“I sell a product to a market that doesn’t want it, but is forced by law to buy it.” – Dan Meyer

Watching his talk, I couldn’t help but draw a parallel to the way the Business Intelligence concepts and methodologies have traditionally been presented to non-techies.  Is it just a matter of complex tools?  Or is it deeper?

“The formulation of a problem is often more essential than its solution, which may be merely a matter of mathematical or experimental skill”  – Albert Einstein

Meyer references this quote by “the man”, Albert Einstein.  Can you think of how B.I. manages the formulation of data schemas, hierarchical data models, nesting, etc?  Bust open a textbook or Wikipedia, read it, then ask yourself, how engaging would this content be to someone who:

1. Lacks initiative

2. Lack perserverance

3. Lacks retention

4. Has an aversion to word data problems

5. Eagerness for formula reporting output

Meyer highlights these factors as being emblematic of his captive audience in the classroom.  I’ve made a couple of adjustments to tweak the context to that of B.I.  If you don’t agree that these factors apply equally to the vast majority of business users of B.I., please speak up.

Advances in technology are creating the ability to put the tools into the hands of the end user.  Our technology is proof of that; however, we still have some serious work to do on the owner’s manual.

For example, How would you deconstruct the process of building a data hierarchy to facilitate creation of a Data Mart?

I’ve recently started volunteering with Junior Achievement teaching business concepts to 5th graders.  You can see the attention of my little budding capitalists wax and wane throughout the session.  They haven’t yet learned to hide their expressions so when they “check out” it’s pretty obvious. But I’m glad for it.  I know exactly when I need to inject some PT Barnum into the act.

Let’s do the same for Business Intelligence.

Here’s Dan Meyer’s suggestions for fixing math education delivery.  Let’s do the same and give Business Intelligence class a makeover.

The Fix

1. Use multimedia

2. Encourage students business users intuition

3. Ask the shortest question you can

4. Let students business users build the problem

5. Be less helpful

I encourage you to watch the whole talk (below):

Enjoy!

Related posts:

1. Business Intelligence Adds a Dimension to Your Strategy
2. Defining Business Intelligence
3. Crowing about Business Intelligence

Reviewing this relic got me wondering about what technology might have accompanied the practice of accounting detailed in the book.

Ready?

Here it is guys:

And:

That’s it.

But where the principles of accounting have remained substantially unchanged over the course of the intervening years, the same cannot be said for business technology.

According to the timeline provided on www.oldcalculatormuseum.com, the development of electronic calculators really only just started to take off around 1961 (you can thank the invention of the integrated circuit - the microchip).  This was BRAND NEW technology.  Previous calculator technology had been manual.

Manual Calculator; Photo: Christos Vittoratos (via Wikimedia Commons)

By the time this book was written, there were a dozen companies creating and innovating new models and the competition to capture the new market was fierce.  Casio, Sharp, Sony, Toshiba, Texas Instruments, Canon, and of course Hewlett Packard; all of these guys were battling it out.  Numerous others are buried in technology’s graveyard.

Needless to say, things have never been the same since.

Accounting and business reporting as we know it today has grown from the roots of this technological revolution.

Business technology has continued to grow by leaps and bounds since that time, but don’t be fooled into thinking there’s no room left to branch out.  The fact you are on our website leads me to believe you’re at least willing to entertain the notion of continuing innovation in business technology.  Safe to assume?

The reason behind this little trip down Memory Lane is that everyday here at Indicee, as we innovate for the future, we can’t help but bump up against the past.  Not the ancient history I’ve outlined above,  we’re confronting the incumbent technology.  We’re confronting the stuff that is likely downloaded on your machine today.

In retrospect, it’s easy to see the value an innovation like the electronic calculator brought to the workplace.  It’s easy to look back and immediately recognize how important this innovation was for business.  Had you been there at that time, you would have jumped on it!  Would you not? You would have jumped on it and tossed your old, manual calculator in the first dumpster you could find!  Right?

