Gartner BI Magic Quadrant 2011 – Keeping with the Tradition

Gartner Magic Quadrant 2011

I have posted the Gartner Business Intelligence ‘BI’ Magic Quadrant (in addition to the ETL quadrant) for the last several years.  To say that I missed the boat on this year’s quadrant is a bit extreme folks, though for my delay, I am sorry. I did not realize there were readers who counted on me to post this information each year.  I am a few months behind the curve on getting this to you, dear readers.  But, what that said, it is better late, than never, right?

Oh, and who is really ‘clocking’ me anyway, other than myself? But that is a whole other issue for another post, some other day.

As an aside, am excited to say that my latest websites http://www.biplaybook.com is finally published. Essentially, I decided that the next step after Measuring BI data, Making the Measurements Meaningful, and Modifying Meaningful Data into Metrics was to address the age old question of ‘So What’? Or ‘What Do I Do About it’?

BI PlayBook offers readers real-world scenarios that I have solved using BI or data visualizations of sorts, but with the added bonus, of how to tie it back into the original business process you were reporting on or trying to help with BI, or tie back into the customer services/satisfaction process. This latter one is quite meaningful to me, because so often, we find our voices go unheard, especially when we complain to large corporations via website feedback, surveys or (gasp) calling into their call center(s). Feedback should be directly tied back into the performance being measured whether it is operational, tactical, managerial, marketing, financial, retail , production and so forth. So, why not tie that back into your business intelligence platforms using feedback loops and voice of the customer maps /value stream maps to do so.

Going one step further, having a BI PlayBook allows end users of your BI systems who are signed up and responsible for metrics being visualized and reported out to the company to know what they are expected to do to address a problem with that metric, who they are to communicate both the issue and the resolution to, and what success looks like.

Is it really fair of us, BI practitioners, to build and assign responisble ownership to our leaders of the world, without giving them some guidance (documented of course), on what to do about these new responsibilities? We are certainly the 1st to be critical when a ‘red’ issue shows up on one of our reports/dashboards/visualizations. How cool would it be to look at these red events, see the people responsible getting alerted to said fluctation, and further, seeing said person take appropriate and reasonable steps towards resolution? Well, a playbook offers the roadmap or guidance around this very process.

It truly takes BI to that next level. In fact, two years ago, I presented this very topic at the TDWI Executive Summit in San Diego (Tying Business Processes into your Business Intelligence). The PlayBook is the documented ways and means to achieve this outcome in a real-world situation.