Craig's blog

Can cancelling a project be a project success?

Typical status measurements for projects are "are we on time?" and "are we on budget?". On time and on budget represent two aspects of project status. The big picture though is that a project is an investment made by a company in order...

Published Wed, Jun 03 2009 4:22 PM by Craig McQueen

Filed under: Performance Management

Performance Management for Marketing Webinar now available

We recently put on a webinar focusing on performance management for a marketing group. The webcast featured valuable insight on topics including: · The customer in today’s economy · Microsoft BI tools and strategy · Customer...

Published Fri, Apr 17 2009 9:24 AM by Craig McQueen

Filed under: Business Intelligence, Customer Management, Performance Management

Agora wins a BI prize and an upcoming Webinar

Microsoft sponsered a Worldwide Business Intelligence demo contest early this year. I am happy to annouce that Agora received a first runner prize for our demo which shows how to use Microsoft tools to support Performance Management in a Marketing organization...

Published Wed, Mar 25 2009 10:31 AM by Craig McQueen

Filed under: Marketing, Customer Management, Performance Management

Presentation by Dr. Jim Goodnight, SAS CEO

I was fortuate enough to attend an event at the Rotmans School of Management last night featuring Dr. Jim Goodnight (founder, Chairman and CEO of SAS Inc.). It was hosted by Roger Martin and Richard Florida. It was an informal setting begining with an...

Published Thu, Mar 05 2009 9:06 AM by Craig McQueen

Changes to Microsoft Performance Point

The news that made the headlines with Microsoft over the past week was the layoffs. However, for BI professionals there has been an even more impactful change. Microsoft is changing the way Performance Point is packaged and licensed. The Monitoring and...

Published Tue, Jan 27 2009 9:02 AM by Craig McQueen

Filed under: Business Intelligence, Performance Point

Business Intelligence and Strategic Planning

With the New Year upon us many organizations (and individuals) are putting plans in place for 2009. There are lots of discussions of strategic objectives, goals, critical success factors etc. The biggest challenge sorting through the planning process...

Published Mon, Jan 05 2009 4:33 PM by Craig McQueen

Filed under: Business Intelligence, Performance Management

Top 5 BI Predictions for 2009

Well as 2008 draws to a close here are my top five (tongue in cheek) Business Intelligence predictions for 2009. 5. Since all the Canadian government can do is squabble over who is going to rule the country Canadians take things into their own hands and...

Published Tue, Dec 23 2008 12:08 PM by Craig McQueen

Filed under: Business Intelligence

Retaining your information: good or bad?

Yahoo announced they are reducing their user data retention policy to 90 days. Read about it here . Is this good or bad for users? Theoretically the more information a company has about you the better it can service you. The company knows your interests...

Published Wed, Dec 17 2008 1:20 PM by Craig McQueen

Filed under: Customer Management, privacy

"over 150 canned reports included"

Software makers often use the volume of pre-created reports as a selling point of their software. The number of reports doesn't matter. The question is does the system have the report relevant to the user with the right data presented in an understandable...

Published Tue, Dec 09 2008 8:59 AM by Craig McQueen

Filed under: Reporting

Marketing in 2009

I attended a roundtable event this morning put on by the Canadian Marketing Association . The panelists represented a great cross section of Marketing Executives from Harlequin, Canada Post, Chapters-Indigo and Dell Canada. Two common themes of the greatest...

Published Thu, Dec 04 2008 10:41 AM by Craig McQueen

Filed under: Marketing, Data Integration

Using Business Intelligence to optimize Marketing dollars

In a presentation I did this week the following image caught a lot of attention: I discussed how with existing customer information and software that you likely already have (Excel and Microsoft SQL Server) you can optimize your customer management processes...

Published Fri, Nov 21 2008 9:18 AM by Craig McQueen

Filed under: Marketing, Business Intelligence, Customer Management

Social Computing Analytics

Telligent has increased their ability to do analytics on social data collected by Community Server with the simultaneous release of Harvest and the hiring of a Chief Social Scientist. Dr. Marc A. Smith was hired from Microsoft and will lead Telligent's...

Published Tue, Nov 11 2008 1:26 PM by Craig McQueen

Filed under: Social Computing

Two big product annoucements

Microsoft had two big annoucements related to BI this week. Both are for Q1 2010 release. Kilimanjaro - this is an addition to SQL server for distributed processing of very large databases. They demonstrated a farm of 24 servers X 8 CPUs processing queries...

Published Tue, Oct 07 2008 9:01 PM by Craig McQueen

Filed under: Business Intelligence Conference

Data Mining at the point of Data Entry

I saw a brilliantly simple application of data mining this afternoon. Consider the scenario where you already have lots of data and users still entry more data via a web form. Apply Data Mining to determine if the information the user entered makes sense...

Published Mon, Oct 06 2008 9:58 PM by Craig McQueen

Filed under: Business Intelligence Conference

Gartner comments on the future of BI

I went to a Gartner session where they talked about the future of BI. The two items that stood our were: BI as a service - particularly as it applies to consolidating information in an industry and selling the aggregate back to the customer base Emergence...

Published Mon, Oct 06 2008 9:54 PM by Craig McQueen

Filed under: Business Intelligence Conference

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Can cancelling a project be a project success?

Performance Management for Marketing Webinar now available

Agora wins a BI prize and an upcoming Webinar

Presentation by Dr. Jim Goodnight, SAS CEO

Changes to Microsoft Performance Point

Business Intelligence and Strategic Planning

Top 5 BI Predictions for 2009

Retaining your information: good or bad?

"over 150 canned reports included"

Marketing in 2009

Using Business Intelligence to optimize Marketing dollars

Social Computing Analytics

Two big product annoucements

Data Mining at the point of Data Entry

Gartner comments on the future of BI