Yet, this sort of reaction is rarely the case when new technologies come to market, isn’t it?  When new technologies show up isn’t there normally a great deal of fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD)?  Isn’t there normally a great deal of resistance to change?

What’s your view?

Related posts:

1. Business Reporting ≠ Dishwasher Job
2. Running the gauntlet of Year End Business Reporting
3. Business Intelligence class needs a makeover

The last couple posts have talked about legacy issues; legacy IT systems, legacy education.  Today I’d like to talk about another actor in the Legacy IT Show, the classic software salesman (circa. 2004).

This guy (above) may or may not be selling software, but does the song and dance sound familiar? I’ve sat on both sides of the table. Listening to salesguys pitch software to me as a purchaser, and doing the accounting & finance work in a company selling enterprise software.  Software, as an industry, is still an infant relative to most other industries; and with youth, comes growing pains.  Here’s the story on both sides.

Listening to pitches, sitting through demos, taking notes only to be asked by a Director, “what would it cost if we just built our own?” was crushing.  Or, hearing about how easy a rollout will be (“it’s like lego”) and then, months later, hearing about how it won’t do all that stuff we thought it would do.  Did we send out that cheque yet?

On the sell-side, working with salesmen who could barely operate a computer or use excel well enough to complete an expense report.  There was one colleague who seemed to continually be calling me from the middle of a war zone, god bless ‘em.  The path to hell is paved with good intentions, indeed.

Over the years, I think we were selling more than software. We were selling a dream. And the dream was that somehow this product would magically work and fix all reporting and organizational problems. Presto!

Inevitably, due either to the vagaries of the software development cycle or to a salesguys overly optimistic nature, enterprise software was erroneously peddled as a solution to all life’s problems and the answer to all our prayers.  Coding is an art and the concept of Minimum Viable Product (MVP) didn’t work in a Web 1.0 kind of world.  It’s easy to forget this was all being pulled out of the air, out of imagination.  We can probably lay a bit of blame on the buyer’s side; I mean, we fell fer it!

Vapourware is the term used to describe selling software that’s still in development although, you could say the same for a solution not fit for the intended purpose.  Which gets us back to our salesguy, our classic software salesman.

A lack of technical expertise, in large part, meant they were simply oblivious to whether it would work or not.  The incentive structure certainly didn’t encourage it.  Once the papers were signed, they’re gone (in some respects that’s as it should be, most of these companies were hemorrhaging cash).  So, it’s a tough rap.  You can’t fault the guys.  There was a level of belief there; they wanted to believe the product would work.  They wanted to believe they could be the next Microsoft.  They wanted to believe their stock options would be worth something.  But they could only believe it because they didn’t know how the product worked.  You follow?

It’s just average guys trying to scratch out a living.  That Beamer doesn’t pay for itself!  If you’re willing to pay for it, we’re willing to do it!

We carry these experiences and memories with us.  Failed implementations.  The project that wouldn’t end.  Lack of adoption.  The work-arounds.  The broken promises, heartbreak, loathing.  It’s all still there lying dormant.  Fool me once and that.

Looking at Saas, the cloud, open APIs, etc, the question now is… can we let go of this baggage and start to trust that the dream is no longer so distant from reality in the software space?  Are we really in an era where systems can talk to each other?  Can share information?  Can snap together like lego?  Or, is it just Vapourware 2.0?

What do you think?  Yes? No? Let’s hear it.

Post Script. After finishing this post, I went to hear Julian Smith (co-author of Trust Agents) speak and he used the “hot burner” analogy. I’m going to go ahead and call that external validation.

Related posts:

1. Software Implementation by the Book
2. Developers of Crystal Reports software launch new business intelligence venture
3. Quarter End Reporting – A Time for Reflection

I had a few experiences this past week reminding me that it’s still very much early both in social media adoption and in understanding new technology. Maybe “DOS-based” is a bit of a strong term. Granted, I did help someone set up their 1st email account this week; but, that’s a rare, rare, rare case of a thirtysomething who never went online… until now. Actually, the jury’s still out on that; 3 to 1 the account goes dormant.  That’s not one of the experiences that got me thinking (although it could).

