Controlling the Cost of Compliance with CALUMO

The National Greenhouse and Energy Reporting Act 2007 was passed in September 2007 establishing a mandatory reporting system for corporate greenhouse gas emissions and energy production and consumption. The first reporting period under the Act commenced July 2008 with reports due in July 2009.

Key features of the Act are:

• Reporting of greenhouse gas emissions, energy consumption and production by large corporations.
• Public disclosure of corporate level greenhouse gas emissions and energy information.

The Calumo and Elwyn groups in conjunction with CIO’s and Sustainability Experts from front running organisations have collaborated to develop an environmental reporting platform to enable corporations to meet the initial reporting requirements.

While the specific detail regarding the format and substance of the reporting requirements have not yet been fully locked down, it is clear that organisations will be required to capture, analyse and report on those operations of their organisation that have significant energy consumption or generation.

We expect that as the new legislation evolves over the introductory period organisations must be able to quickly adapt to the inevitable iterations that will flow from both global and local imperatives. This reality informed the design of our Environmental Reporting platform to offer;

1. quick and highly adaptable implementation to minimise the cost of expected changes to the Act during the introductory period 
2. a one-stop shop for data capture and all environmental reporting
3. flexibility to enable data to be collected from existing ERP and operational data sources
4. multiple hierarchy reporting platform to enable look-through transparency of information and accountability
5. qualitative (via commentary and traffic light reporting) capability to allow management to better interrogate the information.

About the Elwyn Group
Elwyn Group is a boutique consulting firm specialising in reporting solutions to medium and large organisations utilising pre-existing or custom developed solutions.  

About CALUMO
The CALUMO Group (www.calumo.com) is a leading provider of Performance Management solutions for enterprise-wide reporting planning and Business Intelligence.  Since 1998 the group has successfully delivered solutions to a wide range of enterprises from SME's to some of the largest listed companies and government organisations.   These solutions provide quantifiable and valuable business insight, offering a single platform from which to integrate Corporate, Financial and Operational performance and objectives. 
 
The Group is a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner in Business intelligence (achieving full competency in both Platform and Performance Management Specialisations), Data Management Solutions and ISV/Software Solutions.

SYDNEY,- 3 November, 2008 — After taking the difficult commercial decision to substantially change their Business Intelligence technology stack in February of this year, University of New South Wales have taken out a little time at the conclusion of their annual planning process to celebrate what has been achieved.

Reflecting on the process the UNSW Finance Division stated “This project has and will continue to be the catalyst for very positive change at UNSW. The UNSW team, with CALUMO’s expert guidance, are delivering a platform that enables us to maximise the financial resources available to support our teaching and research priorities more effectively and in minimal time.”

“The time frame from commencement to yielding real business value was astonishingly short.  The University environment is very demanding and complex; the flexibility and performance of CALUMO has been excellent.  It’s a breath of fresh air for the user community and the University was proud to be supporting world-class Australian innovation in Business Intelligence.”

CALUMO Group CEO Dominic Parsons said “As an academic institution there is a great deal at stake for the future in laying a platform that will enable the institution to effectively deliver on its vision.  Working with the University has been a special opportunity for us and the combination of their staff, senior sponsorship and our delivery teams has produced a benchmark result.”

The UNSW system is serving 250 users with critical information in frequencies ranging from daily and monthly to quarterly and annually.  It allows for collaboration across that broad range of users both for reporting and contribution to future financial and academic resourcing plans.

Summing up from the teams’ perspective MIS Manager Alister Cairns added “We are saving considerable time in administration compared with other products in the market. CALUMO’s simplicity of design and openness allows us a flexible system that we can use for data collection, analysis and reporting on a wide range of data. There are no unnecessary administration programs, and thus native Analysis Services, SSIS and SQL Server are used to develop and administer applications (Cubes, fact tables, data sources, dimensions etc.)”

“The CALUMO reporting frontend is intuitive and flexible in that we have a range of options for delivery to our wide ranging user community. We can use a web portal, Excel, deliver PDF's or hard coded excel reports. It is open for us to decide on our options for the data we choose to analyse, the user experience and administration.”

UNSW is using Microsoft and CALUMO Business Intelligence solution for their annual budgeting cycle, management reporting and forecasting.  The value return from BI increases exponentially with deployment.  Over the next 12 months UNSW are planning to further expand their BI platform to incorporate additional reporting and scorecarding.

About the University of New South Wales
UNSW was established in 1949 and now has close to 40,000 students, including more than 7000 international students from over 130 different countries. UNSW has an annual turnover of $1 billion and employs over 5000 staff. UNSW is a founding member of the prestigious Group of Eight research intensive universities in Australia and a member of the Universities 21 international consortium

About CALUMO
The CALUMO Group (www.calumo.com) is a leading provider of Performance Management solutions for enterprise-wide reporting planning and Business Intelligence. Since 1998 the group has successfully delivered solutions to a wide range of enterprises from SME's to some of the largest listed companies and government organisations. These solutions provide quantifiable and valuable business insight, offering a single platform from which to integrate Corporate, Financial and Operational performance and objectives.

The Group is a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner in Business intelligence (achieving full competency in both Platform and Performance Management Specialisations), Data Management Solutions and ISV/Software Solutions.

CALUMO and Microsoft will co-present  “The Business Intelligence Scenario” at The 2nd Annual Southern Region CFO Symposium 2008, where more than 100 CFO’s are scheduled to attend over two days.

Business Intelligence has gathered increasing profile in recent years as both the IT and Finance functions have become aware of its potential to improve business. Tim Dawson (Financial Services Industry Manager, Microsoft ) and Chris Mentor (Director Consulting Services CALUMO Group) will profile typical BI scenarios focusing on deployment challenges and outcomes.

When: Monday 13th and 14th October 2008
Where: Hilton on the Park, Melbourne

About CALUMO
The CALUMO Group (www.calumo.com) is a leading provider of Performance Management solutions for enterprise-wide reporting planning and Business Intelligence.  Since 1998 the group has successfully delivered solutions to a wide range of enterprises from SME's to some of the largest listed companies and government organisations.   These solutions provide quantifiable and valuable business insight, offering a single platform from which to integrate Corporate, Financial and Operational performance and objectives.

The Group is a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner in Business intelligence (achieving full competency in both Platform and Performance Management Specialisations), Data Management Solutions and ISV/Software Solutions.

- Last week we presented a logic puzzle devised by Einstein which we used as a simple analogy to explain business intelligence and the components (cubes, dimensions and elements) typical of a real business with thousands or millions of transactions.
– This week, we provide a solution to the puzzle as well as discussing the Data Mining perspective illustrated in Einstein's puzzle...

Click on this link to look back at the original puzzle and the 15 hints provided.
The question is: Who owns the fish?
Here is The Solution:

Since we know we have only 25 data points to derive, let's start by making a five by five table (instead of a 5 x 5 x 5 x 5 x 5 x 5  or 15,625, six dimensional cube) where columns represent the five houses and the rows represent nationality, colour, drink, smoke, and pet per the table below.

• In the next table below, let's fill in the easy clues first (hints 8, 9 and 14).
• Then, the green house/white house combination (hint 4) cannot be houses 1 and 2 or houses 2 and 3 because the second house is blue. It also cannot be houses 3 and 4 because the green house owner drinks coffee (hint 5) and the third house owner drinks milk. So the green house must be fourth and the owner drinks coffee and the white house is fifth.
• The red house with the Brit (hint 1) cannot be the second, fourth or fifth house (which are blue, green, and white), nor can it be the first house (which contains the Norwegian), so it must be House 3.
• Therefore, the yellow house with the Dunhill smoker (hint 7) must be the first house and horses are kept in the second house (hint 11).

