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

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?

Last week I had the good fortune of attending SAP’s annual Sapphire event in Orlando.  Other than some warm weather, and some pretty exciting thunder storms, there were lots to see and hear at the event.  As usual SAP put on a good “show” with lots of content, customer speakers, and product updates.  Some of the more interesting tidbits of information I found included: 

• SAP Business Suite 7 (released worldwide May 2009) – specifically Product Lifecycle Planning (PLM) was demoed and this showed, I thought quite nicely, the concept of embedding analytics into the business process (and resulting application).  Too many vendors think that “embedding analytics” means a stand alone application for “analytics” which is OK, but not really what users want.  The functionality seemed flexible and could easily be extended to other application domains and processes, such as ERP, CRM, Procurement, and SCM.  I believe that is what SAP will do looking forward
• Sustainability – SAP unveiled/updated the attendees with its own efforts in this important area (how SAP the vendor is monitoring its carbon footprint, and reducing it) as well as how it plans to help its customers/users manage and reduce their own footprints.  The problems in this area are many and can be boiled down to:
  • data (do we have what we need to determine footprint)
  • scope (what and whose footprint are we talking about anyway)
  • legislation/regulation (external, possibly even silly, requirements to report and even do things)
  • business case (trying to relate this effort with the pursuit of profit is complicated as it is)

SAP’s strategy is not to bet on any one approach across these 4 dimensions of complexity.  Instead the vendor has created a nice playground in which its customers, partners, and other interested stakeholders can participate by providing input to SAP.  Using this web site you can all vote as to where you think SAP should focus.  At least we won’t get dinged for chasing SAP now; SAP can blame the lack of, or specific responses from, the community for the decisions (or lack of).  In all seriousness though, SAP is making efforts and this should be looked at positively.  However, I myself would like to know more about the model they use (the scope, data) in order to understand how well SAP understands this problem – and growing opportunity.

• SAP MDM – strategy was updated, expanding their efforts related to governance – a very thorny topic for MDM users (from all vendors).  SAP has several “products” in the MDM arena and it is making efforts to align the product naming conventions that come from, more recently, a more evolved product strategy.  Watch this space for news on this (well, watch our web site at www.gartner.com).
• Hasso Platner, the Chairman of the Supervisory Board, presented for an hour on a new in-memory database design that seems to show promise increased performance over other database designs.  The whole key note for day 2 was spent on explaining to attendees how new and powerful this database design was, over all-comers.  No need to wonder what this was all about.  Guess what’s gonna happen soon…
• SAP demoed their new SAP Business Objects Explorer.  Now this product looks very interesting.  It looked like a flexible data mining-cum-data analysis tool.  It is designed to sit across lots of data stores and provide an English language search capability that automatically aggregates and/or presents data intuitively to users.  Imaging searching for “customers”, “region”, “revenue”, “last 3 years”, “top 3” (or something like that) and the within seconds (speed as a key characteristic) a grid is populated with sales data for the last 3 years sorted by customer and region.  Of course, the tool is bounded by the accuracy and effective integrity of the data and stores (no “single view” results in crappy output).  More interesting, the paradigm (over used word, sure) that the application offers is new; the problem I have is that users do not, yet, think or work this way.  During the demo I thought to myself, “meandering BI” in that the demo implied that business users sat around in front of the screen all day just toying with ways in which to interest with their data.  This was unfair (I figured afterward) in that the demo    Molson Coors has been written about on their use of the product. 

Other than that, the time was spent in various 1-1 meetings with SAP executives and customers.  The event was well received and helpful in building out research positions.

My overall highlight however was the pleasure I had in attending a breakfast session hosted by Backoffice Associates.  These guys are a small vendor that focuses on data migration and data governance in and around the SAP environment.  They seem to play a niche role in helping firms get governance of master data underway in preparation of and In support of the technology that would come from SAP (SAP NetWeaver MDM).  I was on the panel and heard some great stories of large SAP customers that had worked with Backoffice Associates with SAP ERP.  These were customers with complex businesses, often global, with lots of MDM challenges, and that had used Backoffice in association with SAP applications.  Very informative.

Better yet, I had the pleasure of getting my picture taken with Brent Spiner – otherwise known as ‘Data’.  This was not favoritism – he was on the show floor so lots of folks had their picture taken.  Anyway, you all should know who Data is – and if you don’t, you should J.  I could not wipe the smile from my face all day.