What got me thinking was speaking with another accounting professional about using the Groups in Linkedin for following industry-related discussions and content. I had the chance to provide some insight about twitter; felt good about that. I was informed that it’s still a bit of a big deal to raise a voice online. I guess that should be obvious, but I forget because the conversation IS happening… despite the fact tons of people aren’t here. It’s kind of like turning the much-quoted phrase “Your customers are talking about you whether you participate or not” on its head. When the accounting and finance conversation is isolated, things get considerably quieter.

In a tech-friendly industry like Business Intelligence, it’s similarly insulated but in a different way. There they have been having pretty much the same conversation for the last 50 years. The only difference between then and now is, it’s online now.  Don’t even get me started on Data Quality! ← sorry guys

The other experience that got me thinking was with respect to course content in my professional organization’s (CGA) Information Systems Strategy course. There seems to be a real bias in the material relating to custom-built software over purchased applications. This is surprising to me. What was more surprising is; through discussions with students, there was unquestioning belief in it! The fact is, there’s a level of trust there between student-teacher telling them they are getting the right information. I think it shows how difficult changing technology makes it for academics (outside tech) to keep up.  That said, it’s a problem.

When they say “custom-built”, they are talking about in-house, from scratch software – think some proprietary system no one’s ever heard of.   Purchased applications would range from Quickbooks to SAP. Imagine. I feel like this is something that entered the course curriculum at its inception back when code was being written using Hieroglyphics. Am I wrong?

This actually ties nicely in with my last post about Legacy IT Systems. We’re still dealing with them. We’re also dealing with a Legacy Education System. This could explain some of the continuing difficulties between CFOs and CIOs.

There are lots of folks in accounting doing the right things though. Look at AICPA and CPA2Biz’s just-announced alliance with the software as a service accounting package, Intacct. Here’s an example of keeping current! Of course, in general it’s tough for professional bodies to do this kind of endorsement. What I like about it though is the endorsement of the technology. Maybe the question is, does that validation extend to the course curriculum for prospective accountants?

What do you think?

I think it also exemplifies the Echo Chamber analogy.  Who’s in your Echo Chamber?  Who’s not?

Related posts:

1. Ghost of Software Salesguys Past
2. Developers of Crystal Reports software launch new business intelligence venture
3. Asset or Expense: How do you account for Data Quality?

Think about what you might consider a legacy.  Lots of Americans will likely read this, so let’s use something more Americana.  The Ohio State football program maybe? -> BTW, they need to optimize their website, it’s coming up 3rd when I google “OSU”.  We’re on the west coast, so how about USC?  Or how about this; the BCS Championship game is being played on Thursday – Texas Longhorns against Alabama Crimson Tide.  How does the legacy of these football programs affect all the students (past and present) from all of these schools?  Just to give you an idea, for the uninitiated, any college team worth a legacy gets roughly 100,000 fans in attendance PER GAME.

I think all of us look for these kinds of connections.  Of course, Benedict Anderson (International Studies prof at Cornell) would argue these are just Imagined Communities; but those arguments notwithstanding, the point is that normally legacy is a good thing.

Yet, in the realm of Information Technology, legacy takes on an entirely different complexion.  Legacy IT Systems are routinely the whipping boy of the modern organization.  If your system was built prior to last week, the inclination is to believe (fervently) that something better MUST exist and that this dog you’re currently computing on needs to be taken out back the woodshed.

There seems to be very little respect and appreciation for the history of organizations that is captured by these Legacy IT Systems.  I think, anymore, we all just see the problems, work-arounds, and supplement that with a healthy dose of “the grass is always greener”.  I think that if you track down your IT guy and start asking some questions, you’ll be amazed at the history behind your systems.  Were there purchased over a number of years?  Has your organization grown by acquisition? What’s the oldest piece of hardware in the backroom?

We’re interested to hear what your organization is running on.  Share your story in the comments.  Maybe it’s time to cast the legacy of your IT system in a more positive light.  After all, no team has a perfect record.  It’s as much about the losses as it is about the wins.

