UK to press for green accounting at Rio
Britain will be calling on governments to adopt “green accounting” at the forthcoming world conference on sustainable development, to be held in Brazil in June.
Caroline Spelman, the Environment Secretary, will announce an initiative to get all countries to produce accounts based on “GDP-plus”, an enhancement of the traditional gross domestic prduct (GDP) including assessments of “natural capital” such as rivers, forests and other natural resources. Read more
Today’s MBAs – the “sustainable generation”
Good news – tomorrow’s business leaders are a lot “greener” than today’s. According to a new study commissioned by Sky MBA students are likely to see themselves as part of the first “sustainability generation”. They are more knowledgeable about sustainability and see business opportunities in it which today’s leaders are not generally taking advantage of.
ZDnet lists BI in top Five for 2012
ZDnet blogger Heather Clancy ranks Business Intelligence second in an entry entitled “Five Essential Technologies for Small Businesses”.
Heather reckons “big data” will be adopted in a major way by small companies in 2012, citing an SMB Technology Group study which indicates 16 percent of small and 29 percent of medium sized businesses have bought a BI solution in the past two years. A similar proportion plan to make BI investments over the next twelve months.
Read more
The Carbon Trust Standard – Measuring carbon reduction
This is one of a series of short articles that highlight environmental standards and measures organisations can use to raise their level of sustainability. And one of the most effective ways to secure measurable improvements is in the area of carbon emissions.
What is the Standard?
The Carbon Trust Standard was set up in 2007/08 and according to its website is “widely considered as the world’s leading certifier of organisational carbon footprint reduction”. The Standard recognises a commitment to measuring, managing and reducing carbon emissions. Key areas measured are:
- Carbon footprint
- Carbon management
- Carbon reduction
IBM Takes Text Analytics to Its CIO Survey
IBM has used text analytics of worldwide interviews with midmarket CIOs to identify four distinct patterns in CIO vision, planning and thinking for the next three to five years. The report also shows that more than 80% see business intelligence and analytics as part of their corporate strategic vision.
The report, entitled The Essential CIO, contains insights from IBM’s 2011 Global CIO Study. Based on conversations with 622 midmarket CIOs, IBM asserts that
- 83% include business intelligence and analytics in their strategic vision
- 72% envisage mobility solutions
- 67% envisage virtualization
The four CIO “mandates” uncovered with the help of text analytics are defined as
Expand – “Refine business processes and enhancing collaboration”
Levarage – “Streamline operations and increase ogranisational effectiveness”
Transform – “Change the industry value chain through improved relationships“
Pioneer – “Radically innovate products, markets, business models”
According to the paper, Internal collaboration and client interaction are among the principal goals of midmarket CIOs with a Leverage mandate. Critical activities are managing essential IT activities and fast, accurate delivery of information to decision makers.
For CIOs with an Expand mandate the most critical goal is probably improved decision making. They aim to achieve this by simplifying internal processes and products, and by capitalizing on analytics.
CIOs in the Transform category are focused on managing complexity for their organizations, customers and partners, simplifying internal key processes but also supporting efforts to simplify for clients. More than 50% also intend to simplify for external partners.
Pioneer CIOs are interested in product/service profitability analysis, citing new sources of revenue as the highest impact of IT on their organizations in the coming three to five years.
IBM completes its report by stressing the continuing need to innovate in the face of rapid technological change and the “onslaught” of data, rather than be satisfied with incremental operational improvements.
Full article: http://www-304.ibm.com/businesscenter/cpe/download0/218842/2011mmciostudy.pdf
IBM Takes Text Analytics to Its CIO Survey
IBM has used text analytics of worldwide interviews with midmarket CIOs to identify four distinct patterns in CIO vision, planning and thinking for the next three to five years. The report also shows that more than 80% see business intelligence and analytics as part of their corporate strategic vision.
The report, entitled The Essential CIO, contains insights from IBM’s 2011 Global CIO Study. Based on conversations with 622 midmarket CIOs, IBM asserts that
- 83% include business intelligence and analytics in their strategic vision
- 72% envisage mobility solutions
- 67% envisage virtualization
The four CIO “mandates” uncovered with the help of text analytics are defined as
Expand – “Refine business processes and enhancing collaboration”
Levarage – “Streamline operations and increase ogranisational effectiveness”
Transform – “Change the industry value chain through improved relationships“
Pioneer – “Radically innovate products, markets, business models”
According to the paper, Internal collaboration and client interaction are among the principal goals of midmarket CIOs with a Leverage mandate. Critical activities are managing essential IT activities and fast, accurate delivery of information to decision makers.
For CIOs with an Expand mandate the most critical goal is probably improved decision making. They aim to achieve this by simplifying internal processes and products, and by capitalizing on analytics.
CIOs in the Transform category are focused on managing complexity for their organizations, customers and partners, simplifying internal key processes but also supporting efforts to simplify for clients. More than 50% also intend to simplify for external partners.
Pioneer CIOs are interested in product/service profitability analysis, citing new sources of revenue as the highest impact of IT on their organizations in the coming three to five years.
IBM completes its report by stressing the continuing need to innovate in the face of rapid technological change and the “onslaught” of data, rather than be satisfied with incremental operational improvements.
Full article: http://www-304.ibm.com/businesscenter/cpe/download0/218842/2011mmciostudy.pdf
Global BI market set to grow – again
According to The Gartner Group, global Business Intelligence spending will grow by 9.7% in 2011 to reach $10.8 billion by the end of the year. Growth will continue until 2014. Gartner sees this as a sign of the “strategic importance” of BI, according to managing vice-president Ian Bertram. Vendors are also making BI, analytics and performance management central in their marketing strategies. Read more
What’s new in IBM Cognos 10?
Cognos 10 has been out a couple of months now. So what’s happened to Cognos 9, and what’s so different from Cognos 8?
Well, Cognos 9 apparently is Cognos Express, in case you missed it. Most users still have Cognos 8, although hearsay evidence is that many are moving to Cognos 10. So what’s new (as far as Cognos is concerned)? Read more
What Is Event Studio?
Event Studio is a component of Cognos 8 Business Intelligence. It allows users to keep track of events that they consider important. An event can be any change in data; for example when a metric you have been watching falls below acceptable levels.
It does this by allowing you to create agents to monitor events you are interested in. there is no limit to how many events you can set up. Agents can be scheduled to run at any time or frequency.
A task can be set up to do a number of actions, including send an email, run a report or job (ie several actions) or update a database.
Each agent has a subscription list of users who will be notified when the agent is activated.
What Is Analyis Studio?
Analysis Studio is a drill-up drill-down product that allows you to examine and analyse large amounts of data. From this reports can be created and saved to be run in the future. Reports can be output in various formats including HTML, PDF, Excel and text files.
Analysis Studio works with dimensional data, which is data organised into hierarchies and levels. You can filter data, swap rows and columns and sort rows and columns. Data can be shown in a grid as shown above (known as a crosstab) or in a number of chart formats. All the main chart types, such as line, bar and pie charts, are supported. Read more