We can now complete the puzzle in the last table below as follows:

• The Norwegian in the first house does not drink milk or coffee, because we already know these beverages are drunk in the third and fourth houses.  They do not drink tea, because the Dane drinks tea (hint 3), nor beer, because the Blue Master smoker drinks beer (hint 12) and the Norwegian smokes Dunhill. Therefore, the Norwegian must drink water.
• The Blend smoker is in the second house, with a neighbour who drinks water (hint 15).
• This Blend smoker cannot drink beer (hint 12), so the beer-drinking Blue Master-smoking person must live in the fifth house.
• The tea-drinking Dane (hint 3) lives in the second house.
• The German who smokes Prince (hint 13) must be in the fourth house.
• The Swede must live in the fifth house with his dogs (hint 2).
• The Pall Mall smoker lives in the third house and raises birds (hint 6).
• That leaves only the Norwegian in the first house as the one with cats who lives next door to the man who smokes Blend (hint 10).

Therefore, assuming that the fifth pet is a fish, it is the GERMAN who owns the fish.

The Data Mining Perspective
It is worth commenting that the distribution of data in this problem makes it manageable as a solution in two dimensions. In the business world however, there will be thousands or millions of transactions and the distribution of data will not be so neat. For example, not all Germans own fish and not all people who drink water also smoke Dunhill. So with many many transactions, business decision makers might typically want the answers to questions like:

• Which nationalities drink beer?
• Is there a link between pet ownership and cigarette preference?
• What is the most popular house colour in Norway?

For questions like these, the process of discovery is inverted and, rather than having the gathered intelligence allow us to fill in the data points, we use the available data points to enable business to extract answers about the relationships implied by the data. Relationships that may not be apparent or obvious from a dimensional business intelligence review of the available data. This is Data Mining. “Data mining is the semi-automatic extraction of patterns, changes, associations, anomalies, and other statistically significant structures from large data sets.”

So how do Business Intelligence and Data Mining differ? Terms associated with traditional BI include analytics or exploration, drill down, trending, reporting, planning data entry and modeling of business rules. For data mining, terms include predictive analytics, classification, association, regression, segmentation.

In a future post, we will go into these data mining terms in more detail.

About CALUMO
The CALUMO Group (www.calumo.com) is a leading provider of Performance Management solutions for enterprise-wide reporting planning and Business Intelligence.  Since 1998 the group has successfully delivered solutions to a wide range of enterprises from SME's to some of the largest listed companies and government organisations.   These solutions provide quantifiable and valuable business insight, offering a single platform from which to integrate Corporate, Financial and Operational performance and objectives.

Calumo is partnering with Microsoft in a series of sessions, to illustrate how Microsoft, one of the world's largest companies, reduces the cost and risk associated with financial reporting.
Microsoft Corporate Accounting Group Manager Lisa Nelson, and Director of Corporate Accounting Alice Jolla, will be discussing in detail how Microsoft's financial reporting process creates a well controlled work environment.

CALUMO Group will be discussing the relevance of this best practice to Australian close and reporting. These practices enable Companies to dramatically streamline time-consuming traditional methods by operating out of one consolidated environment. Companies can collaborate and manage calendars, task lists, documents, and sign offs with a complete audit history and streamline the audit process to boot.

• Microsoft has benefited through this best practice as follows:
• Reduced annual report filing time from 50 days to 31 days
• Shaved approximately five days out of internal checking process
• Reduced black-out periods for stock trading
• Enabled quarterly reporting simultaneously with earnings press release
• Streamlined auditor involvement and reduced related costs

These events are scheduled for:
Melbourne: 23 September 2008
Sydney: 24 September 2008
Perth: 26 September 2008

Please Register Here.
Places at this complimentary event are limited - don’t miss your chance to attend an exclusive invite only session.

About CALUMO
The CALUMO Group (www.calumo.com) is a leading provider of Performance Management solutions for enterprise-wide reporting planning and Business Intelligence.  Since 1998 the group has successfully delivered solutions to a wide range of enterprises from SME's to some of the largest listed companies and government organisations.   These solutions provide quantifiable and valuable business insight, offering a single platform from which to integrate Corporate, Financial and Operational performance and objectives.

The Group is a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner in Business intelligence (achieving full competency in both Platform and Performance Management Specialisations), Data Management Solutions and ISV/Software Solutions.

The logic puzzle below is attributed to Albert Einstein and it is said that only 2% of us can solve it.

The Puzzle
There are 5 houses in 5 different colours.
In each house lives a person with a different nationality.
These 5 owners drink a certain type of beverage, smoke a certain brand of cigar, and keep a certain pet.
No owners have the same pet, smoke the same brand of cigar or drink the same drink.

Hints
1. The Brit lives in a red house.
2. The Swede keeps dogs as pets.
3. The Dane drinks tea.
4. The green house is on the left of the white house.
5. The green house owner drinks coffee.
6. The person who smokes Pall Mall rears birds.
7. The owner of the yellow house smokes Dunhill.
8. The man living in the house right in the middle drinks milk.
9. The Norwegian lives in the first house.
10. The man who smokes Blend lives next door to the one who keeps cats.
11. The man who keeps horses lives next door to the man who smokes Dunhill.
12. The owner who smokes Blue Master drinks beer.
13. The German smokes Prince.
14. The Norwegian lives next to the blue house.
15. The man who smokes Blend has a neighbor who drinks water.

The Question: Who owns the fish?

At the CALUMO Group, we have been providing business intelligence and performance management solutions since 1998. To solve this puzzle, we viewed it as a typical business intelligence or data mining challenge where very often all the information required is available, but where the means to derive and present the answers is not that obvious. Here is how we answer these questions for our customers:

The Business Intelligence Perspective - Cubes, Dimensions and Elements
We broke the problem down into a matrix, or cube, comprising six dimensions with each dimension comprising five elements as follows:

We then combined the six dimensions into a cube. Physical cubes can only be three dimensions, but the representation below is a great way to visualize the concept of six or more dimensions. Start with the cube made up of 3 dimensions; Drinks, Smokes, Pets. This cube is then embedded into a further cube comprising; Houses, Nationality and Colour.

It's of significant interest at this stage to note that the puzzle only contains 30 populated data points (5 houses, 5 Nationalities, 5 Colours, 5 Drinks, 5 Smokes, 5 Pets). The possible data points or combinations are comparatively huge at 5 x 5 x 5 x 5 x 5 x 5 or 15,625. This phenomenon of few actual data points, but a large number of possible data points is referred to as sparse data and data explosion and is very typical of real life commercial business intelligence applications.

Remember, this puzzle only has 6 dimensions with only 5 elements in each dimension and only 5 transactions in total. Imagine a real business with dimensions like Customers or Products, which typically have hundreds or thousands of elements, and cubes with more than 6 dimensions and transaction numbers in the thousands or millions.

On a typical CALUMO assignment, we gather and transform data to support the business intelligence building blocks. We then integrate and present the data in a unified business intelligence and performance management application. The challenges we face and the business answers we provide are not too dissimilar to Einstein's puzzle.

So, it is no coincidence then that all of our consultants are able to derive the answer to Einstein's puzzle. Were you able to work it out, or more importantly, are you able to answer all the difficult business intelligence questions at your organization? If the answer is no to the first question, and if you're interested, we will be posting the solution to the puzzle next week.