Go Canada!

Related posts:

1. Ghost of Software Salesguys Past
2. Software Implementation by the Book

The notion of intelligence is…  “the ability to apprehend the interrelationships of presented facts in such a way as to guide action towards a desired goal.”

- Hans Peter Luhn, IBM Journal, October 1958

The above quote is generally credited with coining the term Business Intelligence (B.I.).  Luhn’s vision was ambitious for his time and it’s still ambitious today.  How much of the following article do you find relevant right NOW with respect to your business reporting challenges?

The following are direct quotes from the IBM Journal Article, “A Business Intelligence System” published 1958 with my commentary added:

Information is now being generated and utilized at an ever-increasing rate because of the accelerated pace and scope of human activities and the steady rise in the average level of education. At the same time the growth of organizations and increased specialization and divisionalization have created new barriers to the flow of information. There is also a growing need for more prompt decisions at levels of responsibility far below those customary in the past. Undoubtedly the most formidable communications problem is the sheer bulk of information that has to be dealt with. In view of the present growth trends, automation appears to offer the most efficient methods for retrieval and dissemination of this information.

With respect to the volumes of data being created in 1958, I think we can safely say, you ain’t seen nothing yet.  Keep in mind that 1958 was really the primordial soup of computing and information management.  At that time, the Integrated Circuit had just been developed which would pave the way for development of computing as we know it today.  Looking back on IT in 1958, I’m thinking it consisted of a “series of tubes”.

Luhn continues:

Ideally, an automatic system is needed which can accept information in its original form, disseminate the data promptly to the proper places and furnish information on demand.

So, in 1958, the concept of “on-demand” is also christened.  A blog I follow called, Only Dead Fish, by Neil Perkins references the Greek term, Kairos, recently when discussing the importance of context.  Kairos refers to, “the right or opportune moment” or “the supreme moment”.  I think this is the best way to think about the basic need/want underpinning the concept of on-demand.  I think this is how Luhn was thinking about it too:

One of the most crucial problems in communication is that of channeling a given item of information to those who need to know it. Present methods of accomplishing this are inadequate and the general practice is to disseminate information rather broadly to be on the safe side. Since this method tends to swamp the recipients with paper, the probability of not communicating at all becomes great.

Of course, we have come to know this “general swamping” in terms of email as opposed to paper, but it’s interesting that the problem remains the same.  How often are you required to spam the inboxes of your co-workers with reams of reports that may or may not be relevant to what they are currently thinking about?

Luhn actually advocates the creation of Profiles that would reflect the person’s sphere of interest!  This guy was truly visionary!  He goes on to discuss what he describes as “the Library problem” referring to the process by which users retrieve information from the system.  I really like this term and think we should resurrect it here and now!  Call me, The Librarian!

These Librarians that Luhn describes will become the guys who are your Systems Administrators and Database Administrators today.  In Luhn’s world, these are the guys who would eliminate the need to train the end users of the information in navigating the complexities of the system.  Although, later he does offer a tantalizing glimpse into an ever greater vision of technological advancement:

Although the service of a librarian is considered a convenience to the action point, in certain cases, means may be provided at the action-point location to permit direct access to the system. This would be justified where many of the inquiries concern lookup-type retrieval of data.

Otherwise, the system he envisions does actually begin to characterize what’s become the classic IT problem when it comes to report generation.  That process being:

1. Information user requests a report from IT
2. IT evaluates the request and, time permitting, creates the report for the user
3. User receives the report and discovers that it doesn’t quite fit the need
4. A new request goes to IT
5. Repeat (ad nauseum)

In 1958 though, this was a revolutionary breakthrough in organizational management!  Perhaps it’s time to look for the next breakthrough, after all, it’s been 50 years.  The article goes on to detail the process of capturing and organizing information including the EVENTUAL DESTRUCTION of the data!  Microfilm, magnetic tape, punchcards, these are the modes of storage being considered.  At the same time, the functional technology being envisioned is virtually StarTrekkian:

The magnetic tape record is now introduced into the auto-abstracting and encoding device. This device submits the document to a statistical analysis based on the physical properties of the text, and data are derived on word frequency and distribution.

