ambassadors,”
Howard says. “They’re going to spend
most of their time working with the
business guys who understand how
the data is intended to be used.”
You need strong executive leader-
ship to drive the business lines. “The
biggest problem with BI has always
10 NEXT-GENERATION BI STRATEGIES • SEARCHCIO.COM
been getting the business lines to
agree on what can be made common,”
Howard says. Private wealth bankers
“Managers don’t want
other people to look at
their numbers. They talk
about compliance and
governance, valid rea-
sons. But generally they
like the opportunity
to spin the numbers
themselves.”
—BILL HOSTMANN,
Analyst, Gartner Inc.
tend not to want to share with the
company’s retail bankers, for example.
From an infrastructure perspective, it
is important to try to normalize that
relationship.
Hostmann calls the phenomenon
“managers dancing with the num-
bers,” flaw No. 2 on his list of BI mis-
takes.
“Managers don’t want other people
to look at their numbers. They talk
about compliance and governance,
valid reasons. But generally they like
the opportunity to spin the numbers
themselves. They don’t want to have
transparency by a dashboard or score-
card or report. They want to go into
the monthly executive-level meeting
 Chapter 3
with slides and dance their numbers.”
Do your company a favor. Trans-
parency correlates with better busi-
ness performance. It’s up to the busi-
ness to say those monthly review
meetings will be based on the follow-
ing sets of questions and the following
sets of data. Find strong business
sponsors who believe in a fact-based
approach to management and IT peo-
CHAPTER 1
ple who can map agreed-upon metrics
Business and to the data, Hostmann says. Man-
IT Must Align
on BI Strategy agers who don’t agree that is the right
data should get the opportunity to fix
it. “And that is the best way to get to
CHAPTER 2 data quality.”
Leveraging
Existing Tools
for Better BAM
HOW MANY PLATFORMS
CHAPTER 3
DO YOU HAVE?
Five Tips for a Many of the big vendor packages—
New BI System
Oracle Corp. or SAP AG—come with
a BI solution. As a result, “you unwit-
CHAPTER 4 tingly end up with multiple BI solu-
Bringing tions in your infrastructure that don’t
Analytics Back
In-House work well together,” Howard says.
“The issue becomes how do you cre-
ate an uber-BI that gives you a consol-
idated view of all your processes and
transactions.”
Hostmann says enterprises often
mistakenly assume that the best
option is to buy a BI system from their
standard ERP vendor. Indeed, the error
is one of the “nine fatal flaws” Host-
mann and colleagues urged clients to
avoid in their recent research report
on BI. (“The first fatal flaw: believing
there are only nine fatal flaws,” Host-
mann jokes.)
11 NEXT-GENERATION BI STRATEGIES • SEARCHCIO.COM
There is plenty of pressure to go
with the standard vendor. The CFO
who authorized millions of dollars for
ERP may balk at spending more for BI
and corporate performance manage-
ment tools. But “one-stop shopping”
doesn’t necessarily lower the total
cost of ownership, Hostmann says,
or deliver the best fit for your enter-
prise’s needs. Determine which BI
functions are delivered by your enter-
prise application vendor and compare
these functions with those offered by
other BI system vendors.
WHO’S GONNA PAY?
After you’ve shelled out for your BI
software, expect to pay three to five
times that in implementing it. Busi-
ness intelligence is expensive, another
reason for taking full measure of the
political implications tied to this busi-
ness initiative. Implementing BI
involves multiple IT initiatives, as
mentioned, and more than a dozen
business and IT managers. Gartner
strongly recommends that organiza-
tions form a BI “competency center”
that brings together the business user,
analysts, data specialists, executives
and business sponsors to build a coor-
dinated BI program and a set of proj-
ects that deliver on complex work-
flows across a lot of undefined
economics.
“Here’s IT building out this thing.
Is it just peanut-buttered into the IT
costs? Who’s going to pay for these
efforts that are not typically defined
 Chapter 3

on any type of budget,” Hostmann helping companies understand what

says. BI has not been widely accepted they are doing, but also for providing
as the cost of doing business, on par, accurate information to auditors,
say, with the preparation of a depart- Howard says. BI is also related to data
mental-level budget. center consolidation and virtualiza-
Hostmann says the most successful tion, two cost-saving measures that
many companies will continue to pur-
sue next year. And that comes back to
BI has not been the data.
“In order to be effective with that,
widely accepted you again have to have data manage-
CHAPTER 1
Business and as the cost of doing ment to go along with it, and BI is a
IT Must Align
on BI Strategy business, on par, say, good way to inform that effect, to tell
you where redundancies are and study
with the preparation the state of your data,” Howard says.
CHAPTER 2 of a departmental- Hostmann agrees that BI is critical
Leveraging
Existing Tools level budget. to any number of business scenarios
for Better BAM in this recession. “Let’s step back for
a minute. If you look at the business
CHAPTER 3
factors like emerging markets, liquidi-
Five Tips for a ty of capital, risk appetite—all of those
New BI System
organizations he has seen typically things have dramatically changed in
have someone at the CFO level who the last year. That means most com-
CHAPTER 4 decides that answering the dozen or panies’ business models have
Bringing so questions about the operational changed on multiple dimensions, and
Analytics Back
In-House side of the business is as important that means that the information and
as analyzing the financial side of the the rules that they make decisions by
business and signing off on the have changed dramatically since last
money. year,” Hostmann says.
How important is BI? “We even go
as far as to predict that a good 30%
WHY INVEST IN BI NOW? of the Fortune 1,000 are going to miss
If you’re facing budget constraints, it major changes in their markets and
seems likely that your project load will their business because they haven’t
decrease. Use the free time to tidy up made the right investments in their
the infrastructure and harden up your information infrastructure.”
environment to prepare for the upturn, Warning noted. ■
as well as what many believe will be a
more stringent regulatory environ- Linda Tucci is a senior news writer for SearchCIO.
ment. Good BI is critical for not only com. Write to her at ltucci@techtarget.com.

