Profile of Penny Crosman
News & Commentary Posts: 53
Articles by Penny Crosman
1/29/2007
The business intelligence movement rolls on and one of its benefactors is Wall Street. It's a good fit -- after all, what asset manager wouldn't want the most insightful views of the right data? I was recently briefed on three new or updated data analysis tools: one for analyzing the blogosphere for stock tips, one for analyzing SEC data, and one for portfolio backtesting. Here's what I found interesting.
1/12/2007
What are the pros and cons of using a data warehouse appliance versus a more traditional data warehouse? We asked John Devolites, general manager, communications and entertainment solutions at Teoco, to share with us his experiences with three data warehouse appliances. The bottom line: he's very happy with the price and his new, fast query rates, but don't call these appliances -- they're a far cry from the simple, plug-and-play boxes that the word "appliance" conjures up.
1/5/2007
It's Friday evening -- a perfect time for a cold pint of Guinness. Did you know that 10 million pints of Guinness are drunk around the world every day, four million of them in the U.S.? Getting all that alcohol shipped from the Dublin brewery to North American warehouses is a supply chain challenge is being met with the help of real-time business intelligence software.
12/22/2006
The promise of a fresh start, a new leaf, new projects, and maybe, just maybe, not repeating the mistakes and bad habits of the previous year is appealing, isn't it? We asked readers and industry luminaries what they plan/hope to do differently and predict will happen in the coming year. Here are some of their answers.
12/15/2006
The latest U.S. Census report came out today, giving data analysts and market analysts plenty of government-generated statistics and predictions about how Americans will behave in 2007 (the report is actually based on 2005 data, but how much could we have changed in the past year?). Generally speaking, we're continuing to watch a lot of TV, use the Web for many things and get fat. And millions of Americans are blogging.
12/11/2006
Optimization software provided a customer's view of performance and paved the way for ITIL adoption.
12/9/2006
I spoke this week to the articulate and knowledgeable Dr. Lynn Harold Vogel, CIO of the University of Texas' MD Anderson Cancer Center, about all the reasons why Americans don't have electronic medical records today, what the best e-health record initiatives out there today are, and how his hospital is building its own electronic records system and working to improve the way it treats cancer.
12/1/2006
What is a flat world and what does it mean for businesses? Will China be the next superpower? Can we understand God by understanding the laws of nature? A panel discussion yesterday afternoon in New York City brought together New York Times columnist (and author of "The World is Flat") Thomas Friedman, Reuters COO Devin Wenig, O'Reilly Media CEO Tim O'Reilly and others for a broad-ranging discussion of the flat world, Web 2.0 and other themes. Here's what I got out of it.
11/27/2006
"From the billions of documents that form the World Wide Web and the links that weave them together, computer scientists and a growing collection of start-up companies are finding new ways to mine human intelligence.
11/22/2006
Newly amended e-document related laws take effect December 1, 2006.
11/22/2006
IBM has announced that Apache has launched a project for UIMA-based software.
11/22/2006
A Weather Channel site used web analytics to find users weren't picking up on important navigational tools.
11/22/2006
How do you make your Web site "organically" pop up in the first five results of a potential customer's Web search? Elastic Path Software's Jason Billingsley offers three suggestions for improving a site's organic search results.
11/21/2006
Search engines don't know the difference between reading glasses and drinking glasses, but a taxonomy puts your query in context. We outline several ways to build taxonomies, ranging from the tough but potentially more accurate approach of building from scratch to the easier but potentially compromised approach of buying a prebuilt taxonomy or using automated clustering software.
11/21/2006
RB Search has developed three evolving taxonomies as well as a product and service ontology with more than 200,000 core terms.
11/17/2006
Vendors have been hawking enterprise digital rights management software since as early as 1994, yet few have bought. Board shenanigans and intellectual property lawsuits may start to propel solutions like Adobe's, which password-protects Word, PDF, and CAD files, to the forefront. Or not.
11/10/2006
A growing body of search software products aims to help a company understand and manage its reputation on the general Web, among media sources and in the blogosphere. Is software the best method of securing good public opinion?
10/31/2006
Intuit QuickBase's general manager Jana Eggers calls it the "app gap": that divide between rich, complex enterprise apps and less complex workgroup tasks often handled using email, spreadsheets, and manual methods. For quick, simple applications that let workgroups in large companies manage sales, customers, and projects, QuickBase offers a library of hosted tools that can be used independently or in combination, knit together if necessary by a Corporate Edition management layer.
