Archive | business intelligence

Speedlinking, May 2009

One part writer’s block and two parts schedule overload means I don’t have time to write an original post.  Speedlinking to the rescue: Over at ‘I Help You Blog’, Philip suggests 101 Great Posting Ideas That Will Make Your Blog Sizzle.  My personal favorite is #101:  Create a post with a 101 ideas. In a relatively…

Continue Reading 0

The Return of Decision Support

According to D.J. Power‘s “A Brief History of Decision Support Systems“, the first use of the term Decision Support System (DSS) was in a 1971 Sloan Management Review article. Gorry and Scott-Morton argued that existing management information systems focused on structured decisions and recommended that systems for semi-structured and unstructured decisions should be called decision…

Continue Reading 2
Sales Performance gauge

Traffic Lights redux

As I’m done bashing MBOs (for now), I might as well revisit my long-standing concern with the ubiquitous red/yellow/green traffic light metaphor. While the metaphor is intended as a simple summary of performance (green = good, red = not good), for most business situations three levels of performance are not enough to truly judge results….

Continue Reading 4

Big Bang Performance Management

Performance management vendors often say adopting their tools must be done all at once, starting at the top of the organization. They argue that, without executive buy-in, a performance management deployment will not have the mandate needed to succeed. Furthermore, the argument continues, without an enterprise data warehouse and reporting tools deployed to every desktop, employees…

Continue Reading 4

Measuring (Lack of) CRM Usage

One of the most common complaints about customer relationship management (CRM) systems is that individual reps don’t use them. This isn’t very surprising to me, as many CRM deployments are designed to give visibility to management or to streamline the ops person’s ability to forecast, rather than to add value to the individual rep. Organizations try…

Continue Reading 9

Predictions, redux

Even though my recent post on BI predictions is still generating higher-than-normal traffic, I assumed that the annual season of prognostication had died down; after all, it’s already Feb.  But over on the BI Questions Blog, Timo strays from declaring the death of One Version of the Truth to provide some suggestions that BI/PM vendors…

Continue Reading 1