Andrew White

Gareth Hershel just published a note (Key Issues for Analytic Applications) that warrants careful attention.  Our research on analytics has flourished of late, and finally have warranted its own Key Issues note.  Such notes highlight the main issues that we distill from our interactions with clients, topped up with our own analysis.  Analytics, those things within business processes that guide decision making and decision taking, have been incorporated within business applications research for years (ever since demand planning applications were introduced in the early 1980s), but the focus on how enterprises seek to improve performance management has caused several trends to build momentum.  One is the need to talk about analytics as a horizontal topic across the entire business intelligent and business application landscape.

Performance Management (PM) is not a BI oriented capability or discipline; nor is it something that business applications (BA) do.  PM is a strategy adopted by enterprises to, among other things, align how each stake-holder operates in order to assure maximum value from its efforts.  This may even lead, counter intuitively, to the acceptance of local poor performance if this leads to system wide effectiveness.  As such, analytics that help with decision making sits across BI and BA technology. 

Hopefully you access to this note, it overview some pretty important issues: 

• How will the use of analytics inside business applications change the way decisions are made?
• How will domain-specific analytical initiatives relate to enterprise-wide business processes and BI?
• To what types of vendors should organizations look to meet their analytical requirements?