If the answer is no to the second question, please contact us to find out how CALUMO can help you get the answers for stand-out business intelligence and performance management. If you were able to work out the answer (in less than 15 minutes), please contact us to consider a career in business intelligence at CALUMO :-)

- In addition to providing a solution next week, we will also be discussing the Data Mining perspective illustrated in Einstein's puzzle.

About CALUMO
The CALUMO Group (www.calumo.com) is a leading provider of Performance Management solutions for enterprise-wide reporting planning and Business Intelligence.  Since 1998 the group has successfully delivered solutions to a wide range of enterprises from SME's to some of the largest listed companies and government organisations.   These solutions provide quantifiable and valuable business insight, offering a single platform from which to integrate Corporate, Financial and Operational performance and objectives.

Sydney, NSW, - September 9, 2008 — Today, MIKADO DYNAMICS is proud to announce that we are now an IBM Cognos Platinum Reseller Partner, making us one of only a few other Australian partners to achieve Platinum status and with offices in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane! The Platinum partner status is the highest level of distinction within the IBM Cognos partner program and MIKADO DYNAMICS has achieved this through our continued success in delivering successful business solutions and increased product sales.

"Going Platinum with IBM Cognos recognises that MIKADO DYNAMICS is seriously committed to its customers, it's people and its partnership with IBM Cognos and the Cognos TM1 BI Platform" said Dominic Parsons - MIKADO DYNAMICS CEO.

About IBM Cognos Reseller Partners and Partnering with IBM Cognos
IBM Cognos Reseller Partners sell IBM Cognos products and provide business intelligence, enterprise planning and corporate performance management consulting services, ensuring the successful implementation of IBM Cognos products. IBM Cognos Partners provide products, services, and technology expertise that help our customers improve and direct corporate performance. Our broad range of partnerships allows us to meet the distinctive needs of our customers in purchasing, deploying, and servicing their business intelligence and performance management solutions. Cognos TM1 offers a single software suite that supports all the components of corporate performance management - from planning and budgeting, to measuring and monitoring performance, to reporting and analysis. Through their industry expertise and specialized knowledge, our partners extend that offering, helping our clients maximize their technology investments.

About MIKADO DYNAMICS and The CALUMO Group
MIKADO DYNAMICS (a CALUMO Group associated company) is the longest standing performance management solution provider in Cognos TM1, with over 12 years experience. The CALUMO Group (www.calumo.com) is a leading provider of Performance Management solutions for enterprise-wide reporting planning and Business Intelligence.  Since 1998 the group has successfully delivered solutions to a wide range of enterprises from SME's to some of the largest listed companies and government organisations.   These solutions provide quantifiable and valuable business insight, offering a single platform from which to integrate Corporate, Financial and Operational performance and objectives.

Microsoft announced the release of SQL Server 2008 on August 6th, 2008. Code-named "Katmai", SQL Server 2008 is the new version of the company’s acclaimed data management and business intelligence platform. This version of SQL Server provides powerful new capabilities such as support for policy-based management, auditing, large-scale data warehousing, geospatial data, and advanced reporting and analysis services.

SQL Server includes several data management and analysis components as follows:

Database Engine
The Database Engine is the core service for storing, processing and securing data. The Database Engine provides controlled access and rapid transaction processing. The Database Engine also provides rich support for sustaining high availability.

Analysis Services - Multidimensional Data
Analysis Services supports OLAP by allowing you to design, create, and manage multidimensional structures that contain data aggregated from other data sources.

Analysis Services - Data Mining
Analysis Services enables you to design, create, and visualize data mining models which can be constructed from other data sources by using a wide variety of industry-standard data mining algorithms.

Integration Services
Integration Services is a platform for building high performance data integration solutions, including packages that provide extract, transform, and load (ETL) processing for data warehousing.

Replication
Replication is a set of technologies for copying and distributing data and database objects from one database to another, and then synchronizing between databases to maintain consistency.

Reporting Services
Reporting Services delivers enterprise, Web-enabled reporting functionality so you can create reports that draw content from a variety of data sources, publish reports in various formats, and centrally manage security and subscriptions.

Service Broker
Service Broker helps developers build scalable, secure database applications. This new Database Engine technology provides a message-based communication platform that enables independent application components to perform as a functioning whole.
 
About CALUMO
The CALUMO Group (www.calumo.com) is a leading provider of Performance Management solutions for enterprise-wide reporting planning and Business Intelligence.  Since 1998 the group has successfully delivered solutions to a wide range of enterprises from SME's to some of the largest listed companies and government organisations.   These solutions provide quantifiable and valuable business insight, offering a single platform from which to integrate Corporate, Financial and Operational performance and objectives. 
 
The Group is a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner in Business intelligence (achieving full competency in both Platform and Performance Management Specialisations), Data Management Solutions and ISV/Software Solutions.

IBM Cognos TM1 9.4 was released on August 14 and can be downloaded from the Cognos support site for registered customers (userid and password required).

Key new features of this release include:

1. "Active Forms" replace dynamic slicing
   TM1 9.4 has removed dynamic slicing.  Instead, new Active Forms allow for standard Excel format options in a worksheet and to view and update live TM1 cube data directly in Excel when connected to a TM1 server.
2. New features to support Sarbanes-Oxley Compliance
   - Three TM1 Administrator Roles
   - New TM1 Audit Log
3. Long String Support
   TM1 9.4 supports strings longer than 255 bytes in cell data and SQL statements.
4. Microsoft Windows Vista and Excel 2007 Support
   - New TM1 ribbon for Excel 2007
   - .xlsx files can be opened in TM1 Web if Excel 2007 is installed on the web server
5. TM1 Web 64-bit IIS Support
6. Unicode Support for multiple languages

A more detailed review of all these new features can be found in the attached TM1 NEW FEATURES GUIDE.

Pictured: In 9.4 seconds, a WORLD RECORD by Frank Wykoff runnning the 100 YARD DASH on June 7, 1930 - A segue reference to "version 9.4" (since Usain Bolt can only run 100m in 9.69 seconds) and a reference to the legendary speed of TM1 cubes.

Integration of IBM Cognos 8 and TMI 9.4
Other exciting developments include Integration of IBM Cognos 8 and TMI 9.4.
At the Cognos TM1 Forum this week (3-5 September) Cognos demonstrated how Cognos 8 Business Intelligence enhances the deployment and implemention of IBM Cognos TM1. This included complex and simple reports, multi-source dashboards, report packs, comprehensive analyses, managed reports with prompts, scorecards, scheduling, distribution and alerts, without scripting or coding!

Utilising the real-time in-memory facilities of TM1 cubes, data updates can be reflected immediately by the BI components. Employing a multi-user live scenario, Cognos illustrated these abilities in a web-based zero footprint environment.

About CALUMO
The CALUMO Group (www.calumo.com) is a leading provider of Performance Management solutions for enterprise-wide reporting planning and Business Intelligence.  Since 1998 the group has successfully delivered solutions to a wide range of enterprises from SME's to some of the largest listed companies and government organisations.   These solutions provide quantifiable and valuable business insight, offering a single platform from which to integrate Corporate, Financial and Operational performance and objectives.

Mikado Dynamics (a CALUMO Group associated company) is an IBM Cognos Platinum Reseller Partner. The Group is the longest standing performance management solution provider in Cognos TM1, with over 12 year’s experience.

Port Douglas, Queensland,— August 7, 2008 — Today, CALUMO Group proudly announced that it has won the Partner of the Year Award for Business Intelligence at the 2008 Microsoft Australia Partner Program Awards. The company was chosen out of a local field of top Microsoft Partners as delivering market-leading customer solutions built on Microsoft technology.

