the analytics edge

We’ve seen the cycle before — product life cycles have matured and the products bloat in size, complexity and price until people start to question their value. To those that have grown up with the products, this seems almost blasphemy. How could we question years of product refinement and adaptation? Don’t you remember all the lessons we learned along the way? There is NO WAY you can live without all those features!

Maybe it’s just us baby boomers getting older and less tolerant of complexity, but I am finding more and more telltales of a groundswell in search of simplicity. Being part of a software startup, we are constantly looking for new and innovative approaches (our potential competition), and I have been really surprised — there isn’t a lot of innovation in the Business Intelligence space, and it seems no one wants to simplify the status quo model of SQL databases and OLAP cubes feeding Excel spreadsheets.

First of all, Excel now sports even more features and can handle even bigger spreadsheets than ever before. That sounds great until you read about how many spreadsheets have errors and what the costs are. Then there are the increasingly scarce BI skills needed to build all the queries to feed all those spreadsheets.

Things like that make me believe we’re on to something with nextanalytics. Simple analytics, not complicated statistical analysis. A powerful script language that works on pages of data, instead of complex query statements, tedious cube construction, or a nightmare of formulas copied over thousands of cells. And it’s soooooo easy to build reports that would be a major challenge with all those other tools, and with a lot less to learn and a lot less to do. An order of magnitude faster to accomplish the task - and we’re not talking about compute speed; far less to learn, less to do, and much easier to reuse previous work.

And the whole thing is available to developers for free in a 300k download (on request), production servers get licensed for under $600. Why wouldn’t you consider it?

I read an article in DM Review today that included the question “So why are CIOs spending so much time and energy on BI?“.  It seemed like a strange question to be asking.  The article was discussing the trends in BI towards a new generation of performance management, but the question made me stop. It seemed like such a silly question.

Why do CIOs spend time and energy on BI? 

Isn’t that their job?

A looong time ago, I wrote up a one line description of what I wanted to do with my career. This was around the time “CIO” was a new idea in only very large organizations. Coming from an engineering background, I enjoyed technology. I also valued efficiency and effectiveness. I carved out a place for myself when I termed my career objective at the time to champion ‘improvements in business effectiveness and success through innovative use of computer technology.’ I found myself in I.T. because that was where it made sense for me to be.  I defined the role of the group based on my personal objectives.

To this day, I still see the I.T. organization as a middleman between the possibilities available with technology, and the challenges of the business. It is our job to continuously scan the technology landscape help the organization take advantage of opportunities where the business can gain a competitive advantage (or at least to cost-effectively not fall behind).

So why spend time and energy on BI? Because information is the lifeblood of any organization, and computer technology today offers so many possibilities for improvements. So many, in fact, that organizations hire specialists to manage it. They put those specialists in the Information Technology group, and the CIO heads up that group.

So the CIO should spend a lot of time and energy on BI. It’s their job.