Abbreviations Used in Business Intelligence

ADS – automated decision systems

ADW - active data warehousing

ANN – artificial neural network

BA – business analytics

BAM – business activity management

BI - business intelligence

BICC – BI Competency Center

BPM – business performance management

BSC - balanced scorecard

CPM – corporate performance management

CRISP-DM - cross-industry standard process for data mining

CSF – critical success factor

DBMS - database management system

DMAIC - define, measure, analyze, improve, control

DSS – decision support system

DW – data warehouse

DWA - data warehouse administrator

EAI - enterprise application integration

EDW – enterprise data warehouse

EII - enterprise information integration

EIS – executive information systems

EPM - enterprise performance management

ETL – extract/transfer/load

GIS – geographical information systems

GUI - graphical user interface

HITS - hyperlink-induced topic search

HOLAP - hybrid OLAP

IPA - intelligent process automation

KDD - knowledge discovery in databases

KMS - knowledge management systems

KPI – key performance indicators

MIS – management information systems

MLP - multi-layered perception

MOLAP- multidimensional OLAP

NLP - natural language processing

ODS - operational data store

OLAP – online analytical processing

OLTP – online transaction processing

PDA – personal digital assistant

PLM - product life cycle management

RDW - real-time data warehousing

ROLAP - Relational OLAP

RDBMS -  relational database management system

SEM - strategic enterprise management

SEMMA - sample, explore, modify, model, assess

SOA - service-oriented integration

SCM – supply chain management

SVD - singular value decomposition

SVM - support vector machines

TDM - term-document matrix

TUN – Teradata University Network (teradatauniversitynetwork.com)



Supporting sites:

teradatauniversitynetwork.com

pearsonhighered.com/turban

information-management.com

tdwi.org – the Data Warehousing institute

olapreport.com

dssresources.com

businessintelligent.ittoolbox.com

b-eye-network.com

aisnet.org
enterprise.waltoncollege.uark.edu/mec.asp

hbsp.harvard.edu/b01/en/academic/edu_home.jhtml

bpir.com

idea-group.com

knowledgestorm.com

cioinsight.com

technologyevaluation.com

baselinemag.com

2012 - The Year of the Big Data

According to the Wall Street Journal columnist DENNIS K. BERMAN, analytics harvesting from massive databases will begin to inform our day-to-day business decisions. He calls it Big Data, analytics, or decision science. Over time, this will significantly change our world. Computer performance power grows so fast, that "systems can now chew through billions of bits of data, analyze them via self-learning algorithms, and package the insights for immediate use." Analytics and self-learning algorithms will be a game changers. An example of the trend is the fact that Hewlett-Packard recently bought Autonomy which has a technical solutions to clean unstructured data and to apply analytics to that big data. It also helps organizations to derive meaning and value from their information. A collection of computer technologies that work with the Big Data are collectively known as Business Intelligence (BI), and also referred to as business analytics.


The importance of analytics is that it help us reduce human biases from our decision-making. Using BI will help us eliminate our worst human tendencies. The key point is to have analytics in a real time. Such information is a must for all types of decisions, for strategic planning and forecasting, and even for survival. Now business cycles become shorter and compressed; that is why faster, more informed, better decision making is a competitive imperative. Organizations have to work smart. A championship of BI become a smart choice for more and more companies.


Examples of how Opera or Mu Sigma helps their customers improve decision making and as a result increase revenue attract venture companies. Investing money in BI becomes very actual due to the fact that there is a whole class of things that couldn't be done five years ago.



Resources: DENNIS K. BERMAN http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203462304577138961342097348.html

Organizational Perspective - from good to great.

Does every company has a strategic plan? Is this plan communicated to all level of organization and used for creating operational plans in every department? Are operational plans in every department even exist? A good example would be a marketing department.  If such a plan exist, is it aligned with the organizational strategic plan? Continuing as example with the marketing department, are all activities in the department, and project portfolio are driven by this plan? These are questions that any growing organization starts to ask at some point during its growth.

According to the Organizational Project Management Maturity Model (OPM3), an organizational strategy can turn a good organization into a great one. And of course strategies that fail, or luck of strategy can quickly damage the organization's reputation and brand, internally and externally. "Effective strategy execution is the responsibility of all level of management, who must be involved actively and consistently to orchestrate required organizational changes and to manage the portfolio of investments that underpin these change initiatives."

An organization should have a governance mechanism that force the linkage between strategy and project portfolio. The right governance in project portfolio management provides decision-making transparency and increases likelihood of realizing desired return on investment.

 OPM3 contains the Best Practices designed to help organization to achieve that.

The OPM3 framework contains three interrelated components: Best Practices, Capabilities, and Outcomes.

Best Practices include:

• SMCI Best Practices - Standardize, Measure, Control and continuously Improve
• Organizational Enabler Best Practices - structural, cultural, technological, and human resources.

A Capability is a specific competence that must exist in the organization to be able to execute project management processes. Development of Capabilities leads to Best Practices. These capabilities determine the organizational maturity.

An Outcome is a tangible or intangible result of applying a capability.

OPM3 maturity assessment can help organization to see which Best Practices, Capabilities, and Outcomes an organization has and reveal about the organization's maturity level.  Based on the assessment an organization can create an improvement plan.


