What is the Best Business Intelligence Solution for my Business?

Are you afraid your Business Intelligence solution will fall short of original expectations and vision?

In many cases traditional Business Intelligence has continued to over-promise and consistently under-deliver. During the selection process people get caught up in the story about how this new found insight will change their business and business decisions forever, only to find that during implementation time, effort and complexity takes over.

Most people at least understand a BI solution should handle large amounts of their information and assist in identifying and developing new opportunities. Ultimately BI assists a business in understanding historical data and should also attempt to correlate these findings into the future projections.

In reality, a BI solution can be just the opposite, with inconsistent outcomes resulting from layered complexities, high up-front capital expenditure, specialist resource requirements, and lengthy development time frames. To prevent these issues organisations need to fully define and assess the capabilities that will help them to leverage BI against the strongest competitors in their market.

Modern day decision makers want to understand overarching business views and examine increasing levels of detail to not only report outcomes but to then apply actions. Unfortunately, with traditional platforms information can end up being disconnected from the world of the business user and require further time and effort to deliver. This is possibly driven from the fact that historically customers have been tempted to create a “big bang” solution due to the cost, time and effort of creating and updating a BI solution were very high.

A modern Business Intelligence solution should require less IT resources and deliver the solution quickly, while still allowing for further iterations of development to continue. When reviewing a BI solution you can save money, increase the speed of deployment, and create greater end-user buy in if you answer the following questions.

• Aim to reduce upfront and ongoing specialist IT resource dependency. What will be the required level of skills for installation, implementation and BAU?
• Calculate the total cost of ownership for the solution, including licensing, upgrades, installation, resourcing, time to deliver and capital expenditure. What will be the ROI for the project?
• Be wise with tool selection when considering self service capability and simplicity of use. Even though a brand may offer licenses in a variety of tools for different purposes, will this ‘suite’ cause further complexity and confusion during rollout?
• Include business users during the solution selection and development process, otherwise simplicity can be overlooked.  Can a business user uncover information without complexity, specialist skills and time consuming processes?
• Tread carefully with a business focused on Excel as a BI solution. Leveraging off an add-in can be beneficial but will Excel create issues with the quality and consistency of information?
• Ensure the platform is agile enough so you can focus on a key business area that will reduce costs, or improve productivity, then have the ability to move onto further incremental delivery. Does the platform lean itself to an iterative development approach?
• Review you data integration method and intended data sources – on-premise, social media, cloud to cloud etc. Can you access these applications in a timely and cost effective manner?
• Allow users to access data anywhere and on any device leveraging web-based dashboards as your primary interface but include alternate output options (e.g. Email, Excel, PDF) to provide flexibility.

In summary, a modern solution should have more transparent time to value and ROI for a business intelligence deployment. A Business Intelligence solution should allow an organisation to prove success on initial high need projects, and then expand over time. The modern web-based platform should empower the end user to quickly and efficiently identify opportunities. By choosing an adaptable analytics platform you will increase the likelihood of ongoing success of a BI program.

Anaplan Platform vs. IBM Cognos TM1 and IBM Cognos Express

In today's environment IT departments struggle to keep pace with the growing demands of the business.

Adding to IT’s stress are legacy applications that continue to burn an increasing amount of IT’s budget. Constrained organisations cannot afford failed front office projects that strangle IT productivity and credibility.

When considering a corporate performance solution, a company may first look to large enterprise vendors, like IBM, for planning, forecasting, and analytic applications. These enterprise vendors offer a stack of products or suites including IBM Cognos Express and TM1, but each brings integration complexities, long time to value, and require a large investment into infrastructure. These on-premise solutions are expensive, requiring costly consultants and heavy IT involvement, with huge maintenance and support bills.  

Anaplan

Anaplan connects all of the company’s people, data, and front line business activities together in one platform, available to all business users through a single portal.  The platform brings a company’s functional users together using a common interface, which links the user community across planning processes.

The revolutionary Anaplan platform enables the business analysts manning the front lines of the enterprise, to design, build, deploy, and maintain the business applications.  The results to the business are performance improvements and top line productivity gains without putting more demands on their stressed and undermanned IT organisations.