A relative value of sentence significance is then established by a formula which reflects the number of significant words contained in a sentence and the proximity of these words to each other within this sentence. Several sentences which rank highest in value of significance are then extracted from the text to constitute the auto-abstract.

Whoops, I think we may have also just inadvertently discovered the origin of vaporware.  The article does admit that the functionality being described is only a vision and that “the question arises as to how far away such systems may be from realization”.  The fact is that some of what has been envisioned has only recently been achieved.  Think about tagging, creating profiles, digital indexing, and keyword searches.  What makes me think this article figures prominently in the lives of both Larry Page and Sergey Brin?

Dissemination of the new information occurs based on the user-generated profiles.  This feature is, again, only recently been substantively achieved.  The means of dissemination according to the article? The use of personal printers!  The more things change, the more they stay the same.  I still know companies where the primary means of report distribution is the printed page.  I encourage you to print out page 4 of this article and overlay the copy onto your organization’s business process information flowchart.  Similarities?

Okay.  Just a few more quotes here to round things off, but you can peruse the embedded document for the full story:

In the process of transacting business it is often desired to determine who concerns himself with a given subject. The usual type of question asked is: “Who does or knows a certain thing?” A function of the Business Intelligence System is to answer questions of this type.

Perhaps the techniques which ultimately find greatest use will bear little resemblance to those now visualized, but some form of automation will ultimately provide an effective answer to business intelligence problems.

Indeed.

Enjoy.

IBM Biz Intel 1958

Related posts:

1. Business Intelligence class needs a makeover
2. Business Intelligence Adds a Dimension to Your Strategy
3. Mind Your Own Business Intelligence (I Stole this Title!)

The story was the same, time and again, regardless of location, job function or technology involved: people everywhere are wasting hours, days, weeks and even months cutting and pasting information from their applications into spreadsheets in order to analyze their businesses. Why are they doing this? Because they don’t have any other solution that is easy to use and cost effective to implement.

• The woman waving her arm in the air runs Sales Operations. Their accounting system is not integrated to their text-file-spouting, antiquated MRP system and their forecasting application is home-grown. The result is that they manually move data around into Access databases and worst of all, cut and paste into a 64MB spreadsheet that cannot be shared with the people who need it because of its size. She has already calculated the time spent on manually mashing this data is over 50 person-days per year!
• Manufacturer of RV’s who sells through a dealer network.  They have over 10 years of sales transactions by dealers and VIN number stored in Excel files and a separate application that tracks warranty information.  They recently implemented MAS so now they need to create reports from 3 separate systems and want to give their dealers access to reports.
• One IT Manager receives a daily stream of EDI information from distributors about sales. This information is processed as CSV and then imported into custom tables in their accounting system. On top of this, he has written over 120 Crystal Reports files that are scheduled and emailed to support requests for information from their 50+ sales reps in the field. The reps are compensated both on their sales and sales from the distributors. He cannot get enough reports built fast enough to satisfy their requirements, as the information requests change almost daily.
• A women from a Legal aid society said they receive hundreds of invoices every day from legal aid lawyers.  To figure out how to best spend a limited legal aid budget, she and her boss are spending hours each week manually importing then sorting, subtotalling and pivoting through the invoice data in Excel.

The most common request was for simple sales reporting.

• One senior project manager needs to get sales report to 70 in-house and field sales reps.  They have Business Objects internally and he said it was “overkill”  in terms of complexity and price for simple sales reporting.
• The controller of a medical clinic needs to analyze expenses which are coded by doctor, procedure and about 10 other categories.  Today she has to export the data to excel each month to understand expense trends and identify controls.
• CFO of a plastics company needs to provide sales reports for the company owner and the sales team composed of external manufacturers reps.  Today his only option is to e-mail excel reports which is time consuming because each rep needs a separate report.