Pictured: holding the award and celebrating were Bruce McCarthy, Dominic Parsons, Johann Potgieter, Brenden Russell, Jeff Walter and Mike Henegan of CALUMO Group.

Accepting for CALUMO, group CEO Dominic Parsons said “I am proud to accept this award on behalf of the CALUMO team.  Our developers and professional services teams work tirelessly to deliver truly innovative, effective and world-class solutions for our clients.  This is our second award from Microsoft in as many years and to be recognized with the inaugural Microsoft award for BI is a great affirmation of our vision for Performance Management.”
 
The CALUMO Group has been providing Business intelligence and Performance Management solutions for over 12 years and began working with Microsoft only 3 years ago.  Their unique BI application and pragmatic approach to delivering fully fledged BI has been openly embraced by its clients.
 
This award recognises partners who provide data-warehousing and business-intelligence solutions that improve organisations by providing business insight to all employees — leading to better, faster, and more-relevant decisions.  CALUMO Group was recognised for superior technology and innovation in Business Intelligence. 
 
“Our partners are the lifeblood of Microsoft’s business and through the Awards we’re able to highlight and recognise those who have gone above and beyond in delivering exceptional technological solutions and services to Australian customers,” said Mr Paul Voges, Director of Small and Mid Market Solutions and Partner Group, Microsoft Australia.
 
“It’s an honour to acknowledge their dedication and success as part of the Microsoft partner community, and also to recognise the broader role that they play as leaders in Australia’s IT sector.”
 
The Microsoft Australia Partner Program Awards recognise Microsoft Partners that have developed and delivered exceptional Microsoft-based solutions over the last year.
 
 
About CALUMO
The CALUMO Group (www.calumo.com) is a leading provider of Performance Management solutions for enterprise-wide reporting planning and Business Intelligence.  Since 1998 the group has successfully delivered solutions to a wide range of enterprises from SME's to some of the largest listed companies and government organisations.   These solutions provide quantifiable and valuable business insight, offering a single platform from which to integrate Corporate, Financial and Operational performance and objectives. 
 
The Group is a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner in Business intelligence (achieving full competency in both Platform and Performance Management Specialisations), Data Management Solutions and ISV/Software Solutions.

Whilst enthusiasm and investment in business intelligence and performance management projects continues across enterprises of all sizes and all industries, major project successes cannot be taken for granted.

From enlightening to disappointing, we use the “helicopter view” and “head in the clouds” analogies to describe the range of outcomes possible from business intelligence projects.

The "Helicopter View" is a metaphor for rising above the detail of the situation so that you can see it as a whole, and see the wider context. It means taking the overview in order to see the essential rather than the detail.

Business Building Blocks
The "Helicopter View" is the big picture of your business and a way to see how all of the parts fit together. To achieve this, the Business Intelligence solutions must be holistic and include all the building blocks of the enterprise. The Business Intelligence solution must also highlight the linkages between the building blocks. The building blocks typically include:

1. Customer Segments – who are your customers?
2. Value Proposition - what do you offer each of your customer segments?
3. Channels - how do you reach each of your customer segments?
4. Customer Relationships – how do you relate to your customers over time?
5. Revenue Streams - how do you earn money?
6. Key Resources – based on which assets are you running your business?
7. Key Activities - what key activities do you need to run your business?
8. Partner Network - with which partners do you leverage your business?
9. Cost Structure – where and what are your most important costs?

Convergence of Data and Performance Management Applications

Performance Management includes a multitude of Business Intelligence applications. The benefits of the “Helicopter View” can only be fully realized when the entire suite of applications is integrated into a single unified application or platform.

Inextricably linked to unified application is the requirement for the convergence of data. Gather the data to support the above "business building blocks” and “performance management applications”. Transform and make it consistent via such processes as Master Data Management and data cleaning (if necessary). Integrate and package the data for BI consumption.

The “Helicopter View” relies on the convergence of both data and performance management applications.

Without a business intelligence helicopter view, supported by reliable and timely detailed information produced by quality and repeatable processes, you could be running your businesses with your head in the clouds when your focus should really be on the ground.

On Feb 14, 2008 New York City unveiled a new online performance management system they called "Citywide Performance Reporting" (CPR). CPR takes 500 key performance indicators, which are updated monthly, and makes them available to the public online. You can visit the New York CPR site here.

With an annual budget of US$58.5 billion, NYC is many times larger than Australia's largest council; however the performance management challenges faced by NYC are still comparable to those faced by Australian local government agencies.

The New York City press release said: "CPR is the culmination of more than two years of work coordinated by the Office of Operations, and involving more than 40 City agencies." The three key benefits of CPR can be summarised as follows:

1. CPR uses a standardized reporting format across all agencies and all data types, and provides a single point of access for all users.
2. CPR aggregates data across agency into "citywide themes," which represent groups of related services such as infrastructure, education, or public safety.
3. CPR will identify problem areas and improve service delivery. It is another step in improving transparency and customer service for New Yorkers.

You can read the full press release here.

Notably, these 3 benefits are very similar to the challenges faced by Australian Local Government agencies. The stated 3 key benefits of the CALUMO Local Government Performance Management Solutions" are as follows:

1. Integrate and transform multiple data sources into highly informative metrics and KPI reports for performance management of diverse and competitive Council operations.
2. Provide open and transparent reporting for improved governance and stakeholder management.
3. Provide planning and reporting from a single reliable source, satisfying a council’s strategic, organisational and compliance requirements.

The following is a screen shot of one of NYC’s online performance reports:

Whilst I have several criticisms of how the CPR data is presented and ultimately therefore it's value to the end-user, I only want to point out two flaws in CPR, which are specifically claimed in the press release as benefits.

1. "CPR is trend-based, not target-based. It compares current performance to performance during the same time last year providing a short-term performance trend or "snapshot", intended to be used for real-time decision-making."
   In our opinion, comparing current performance to the same time last year does not provide a meaningful trend and I doubt it could be used for real-time decision-making.
2. "CPR will offer graphical representation of performance, including pie charts to make performance trends easy to identify."
   CPR includes only pie charts. Pie charts are not typically used to identify trends. Pie charts are also often criticized for taking up too much space on a page and that it is not easy to visually compare the size of each slice.

I have provided below an example of the equivalent CPR report from CALUMO Local Government Performance Management Solutions.

(click on image to enlarge)

CALUMO Local Government Performance Management Solutions deliver the functionality Councils need to achieve their many internal planning and reporting objectives. It delivers open and transparent reporting for improved governance and stakeholder management.

Please join us as our guest at the Microsoft Business Intelligence Summit in Melbourne on 28 November, or Sydney on 29 November. The focus of this complimentary one day event is to excite and educate high level delegates with solutions built on Microsoft’s comprehensive BI platform.

One of the presentations, by Lea Munro of Queensland Rail, is a CALUMO user story titled “Forecasting & Reporting – How Queensland Rail have Extended the Microsoft BI Platform”.

One of the greatest risks to effectively embedding any corporate BI system is the failure of IT and operations to connect, agree and move forward together.  By choosing the Microsoft Platform and CALUMO, QLD Rail set out with the best possible start – an infrastructure that IT knew, understood and trusted; and an application layer that offered end users the depth and flexibility they need to both submit and extract the information they need.  This approach has provided QLD Rail with a successful initial roll-out and the capability to scale rapidly across its enterprise.  In this session Lea Munro discusses QLD Rail’s process for selection, the success of the initial roll-out, lessons learned and plans for the future.

The Business Intelligence Summit delves into the technology and practical benefits behind Microsoft’s leading business intelligence products, and how to seamlessly integrate them within your organisation. It’s the first of its kind to be held in Australia.

