Andrew White

I spent a couple of days in Montreal, Canada, where I had the pleasure of a number of end-user 1-1 meetings.  The weather was bright and sunny on Tuesday, cloudy and overcast on Wednesday morning but sunny later in the afternoon.  It was quite a lot cooler than in Atlanta, though locals said that their summer had come quite late this year.

Among my calls I spent time with a retailer, a manufacturer (apparel), a large industrial engineering group, and a waste products re-processing firm.  There were several common themes – one that I (of course) appreciated a lot; one or two that I did not expect: 

a)     MDM is alive and well, and popping up in many places.  Every firm I spoke with had issues with their accuracy of their master data and were experiences symptoms that harmed their business performance.  Some users had the ability to respond, and were working on an MDM program.  Some users had no ability to launch an MDM program so they were “muddling through”, looking for the proverbial silver bullet.

a)     Process maturity, for any given process, and the ability for a firm to recognize that there is such a thing, helps a lot in terms of improving business performance.  Several firms – different industries – were, are, or will be adopting some idea referred to sales and operations planning (S&OP).  S&OP is, at its root, collaborative business planning and issue resolution.  It is NOT a substitute of “day to day operational dialog between departments”, yet too many firms might allow their S&OP efforts drift in this direction.  Also, for some other firms, S&OP should not be “the” end goal anyway – since they are too complex, or too diverse.  A more mature view might lead to Integrated Business Planning (IBP), an updated and new level of business planning that Gartner defined.

 c)      Green, global warming, and social awareness keeps popping up in many places.  Some firms are innovating by continuously looking at established customer and/or supplier relationships, for new information, product and/or services that can be exchanged between each other in order to create value.  Waste exists everywhere, so some firms strive to look everywhere and anywhere for one firms “waste” that could be turned into value for someone else.  And, it seems, there is a lot of it (waste) about – so lots of opportunity.

Gareth Herschel, lead analyst research how analytics are used (or will be, or should be) within business applications, just published the Gartner Hype Cycle for Analytic Applications, 2009.  Analytic applications are a new type of business application – they are not traditional transactional applications; nor are they built on traditional business intelligence tools – though either could be used to build such an application.  However, what we see most of today are specifically developed applications that embed some process model with embedded analytics.  The process model might be weak, or limited, or extensive and detailed, but what is common is the embedded nature of the analytic needed to help the user make the decision that is modeled. 

There are no “business analytic frameworks” or “re-usable analytic registries”, though in time they may emerge – witness to the acquisition of BI vendors by large application vendors.  However, the value users can get from today’s specific analytical applications can be considerable.  A quick look at the Hype Cycle will highlight one or two areas that should prove interesting and valuable to everyone.

Submit a customer case study to win the Gartner MDM Excellence Award 2009!  Go here: http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=851612&tab=special&params=pg,zzz.html