The Anaplan platform converges business consumers, but also brings application developers together. In Anaplan the business consumers are also the developers of the solution.  Anaplan’s common development interface uses a natural, easy to use language across planning, dashboard, and forecasting solutions.

Anaplan’s cloud based architecture shifts the management of infrastructure from critical organisational IT resources to cloud computing experts at Anaplan.  The businesses can focus on building solutions that transform their core business. 

IBM Cognos TM1

IBM Cognos TM1 infrastructure requires IT consultants or specialised staff with expertise in tuning and managing a TM1 environment. The enterprise infrastructure could potentially include development, UAT, and production servers. 

The impact to the business is that IBM Cognos TM1 projects are much more complex, require many more resources, and take significantly longer to implement than a similar project in Anaplan.

In Anaplan business applications are rapidly built by Business Analysts using a natural business language without having to be concerned about the underlying infrastructure. The TM1 cube calculation rule syntax and extract transformation load (ETL) script are not a business language like Anaplan, but rather two separate application specific coding languages.

Anaplan is geared to the Business Analyst with the organisational knowledge to build and deploy business orientated applications quickly. The Anaplan user does not require enterprise IT knowledge of a proprietary syntax and scripting language. In comparison, building TM1 applications is difficult because it’s not a natural transition from a spreadsheet environment and it requires dedicated application specific skills.

The TM1 skill-set is typically an IT or consulting resource with extensive experience in TM1 and the two scripting languages for processes and cube rules. The web interfaces are then configured using separate tools and can require additional knowledge of MDX coding.

TM1 is architected using on-premise technology and requires a heavy dependency on infrastructure and IT support with limited computing resources for scalability and performance. Simple upgrades and maintenance outages will require a heavy involvement of IT resources and signifcant overheads are involved with the on-going support. TM1 is more static when it comes to making changes. Generally, change requests must be submitted through the specialised TM1 resources to coordinate the changes and impact across the product. 

IBM Cognos Express

The IBM mid market equivalent of TM1 is the IBM Cognos Express Xcelerator components. Xcelerator is essentially the same tool as TM1, except usually an earlier version release.

Cognos Express also comprises of other additional Cognos components creating a stack of products that IBM sell in separate licenses.  Organisations that deploy IBM Cognos Express soon realise that building and using products that are part of a stack adds complexity.

With each product brings both development and end user complication. Whether it’s training your end users on another interface or adding consultants, implementations will result in a longer time to value. This difficulty in developing and using business software is counter to the premise of business self-service.

Whether you invest in a just the TM1 equivalent component or your development spans multiple tools, you will find skill-sets which have a dependency on consultants and depleting your organisations capability of self-service.  In the end, your project will take more time, carry more cost, increase risk and return limited value. Your users will be potentially forced to use multiple disconnected and dissimilar interfaces, causing confusion, frustration, and limited buy-in.

Summary

The Anaplan platform is not only intuitive and easy to use, it is built from the ground up, to leverage cloud technology, in memory computing, and multi threaded processing, delivering time to value, instant access and enterprise collaboration.  It’s simple, “pay as you grow”, subscription based pricing plan is a shift from the traditional enterprise vendors whose model requires significant investment in hardware, services, and software.

Anaplan is just easier to build robust solutions without consultants, where an IBM Cognos project can create backlogs due to the availability and costs of scarce consulting resources. A solution that takes months in IBM Cognos will take weeks to build in Anaplan, and be built by business analysts not external consultants.

Anaplan is the enterprise-scale cloud platform that now enables executives to optimise front-line business performance (sales, marketing, production, services, manufacturing, IT, and finance) interactively, all in one place. As a result the impact to your business will be massive improvements in revenue, margins, and transparency.

Is it cheaper to own than rent?

