Gather snowflakes into a snowball - targeting the midmarket in ways that they understand

This post is a continuation of the February 19, 2009 post on midmarket business intelligence.

So how can one look at the midmarket?  How can all of these snowflakes make sense?

While it's tempting to categorize by employee size or revenue (and yes, we at Birst often categorize them that way, too), it's not how the market views itself.

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="421" caption="Look, I found one that wants HR analytics."][/caption]

While I mentioned last time that nobody has ever come up to me saying "I have 20 employees and $X revenues; I'm an SMB and I need SMB BI," I have run into many companies saying "I need something to make better sense of my sales and financial information.  It's too complex for me to do on my own anymore, and I don't have a big IT team to help out."  This is usually followed up by "And my budget is kind of small and I'm really not overly technical myself.  I really can't afford (enter Big BI company name here)."

In October, Aberdeen did a review of the BI midmarket and found that small and medium sized businesses were essentially interested in 2 things:

1. Easy to use business intelligence

2. Affordable business intelligence

You're absolutely shocked, I'm sure.

What I've discovered is that the midmarket understands its needs, its wants, and its budget, and approaches it that way: I need sales analytics, I want it to be easy for me to use without too much trouble, and I have this much money to spend.

So to cater to the midmarket, you  need to address their pain points, to make things easy for them to get started and use, and then provide it at the right price.

Which brings me back to Lyndsay Wise's observation that on-demand business intelligence solutions are the “best poised to meet the needs of small and medium businesses.”  While she attributed this to familiarity with the on-demand model, there might be more at work here.

On-demand business intelligence meets the need for BI that is fast to deploy, easy to use, and resource friendly.  It generally costs less in terms of time, capital, and labor to get started.

On-demand business intelligence also tends to be geared to the business user instead of the IT user, so it's easier to use - the learning curve is much shorter.  As a result, more people can use it in the organization and the benefits spread more broadly.

Some on-demand BI vendors are function-specific and focus on sales analytics applications, for example.  While others integrate data from a variety of sources and can be used for sales, marketing, finance, operations, etc., or for looking across the business and reviewing how all of these components interrelate.

As it turns out, the beautiful diversity of snowflakes can be categorized.  And they tend to group themselves on their own.  Snowflakes are clear, cold, crystalline, and sticky - which makes them easy to turn into snowballs.

Snowflakes aren't completely different - Lyndsay Wise on BI in the midmarket

Historically, the midmarket has had to go without BI due to resource constraints and lack of IT expertise.  Only the largest and most technically sophisticated companies could afford or were capable of implementing traditional on-premise BI.  And even then, it often went to the most elite users.

Today, there are a seeming bounty of vendors trying in various ways to approach the midmarket.  But what is the midmarket?  And what do they really need and want?

As Lyndsay Wise discusses in her recent piece, Redefining the Midmarket and its Business Intelligence Requirements, the midmarket can be hard to characterize.  It is often described by the rough metrics of revenue size or employee size.  But is that how they see themselves?  Or how they characterize their BI needs?

I have yet to meet a person who comes up to me and says "I'm an SMB company with SMB BI needs."

So it's not surprising when Lyndsay says "There is a lack of cohesion existing in the market in terms of what small and mid-sized companies really need to make business intelligence successful. . . there is little agreement on the similarities within mid-sized companies and the key requirements needed for their BI needs."

Seth Grimes agreed and responded in his Slicing up the BI Market posting that perhaps segmenting companies by IT spending, how IT is managed (components or enterprise?), or analytical styles is a better way to go.

So is the midmarket like snowflakes?  Each individual one different, unique, and challenging to classify?

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="329" caption="Surely we can come to some common agreement about business intelligence."][/caption]

Or are there some similarities that can help vendors and customers find each other?  All snowflakes, after all, are crystals, cold, and clear.

Out of the various vendors, Lyndsay saw on-demand business intelligence solutions as the "best poised to meet the needs of small and medium businesses."  She attributed this to familiarity with the on-demand model.  But is this all that's going on?

To be continued.

Decision centered BI, made for real humans - Stephen Few raises the cry

Stephen Few raised an interesting point on his blog recently with a piece entitled "Business Intelligence -It's time to pass the baton" The key point, which I will quote directly, is that "[BI] has provided a powerful technical infrastructure for collecting, integrating, improving, storing, and accessing large amounts of information, but few tools that directly help people understand and make good use of that information."  This battle cry raised a nice conversation among some BI pros like James Taylor.  Over at datadoodle, Ted Cuzzillo amplified the roar.

Stephen's point is spot on.  Despite its own statements that it's breaking free, traditional BI doesn't reach broadly enough in the organization to have as great an impact as it could possibly have.  Better data visualization and greater ease of use would be of tremendous value here.

