Business Intelligence in the New Year

An entire month has just passed since my last blog on business intelligence software topics. This is my first post of the new year.

Two things have kept me extremely busy: BI Dashboards and BI Conversions. Last year, those BI activities were hot but going into 2011 they seem to have picked up even more. My BI consultants and I have been traveling across the country either building web-based dashboard applications or converting legacy reporting applications to modern BI technology.

An entire month has just passed since my last blog on business intelligence software topics. This is my first post of the new year.

Two things have kept me extremely busy: BI Dashboards and BI Conversions. Last year, those BI activities were hot but going into 2011 they seem to have picked up even more. My BI consultants and I have been traveling across the country either building web-based dashboard applications or converting legacy reporting applications to modern BI technology.

On the conversion side, we are helping companies shed legacy reporting tools and transition to web-based BI. However, I also see firms getting rid of “modern” BI products where the software vendor has failed to keep these clients happy.

Some software vendors seem to believe they are in the catbird seat with existing customers. Once a BI product has been implemented and in use for some time, it is difficult to remove. A false sense of arrogance might encourage a software vendor to engage in less than proper behavior–they do not fear an immediate loss of the account due to the challenge their customer would have replacing the installed BI product.

Our BI Dashboard application development projects have been exciting. Most provide management with enterprise views of operational metrics showing actual performance against budgets or previous activity. However, profit is not the only reason for business intelligence. In addition to commercial organizations, we are also working with healthcare dashboards where patient care and chronic disease management is being measured.

One of my New Year’s resolutions will be to allocate more time to this blog.