Budgeting and forecasting has been done for so many years that some organisations have forgotten why they even bother. Surely finance staff could better spend their time analysing their actual performance? But therein lays the first benefit of planning. It provides a benchmark against which to measure actual performance. Is... read more →
Jun 03
May 04
These terms are often used interchangeably, which can cause confusion. There is no rule about what each term means, but I like to make a distinction between the two to remove that confusion. The following diagram summarises what I see as the essential differences between the two: Dashboards Dashboards typically... read more →
Apr 15
Failing to Plan is like Planning to Fail, but it’s difficult to plan something so nebulous as Business Intelligence. That’s why we created the “Performance Plan”. How many times have you been in need of information but when you reached for the latest BI report you found it only met... read more →
Mar 29
Dashboards are a wonderful way to check how an organisation’s key indicators are tracking. They can indicate when action is required, when questions need to be asked and inject objective information into the decision making process. The catch is how do you do it properly? There is surprisingly little written... read more →
Mar 14
Active or Off-line reports Active Reports allow for the delivery of interactive dashboards and reports that business users can work with offline. They provide the flexibility needed to access vital information even when disconnected from the network Often one of the challenges with Dashboarding and Reporting is access to data... read more →
Feb 11
The Data Warehouse Institute Seminar A couple of years ago I had the good fortune to attend a session with Arkady Maydanchik, one of the world’s leading authorities in Data Warehouse data quality. Arkady is an accomplished speaker and the session was both informative and easy to follow. What the... read more →
Jan 20
Back in October 2007 a company by the name of Applix was acquired by Cognos. Cognos rebranded the company’s flagship product, TM1, to Cognos TM1. A few months later Cognos was itself acquired by IBM. It’s fairly old news, but has become more, rather than less, important in the world... read more →