CIO-Reinvented Blog - By Prashanth Rai

The booming BI / CPM Market–Gartner , What about the other side of the equation?

Today Gartner released a report discussing the BI /CPM market, key takeaways from the report are:

• Worldwide business intelligence (BI) platform, analytic applications and performance management (PM) software revenue reached $10.5 billion in 2010
• Growth of 13.4 percent increase from 2009 revenue,
• BI spending has far surpassed IT budget growth overall for several years, and it is clear that BI continues to be a technology at the center of information-driven initiatives in organizations. Vendors aggressively market their capabilities in this area, so revenue growth is as much a function of vendor push as a demand pull
• The four large "stack" vendors (SAP, Oracle, IBM and Microsoft) continue to consolidate the market, owning 59 percent of the market share. (Chart with the market share break up)
• There is ongoing BI tools consolidation in the IT-department
• Business users care less about who they buy from; they want domain-specific functionality and usability that meet their needs.

So why were/are companies willing to spend on BI / CPM solutions even in these challenging times during which we have seen IT budgets overall frozen or cut? Here are some interesting data/view points:

• Through 2015, organizations integrating high-value, diverse, new information types and sources into a coherent information management infrastructure and use that information to make better decisions will outperform their industry peers financially by more than 20%. – Gartner
• Through 2015, more than 35% of top 5,000 global companies will fail to adapt to significant changes in their business and markets due to underinvestment in their information intelligence infrastructure and analytic competencies – Gartner
• Top performing organizations use analytics 5 times more than lower performers – MIT Sloan Management Review Survey
• Half the respondents said that improvement to information & analytics was a top priority in their organization. And more than 1 in 5 said they were under significant pressure to adopt advanced information and analytics approaches. - MIT Sloan Management Review Survey
• 6 out of 10 said innovating to achieve competitive differentiation as a top business challenge - MIT Sloan Management Review Survey

In the Gartner has highlighted / focused on the booming BI/CPM market based on software/license sales, but I think the important part to focus on is how or whether enterprises/organizations are getting these projects executed successfully. Getting the product / solution bought is only the first or initial part of the battle, getting it implemented right, maintaining & growing it successfully on an ongoing basis, increasing the usage / proliferation of these tools and methods across the organizations are where BI / CPM projects succeed or fail.

As highlighted by this recent report by Geneca on IT project failures – here are some interesting data points to think about:

• Seventy-five percent of respondents believe that their projects are either always or usually doomed right from the start
• Seventy-eight percent of respondents think the business team always or usually lacks alignment on project objectives

Another key data point that highlights the fact that organization's need to do more on the implementation front to make BI / CPM projects successful is:

• Only 27% of organization have adopted or setup business intelligence competency centers in their organizations – Gartner. This is a critical piece of the BI / CPM puzzle for companies to transform themselves into analytic enterprises.

Prashanth Rai

Mobility–The Key Challenge for CIO’s in 2011 - 12

Arriving at the mobility architecture/approach for the organization is going to be a key initiative for CIOs in 2011-2012. It could be an opportunity for a CIO to truly be the Chief Innovation Officer of the enterprise leveraging mobility to innovate his/her business/organization. But its not going to be an easy journey.

This slide from a recent Gartner presentation is a good depiction of the different aspects that CIOs will need to wrap their heads around before arriving at their mobility strategy for the enterprise.

Mobility is fast becoming a key dimension of discussion in any IT project. It has come in from left field in the last year or two and is now becoming an central tenant of most IT projects. A good example of this is Last month was I talking to a customer who had a failed implementation of CRM, and one of the points of failure or lack of usage of the solution they implemented was their poor or non-existent support for mobility.

Some interesting data on this topic from Forrester:

• Mobility is front and center for 62% of CIOs and IT leaders across the globe, with 16% seeing it as a critical priority and 46% seeing it as a high priority.
• Forty-eight percent of organizations interviewed by Forrester across the globe will be spending on mobilizing enterprise applications in 2010. Another 37% show an interest with no plans to implement in 2010.
• Around 75% of organizations deploy mobile applications to increase worker productivity, and 65% to increase employee responsiveness. Forty-eight percent are focused on resolving customer and internal issues faster. Overall improved customer satisfaction is an important driver of mobilizing applications for 42% of firms.
• Thirty-eight percent of companies surveyed are developing their mobile applications in-house, 27% are buying them from an application store, and 25% are having external IT services firms develop custom applications for their mobile requirements. Only 22% are using a mobile extension from an existing packaged application

Mobility in the RIM world was restricted largely to email & calendaring but in the Apple age, everything is mobile. I think the biggest disconnect GEN Y workers are going to have with corporate IT is probably going to be support (or the lack of it) of mobility.

The mobile device has become the primary portal to the electronic world today. And this has become possible by the improved capabilities of smart phones and tablet devices and the growing ecosystem of applications that are created on these platforms."...There is an app for that" has become common vocabulary and all apps aren’t just limited to some trivial functionalities there are a lot of useful capabilities becoming available through these apps that are very relevant and useful to the business user.

“What is mobility” – That seems to be a moving target too. Until 2010, it was only smart phones, now we are talking tablets, who knows what’s next?

The proliferation of smart phones and tablets has been phenomenal. A good indicator for this is that Apple has managed to sell a significant number of iPad2s in just the first month of release. The rate of their adoption in the enterprises is also on the up. Smartphone usage was always high in the corporate world but limited to middle management and above and was restricted primarily to RIM. But today, the proliferation is near complete across the whole organization and it's heterogeneous in terms of platforms – you have IOS, Android, Windows 7, Web OS etc.

CIOs need to take the challenge head-on and leverage this opportunity to innovate.

Prashanth Rai

Transformative effect of BI/Analytics…

This week has started with an interesting theme “transformative” BI (simply put companies that are using BI / Analytics to transform themselves in every aspect)

Over the weekend I spend sometime reading the report titled Big Data, Analytics and the path from Insights to value. Its report by MIT Sloan review sponsored by IBM, it’s a must read for everybody interested in this space.

The report left me thinking, how many companies are really looking at their BI / Analytics initiative as transformative for their business – Not enough was the obvious answer. And this number is lower when we look at small and medium sized enterprises.

There is a need to create the relevant models to “highlight” / “show” the transformative impact analytics/BI can have on an organizations.This is probably a good initiative for the SAP Value Engineering team to take up like they have done for the ERP or the transaction space, they need to do something similar for the “Analytics” space. This will be very complimentary with the SAP BI4 launch.

Am working with a CIO of SME to evaluate their current “Analytics approach” and arrive at what is the GOTO “Analytical” strategy for the organization. They are taking a tool approach to the problem, will need to work with them to get them to think of it in a broader context and also rope in the right people from the management team to think through how they can leverage BI/Analytics to transform their business – Its going to be a long journey but the results will be worth the effort for sure.

Prashanth Rai