Rethinking Hosted Blogs

After the Blogger outage that ended earlier today caused my most recent updates to the look and feel of the blog to be lost, I have to say I'm giving second thought to this whole hosted blog thing. Just a few days ago I was reading about Wordpress.com getting hacked and thinking "there but for the grace of God go I." Apparently, I spoke too soon.

A Quick Look At Microsoft Office 365 Beta

The following article was removed from the blog during the Blogger outage. I'm reposting it for the benefit of those who missed it previously.

I had the opportunity to sign up for the Microsoft Office 365 beta program over the weekend. This is "Office-in-the-cloud" with SharePoint thrown in for good measure. I was curious to see if Office 365 had anything to offer from a business intelligence standpoint, so I put it to the test. Warning: you may find this a little geekier than the business-professional-oriented content I normally post on this site.

Blog Updates

If you've been here before you'll note a change in the title. Having finished my "primer" posts I decided it was time to drop "primer" from the blog title. I plan to shift the focus of the blog toward small to medium businesses (SMB) and to post a bit more.than I have recently. I'll still try as much as possible to "take the mystery out" of the subject matter. Also, I intend to seek out opportunities to monetize the blog in a way that is consistent with the content and, hopefully, useful to you (no pizza ads if I can help it). Finally, I'm working on compiling the "primer" posts into an eBook which I'll make available for download. Stay tuned.

Business Intelligence Still A Problem For Small And Medium Firms

An InformationWeek article released earlier today (US EDT) highlighted the struggles that small and medium size businesses still face in attempting to implement business intelligence (BI). The article, which quoted a survey by BI vendor LogiXML, noted that nearly half of all non-technical users polled were dissatisfied with their BI implementations. The main hurdles are cost and lack of IT staff, cited by 27 and 26 percent of respondents respectively. The 575 respondent firms polled by LogiXML were predominantly small and medium in size.

An Idea Whose Time Has Come (Again)

A press release issued earlier this morning (US EDT) by Star Analytics touts the company's offering. Star Command Center 3.0. Star Command Center isn't really a business intelligence (BI) software package itself. Rather, it sits on top of other vendors' BI platforms, providing a single interface to all your enterprise's BI applications. (Enterprise? Star Command? Hmm . . .)

The Evolution of Enterprise Architecture

Gartner has issued a new press release summarizing its analysis of trends in enterprise architecture (EA). Until recently EA has been strictly an information technology (IT) function that was narrowly focused on the data and technology components of the business organization. According to Gartner, however, EA is becoming a collaborative effort between IT and the business. They project nearly a third of all such effort will be collaborative by 2016, up from 9% currently.

Business intelligence can only benefit from this shift. As EA moves from a data-centric focus to a business and strategic focus, we should expect business intelligence efforts to yield greater value since they'll flow from a more sharply focused strategic vision of the business. Sharpening the strategic focus will be critical as information inputs from social networking channels both inside and outside the business multiply. Failure to do so will increase the risk of decision makers being overwhelmed by information noise.

Especially in larger and more forward-thinking organizations business intelligence and analytics are becoming less a matter of gathering data to make narrowly focused decisions and more about seeing meaning and context to enable long-term strategic planning and contingency analysis. Viewed in this context, I think the emerging trend in EA is a natural evolutionary step forward for business intelligence and analytics.

Mobile Business Intelligence: A Consumer Electronics Perspective

In January 2011 I presented a couple of articles on mobile business intelligence. In my assessment of strategic considerations for mobile BI I noted that, given the ways in which we consume data, tablet devices should provide a better user experience than smartphones for almost all BI-related functions.

This morning I read an analysis of consumer trends in mobile devices that reinforces my assessment. The article, written by mobile industry consultant Eric Chan, makes a compelling argument that data-intensive, cost-pressured consumers will increasingly choose a tablet-feature phone combination over a tablet-smartphone combination. In Mr. Chan's words:

Consumers use smartphones primarily for media and data capabilities, not calling features. That means they're not really 'telephones,' per se; to the average person, they are portable media devices. So why stick with a three-inch screen when you can have one three times larger? And if you do buy a tablet, why continue with a smartphone? At current prices of $200 to $400, the smartphone is too expensive to win the battle against tablets at a mass-consumer level.

There are problems with this analysis. As commentators on the article rightly note, there is a convenience factor associated with the smartphone's combination of small size and functionality that feature phones cannot yet match. But I see two things that mitigate this. First, feature phones are likely to get smarter over time. Second, as smartphones become larger to compete with the superior screen size of tablets (which, as Mr. Chan noted, is already happening), they will squeeze the very pocket space that gives them their current competitive advantage.

All of this reinforces my belief that, for most BI-related knowledge work, the tablet will be the mobile app client of choice.