Resource: PMI, Organizational Project Management Maturity Model (OPM3), Knowledge Foundation.

IT risks present in Corporate America today

Corporate America has a wide range of IT risks today because most of business models have a dependency on IT. Depends on two strategic dimensions of how much the company relies on cost-effective, uninterrupted, secure, smoothly operating technology systems (referred as "defensive" IT), and how much the company relies on the IT for its competitive edge through systems that provide new value-added services and products or high responsiveness to customers ("offensive" IT), and also on the role of IT, and IT governance in the company, following risk factors can be identified.


• Proper security of IT networks within and outside the company.

• Service outage because of the power failure or natural disaster.

• Inadequate disaster recovery or business continuity measures.

• IT-related surprises coming from lax or ineffective project management. The larger IT projects - the higher the risk.

• Problems with IT-related activities outsourced to 3rd party vendors.

• Legacy systems can present surprises of incompatibility with newer systems or the way of the processing the information.

• Legal problems can arise around the intellectual property issues related to IT.

• Missing the fresh threads and opportunity of using leading-edge technology applications that competitors switch to.

• Risk that IT investments don't create a business value for the organization.

• Aligning of IT assets with the concurrent needs of multiple regulations. Example: data retention, information protection.

• Insufficient number of IT staff.

• IT staff with inadequate skills.

• Lack of agility/development problems.

• Problems with document content and knowledge management.

• Electronic archiving or storage problems.

• Privacy incidents.

• IT infrastructure is inadequate to meet the current and future needs of business in a cost-effective and timely manner.

The Global business faces probably the majority of all possible IT risks. Establishing the adequate IT governance can help to mitigate or eliminate most of risks.

Resource:

Applegate, L.M., Austin, R.D., Soule, D.L. (2009). Corporate information strategy and management: McGraw-Hill.

IT Impact on Organizations

Many organizations are struggling to understand the reality of an economic transition from the industrial economy to a global network economy. In this new reality organizations must become much more agile, innovative, and entrepreneurial and not loosing the efficiency, power, and reach. Choosing the right business model become very challenging. How to build the capabilities that would align the organization with the environment and the chosen strategy to quickly and effectively respond to opportunities and threads. Most executives confront problems that they do not wish to sacrifice efficiency for speed; neither can they abandon authority and control as they empower others. It can be characterized by wish: "we want to be global and local, big and small, and radically decentralized with centralized reporting and control."

Many researches suggests that IT was seen as a key enabler of controlling operations while also providing real-time information analytical tools. In 1950s and 1960s some of the hybrid organizational solution model, matrix,emerged. Companies that adopted these approach had the same drive as we have now days: need to be adoptive, information-intensive, team-based, collaborative, and empowered.  But companies that adopted the hybrid design of the 1960s through 1980s soon learned that the new structures and systems bred conflict, confusion, information overload, and costly duplication of resources. Over past decades, strategic thinking has outdistances organizational capabilities. One of the "lessons learned" why matrix organizations didn't succeed in the past was understating about organization's inability to provide and manage timely information. All pressure of handling complexity was put on managers directly. They would have dazzling array of conflicting information. 
Only the now days IT can provide the capabilities of meeting the information challenge and making the matrix organizational structure successful.
Some other important "lessons learned" from the past:

• Speed counts, but not at the expense of control.The faster the pace, the greater the need to monitor business operations and clearly define and enforce the rules of the road.
• Empowerment is not anarchy. The isolated efforts to empower employees can lead to disaster when not accompanied by more comprehensive redefinition of authority and control through organization.
• Transforming an organization requires more than just changing the structure.

For the success there should be a comprehensive approach to organization design that includes analysis and realignment of capabilities within four key areas of business model design: processes and infrastructure, people and partners, organization and culture, and leadership and governance. Improved access to information and high-capacity networked communication systems are core elements of redesign in all four areas.

Resource: Applegate, L. Corporate Information Strategy and Management. 2009.

Lean Six Sigma: a foundation for innovation

Lean approaches focus on reducing cost through process optimization. Six Sigma is about meeting customer requirements and stakeholder expectations, and improving quality by measuring and eliminating defects.

However, Lean Six Sigma’s goal is growth, not just cost-cutting. Its aim is effectiveness, not just efficiency. In this way, a Lean Six Sigma approach drives organizations not just to do things better but to do better things.
Here are several questions:

• Do you have a clear vision of where you want your company to be in two years? In
five years? In ten years?
• How closely tied is this vision to the needs of your current and target customers? And is your understanding of these needs based on actual assessments or assumed information?
• Will this vision require innovations in your business model? In your products or services? In your markets?
• What will you need to do at the operational level to enable and drive these innovations?
• To support innovation, what changes will be required to your management approach, organizational structures, metrics and skills?
• How are you making innovation happen more systematically? Are you establishing
the right environment?

Resources: http://www-935.ibm.com/services/at/bcs/pdf/br-stragchan-driving-inno.pdf

Project Management: Implementation and Best Practices at Sitecore.net - Dreamcore Europe 2011, London

I made a presentation at Sitecore developer's and customer's conference "Dreamcore Europe 2011" in June 2011, in London, about project management experience on sitecore.net. Link to the presentation video