Click here to register.

Johann presented new data visualisation techniques using sparklines (aka in-cell charts or microcharts) and gave some examples of predictive analytics and data mining to extract opportunities from data.

The CPA Congress is the biggest event for public sector and business professionals to discover insights for sustainable performance. Each year the CPA Congress attracts over 2,500 like-minded industry professionals and maximises professional development by offering over 80 sessions across a range of topics from high profile speakers www.cpaaustralia.com.au

Click on the link to view/download the Exception Reporting presentation.

What women want and other analytical questions

Last night my wife showed me a spreadsheet where she's been recording her weight for the last 9 years (she herself admits to being a bit OCD). I saw a perfect application for CALUMO In-Cell Charting to present this data in an intensely meaningful way using a sparkline.  She was so impressed when I showed her the chart and for once my need for analytics, proof & logic satisfied her need to be understood.

My Analysis
Within a few seconds of building the chart, I was able to make the following observations:

• Other than on 4 occasions, she has stayed within + or - 10% of her 9 year average weight (her normal range).
• You can easily spot her 2 pregnancies at the 2 chart peaks, but I note she consumed more chocolate thickshakes during her first pregnancy, thus explaining her max of 90kg (at the red dot) just before the birth of our first child.
• She experienced more dramatic weight loss after her first pregnancy than after the second pregnancy. The faster weight loss was assisted by weight loss tablets, which took her to her min of 63kg (at the green dot), but the low was short lived when she stopped taking weight loss tablets.
• I proudly note a healthier and more sustainable approach during & after her second pregnancy (fewer thickshakes, no weight loss tablets and plenty of exercise).
• In the early years, prior to her first pregnancy, there are a few volatile up & down swings. These reflect those volatile and decadent years before children.

So why did I use an in-cell chart?

Well, for one thing the chart above is effectively representing more than 3,000 data points (9 x 365). CALUMO In-Cell Charting provides an intelligent visual presentation of large amounts of meaningful data for identifying trends, comparing data and highlighting exceptions. Secondly, the chart display with the min/max, normal and closing looks deceptively simple – its actually not for the novice to achieve in standard spreadsheet packages. By combining charts and data together in a table, we easily achieve this and do away with the need to separately label axes and legends, or the need to associate the table data with the chart information.

CALUMO In-Cell Charting (AKA Sparklines) provides Line, Axis, Bar, Bullet, Grid, Strip & Arrow charts. Imagine the application of this where a single page transforms and concentrates large amounts of corporate data into KPI's on a single page for rapid and effective review and analysis.

One of the Six Most Promising Private Technology Ventures from Australia

Red Herring 100 Asia is an exclusive event honouring 100 cutting-edge private technology companies from across the Asia-Pacific region.  The event brings together an elite roster of entrepreneurial and global venture investment firms to showcase excellence in innovation.
 
Winners were selected from a pool of more than 500 applicants based in 16 countries/regions including China, India, Japan, Singapore, Korea, Australia and Vietnam.  The names of the 100 announced winners can be found online at www.herringevents.com/asia07/redherring100.html#100.
 
The Red Herring editorial team carefully selected the winning companies based on both quantitative and qualitative criteria such as financial performance, technology innovation, quality of management, execution of strategy, and integration into their ecosystem. The 100 winners are based in 16 countries/regions including China, India, Japan, Singapore, Korea, Australia and Vietnam.
 
"After a rigorous evaluation process, we’re very happy with winners we selected,” said Joel Dreyfuss, Editor-in-Chief of Red Herring.  “There was a large pool to choose from and we’re impressed by the calibre an innovative talent bursting from Asia’s business and technology sector.”

About CALUMO Labs Pty Ltd
CALUMO Labs software is the only complete, unified Performance Management and Business Intelligence solution built entirely in .Net2 and powered by Microsoft’s Analysis Services 2005. CALUMO provides planning, forecasting, consolidations, reporting, analytics and dashboards across financial, executive and all operational departments. CALUMO Labs empowers the enterprise through insight, integration and collaboration. For more information, visit www.calumo.com.
 
About Red Herring
Red Herring is a global media company uniting the world’s best high technology innovators, venture investors and business decision makers in a variety of forums: a leading innovation magazine; an online daily technology news service; technology research, and major events for technology leaders around the globe. Red Herring provides an insider’s access to the global innovation economy, featuring unparalleled insights on the emerging technologies driving the economy. For more information, visit www.redherring.com.

SYDNEY, Australia, August 31, 2007 –  At a gala function at the 2007 Microsoft Australia Partner Conference held at Hamilton Island, Microsoft awarded Calumo Labs Pty Ltd the Microsoft Partner of the Year Award in the category "Data Management Solutions, Database Management".

The award recognises the partner that provides outstanding solutions in data warehousing and business intelligence. The winning partner’s solutions provide organizations with a competitive edge in performance reporting and business insight across the enterprise, leading to better and more timely business decisions.

"The award is a testament to the depth of experience and innovation that Calumo Labs brings to customer solutions delivered on the Microsoft platform" said Christine Bishop, Product Marketing Manager SQL Server, Microsoft Australia. "Given the significant investments that Microsoft have recently made to make BI capabilities more accessible across the organization, partners such as Calumo Labs are vital to the future success of Microsoft and its customers."

"We are delighted to have received this award from Microsoft” said Jeff Walter, Marketing Director, Calumo Labs. “It confirms our leadership position in delivering innovative BI solutions to clients using Microsoft technologies. For us, the award underlines the enormous opportunities for Business Intelligence delivered on the Microsoft platform and reflects the dedication, talent and professionalism of the entire Calumo Group team." Mr Walter also offered "Special thanks to the Microsoft Australia team for their ongoing support and willingness to always ‘go the extra mile’ for their partners."

Pictured: Jeff Walter holding the award and celebrating with Christine Bishop (Product Marketing Manager SQL Server) and Tony Mudie (ISV Business Solutions), Microsoft Australia.

About CALUMO Labs Pty Ltd (formerly SPF Pty Ltd)
CALUMO Labs software is the only complete, unified Performance Management and Business Intelligence solution built entirely in .Net2 and powered by Microsoft’s Analysis Services 2005. CALUMO provides planning, forecasting, consolidations, reporting, analytics and dashboards across financial, executive and all operational departments. Calumo Labs provides comprehensive consulting, training and support services for BI solutions built with Calumo on the Microsoft BI platform. CALUMO Labs empowers the enterprise through insight, integration and collaboration. For more information, visit www.calumo.com.

One of the Most Promising Private Technology Ventures in Asia

Red Herring carefully selected the finalists based on criteria such as technology innovation, financials, business model, management team, customers and alliances.  The 200 finalists are based in 16 countries/regions including China, India, Japan, Singapore, Korea, Australia and Vietnam. The names of the 200 companies short-listed as finalists for the "Red Herring 100 Asia 2007" can be found online at http://www.herringevents.com/asia07/redherring100.html

"The 200 finalists we selected from across 16 countries and regions are all excellent contenders," said Joel Dreyfuss, Editor-in-Chief of Red Herring. "They are exceptional companies who thrive on innovation and strongly define the important role of technology in Asia’s economy and throughout the world."

About CALUMO Labs Pty Ltd
CALUMO Labs software is the only complete, unified Performance Management and Business Intelligence solution built entirely in .Net2 and powered by Microsoft’s Analysis Services 2005. CALUMO provides planning, forecasting, consolidations, reporting, analytics and dashboards across financial, executive and all operational departments. CALUMO Labs empowers the enterprise through insight, integration and collaboration. For more information, visit www.calumo.com.