Instead of "passing the baton" on to data visualization alone, however, I'd like to suggest a slightly different analogy.  The "baton" implies that the first runner isn't important after it's handed off to the next.  Instead, it's more like a bobsled team.  There needs to be both a driver and the runner who gets the bobsled going.  The runner is the BI infrastructure.  But the driver, who is critical once the runner is in the sled, is the one who navigates you to the swift and speedy destination.  That's the decision support/data exploration/data visualization part.

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="300" caption="Everybody focus on the business objective, now."][/caption]

The heavy data lifting and calculating needs to be tied to better data visualization that's easier for business users to use.  While the fancy visualizations are slick and cool, you have to have the data properly gathered and analyzed to get there and oy, there's the rub.

So I must humbly suggest that in addition to the vendors who focus on visualization, like Tableau and Panopticon, you might see a nice bobsled team from the vendors who are focused on making BI more affordable and approachable in general.  The on-demand business intelligence vendors, of which Birst is one, are combining the runner with the driver to make BI both easy and effective within organizations.

5 Hot Business Intelligence Topics for 2009 - a belated shout out to the Dashboard Spy

It's fascinating to us here at Birst how many customers come to us with a first request of "I want a dashboard."  Not "I want BI."  Not "I want better analytics and reporting across my financial, CRM, and operating data." Not "I want to mine my data from here to Timbuktu."  No.   They might want those things, but it's not the first thing they ask for.  It's "I want a dashboard."  Some customers who know that they have a reporting problem and have no idea what BI is still know what a dashboard is and know that they want it.

That's why I'm giving a belated shout out to the Dashboard Spy.

Hubert Lee, the Dashboard Spy, put together 5 Hot Business Intelligence Topics for 2009.  Here it is in quick summary. It's worth a full look especially if, you know, you want a dashboard.

"While exchanging New Year’s greetings with many Dashboard Spy readers and contributors, I found certain “top-of-mind” topics appearing on everyone’s list. In this post, I share 5 of what will most certainly be the hottest topics of discussion when discussing business intelligence dashboards in 2009.

Dashboard Topic #1

“Business Intelligence, the recession-proof application”

Corporate spending has ground to a halt. This has impacted in a dramatic way the world of IT where, even in the best of times, we have to work hard at proving ROI and business justification. IT managers now are scraping by with reduced staff and application funding. However, I’ve received reports from quite a few organizations where business intelligence dashboard budgets survive. In fact, a few new dashboard reporting projects received the go-ahead despite cutbacks on other technology spending.

Dashboard Topic #2

“The Power of The Mash-Up Dashboard”

2009 will be a break out year for mashup dashboarding.

The mashup dashboard takes a mix and match approach to enterprise dashboard content that provides a real user-centric focus. Think combination of business intelligence applications, reporting engines and web portals.

In 2009, more companies than ever will make their databases and application engines available for use across the internet. While TOS (Terms of Service) agreements will be in effect, the access to the data is generally granted at no cost. This has opened the world of the enterprise dashboard and made the dashboard design pattern a smorgashboard of content from a range of data providers. This “mash-up” of content serves up unique combinations of dashboard content for the ever-hungry dashboard end user. Once they’ve tasted the mash-up dashboard, there’s no going back.

Dashboard Topic #3

“The Unavoidable Dashboard” or “Here Come the Widgets!”

For organizations to achieve real returns on their business intelligence efforts, there is one startlingly simple requirement - “Get the data in front of the manager”.

From the forward edge of business dashboard techniques comes the idea of desktop dashboards. With the end user now getting comfortable with widgets and gadgets (those mini applications that appear on your PC or Mac as part of the windows environment), we will see more and more adoption of this technique to deliver business intelligence.

Dashboard Topic #4

“The Eye Candy Controversy, Continued”

Several dashboarding platforms released upgrades during 2008 that take graphics to a new level. Flash-based bling and web 2.0 styling is here to stay. “Create your own dashboard” software now makes it extremely easy to add all the glitz and chrome you want to your business intelligence interface. Project sponsors who want to show slickness love this functionality but the information visualization best practice crowd is choking on their pie charts and loading up their bullet graphs. The “eye candy” versus “clarity of data visualization” controversy will no doubt continue to grow in 2009.

As a dashboard adoption observer and business intelligence industry reporter, I will state my opinion that at this point of the maturity curve of business dashboards, it’s great that the dashboard end user or department level dashboard builder has the technology available to produce great looking visual interfaces for business intelligence. Yes, there are plenty of “wrong” practices out there, but I’d rather enjoy this frenzy of do-it-yourself dashboarding than to wait forever for IT and their data visualization experts to get something “right”.

Dashboard Topic #5

“The Rise of the InfoGraphic”

2008 was a banner year for infographics. I mean that literally. News sites such as the New York Times have set up considerable resources for the production and prominent display of data-driven information graphics. As explained in this interview with the NY Times Graphics Director Steve Duenes, information graphics are taken quite seriously.

For Hubert's full analysis click here.

For examples of business intelligence dashboards that you can create quickly and easily with Birst, visit theTours and Demos section of Birst.com.