The frustration is universal and has nothing to do with how Sage (or any other company) writes software, integrates their applications or add reports to their solutions.

• Companies will always have unique reporting requirements.
• Companies will always purchase and use applications that are not integrated with one another.
• Companies will always create custom solutions to satisfy their needs.
• Companies will always crunch data in spreadsheet, creating a whole host of issues

Indicee allows people and companies to make sense of all of this related but orphaned information. It was a great week. A terrific opportunity to get in front of a large number of people who all had similar stories to tell and to be able to deliver a product that switches on the light at the end of a long tunnel filling with countless hours of mouse-clicking.

Related posts:

1. Reflecting upon Sage Insights 2010
2. Indicee and Excel
3. Software Implementation by the Book

New monitors in hand, ready for action

12 years on the road – you’d think I’d learned my lessons by now but there’s always a way to teach an old dog new tricks. This year, I thought I’d gotten clever. I beat the system and combined the art of promotion with some green thinking and practical savings. I bought new monitors for the trade show. That doesn’t sound particularly inventive, but it is when you consider the money spent and how it’s used. We could have spent $500 renting monitors for our booth. Instead, we bought 2 brand new monitors for about $440 and are giving them away as prizes. Ya, ok, we’re still shelling out the money, but this way, two attendees at the show walk away with great prizes – a much better result than putting the money into the hands of someone charging near-criminal fees to rent equipment.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m all for free enterprise and those in the rental business deserve to make a good living off of their services, but I do draw the line at the decidedly outrageous.

We ordered internet service to our booth for the show. It cost more for 3 days of service than the average household spends on high-speed internet for 3 years. I can live with that. This stuff takes a lot of work to set up for a show. I paid extra for a second line because the instructions mentioned things like being cut off for bringing your own hub. I left the hub at home.

We arrived at our booth to find only one internet line hanging from the ceiling. I called the Internet people and was assured that all I had to do to engage the second line was to attach my hub and cables – the ones I had left at home for fear of being disconnected. I mentioned this and they offered to rent them to me for approximately $440, with a $149 credit after the show.

I was close to buying a hub and cables at the store earlier that day when I bought the monitors. I wanted to extend our hotel room’s archaic single-line internet connection (maybe I’ll get to that story in another post) but thought the $65 expense was a little much and left without them. I did the math, got in the cab, headed back to the mall and now own a small hub and two cables.

Apparently, I’m in the wrong business. Why bother with this software stuff when I can make people’s lives better by renting them stuff for upwards of 1000% more than the retail price? Seems like a good plan to me.

Related posts:

1. Road Warriors
2. Business Reporting ≠ Dishwasher Job
3. Defining Business Intelligence

I was contemplating something like:

• Confessions of an Excel Jockey
• Fathers of Invention; The Mother of All Spreadsheets
• or Ghosts of Spreadsheets Past

What is difficult, complex, or nuanced about that?

What I found, as I started digging into a bit of cursory research (what is a blog post without links?), was that the debate about the relative value of spreadsheets has been raging with a fair bit of intensity for some time.  It wasn’t long before I had compiled literally pages of links that espoused support for or against their use.  There’s a term out there describing the exponential growth in the number of spreadsheets in a company as “spreadmarting”.  Well, my links on the spreadsheet question were spreadmarting!

My web journey ran the spectrum of views!  There are those that dig excel to the point of self-applying a moniker like “Mr.Excel”; and on the opposite side of the spectrum, you have an actual institute dedicated to studying the dangers inherent in spreadsheet use.  There are web pages dedicated to compiling links to other excel resources [I randomly chose one here], and articles detailing some of the greatest business blunders attributed to spreadsheet errors.  If you feel you may have a spreadsheet problem, for the small fee of $1749 Forrester Research will provide you with a white paper (complete with a money-back guarantee) that promises to explain spreadsheet best practice for you – let’s assume it’s really great.  Or for the more frugal-minded, there’s Truth To Power’s practical Top Ten list.