About Red Herring
Red Herring is a global media company uniting the world’s best high technology innovators, venture investors and business decision makers in a variety of forums: a leading innovation magazine; an online daily technology news service; technology research, and major events for technology leaders around the globe. Red Herring provides an insider’s access to the global innovation economy, featuring unparalleled insights on the emerging technologies driving the economy. For more information, visit www.redherring.com.

Just for fun I created the AFL ladder below using CALUMO to illustrate two of our business intelligent in-cell charts.

In the first column of the table, we're using a win/loss bar chart to show each team’s record for the 17 rounds of the 2007 AFL season. A blue bar represents a win, a red bar a loss and a blank bar a draw. With 16 teams and 17 rounds played, the bar chart effectively shows the visual equivalent of 272 data points, maximizing data density without compromising readability or ease of use.

Let's take a look at these results: Geelong took 5 rounds to warm up, but definitely seem to be on a winning roll now. Collingwood & Fremantle both seem to have a "win at home, loose away from home" problem. After winning six games straight, West Coast started paying the price for not being able to play their best football.

CALUMO In-Cell Charts provide an intelligent visual way of presenting large amounts of meaningful data for identifying trends, comparing data and highlighting exceptions.

In the last column of the table, we compare the percentage wins using a simple relative sized horizontal bar combined with numeric value percentage wins. By combining charts and data together in a table, we do away with the need to separately label axes and legends, or the need to associate the table data with the chart information. In order to achieve this, CALUMO Visualization Widgets provide in-cell charting for presentation class dashboards and charts.

With the click of a mouse, CALUMO In-Cell Charting make the design of really compelling executive dashboards easy.

Business Intelligence and Performance Management Home

CALUMO has been chosen as one of five finalists in the "Applications and Infrastructure Tools" categories for the prestigious 2007 iAwards.

The Applications and Infrastructure Tools award is presented to the most innovative nomination for the development of applications and infrastructure tools. Any software program that operates hardware increases the efficiency of systems, measures and/or monitor systems usage and performance. Any software program that provides for data access/retrieval, data manipulation (eg.sort/merge), data management, data warehousing and program design/development. It includes all database management system (DBMS) software; decision-support and executive information system (EIS) programs; spreadsheet programs; front-end and back-end CASE tools; and emerging areas like cooperative processing and/or object management application development tools.

The iAwards finalists reflect the diversity of innovation across the Australian high-tech community. The iAwards program recognises the need to celebrate the significant contributions that ICT makes to the Australian economy.
 
The iAwards will be co-presented by AIIA, the Australian Financial Review, the CSIRO ICT Centre and MIS Australia at the iAwards gala dinner on Wednesday 30 May 2007 in Sydney.

The Australian iAwards are an initiative of The Australian Information Industry Association (AIIA).

About AIIA
The AIIA is the leading national body representing the information and communications technology (ICT) industry. With almost 500 member companies right across the country, from every sector of the industry and representing every size of company. AIIA sees itself as the representative of the Australian ICT industry.

The role of AIIA is to set the strategic direction of the ICT industry, influences public policy, engages industry stakeholders and provides member companies with business productivity tools, advisory services and market intelligence to accelerate their business growth. AIIA assists the ICT industry to meet its business objectives, both locally and globally.

Business Intelligence and Performance Management Home

– In Part 1, I discussed the rise of Microsoft’s OLAP market share and how this benefited us by educating the market on the benefits of business intelligence and what has become Business Performance Management.
– In Part 2 last week, I discussed our decision to embrace Analysis Services including our research findings and the enormous opportunity we saw for BPM applications on Analysis Services 2005.
– This week I will discuss our BPM vision and product roadmap and explain in some detail the CALUMO Microsoft Partnership where we’re embracing elements of their BI platform whilst applying our subject matter expertise to provide a more sophisticated and complete offering..

Let me start by saying that in our view Microsoft’s entry with PerformancePoint is an important validation of the BPM market as a whole.

For PerformancePoint, the immediate opportunity is to see how ProClarity has been combined with existing capability such as Business Scorecard Manager and other new capability to provide a framework for budgeting, forecasting, planning, and consolidation. In light of PerformancePoint and other developments, we will continue to embrace any new capability if we think there are components of the technology that make sense and add value for our customers. CALUMO is a certified member of the “Microsoft SQL Server Data Warehouse Alliance” and for a long time now we have leveraged elements of the Microsoft BI platform to deliver our BPM applications. We intend to continue to rely on this approach.

What differentiates our offering is that we continue to offer significant application logic over and above the Microsoft platform. As I mentioned in my previous post, the market understands BI and BPM because of Microsoft’s reach, but often needs or wants a more sophisticated solution than is available through vanilla Microsoft. The OLAP Report has just released its annual OLAP Market Shares showing Microsoft's share increase by nearly 4% from 2005 to 31.6% for 2006. Tellingly the report also states that “Microsoft Analysis Services is typically chosen by smaller organizations”. CALUMO extends the reach to medium and large organizations with more advanced capability than would otherwise be satisfied by a non-Microsoft solution such as Hyperion, Cognos, or Business Objects.

Partnership with Microsoft

In our view, Microsoft sees the value of working closely in partnerships that can add value to their stack. An example of this is their Office Business Applications (OBA) initiative. Microsoft wants Partners to develop applications that integrate closely with Microsoft Office to front-end business applications. These OBA’s are important to Microsoft because they provide a way to get Office entrenched in businesses. By the way, OBAs are for use with Office 2007 only. With our extended Calumo OBA we take the program even further with extensive integration with Internet Explorer, SQL Server 2005 and support for older versions of Excel.

Our technical partnership makes sense too. If you look at the BI/BPM landscape as a whole, it’s increasingly becoming a black and white choice between new technology solutions versus old technology solutions. CALUMO had a blank canvas technology wise and functionality wise. As a result, we don’t have any integration issues with multiple products or legacy code. Everything is .Net2.0 and SSAS. Technically therefore working closely with Microsoft is mutually beneficial. Originally it was only a question of an order of magnitude increase in performance between 2000 and 2005. Of late it’s been a best practice approach in database design and high-end business requirements.

Our value-add over PerformancePoint includes operational analytics, predictive analytics, and depth and breadth across our applications. To try and be more specific regarding depth and breadth across applications, some of our features available through both Excel & the Web include:

• Ad-hoc Browse (through Excel and or the Web)
• Slice to Excel
• Rich Excel client functionality
• Web Reports - functionally rich, dynamic, freeze frames
• Read Only or Write back (through Excel and or the Web)
• Bottom-Up (basic & advanced)
• Top-Down  (basic & advanced)
• MDX Support
• Support for Stacked Dimensions
• Multiple Cubes within a single view
• Report/Batch Manager
• Text management
• Drill Down (Members)
• Drill Through (Transactions or Cubes)
• Advanced Member Search & Sort
• Save Data Views
• Save Member Subsets
• Support for Member Aliases
• Support for Grids, Charts, Gauges
• Data Filter - rankings, top/bottom n or %
• X64

Regarding our competitors, a significant differentiator is our ability to offer a complete BPM application on a single unified platform (no legacy code, no integration issues with multiple products). Our Excel Add-in is also very advanced including no less than 35 spreadsheet functions. We have given Excel a lot of thought and focus in development.

This brings us to where we are today where we continue to forge ahead with our vision and believe that the Microsoft BPM Applications gap remains a significant opportunity. We continue to diligently draw upon our previous 10 years subject matter expertise to build sophisticated BPM applications. While we are doing this, the number of Calumo customers continues to grow.

