Archive for the ‘Business Insights’ Category
50% of Netezza Sales to come from IBM Channel Partners – What’s it to you?
There’s talk in the market about what it means to have 50% of Netezza Sales come directly from IBM Channel Partners. Thought you may be interested in Clear Peak’s brief synopsis of what this could mean for existing customers or those considering Netezza.
Positives:
- IBM dollars behind training and marketing.
- More financing options for mid-market companies.
Bottom Line:
Likely to be some time before solution providers are really familiar with how Netezza integrates with other BI technologies, best use cases, technology limitations and how to create the most optimal overall BI/DW architecture.
Considering the mandates to keep data around for 10 years, companies need to look at how to get more value out of their existing data assets by tweaking their processes. IBM’s not likely to train solution providers on how to make the data actionable, and ultimately, create smart predictions.
Reference:
http://channelnomics.com/2011/08/24/ibm-brings-business-analytics-partners/
http://www.itchannelplanet.com/channel/article.php/3938951/IBM-Revs-Up-Netezza-Channel-Support.htm
Making Marketing Sense of All Those Systems and All That Technology: Some Compelling Success Stories
Clear Peak’s very own William Tara, will be speaking at the Casino Marketing Conference on Wednesday, July 20th from 2:30pm – 3:30pm about “Making Marketing Sense of All Those Systems and All That Technology: Some Compelling Success Stories.”
Casino marketers have more information on their gaming customers than ever before, as well as numerous systems and tools to leverage that information for improved performance and competitive advantage. Now it’s time to ask where savvy casinos are seeing their return on investment of all this business intelligence and in what strategic circumstances they are using it to drive gaming revenue, better serve customers, and deepen relationships with those sometimes finicky VIPs. This session will feature situational case studies of “best practices,” where intelligence was used intelligently and systems used systematically, to achieve measureable, inarguable casino marketing success.
Moderator: Charles Anderer, BNP Media Gaming Group
Panelists: Maryellen Muir, Manager Systems Consulting Team, BallyTechnologies; Phil O’Toole, Senior Product Manager, Konami Gaming, Inc.; William Tara, Managing Partner, Clear Peak LLC (official Partner of IGT); Aristocrat Technologies Speaker TBA
Getting IT out of the report writing business
The creation and maintenance of Analytical Reporting has long been the bane of IT and with good reason. Reporting is necessarily reactive to the business, end users are often unsure of what they really need (or currently have for that matter) and increasing data complexity makes it time and labor intensive. This makes reporting nearly impossible to forecast from a budget or resource perspective.
In the last few years, both existing and new reporting/analytic tools have become much more user friendly. True user self-service is now a reality across the spectrum of price points. At the high end of the spectrum MicroStrategy, Business Objects and Cognos are still getting stronger, especially on their analytics capabilities. What is truly remarkable are the features found in what might be labeled midmarket products. Tableau, Qlikview, Pentaho Enterprise and Jaspersoft Enterprise all over very strong user self service at entry-level price points. While each has its strengths, all are potentially viable tools for the large enterprise.
Leading the horse to water
In our experience, most business organizations respond positively to the self-service concept. Sticking points with the business usually involve either the budget or availability of the expertise necessary to take on self-service. The sticking point with IT is building a consistent and reliable infrastructure foundation for self-service.
Data governance is key to making self-service a reality. By data governance we simple mean data accuracy and integrity. While each business has a unique set of issues, users need to be notified if upstream processes have failed. Another crucial aspect of governance is data quality. It is difficult and prohibitively expensive to fix upstream data quality processes in the analytics layer. Data quality needs to be addressed where the quality problem is created. As data is added the business and IT need to revisit the environment to ensure quality is maintained.
User self-service can go too far
The goal of self-service is to balance cost, efficiency and responsiveness of analytical reporting to a business. It is possible to go too far, These new analytic tools also have ETL functionality and the ability to proliferate data cubes, thus creating data warehouses on top of data warehouses. This approach ultimately “complexifies” the analytic environment creating expensive and unresponsive overhead. An on-going data governance process will allow the organization to anticipate and manage increasing data complexity.
Part 3 of 3: Decreasing your total cost of ownership
At the end of March, Rita Sallam from Gartner published the report “BI Platforms User Survey, 2011: Customers Rate Their BI Platform Vendor Cost of Ownership.” A fifteen minute survey was completed by 1,225 BI professionals across the globe, of which 20% didn’t come from a vendor reference list. We thought it would be helpful to interpret the results and include our insights from being on the ground for several implementations.
If you would like to DECREASE your total cost of ownership, the following tidbits of advice will help justify your Business Intelligence investments:
5. Manage process for business ad-hoc reporting requests
Questions about current BI environment: Do your business users deploy their own technology rather than going through the proper IT channels? As a result, do business users create their own metadata, degrading data quality?
Suggestion to manage ad-hoc reporting requests: Create a self-service architecture that allows IT to get out of the report writing business.
6. Accurately measure total cost of ownership at beginning of implementation, and manage expectations.
Suggestion to accurately measure TCO: Look at both hard and soft costs of the initial implementation, support and maintenance. Include number of users, skill level (super user, part time user, etc.), complexity of data, size of data, cost of rolling out, time and effort for new additions, IT reputation and business sanity.
PART 2 of 3: Decreasing your Business Intelligence Total Cost of Ownership
At the end of March, Rita Sallam from Gartner published the report “BI Platforms User Survey, 2011: Customers Rate Their BI Platform Vendor Cost of Ownership.” A fifteen minute survey was completed by 1,225 BI professionals across the globe, of which 20% didn’t come from a vendor reference list. We thought it would be helpful to interpret the results and include our insights from being on the ground for several implementations.