12 NEXT-GENERATION BI STRATEGIES • SEARCHCIO.COM

 Chapter 4

Bringing Analytics
Back In-House
By Linda Tucci

mission statement.
CHAPTER 1
Business and Learn how one Meredith needed a BI solution to
IT Must Align
on BI Strategy firm chose a BI provide marketing and circulation
managers with timely, standardized
solution to bring its and detailed information about their
CHAPTER 2
Leveraging
customer database promotions, says Jose Lora, a BI solu-
tions architect at Des Moines, Iowa-
Existing Tools
for Better BAM and analytics back based Meredith. The existing system
in-house. was made up of multiple heteroge-
CHAPTER 3 neous databases that required inten-
Five Tips for a sive manual work to consolidate. The
New BI System
system was also inflexible and new
WHEN A MIDWEST media company reports required heavy support from
CHAPTER 4 decided to bring its customer data- IT resources. “In fact, there were
Bringing base and all analytics back in-house, analyses that were not possible
Analytics Back
In-House it bought a data warehouse from Tera- because of the long time that it would
data Corp. and launched a search for take the staff just to put them togeth-
a business intelligence (BI) platform. er and because historical data was
The company, Meredith Corp., pub- not available to the users due to the
lishes such well-known magazines as limitations of the existing system,”
Ladies’ Home Journal and Family Circle, Lora says.
as well as books, websites and 24
other magazines; it also owns a dozen
TV stations. The company outsourced CHOOSING A VENDOR
the analytics and reports for its main Which BI vendor to go with, however,
consumer database to Acxiom Corp. invited more debate, says Lora, who is
when it decided its vast data stores part of a 25-member BI team at
needed to be in-house. Its database Meredith. Lora oversees a team of five
includes more than 85 million names, BI architects who focus on BI report-
according to Meredith’s corporate ing. He had to advocate forcefully for