Conditional Formatting for Maintenance Free Formatting & Presentation

Shading alternate rows is a very common and easy way to make a table with multiple columns more readable. This is usually achieved in Excel by applying Format, Cells, Patterns, Color on alternate rows. So what's the problem? Well, if the table is then sorted, or rows are deleted or added the shading will be scrambled in the process.

Conditional formatting is great way to keep the desired shading without any effort. This is achieved by using a =ROW()=EVEN(ROW()) formula as a conditional format across the entire table as follows.

How does this work?

• The formula =EVEN() rounds any number to the nearest even integer. For example =EVEN(9)  rounds to an even 10.
• =ROW() returns the row number of the current cell.

Therefore when these two formulae are combined in a “Formula Is” condition such as "=ROW()=EVEN(ROW())", if =ROW() is an even number, the formula returns True and applies the conditional format. if =ROW() is an odd number the formula returns False and the conditional format is not applied.

We hope this tip makes things easier for you.

– In Part 1 last week, I discussed the rise of Microsoft’s OLAP market share and how this was beneficial by educating the market on the benefits of business intelligence and Business Performance Management (BPM). This week I discuss our decision to embrace Analysis Services including our research findings and the enormous opportunity we saw for BPM applications on Analysis Services 2005..

In 2003, we began a “from the ground up” development of our BPM application powered by Analysis Services 2005 (SSAS). Our product CALUMO is the result of these efforts. The development brief was to build a sophisticated BPM application at least equal to or better than what we had done in the past (SPF Plus on TM1 OLAP Server). It also had to be better than the solutions offered by our competitors (Cognos, Hyperion, Outlooksoft etc).

A standout item of research that illustrates the opportunity we saw is the chart below which correlates OLAP Market shares (per the OLAP Report) against the BPM Applications market shares (per IDC).

Note that Hyperion has almost precisely the same OLAP and BPM market shares, yet Microsoft has nearly 30% OLAP market share, but only a trivial BPM share. This is an enormous gap of nearly 25%. Although there are other 3rd party players who leverage Analysis Services filling some of this gap (eg about 2% each from Outlooksoft and GEAC, plus others which were not tracked by IDC), our research showed that most of these customers needs were not being fulfilled. They were either:

• Not using Analysis Services (ie they were using SQL Server, but the OLAP module was shelf-ware), or
• the applications were very simple and could not be classified as BPM.
• In some of these cases the gap was or is being filled with a non Microsoft solution for both the OLAP and BPM components (eg Hyperion, Cognos or TM1).

We believed that providing for and filling the Microsoft BPM Applications gap was the most significant and neglected market opportunity at the time. For us, it has been about being first to market with the latest technology on Analysis Services 2005. It’s also about providing a more sophisticated application than Hyperion, Cognos and our other competitors on a unified platform.

Software development is never easy, but our decisions and efforts so far have been more than vindicated:

• Analysis Services 2005 has proven to be a dramatic improvement on 2000,
• and, because we built CALUMO from the ground up, we don’t have any legacy code, or integration issues with multiple products. Everything is .Net2.0 and we are not trying to support customers on both MSAS and SSAS.
• Also, the subject matter expertise we have from our previous 10 years of BPM software development, has allowed us to design what we consider to be a complete, sophisticated and functionally rich application (for Web, Excel, Reporting, Analysis, Write-back and predictive analytics on one unified platform).

Looking back, we achieved what we set out to do, but how do we continue on this path of judicious serendipity? In light of PerformancePoint and other Microsoft BI initiatives, we’re now even more excited about leveraging Microsoft technology and our ability to build software that could fill the 25% BPM applications gap.

– In Part 3 next week, I will discuss our BPM vision and product roadmap and explain in some detail the CALUMO Microsoft Partnership where we’re embracing elements of their BI platform whilst applying our subject matter expertise to provide a more sophisticated and complete offering..

With the imminent release of Microsoft PerformancePoint, I have been asked several times how this will effect our vision for CALUMO and the impact it will have on the BI market generally.

The best way to answer this question is to provide a bit of our history and consider Microsoft’s gradual entry into the market [the market being OLAP, Business Intelligence, and Business Performance Management]. One cannot just consider Microsoft’s play based on PerformancePoint alone. One must view Microsoft’s entry based a long history of software releases starting with Excel Pivot Tables, then OLAP Services for MS SQL, Analysis Services 2000, Data Analyzer, Analysis Services 2005, and now PerformancePoint (built out of ProClarity).

We’ve been in the BI business since the early 90’s. It was around the time, Excel Pivot Tables were released by Microsoft. I remember the fear I felt when some analysts and prospects told us that our business could not survive Microsoft's entry into our space. The same thing happened when OLAP Services was released at the end of 1998 and again later when OLAP Services became Analysis Services 2000. Over the years I’ve watched in awe as Microsoft’s OLAP market share soared from nothing to nearly 30% in 2006. At the same time, our business also grew and has been very successful since those early years.

So why do we think both businesses and others in the space have continued to prosper and grow?  Well, as you can imagine we take understanding this pretty seriously.  The key things we believe are:

• Microsoft’s incredible reach and marketing machinery educated the market about OLAP and multi-dimensionality.
• Pivot tables and Analysis Services 2000 did not have enough features and performance to satisfy many of our customers which were mid-market to large corporates (for example, query performance in conjunction with write back was a problem in Analysis Services 2000 which is a major improvement in 2005).

So, rather than going out of business, we met more prospects who understood multi-dimensionality because of Microsoft, but who wanted more than Pivot Tables and Analysis Services 2000 could offer. Many of these organizations became our customers.

Whilst it was a huge relief to still be in business, we were not naïve enough to think that Pivot tables and Analysis Services 2000 would not one day mature into significantly more complete and competitive offerings.

Based on our research, we considered it significantly more likely that Analysis Services would mature as an OLAP engine before Pivot Tables was enhanced sufficiently to be considered a competitive BPM application.  So, how do you take the successful components of a strong BI business not built on Microsoft and align and prosper with the Microsoft platform -  once again, we spent many hours considering what our business needed to do to remain competitive and continue to delight our customers.

– In Part 2 next week, I will discuss our decision to embrace Analysis Services including our research findings at the time and the enormous opportunity we saw for BPM applications on Analysis Services 2005...

Microsoft has published a 120 page Analysis Services 2005 Performance Guide.

Major topics from the contents page include:

• Enhancing Query Performance
  • Understanding the querying architecture
  • Optimizing the dimension design
  • Maximizing the value of aggregations
  • Using partitions to enhance query performance
  • Writing efficient MDX
• Tuning Processing Performance
  • Understanding the processing architecture
  • Refreshing dimensions efficiently
  • Refreshing partitions efficiently
• Optimizing Special Design Scenarios
  • Special aggregate functions
  • Parent-child hierarchies
  • Complex dimension relationships
  • Near real-time data refreshes
• Tuning Server Resources
  • Understanding how Analysis Services uses memory
  • Optimizing memory usage
  • Understanding how Analysis Services uses CPU resources
  • Optimizing CPU usage
  • Understanding how Analysis Services uses disk resources
  • Optimizing disk usage

The guide is currently applicable to SQL Server Service Pack 2. We hope this is an indication that it will become a living document with further contributions and enhancements as SSAS 2005 evolves and further expert knowledge is acquired through research and practical experience.

Congratulations to the authors and subject matter experts who contributed to this document. As Mosha Pasumansky (one of the contributing subject matter experts) says on his blog "This guide is a big deal, and anybody serious about Analysis Services 2005 should download it and read from end to end."

Business Intelligence and Performance Management Home

Good dashboard, graph and chart design is critical to getting the most out of your Business Intelligence software investment.

