Dashboards Countrywide

Countrywide executives hope 2007 will be a smart year for its business intelligence rollout.

For the Calabasas, Ca.-based institution that specializes in real estate finance, correspondent lending and other financial services, “SMART” refers to “strategic mission achieved through re-design and transformation.” It’s a plan to create up to 200 different reports for centralized dissemination, including a strategic planning report targeted at C-Level executives.

Countrywide hopes that the rollout, which is underway and is scheduled to ramp up in 2007, will give executives across departments a quick view of strategic plans, projects and corporate performance while shedding reliance on spreadsheets.

Read the full story (Bank Technology News)

BI Making Headway in Banks’ Profitability Efforts

Imagine being able to look at all the data on your customers across your organization to determine the best ways to increase the profitability and loyalty of those clients. Nothing new there — banks have been doing this in some form for years. It’s called CRM, right?

Not quite. Although customer relationship management and the technologies that have grown around it provide banks with some value around data interpretation, the future of analytics lies in business intelligence (BI).

Read the full story (TechWeb)

BPM and SOA insight from Mathias Kirchmer

On the heels of the ARIS ProcessWorld conference in Amelia Island, Fla., SearchSAP.com sat down with Mathias Kirchmer, chief innovation and marketing officer for Saarbrücken, Germany-based IDS Scheer to discuss the business process management (BPM) topics that came out of the conference. Kirchmer dissects some trends he’s seeing in the BPM market, gives an update on the company’s partnerships with SAP and Oracle and offers some advice for BPM projects.

Read the full story (SearchSAP)

Five Common Pitfalls to Avoid in BI Projects, Part 1

DM Review welcomes Lyndsay Wise as a new monthly online columnist. She will share her expertise and research materials gained as a BI analyst for the Technology Evaluation Centers in this column that will appear the third week of each month.

Annually, more than 70 percent of IT projects fail to meet expectations or become shelfware. Reasons for failure range from business intelligence (BI) projects not being completed on time and within budget to not being completed at all. Alternatively, BI initiatives may satisfy IT’s needs, but may not address those of end users. What should organizations do to avoid the common pitfalls and ensure success? Organizations should benchmark companies who have had successful implementations and learn from their mistakes during the preparation phase so as not to repeat them.

Read the full story (DM Review)

Tibco snares BPM, SOA for Carphone Warehouse

The Carphone Warehouse, an independent retailer of mobile phones and services in Europe, has chosen Tibco Software’s service-oriented architecture (SOA) and business process management (BPM)solutions to serve as its foundation for a flexible order management and fulfillment platform.
The next-generation order fulfillment platform is reportedly designed to improve The Carphone Warehouse’s fixed-mobile converged (FMC) services offering and better meet consumer needs.
The company has begun a phased deployment of Tibco’s software spanning core business functions including service activation, billing, CRM and provisioning.

Read the full story (DMeurope)

Throwing The Book At Wayward Lawyers

Stuart Maue’s weapon of choice for reining in runaway lawyers’ bills is business intelligence, in the form of databases, software and tools to analyze reams of bills and invoices. Since 2000, the company has invested more than $10 million in expanding its capabilities, creating portals for clients so they can better understand how and where their money is being spent.

It’s an implementation that offers lessons for chief information officers on how database technology can be combined with business intelligence tools to peer deeper into even the murkiest areas of a company’s business.

Read the full story (Baseline)

Making plant data relevant

Retrieving plant data across all facets of the production environment is vital for optimising productivity and making appropriate business decisions. The challenge is making that data relevant and available to everyone who needs it in the organisation.

Historians provide a means to bring together and store data from a wide range of process control systems. They also historise and archive past data and provide a variety of data retrieval options. Such data allow operations staff to carry out the tasks necessary to optimise productivity levels – for example, comparing different production lines, processes or time frames, identifying adverse conditions that triggered alarms, identifying process deviations, or identifying areas for reducing waste, time, energy consumption or errors.

Read the full story (SA Instrumentation & Control)

Australian University deploys Cognos

In late 2004, Deakin University deployed Cognos as its reporting solution to keep executive management and government up to date on student enrollment information. The university decided to upgrade to Cognos 8 BI for increased flexibility in filtering and building ad-hoc reports to support decisions across the entire university. For example, a faculty member can now look at data on student load and slice the data in any dimension to focus on specific student characteristics. The organization also wanted the flexibility to roll out analysis, metrics, and event management capabilities to support changing business needs in the future within Cognos 8 BI’s single product and architecture. Finally, Deakin University plans to expand Cognos 8 BI to report HR and financial information from several transactional data systems which reside outside of the data warehouse, such as Alesco.

Read the full story (PRWeb)

Turn up the bass: Sennheiser chooses MicroStrategy for BI Reporting

MicroStrategy® Incorporated (Nasdaq: MSTR – News, a leading worldwide provider of business intelligence software, today announced that Sennheiser electronic GmbH & Co. KG has selected MicroStrategy to support multiple business intelligence initiatives across its enterprise. Sennheiser electronic GmbH & Co. KG is a worldwide group of companies with more than 1,600 employees and one of the world’s leading manufacturers of complete audio solutions.

Read the full story (Yahoo Business)

Business Intelligence: Exploring the Depths of Data

What do a gasoline engine maker, publishing company and football franchise have in common? Their use of business intelligence software…

Worldwide sales for business intelligence software will reach $6.36 billion this year, rising to $7.04 billion next year and $7.8 billion in 2008, according to IDC forecasts. And with companies consolidating their vendors and seeking more strategic results from their tools, software providers have been building up their business intelligence platforms.  

Read the full story (eWeek)