Next Generation Business Analytics Technology Trends

NEXT GENERATIONBUSINESS ANALYTICS TECHNOLOGY TRENDSTECHNOLOGIES AND TECHNIQUESFORBUSINESS INTELLIGENCE & PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENTThis work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/.PresentersMichael BellerAlan Barnett10 years of executive 25 years of retail management management experience leading experience with Steve and major growth and change Barry’s, Levitz Furniture, initiatives asLoehmann’s, Victoria’s Secret COOStores, and Barney’s New YorkCIOMerchandisingEVP of Strategy ManagementPlanning15 years of management Information Technologyconsulting experience helping Frequent speaker industry clients with operations and IT events on systems and strategy, planning, and operational planningexecution© 2009 LIGHTSHIP PARTNERS LLC2Learning Objectives• Understand limitations of current Business Intelligence tools• Discover how next generation tools for Business Analytics can supplement and enhance current BI environments• Identify vendors and characteristics of next generation Business Analytics tools© 2009 LIGHTSHIP PARTNERS LLC3Agenda• Business analytics vs. business intelligenceWhat is Business Analytics?• Challenges for current BA environmentsIT Limitations – Data and Tools!Business Impact• Next generation BA vendors and toolsBusiness trendsTechnology trends© 2009 LIGHTSHIP PARTNERS LLC4BUSINESS ANALYTICS VS. BUSINESS INTELLIGENCEBusiness analytics is more than just traditional business intelligence and reportingBusiness IntelligenceBusiness Analytics• Oriented to standard and consistent • Oriented towards ad-hoc analysis of metrics and analysispast performance• Focused on dashboards and pre-• Focused on interactive and defined reportsinvestigative analysis by end users• Primarily answers predefined • Used to derive new insights and questionsunderstanding• Provides end users indirect raw • Explore the unknown and discover data access through cubes, reports, new patternsand summarized data• Relies on low-level data to provide • Exception based reportingvisibility to unexpected activity© 2009 LIGHTSHIP PARTNERS LLC5BUSINESS ANALYTICS VS. BUSINESS INTELLIGENCEPart of routine daily, monthly, and quarterly processes – not a sporadic or exception based exercise“Peel the onion” – answers to some questions generate more questions – dive deeper and deeper into the dataExplore the unknown, search for new patterns and new findings and new metricsInvestigate exceptions and anomalies, research hypothesesGain broader and deeper insight and understanding into past performanceStay focused on goal to improve business planning and overall business performance© 2009 LIGHTSHIP PARTNERS LLC6BUSINESS ANALYTICS VS. BUSINESS INTELLIGENCEBusiness Analytics provides end users tools and data to explore and develop broader and deeper business insight“there are $8B (yes, billion) of • What is business analytics?internally developed analytic Continuous iterative exploration and investigationapplications with Excel as of past business performance their front end. The BI players treat the output to Excel as a to gain insight and drive business planningfeature” [3]• What impacts and drives business analytics?The quantity and detail of critical business transaction and related datacombined with powerful and flexible data analysis tools • How do you improve business analytics?Use next generation technologies to lower data warehousing and IT infrastructure costs,Store larger amounts of historical data at granular levels of detail, andProvide ad-hoc analysis and data mining without IT development efforts.© 2009 LIGHTSHIP PARTNERS LLC7CHALLENGES FOR CURRENT BA ENVIRONMENTSOrganizations struggle to aggregate sufficient breadth and depth of data for thorough Business Analytics• Level of granularityTransaction data is summarized and aggregated for analysis“80% of • Historical contextcompanies use Technical constraints often lead to three or more less than optimal data retentionbusiness • Consolidated viewintelligence (BI) products” [1]Data warehouses often focus on closely related systems, not enterprise viewsMultiple disparate data silosWebsites and ecommerceSupply chainEnterprise resource planning (ERP)CRMFinancialOther, e.g., weather, competitor, etc.© 2009 LIGHTSHIP PARTNERS LLC8CHALLENGES FOR CURRENT BA ENVIRONMENTSTraditional data analysis and reporting tools are oriented to IT developers and difficult to modify at the speed of business• Complex tier of toolsETL and EAI platformsData warehousesDashboards and reportsAd-hoc analysis• CostlyCapitalEffortComplexity leads to fragile Durationsystems and long lead times • Oriented to ITfor changesCumbersome for end usersPuts IT in the middle© 2009 LIGHTSHIP PARTNERS LLC9CHALLENGES FOR CURRENT BA ENVIRONMENTSCurrent BI environments pose numerous challenges for Business Analytics and impact quality of business planning• Understanding of past performance leads to quality of future planning• End users often develop cursory and summary level insight into business performance which leads “the only way to make a to sub optimal plansdifference with analytics is to take a cross-functional, • BI tools have multiple versions of cross-product, cross-the truthcustomer approach” [5]UncertaintyWasted effort© 2009 LIGHTSHIP PARTNERS LLC10