Good visual communication of data enhances insights and provides rapid communication of information to decision makers.

We have below an example of a poorly designed chart, followed by an analysis of the problems and our proposed alternative solution.

The chart below forms part of a dashboard which formed part of a BPM application presentation we attended.

Our analysis of the problems with this chart:

• The background visual effect is distracting and adds no value.
• With Pie Charts it can be difficult to visually compare the sizes of pie slices. In this case, the reflective water droplet at the centre of the pie is flashy, but makes it even harder to make this visual comparison.
• The legend uses a lot of display space and does not intuitively match back to the pie slices.

Our Proposed Solution:

Note, there is nothing fancy about our solution, but it is simple and communicates clearly and effectively.

• Our use of horizontal bars solves a few problems. Firstly, the legend becomes the Y axis text labels which are now directly associated with their respective bars (this would not have been as convenient with vertical bars, especially with long text labels.)
• Secondly, the values can be sequenced by size, from large to small or vice versa. Ranking adds significant visual value here.
• As a general rule, involve a graphic designer in the development of visual effects (eg a corporate template for reports and dashboards), but when in doubt, remove any background images and visual effects which are not adding any value.
• We did not use many different colours in our solution and as always, we took into consideration what our chart would look if it was photocopied or printed in black and white.

Alignment of objectives is the most important factor responsible for breakthrough business performance.

Whilst this may sound obvious, it is often a simple idea that provides powerful results. Take a look at the image below. Somewhat abstract, it is a striking illustration of unaligned objectives. Much is said about charismatic business leadership and the need to increase revenues, innovate, or reduce costs, yet without strategic and cross departmental alignment, collaboration and accountability our illustration shows why it would be difficult to achieve anything.

Source: BRW Magazine advertising campaign.
"BRW: Know which way business is heading"

In our experience, the primary barriers to business alignment are culture and technology related.

Examples of cultural barriers include departmental information silos, a lack of cross-departmental knowledge sharing and resistance to change. A cultural shift is required for alignment to occur. To effect cultural change, the best chance of success requires a combination of C-level sponsorship and the involvement of key departments (Operations, HR, IT and Finance).

Technology barriers centre on the difficulties of integrating multiple systems, as well as the capability to deliver relevant and consistent information to each user across all departments. Adopting technology offering a unified platform for consolidation, reporting, analysis, budgeting and forecasting can significantly assist in the alignment of business objectives for breakthrough business performance.

What is it about the Kalman filter that makes it attractive from a retailer’s point of view ?

As  mentioned in passing two weeks ago the original idea of the Kalman filter when applied to missiles and spacecraft was that as new information became available on the position, velocity and acceleration of the vehicle, the Kalman filter only needed to process the latest data. It was no longer necessary to have to reprocess all of the flight telemetry data recorded since launch to work out the position of the vehicle.

The application of this approach to retail point-of-sale data means that rather than having to process 52 weeks of sales data each week, only the most recent data needs to be processed. A single initial pass through 52 weeks of data is enough to calculate the filter’s coefficients. The filter can then be updated by addition of only the most recent week’s sales data. If you are having to estimate millions of SKU locations this is going to be pretty important. As new data becomes available, updating of the filter can occur at a greater speed than calculating a moving average model. All the more so with the advent of 64-bit servers.

This all well and good, but why go to all this extra trouble to calculate a stock model using a relatively complex method? The main driver of retail inventory levels is forecast accuracy. The stock you order today is the stock you have to live with tomorrow! From real-life retail experience, a Kalman filter estimate is often more accurate three weeks out than a moving average from only one week out. This translates to a 35% improvement in stock turns over a moving average model. If you get 3.5 turns from a moving average, you will get 4.7 turns from a Kalman filter.

There are probably better things to spend money on than unnecessary inventory.

In our experience, it's always good to start a budgeting & forecasting project during a quiet part of the year. Get it in for a forecast month so that if the project end-date slips, go-live can be shifted a month with no major business disruption. It also gives you the benefit of a soft start on a non-critical forecast, where everyone gets used to the system and transitions smoothly into the budget when this rolls around.

On the other hand, implementing only at budget time can lead to long hours for the project team and, because the project end date (budget start) can’t change, final testing is sometimes only completed during the budget process.

A lot of companies start their Business Intelligence / Performance Management purchase cycle in the latter half of the year leading up to the budget cycle. The vendor selection process and contract signing often take longer than expected, leaving only a couple of months to spare before the system has to be scoped, implemented, tested, trained and rolled out. In other words, getting the system in and ready for budgeting immediately whatever stop-gaps this may include. The compromise is often the planned rolling forecast which takes the backburner for another day. A lot of momentum is lost as resources focus on the budget and other new projects demand attention. Unless the initiative is focused back on completing the rolling forecast capability, then, apart from reporting, the model sits in stasis until the next budget.

Whichever approach you take, we'll be happy to work with you to get the job done on time and on budget, but we also like to think that with a bit of foresight, we can help you remove some stress and accelerate your ROI.

Business Intelligence and Performance Management Home

In business today graphs, charts and gauges often form an important part of measuring and presenting numbers. In our business, which revolves entirely around the presentation of business intelligence and performance management numbers, we see poorly designed graphs and charts on a daily basis.

In order to illustrate (and hopefully prevent) some common design mistakes, we will provide some examples of poorly designed charts, followed by an analysis of the problems and our proposed alternative solution.

The chart below forms part of a presentation we attended, described as “a fantastic presentation of graphics for more visual appeal.”

Our analysis of the problems with this chart:

• The background image is distracting and adds no value
• The gridlines are hardly visible, but do not make it any easier to understand the chart
• The legend uses a lot of space and could be more intuitive to match back to the chart bars
• The bars are unnecessarily thin which makes them harder to see
• The chart has no title
• The Y axis title/units (US$) has been written vertically making it subtly difficult to read.

Our Proposed Solution:

• As a general rule, anything that does not contribute to the meaning of a graph is an unnecessary distraction. Therefore remove the background image and grid lines which are adding no value.
• We considered removing the X and Y axis lines, but decided in the end only to de-emphasize them by changing them from black to light grey.
• We recommend the use of soft, or neutral colours and colours of different saturation. Save bright colours for emphasis only where required. In our solution we could have used colour but used shades of black and grey to highlight that we thought about how our chart would look if it was photocopied or printed in black and white. Imagine how the original solution would look if it had to be faxed.
• The legend has been moved above the chart and ordered in the same sequence as the bars, to ease the process of matching the legend up with the bars.
  Moving the legend provides more space for the chart and allows the bars to be thicker for better visual effect.
• Change the orientation of the Y axis title/units to be horizontal.
• Add a title to the chart

Business Intelligence and Performance Management Home

CALUMO is a three syllable word pronounced Cal (as in the first syllable of calculate) + Lieu (as in “in lieu of” meaning “in place off “) + Mow (as in mow the lawn).

CALUMO is derived from celeusma, a Greek word (but used also in Latin: ke>leuma) meaning the song, chant or command given by the chief oarsmen that gives power and rhythm to the rowers.

In the same vane, CALUMO empowers people facilitating collaboration within an enterprise for unified business performance management.

Some people have told us the name also sounds like calculate from “Cal”; numbers from “umo” derived from numero; and illuminate from “lumo”.

All this is true and reflects a sense of what CALUMO is about, but most importantly we think that people using CALUMO are Business Intelligent.

Business Intelligence and Performance Management home.

We read with great interest recently that Financial Consolidation Applications have reached the Plateau of Productivity on Gartner’s Hype Cycle for Business In