At least weekly, I am granted the opportunity to meet and work alongside experienced professionals who serve in a corporate business intelligence (BI) leadership function. When they describe their role upon introduction, there is a common thread to the scope of influence and control which usually intersects one or more of these domains: Read more
Tag Archive for: Business Intelligence
One size does not fit all. Try as they might, there is not a single BI platform that can offer every capability that users require. With organizational complexity increasing, and the growing demand for self-service analytics, it has become commonplace, even recommended, for organizations to maintain multiple BI platforms to meet the needs of people in diverse roles with differing needs across the organization. Read more
You walk down the long hall, and tentatively knock on the side of a cubicle, just loud enough to be heard over the din of keyboard clicking. The occupant of the chair slowly spins around. “Yes?”
“So, um, I was wondering about that report I requested…”
“Yes I remember” comes a flat reply. “We’re still looking into it, I’ll let you know in a week, OK?”
The chair spins back around, keyboard sounds resume. Read more
In the world of data and analytics, technical debt is what happens when organizations make conscious decisions to solve short-term problems, even when they know there could be long-term and potentially negative implications around their actions. It exists in every organization, including yours. Not all technical debt is bad, as long as it is strategically planned and tactically paid off. Read more
In the last few weeks, I’ve spoken with three different clients who are struggling with the issue of end user adoption. Each described a routine set of activities, either completed or in process, that you would expect to see in a thoughtful change management program. Nonetheless, all three customers expressed frustration at the lack of user adoption.
Why is this? Do we need to rethink our traditional process for engaging users as we embark on our data and analytics journey?
In a word, yes. Read more
IT and business leaders share a common goal – to leverage the data available to them in order to make more informed business decisions. The first step to achieving that goal is to create a data & analytics roadmap, a task many companies find daunting. Where do you begin?
“Most organizations are ineffective in communicating data & analytics-related concepts across departments, resulting in suboptimal management and utilization of information.”
– Doug Laney, Gartner Blog Network
CIO and IDG released the 2017 State of the CIO report this week. Their findings are useful not just for the CIO role in general but also for exploring the connection between the CIO and analytics initiatives. Looking at the report through the lens of data and analytics, I had three reactions to the survey results:
- CIOs should consider using analytics to drive business innovation, backing up their transformational and strategic activities with concrete resources.
- CIOs and line of business leaders should consider communicating even more and syncing expectations through data and analytics.
- CIOs should consider investing in a data and analytics roadmap to enable themselves as both business strategists and technicians.
Creating a data and analytics roadmap is an important first step in helping your organization utilize data to achieve growth, understanding, and action. But often we hear from clients that their roadmap isn’t leading them to their desired destination. While many are successful in laying out the technical requirements, identifying the path to business outcomes, and building the right foundation, they still find themselves unable to make sufficient progress towards their goals. Read more
Analytics platform migrations and upgrades are among Ironside’s core competencies. We’ve been doing them since our inception, and we do a lot of them.
Here are four common pitfalls that we’ve seen organizations from a variety of industries suffer from during the process. Read more
As we’ve mentioned before, as of April 2018 there will be limited extended support for Cognos 10.x. Sure, that sounds like a long time from now, but if there’s anything I’ve learned from my time in enterprise IT, it’s that making a change is like turning a battleship. You need to start actively planning for it and plotting your course way ahead of time to ensure everything runs smoothly. Read more
Tag Archive for: Business Intelligence
Ironside helps companies translate business goals and challenges into technology solutions that enable insightful analysis, data-driven decision making and continued success. We help you structure, integrate and augment your data, while transforming your analytic environment and improving governance.