Larry Marion

The cloud–based Business Intelligence juggernaut is picking up speed. The financial reports of vendors plus a new survey by Dresner Advisory Services make it clear that a majority of enterprise applications decision makers is getting more comfortable with the security and control issues of cloud-based BI. Howard Dresner, among the first to use the phrase […]

Sick of those emails and telephone calls from sales people “following up” on a vendor-provided white paper you downloaded out of curiosity and not due to an immediate need? Those calls and emails are a huge waste of your time, and theirs, and everyone knows it. Fortunately, the growing need for – and popularity of […]

New technologies and business imperatives are about to drive much deeper use of business intelligence and analytics tools, posing a substantial challenge to IT departments responsible for supporting those users and those applications. New survey data and interviews indicate that IT departments should seriously reconsider the way they support and train BI users if they […]

Maybe five or six years ago I first heard business intelligence vendors try to explain that not everyone needed real-time data and insights. “What they usually really need is right-time data—the right information to the right person at the right time,” they would say. A subset of data to a subset of users delivered overnight […]

Given all the negative noise about the new Windows 8 user interface for desktops and tablets (and the less than stellar sales reports to date), it was astonishing to see the November 2012 survey from Dresner Advisory Services about current and future use of mobile devices to access business intelligence data and apps. The Mobile […]

Amid all the hoopla over the power of Big Data to digest the gut-busting flow of data from web sites, social media, RFID sensors and mobile devices – with the glamour of bedazzled visualizations and real time insights delivered to your handheld – we often forget that the weaknesses of analytics tools continue to bedevil […]

Amid all the talk (from me and other business intelligence and analytics watchers) about end user departments – finance, marketing, and others – ignoring the IT department when it comes to BI/analytics, the rise of certain advanced analytics tools is reversing the trend. A new survey by Harvard Business Review Analytic Services discovered strong demand […]

If you were wondering if other IT pros also had been getting more “help me” calls from BI users outside of the normal finance and marketing crowd in the past year, rest assured you’re not alone. A new survey by Dresner Advisory Services quantifies the surging uses of BI and analytics in human resources, research […]

Hardly a day goes by that I don’t see another case study, white paper, research report, or press release promoting embedded Business Intelligence or analytics. However, far too many of them either ignore or minimize the two big traps of embedded BI. Before diving into the traps, let’s define terms. Many software vendors and IT […]

Math phobia drives me nuts. We all know there are lots of former English majors in the marketing and sales departments who appear to have an allergy to math.In most cases it’s simply due to fear or ignorance based on a lousy experience in elementary school that typically led to bad deals on car leases […]