Games have been developed based on excel in case you don’t get quite enough during the course of your work day (actually, I highly recommend this one!).  There are even spreadsheets designed to compare other spreadsheets.  Surprisingly, excel formulae only made it to #4 on the “Stuff Accountants Like” blog (#1 is Not Sleeping – sadly, the blog itself has recently gone to sleep).  And since I don’t want to leave out the rest of the blogosphere, here is a link to a list of other excel-related blogs.

What all of this tells me is that the role of spreadsheets in organizations is up for debate.

With that in mind, I encourage you to weigh in.  What is the role of spreadsheets in your organization?  How do you feel about it?  What are your best (and worst) “Excel moments”?

Regardless, there is little doubt about one thing.  The business world, collectively, relies heavily on this little piece of technology that grew out of Dan Bricklin’s need 30 years ago for a souped up calculator when he and Bob Frankston came up with Visicalc.  So, although I haven’t made much headway in relating Indicee to our good friend the spreadsheet just yet, hopefully this post will get you thinking more actively about this ubiquitous business tool.  We can tackle the Indicee connection soon enough as I plan to revisit this topic regularly.

We are Spreadsheet Nation!

Related posts:

1. Quarter End Reporting – A Time for Reflection
2. Business Reporting ≠ Dishwasher Job
3. Defining Business Intelligence

At Indicee our goal is to enable business users, which include analysts, managers and other information consumers, to make better and smarter decisions. When we started building the Indicee product, our focus was not to build another BI tool like we did when we created Crystal Reports. Instead we focused on building an environment of collaboration and community around data and information.  If you look at most Web 2.0 productivity type applications like Basecamp you will see collaboration at the heart of what they are doing.  Indicee is taking a similar approach and the decision to move BI into the “cloud” was very strategic for this reason. Giving a business user the ability to easily access, consolidate, analyze, share and collaborate on information from inside and outside the firewall becomes a powerful story.  This moves well beyond a user’s ability to put together a spreadsheet full of data that can be emailed around. The implications of creating a network of users, from both inside your company and cross company, that can share, discuss, debate and compare data and information really creates a new paradigm for BI.

In the short term, Indicee is providing a lot of value to our early adopters by eliminating much of the complexity and time that they were devoting to the creation of complex “spreadmarts” (see TDWI report on Spreadmarts). If you really dig into these spreadmarts you will find that they are just data stores put together with hours of manual effort.  The typical business user is already pulling their hair out by the time they get to the point of using the really valuable features in Excel.

Indicee will reduce or eliminate the painful process of manually accessing and consolidating data. The application can then surface up the data in a friendly way using a word based “question” interface that enables the users to quickly reveal interesting and informative insights based on the mashed up data.  Users can share and collaborate around this information or take the next step of pushing the information to various external tools and applications. Pushing data back into Excel and Adobe PDF is already integrated into the product, but we see many interesting ways to push information through Email, Blogs, RSS feeds and Facebook.

Pushing data back into Excel makes sense for many business users because they are interested in doing things like forecasts or what-if type analysis, which is really where Excel shines. In fact we see an opportunity to more tightly integrate with both Excel and Google Spreadsheets right inside the Indicee application.  I can give you more details on this in the future.

Our long-term vision is to focus on the big picture value proposition of what Indicee offers to our users. This is the ability to easily mash up data from any source like Excel, Access, packaged applications (ERP, CRM), SaaS applications (Google, Netsuite, Salesforce.com), data aggregators and other public data sources to enable user generated content creation that can be shared, collaborated on, published and pushed anywhere both inside and outside the firewall will turn traditional BI on its head. Combine this with the message of collaboration, access-from-anywhere and zero-footprint brings an extremely compelling value proposition to business users.

At the end of the day when I do my own BI work I use both Excel and Indicee. They both fit into my daily workflow and each has their strengths. My goal as a business user is to be more productive and the more tools and applications I have to enable that the better. I envision Indicee working along side countless applications just like Excel to create a new, collaborative BI world.

Related posts:

1. Indicee Launch
2. Indicee for 2010 : New look, New product, New offerings
3. The Pain That Indicee Solves… Metaphorically Speaking