White Noise

Imagine: a buyers' guide designed to help meet user requirements, not compare bells and whistles

According to The New York Times (Aug. 21, 2001), radio astronomy is under serious threat because the noise generated by telecommunications systems is drowning out the cosmic emissions to which researchers are permanently attuned. Scientific progress is literally slowing down under the weight of aural distraction.

IT departments face a similar challenge. To be succinct, "white noise" might be fine for soothing babies, but it does nothing to help IT executives make important product selection decisions: Marketing-generated hype is making product analysis even more difficult than it needs to be. This challenge is even more complex when business intelligence (BI) products are involved, because technology and business issues are densely intertwined.

Here's the problem: Many IT executives are so distracted by meaningless feature-by-feature comparisons, which are often encouraged by vendors, that they fail to see the forest for the trees - the product's ability to meet business goals and achieve acceptable ROI. Gartner Group recently identified a similar situation in another market when it reported that between 1998 and 2000, $1 billion was wasted on high-end Java application servers, which are clearly overkill for most Web sites.

Furthermore, terminology and nomenclature are constantly shifting - Oracle and Microsoft are notably prolific in that regard - so these comparisons are not only meaningless in principle, but meaningless in practice. (Don't get me started about benchmarking, in which vendors can literally achieve the results they want by manipulating the ground rules.) The result? Purchases that disappoint business decision makers and waste money.

The Greater Guide

In this issue, we hope to dispel much of the white noise that is drowning out useful, purposeful BI product assessment and selection in many organizations. Spearheading this effort is contributing editor and BI expert Mark Smith, who has crafted a unique guide to evaluating BI products that we believe is the first of its kind published to a large audience ("Strategic Assessment Guide for BI Products").

The guide is based on a methodology developed by Smith called DecisionCycle, which, as he describes it, is designed to help you define goal-driven user requirements and then map those requirements to product capabilities. Armed with that information - in essence, a shopping list of software capabilities that will support your specific business goals - you will be prepared to evaluate the market with much less risk of making imprecise comparisons, and with your business goals accounted for from the outset. Imagine that: a buyers' guide built on the premise of helping decision makers do their jobs, not on comparing bells and whistles.

The guide also classifies scores of BI tools and applications into categories formulated on the basis of capabilities, not vendor-defined marketing segments or positioning. (A complete product grid is available.) In the future, we intend to not only maintain this guide as a living document but expand it to include the "buy" side of the market as well.

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Timing is Everything

Colin White's "Analytics on Demand: The Zero Latency Enterprise" is a superb complement to this momentous buyers' guide. In this story, the author defines the architectural underpinnings of what he calls the "intelligent business": an organization that derives significant competitive advantage from realtime closed-loop BI systems. (This concept is not academic; Target Corp. is in the process of deploying such an architecture, and Amazon.com has exhibited some of the hallmarks of an intelligent business for some time.) Furthermore, White explains why these systems will soon achieve the pinnacle of influence in IT.

If you're trying to build a so-called intelligent business, I'd be very interested in hearing about the challenges involved (off the record, of course). Reach me at jkestelyn@cmp.com.