If you would like to DECREASE your total cost of ownership, the following tidbits of advice will help justify your Business Intelligence investments:
3. Optimize capabilities
Questions about current BI environment: Is your company using all capabilities of the technology acquired? Did you match the technology to established business requirements and use cases?
Suggestion to optimize capabilities: Evaluate business use cases and match capabilities/technology accordingly, keeping business invested in value and impact of system to increase adoption.
4. Decrease complexity of Business Intelligence environment
Questions about current BI environment: Did you architect the system in such a way that maximizes technology strengths and mitigate risk, leaving an easy to maintain and scalable architecture? Did you evaluate skill level of in-house and system integration resources? Did you recently evaluate new technologies for potential savings?
Suggestion to decrease complexity: Use strategic partner with “real life” implementation experience for a variety of Business Technologies.
Stay tuned for more information on managing ad-hoc requests and accurately measuring TCO.
PART 1 of 3: Decreasing your Business Intelligence Total Cost of Ownership
At the end of March, Rita Sallam from Gartner published the report “BI Platforms User Survey, 2011: Customers Rate Their BI Platform Vendor Cost of Ownership.” A fifteen minute survey was completed by 1,225 BI professionals across the globe, of which 20% didn’t come from a vendor reference list. We thought it would be helpful to interpret the results and include our insights from being on the ground for several implementations.
If you would like to DECREASE your total cost of ownership, the following tidbits of advice will help justify your Business Intelligence investments:
1. Increase adoption
Questions about current BI environment: Is the platform easy to use? Did you include business goals as a part of your technology selection, architecture roadmap and implementation? Were business users invested in data quality, and therefore, final results?
Suggestion to increase adoption: Create pseudo self-service reporting and analytics by developing a series of 3-5 template visualizations, with drill down capability on only 2-3 data attributes WITH the business. Make SURE your infrastructure has been architected to handle the new expectations.
2. Increase impact and value of decisions made
Questions about current BI environment: What do Business Intelligence applications accomplish at your company? Has it become ingrained into how business users monitor their own performance?
Suggestion to increase impact and value of decisions: Gather the business users to collaborate and gain consensus on definitions for key metric reporting. Identify the first line managers’ key business objectives (how they get paid), and what they need to drill down on.
Stay tuned for more information on optimizing capabilities, decreasing complexity, managing ad-hoc requests and accurately measuring TCO.
Business Intelligence as catalyst for Innovation
We recently had the pleasure of attending the CIOSynergy event at the iconic Millennium Knickerbocker Hotel in downtown Chicago. The Panelists offered insights as to how they spurred innovation at their individual companies. Key points ranged from “Have an expectation of something different every day,” to “Put the right people in the right jobs,” and “Just do something.” Then Howard Putnam (former CEO of Southwest Airlines and Braniff International Airways) provided color to the conversation with illustrative and inspiring stories of Southwest Airlines rise to the top. His leadership through Braniff’s Bankruptcy has been noted by Harvard in a case study rightly called “The Ethics in Bankruptcy.” The key take away for me revolved around starting with the “Why” you are doing something, then figure out the “How” and finally, the “What” because Purpose will create a cause and inspire. The hope here is to inspire Innovation.
Our natural inclination is to arrange the key concepts outlined by our panelists and headlining speaker into categories effecting Business Intelligence. It seems as though these evidentiary pieces of advice may be categorized by Howard’s Why, How and What. The Why is “Innovation.” One may argue Business Intelligence is the How. Aligning the How (or Business Intelligence), with Why (or Innovation), is paramount to success.
We have found People and Process to be the main crux of what differentiates successful Business Intelligence implementations from catastrophic cost centers. Greg Galuska (CIO of DSC Logistics) mentioned honing in on the right organizational and IT skills, while Sajed Khan (CTO of A. Eicoff & Company, division of Ogilvy) talked about boosting IT to a helpful status with the business, making end users happy and ultimately fostering their faith in IT. Kevin Larson (CIO of AAR Corporation) pointed out his airline status as a direct result of really listening to the business and seeing the requirements first-hand.
How are your Business Intelligence initiatives fostering innovation at your company?
For more information on this event: http://www.amiando.com/chicago.html;jsessionid=AF703807A1884C2C2B630885B4137B55.web03?page=477097
The M Resort Spa Casino realizes 94% ROI within 12 months of business intelligence implementation
Many thanks to Scott Rutledge of The M Resort for sharing information on how he was able to accomplish such an expedient return on investment. This case study was presented last week at the IGT Users Conference in Las Vegas. Read about how the solution enables The M Resort to optimize their reinvestment across customer segments resulting in a 360° view of their customer behavior and campaign performance. We welcome comments and feedback on your own experiences or observations regarding business intelligence implementations.
The impact of online gaming, virtual worlds, video technology and player psychology on Las Vegas casino revenues
Clear Peak Distinguished Associate, managing partner at MAPS Capital Management in San Francisco
The economic downturn taught companies across every industry many lessons. For the gaming industry, the downturn was especially difficult, yet, conditions have illuminated a path for improved profitability.
In 2008, Sherman Bradley, Online Casino Advisory’s senior gambling analyst, advanced the idea that diversification in Las Vegas is as responsible for the city’s lost revenues as the national economic conditions. By choosing gambling as just one of many income streams, casino operators lost the recession-proof quality the resorts had enjoyed.