The age old argument on whether it is cheaper to rent than own certainly raises it head when considering cloud opportunities for business. One thing for sure it is not black and white when trying to define the total costs involved in rolling out an on premise or even private cloud solution within the business. Organisations will continue to use a huge mix of infrastructure, platforms and applications, but as cloud becomes more and more pervasive they will need to understand the benefits this technology can provide to their business.  

We could focus on subscription based solution offered as a service being an immediate saving to the business, but with a modern day solution the benefits will come from the agility and increase in productivity for the business as a whole. By moving to the cloud your people will spend less time on the low level tasks like configuring and managing  servers, patching and upgrading applications, and more time on the important strategic roles within the business.

When you are developing a cloud strategy it is important to take the pragmatic approach by completing the appropriate analysis of a vendor, making sure your interest is reflected in the providers and local partners operating model. One solution does not fit all and businesses are not identical, so when completing your due diligence it is important you seek a solution that is flexible and can allow you to focus on the strategic view, not the technology.

In house or private cloud servers and applications get deployed slowly, date quickly and have a relatively short life span.  GoodData and Anaplan are powerful tools driving quick deployment programs that set to drive first-rate and rapid results for your business.  Both platforms use AWS and Rackspace, and both cloud vendors live and die by their customers. If you compare that with an on-premise IT deployment you may find the passion, expertise and capability is not as high, and that significant investment required by the business could mean throwing good money away. Consider the servers, building space, cooling, staff, software and general management costs of your on premise system, would you expect the same costs, hidden or otherwise, coming from a subscription based leading cloud solution? With cloud you can take advantage of having your infrastructure stored at a state of the art data centre, while not blowing your entire budget. Let the experts monitor and upgrade the infrastructure and hardware, and spend your time on the more important parts of your business.

One of the biggest advantages of cloud computing is the focus it puts on business user, differentiation and simplicity can be found through the design of a system built from the ground up. Traditional IT clients have a one off transaction with vendors which are repeated every few years for product upgrades or developments, while a cloud solution is continuously creating a better user experience and increasing efficiency within the system. Both Anaplan and GoodData regularly release advancements with the platforms and listen to feature requests of the clients and partners. When deciding on whether you will own or rent an IT solution consider the benefits in agility, flexibility and capability, as well as the total cost of ownership of the cloud. 

Budgeting & Forecasting: Transitioning from Spreadsheets to Enterprise Cloud Solution

Let’s face it, ensuring your organisation is able to plan and monitor performance against plans and budgets is challenging. And it’s a task made rather more arduous when spreadsheets are the only platform for completing the process. 

Don’t get me wrong – where would we be without the expediency of our reliable friend the spreadsheet. But when it comes to business critical processes like budgeting, planning, and forecasting - that rely on high levels of user participation – the risks and limitations of spreadsheets are abundantly exposed. 

Pesky Pain Points 

The budgeting and forecasting process brings with it numerous difficulties and pain points. Foremost among these issues are version control and consolidation. For most organisations the budgeting process involves rolling multiple functional area spreadsheets into a master budget.  Not only does this consolidation process encourage management and maintenance of multiple spreadsheets, but it creates different Excel workbook versions that evoke concerns over data accuracy and reliability.

And what about performance? Excel has always been a great personal workspace for quick and agile calculations, but is it scalable and robust? How do you get Excel to not be so slow and cumbersome when working with complex data sets? What happens as your business grows, your business passes through multiple iterations to compensate and the size and complexity of your data expands? The unscaleable nature of Excel can be a major limitation and risk. Excel struggles to offer much in the way of security capabilities for multiple users and with data confidentiality a limitation of spreadsheets, how do you ensure your users only have access to their correct cost centre instead of company-wide payroll? 

Needless to say these concerns create errors and inaccurate data resulting in long-winded, potentially broken and disjointed business processes, which in turn lead directly to uninformed decisions and the subsequent poor results that follow. 

Alternatives 

The natural step in solving these pain points is a move to an enterprise platform that has the capability of performing business critical processes with greater reliability and accuracy. One option is traditional on-premise products like IBM Cognos or Oracle’s Hyperion solutions. But these come at a cost – consider licenses, IT install/configuration, programming, additional hardware & software, deployment skills, not to mention exponential costs of users and ongoing maintenance. But another consideration in transitioning to a traditional enterprise solution is the technical nature of the products. Implementing Cognos or Hyperion means contracting an army of consultants to drive the system, and this moderates your ability to maintain and manage the process.   

