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Jason Stamper's Blog: December 2007 Archives
Looking back on 2007, and towards 2008
December 24, 2007
So 2007 will be remembered for BI consolidation: Cognos buying Applix, Oracle buying Hyperion, SAP buying Business Objects and IBM buying Cognos. That and the iPhone hype, of course.
What will 2008 have in store for enterprise IT?
And another thing... lessons on the Underground
December 18, 2007
While I’m on the subject of dubious grammar, allow me to introduce Exhibit B: a billboard on the London Underground that shouted in huge letters: “Improved Signals Means Less Delays”.
I am glad that London Underground is improving its signals. I am even glad that they utilize otherwise-lucrative billboard space in order to tell us so: after all, you have to be seen to be improving, rather than just improving.
But I am less heartened by the fact that the massive message contained not one, but two glaring grammatical errors. Firstly, it should have been “improved signals mean”, not “improved signals means”.
Also, it should have read, “mean fewer delays”, not “mean less delays”.
In fact, for any cynics who travel regularly on the tube – and let’s face it, travelling on the tube can turn the most glad-of-heart optimist into a cynic after a short while -- the corrected sentence should read: “Improved signals likely to make little difference. Only fewer people or greater capacity could result in less overcrowding.”
Jim Shelley is TV critic of the Guardian: but why?
Those among you who read the Guardian newspaper’s G2 section, will oft have seen a column by a certain Jim Shelley, mostly taking the Mickey out of UK TV. Every time he writes a column for the Guardian it says beneath the article: “Jim Shelley is TV critic of the Mirror.”
Firstly, why does the Guardian see the need to publish content by the TV critic of the Mirror? Don’t get me wrong, I like his ShelleyVision columns a lot. I just find it a little odd that they are published in the Guardian. Wouldn’t that be like my own esteemed organ, CBR, publishing a column by the columnists of rival magazines? Why would I, or indeed the Guardian, want to do that?
Check out our BI special report
December 14, 2007
As I mentioned on a previous blog, we co-produced a special report on business intelligence with Special Report Publishing, which was distributed with The Daily Telegraph yesterday.
In case you missed it, we’ve posted the stories into our Business Intelligence Analysis Center, which you can find on the left of our home page.
But to make it even simpler for you to find all of the articles, I’ve created a mini contents page for you down below: now isn’t that what you call organised!
What’s in your basket? A look at BI in retail.
Brave new world: a look at enterprise search
Making the business case for BI investment
Q&A with business intelligence experts
Technology focus: the different approaches to BI
Café Nero case study: why they implemented Cognos, and what they achieved by doing so.
Power to perform: from BI to performance management
Safe & secure: lessons learned from the HM Revenue and Customs data debacle
If you read one thing tomorrow…
December 12, 2007
CBR has co-produced a special report in the Daily Telegraph appearing tomorrow (Thursday, 13 December). So if you’re in the UK, pick up a copy at all good newsagents.
The report is on business intelligence, and you probably don’t need me to tell you what a hot topic that is right now. Little wonder that over $15bn worth of acquisitions have been consummated in just four deals this year: Oracle buying Hyperion, SAP buying Business Objects, Cognos buying Applix and then IBM buying Cognos.
The report looks at the latest trends in BI: the move towards performance management; the rise of enterprise search from the likes of Autonomy, FAST and Google Enterprise; the sophisticated use of BI in the retail sector and even how to justify investment in business intelligence technologies.
There’s a roundup of the latest news, and some thought-provoking factoids – for example that the term business intelligence was first used in the context in which we now use it, in an article in 1958 written by H.P.Luhn in the IBM Journal.
CBR co-produced it with those nice people at Special Report Publishing. It features comment from many of the experts in the BI field, and even takes a look at how companies can avoid a major data loss such as that experienced by Nationwide with the loss of a laptop early this year, or HMRC and its two missing computer discs.
Anyway, check it out tomorrow, and be sure to let me know what you think.
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