14 NEXT-GENERATION BI STRATEGIES • SEARCHCIO.COM

 Chapter 4
the business intelligence platform
from MicroStrategy Inc.
“It was not the cheapest tool in the
market, and I believe it is still not the
cheapest,” Lora says.
“IT teams throw
a BI tool at their users
CHAPTER 1
and think they’ll be
Business and
happy because that is
IT Must Align
on BI Strategy
what they are clamoring
for. In fact, it’s much
CHAPTER 2
more nuanced than
Leveraging
Existing Tools
for Better BAM that.”
—WAYNE ECKERSON, director of
research, The Data Warehousing Institute
CHAPTER 3
Five Tips for a
New BI System
CHAPTER 4
Bringing MicroStrategy has both a desktop
Analytics Back
In-House and a Web client version. Meredith
uses the Web version for all its users
in an effort to simplify deployment
and management: The zero-footprint
Web client works in all the browsers
the company supports, Lora says.
The company uses the desktop tool
for the more advanced super users.
Only 5% of its users have access to
the desktop tool today.
But two attributes gave the Micro-
Strategy Web-based platform an edge
over BusinessObjects SA and a Soft-
ware as a Service offering from Cog-
nos ULC, Lora says.
15 NEXT-GENERATION BI STRATEGIES • SEARCHCIO.COM
“The Web interface was really user-
friendly. The users liked how powerful
and flexible it was,” he says.
Then there was the technical wow
factor.
“From my side, I really liked the
organic growth of MicroStrategy. It
didn’t feel like a Frankenstein of many
tools put together. I liked how archi-
tecturally sound it was—one single
metadata repository! None of the
other tools had that at that point.”
MicroStrategy, certainly not the
largest of BI vendors, also jibed with
Meredith’s predilection for best-of-
breed tools, Lora says. The company,
for example, recently started using
Kxen Inc. analytics tools to speed up
its development. It uses Hummingbird
for extract, transform and load (ETL).
Kxen might not be the “best-known
tool, but it is the best for what we
need,” Lora says. Likewise, Humming-
bird is the best ETL tool for the com-
pany’s Teradata warehouse, he says.
Meredith bought its MicroStrategy
Business Intelligence Platform back in
2003. Then came the hard part.
NAVIGATING THE PEOPLE PART
“Managing adoption was a big issue
for us,” says Lora, who in addition to
his computer science degree has an
MBA from Iowa State University.
Most of the Meredith users at the
time were accustomed to static PDF-
based reports. “We did not want to
shock them into this brand new, very
dynamic Web interface.”
 Chapter 4
Wayne Eckerson, director of
research at Renton, Wash.-based The
Data Warehousing Institute, says IT
teams that fail to manage user adop-
tion are courting failure.
“IT teams throw a BI tool at their
“Managing adoption
was a big issue for us.
CHAPTER 1
Business and We did not want to
IT Must Align
on BI Strategy shock them into
this brand new,
CHAPTER 2 very dynamic Web
Leveraging
Existing Tools interface.”
for Better BAM
—JOSE LORA,
BI solutions architect, Meredith Corp.
CHAPTER 3
Five Tips for a
New BI System
CHAPTER 4 users and think they’ll be happy
Bringing because that is what they are clamor-
Analytics Back
In-House ing for. In fact, it’s much more
nuanced than that,” Eckerson says.
BI experts must understand how
users absorb information, he says. In
addition, how business users analyze
information today will be different
from what they will need tomorrow,
he says, and it is incumbent on IT to
“build that bridge.”
Lora’s group began with a set of
core, comprehensive reports that
would fulfill the current business
needs, “but they were very basic.”
Most were grid reports, with a few
graphs thrown in. “We tried to mimic
16 NEXT-GENERATION BI STRATEGIES • SEARCHCIO.COM
the PDF view they were used to. That
was to help in the adoption process,
and it really did help, at least in the
first two years.”
Then the BI team realized that most
of its users were running reports then
exporting the data to Excel to do the
“real analysis there, creating pivot
tables and charts.” he says. “We
decided to tap the power we had in-
house.”
Lora’s BI team cultivated “super
users“ in Meredith’s business areas
and trained them to teach others in
the more advanced features of
MicroStrategy. These super users
were typically people who had asked
for more—more complex reports,
additional metrics. “Our approach was
to provide them with the basics so
they could self-serve,” Lora says.
The result? Today, the tool is gener-
ating 4,000 reports, well beyond what
Lora’s band of five BI experts could
have produced. “About 95% of the
reports are created by users.”
TURNING INEXPERIENCED
USERS INTO AVID CONSUMERS
Then, when MicroStrategy came out
with its new Dynamic Enterprise
Dashboards, “they all started asking
for them,” Lora says.
Once again, his group managed user
adoption, starting with familiar-look-
ing graphs, “no complex timeline
charts,” Lora says. “With the initial
dashboard, we said, ‘Here are your
five reports you care about condensed
 Chapter 4

to a single view.’”
IT’s disciplined approach to adop-
tion has turned inexperienced BI users
into avid BI consumers. Now, users are
clamoring for advanced widgets like
the pretty Bubble charts that plot met- Next-Generation BI Strategies
is produced by CIO/IT Strategy Media,
ric values as bubbles of different col- © 2009 by TechTarget.
ors and sizes, relying on the BI group’s
Jacqueline Biscobing
expertise in Flex to make it happen, Managing Editor
Lora says. In fact, enthusiasm for per-
sonalized widgets is so high that Lora Linda Koury
CHAPTER 1
Art Director
Business and has had to impose limits. “Once you
IT Must Align
on BI Strategy put in these very nice widgets, they Christina Torode and Linda Tucci
will ask for more and more. You have Senior News Writers

to manage that, too.” Anne McCrory

CHAPTER 2 Editorial Director
Leveraging
Existing Tools Karen Guglielmo
for Better BAM THE DASHBOARD’S IN THE MAIL Executive Editor
One other nice feature that has really
Rachel Lebeaux
CHAPTER 3
sped adoption, Lora added, comes Associate Editor
Five Tips for a courtesy of MicroStrategy. The
New BI System FOR SALES INQUIRIES
McLean, Va.-based vendor delivers Stephanie Corby
dashboards via email, which is partic- Senior Director of Product Management
CHAPTER 4 ularly useful for an IT group like Lora’s, scorby@techtarget.com
(781) 657-1589
Bringing which is not well known across the
Analytics Back
In-House enterprise. “That is helping us sell our BUSINESS STAFF
story.” Andrew Briney
Senior Vice President and Group Publisher
A word of caution: The dashboard,
which is implemented using Flash Stephanie Corby
Senior Director of Product Management
technology, embeds all the applica-
tions working in Flash plus the data Jillian Coffin
itself, so it could even be used as an Publisher, Sales
archival mechanism, Lora says. “But Kari Lindquist and Theron Shreve
I don’t tell my users that because Product Managers
these dashboards can be large in
Katie Graybeal
size, and that could create another Marketing Manager
problem.” ■
Lee Tetreault
Marketing Programs Associate
Linda Tucci is a senior news writer for SearchCIO.
com. Write to her at ltucci@techtarget.com.

17 NEXT-GENERATION BI STRATEGIES • SEARCHCIO.COM

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18 NEXT-GENERATION BI STRATEGIES • SEARCHCIO.COM