So now what? You understand the need for a move away from spreadsheets, but your users are familiar with Excel and reluctant to change. A traditional on-premise enterprise solution can solve your problems, but the costly and technical characteristics are a deterrent.  Well, there is one alternative that may just give you the best of both worlds. Anaplan is a cloud based enterprise solution that is gaining momentum as a best of breed product. It’s the most powerful planning, forecasting, and analytics platform in the cloud, providing a single place for decision makers to share important business data in real time. 

Why Anaplan? 

The Anaplan platform has been built from the ground up and with the average spreadsheet user in mind. The use of natural language makes it easy for users to build and maintain models and the grid-like interface helps make Anaplan an easy step up from Excel. And forget about multiple spreadsheets and versions, with Anaplan different functional areas participate in the same model and instantly promote a joined up approach. No more consolidating and aggregating. Security is no concern either as users have full or selective access depending on roles, functional areas, or cost centres. 

When it comes to performance, Anaplan’s unique in-memory processing means much quicker processing of complex large data sets, which provides a significant edge over both spreadsheets and traditional on-premise solutions. And being a cloud based solution means no hardware, no software, no infrastructure, and no IT. 

Conclusion 

But before you convince yourself that a change is necessary; be sure to look within first. By this I mean ensure you fully understand your current budgeting model. The methodology applicable to your excel models should not simply be transfer to an enterprise solution, but improved upon.  Doing so assures a budgeting and forecasting process that provides a complete and continuous overview of the organisation with the insight and information needed to make business critical decisions.

Businesses must turn information into insight to optimize business performance and drive smarter business outcomes, and there are a host of spreadsheet alternatives that allow organisations to do just that. Can you afford not to make better, more informed decisions? 

Where to now for Cognos Planning?

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away… a product called Adaytum was successfully developed and launched, this product was and still is the mainstay for many planning and budgeting applications throughout the world. The adaytum analyst component was so popular with the masses that in 2003 a company called Cognos decided to acquire the brand and its customers. Cognos decided the Analyst component was such a good application builder that there was no need to continue to develop this part of the tool and began to focus its efforts on a separate web based client install interface called Contributor. Roll forward four years to the year of 2007 and Cognos now decides to purchase a competitor company by the name of Applix, rebranding its flagship planning product TM1 to...um.. Cognos TM1. Soon after Cognos went on to sell itself to the giant IBM, so start adding IBM to all the Cognos product names from now on... hope I haven't confused?

In summary, IBM found itself in possession of two historically popular planning tools Cognos TM1 and Cognos Enterprise Planning (EP).  Previously they both competed under the same umbrella of “budgeting and forecasting” but now were best of buddies and full of praise about each other's strengths, and how they complement each other.

Cognos Planning had the 'front end', but TM1 had the 'back end', and over the next five years the IBM R&D team took a step back, tweaked, tested, analysed, took another step back and then attempted to retro fit the 'good pieces' into their chosen leader brand. Carefully keeping the customers and partners in the dark for most of this period.

Even though IBM would find it hard to admit to this, it is now apparent that Cognos Planning will be slowly but surely be phased out. This may take five, even ten years of routine upgrades and patches before it is finally announced but it does seem the writing is on the wall. Any current EP user that has been working with the product for a long while would admit not many changes have occurred with the Analyst component in the last ten years, and any advances in Contributor are only long overdue performance modifications.  

If you’re an existing Cognos Planning user and you are taking the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” approach, we understand Planning was a good product and that it will continue to be supported by IBM but with a limited development programme based only on bug fixes and hardware upgrades. We recommend that when the next model requirements occur, or your existing models start to become dated and unmanageable, that you take a look at the Anaplan platform.  You may find Anaplan will offer benefits or functionality that makes migrating over an attractive proposition.