10/27/2006
Here's some advice on setting your corporate data security agenda to avoid privacy pitfalls that can undermine any data management strategy.
10/12/2006
IBM announced yesterday the new version of Lotus Notes allows users to copy their Lotus Notes desktop to small USB devices.
10/10/2006
We examine performance management applications Cartesis Analytics 3.5 and KCI Control 8.8. We also take a look at Endeca's Information Access Platform 5.0.
10/10/2006
Customer Web site experiences are universally dreadful.
10/10/2006
A study conducted by the Business Performance Management Forum reveals enterprise compliance weaknesses.
10/10/2006
IBM bolsters SOA products and services arsenal; Oracle launches low-cost document management; and other notables.
10/10/2006
Where should a company start when tackling data security? Experts brought together by Xerox for a security summit suggest a number of first steps.
10/10/2006
Information lifecycle management has long eluded most companies. But EMC has filled in a piece of the puzzle that could start to make ILM a reality.
10/6/2006
You'd think small and midsize businesses (SMBs) on tight budgets would flock to open-source applications.
9/18/2006
InfoScape crawls file systems and automatically tag files with basic metadata and clues to business value, sensitivity and content.
9/13/2006
Business intelligence industry leaders have been lamenting a lack of BI skills in the workforce, prompting a host of institutions of higher learning to educate the masses.
9/13/2006
Doubts about compliance? You're not alone.
9/11/2006
Visible rules allow traceable, changeable decisions.
8/15/2006
Real-time BI can be tricky business.
8/15/2006
Besides being open source, the other unique aspect of Adaptive Planning's eponymous offering is that the company can host it or it can be deployed in a customer's in-house data center.
8/14/2006
Corticon's BRM system provides New Corp. the rules
visibility its business, management and IT people need to succeed.
8/14/2006
Debuting this summer, the instant messaging and web conferencing software is Eclipse based, making it platform neutral. Could this give the Linux Desktop a real chance for success?
8/8/2006
Account Reconciliation is software that eases the reconciliation process
8/3/2006
With its announcement yesterday that it's reselling IDS Scheer's ARIS
Platform as the Oracle Business Process Analysis Suite, Oracle is gaining four
useful BPM components.
8/2/2006
Moving its SOA strategy a few steps further ahead, IBM today announced its acquisition of Webify.
7/27/2006
Pentaho Spreadsheet Services lets business users access OLAP data using Microsoft Excel PivotTables.
7/18/2006
Lucent recently dedicated 200 full-time staffers to building their ITIL architecture within an 11 month time span.
7/18/2006
Although retailers already see the benefits of enterprisewide BI, they readily admit they have more work to do to improve data quality and step up their use of advanced analytics.
7/18/2006
With IBM's release of a Lotus Notes client for Linux desktops, the Linux community is hopeful that the OS still has the chops to become a more credible desktop option.
7/18/2006
A new European regulation coming out next year is said to make Sarbanes Oxley look tame.
6/21/2006
To improve satisfaction, service organizations are analyzing customer interactions to identify and correct problems before they escalate. And to stay in tune with changing needs, firms are scoring customers by the minute, applying analytics to the data stream from call centers, retails stores, Web sites and more to customize on the fly. Find out how you can use analytics to ace customer service.
6/20/2006
SAP, Oracle and smaller enterprise resource planning (ERP) software rivals are starting to partner with data visualization software providers, including Cognos and Business Objects.
6/1/2006
To help companies understand what their customers experience on the web, TeaLeaf's new CX products provide web session recordings and clickstream analytics to identify problems and opportunities.
5/25/2006
Entity Analytics Solutions 4.1 determines identities, finds criminals, and discovers non-obvious relationships between identities like shared phone numbers or bank accounts
5/22/2006
Business change guru Tom Davenport, professor at Babson College and author of numerous articles and books, offers advice on making the most of business intelligence.
4/11/2006
The key to designing smarter processes is measuring and analyzing process results to spot improvements. Bring processes to the next level by blending business activity monitoring and BI with BPM. Such combined approaches are paying off at Great Clips, TransUnion and DHL.
4/11/2006
All this BI activity adds up to more choice and possibly more confusion for customers, who will have to sift through the marketing hype to decide where to turn for needed tools.
4/11/2006
ITIL is in the midst of an update.
4/11/2006
Is it realistic to think Oracle could sweep in and take over the market from Business Objects, Hyperion and other BI leaders? Many in the industry believe the answer is, "not yet."
3/14/2006
Chief information officers rank business intelligence (BI) high on their lists of technology priorities, according to a recent Gartner survey.