By Andrea L. Nylund

LEVERS & PULLEYS Tracing the BI Family Tree

Modern-day Shawn Bay remembers the first “P&G got a jump on the competition time he heard the term “busi- TECHNOLOGY with early data warehousing. It gained technologies ness intelligence.” As a market SPOTLIGHT market share by having information and analyst at Procter & Gamble in knowing how to channel it. By 1985, it had trace their roots the ‘80s, Bay had been part of a Business proven that you can apply technology to network that pioneered data Intelligence business and make money off it,” said Bay. to early work at warehousing and decision sup- “We built a financial to un- PARC and P&G port. But something fell into place one day derstand what was going on at the corporate level.” a few years later while meeting withGart- P&G called in Metaphor Computer Systems, a spin- nerGroup analyst Howard Dresner in off of Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). Nashua, N.H. Metaphor, whose core competency was decision sup- In 1989, Dresner had coined a term for the collec- port and data warehousing, offered customers a sin- tion of technologies involved, and having recently gle integrated hardware and software package with its moved to Gartner, was ready to push the concept of own user interface, operating system, database servers in earnest. Bay liked it—a single and routers. P&G commissioned the company to link phrase that gave form to an emerging industry and put sales information and scanner data from A.C. Nielsen into context “all the technologies that help business to P&G products and customers. A BI Family Tree

Vision Associates, Inc. Ralph Kimball Associates • Apply BI to all industries • Data Warehouse Design Computer Associates

Platinum 1988-Present Unilever Microsoft Red Brick Brio Technology Information IBM DB2 IBM Visual Cognos • COO • Researcher • Fast Ad-hoc • Graphical Query & Advantage • Performance Warehouse • Powerplay Query BI Development Prodea Technology • Transformation Objects

Procter and Gamble

Shawn Bay Bob Herbold David Liddel Ralph Kimball Katherine Richard Larry P&G Deploys Metaphor for P&G Helps IBM enhance P&G Funds Development 1985-88 P&G Employee P&G Employee Metaphor Metaphor Glassey Tanler Barbetta Thousands of Employees DB2 Query Performance of Cognos Powerplay Metaphor Metaphor Metaphor

Metaphor Integrated Business 1984 Intelligence System David Liddel Ralph Kimball

Xerox PARC 1975 STAR WorkStation Source: Shawn Bay, Vision Associates People and tech- make decisions based on fact,” he recalled. “Using fact “We had [data on] customers, products and rev- nologies involved rather than intuition was the key to intelligence.” enues all in one. Data warehousing was built off this with early business From that simple genesis 10 years ago, a lineage of perspective,” said Ralph Kimball, former vice president intelligence efforts technologies and companies was set in motion. Com- of applications at Metaphor and author of The Data have found their panies such as Brio, Documentum, Teradata, Cognos, Warehouse Lifecycle Toolkit. way into current Platinum, Lotus Notes and others can trace their roots KM companies back to Procter & Gamble, data warehousing and the Follow the knowledge and products. discipline that Dresner dubbed “business intelligence.” Now look at what happened to the technology and To mark BI’s 10th anniversary, KMM talked to a few of tacit knowledge that was involved in that project. Kim- the pioneers of a field that laid the foundation for ball left Metaphor in 1986, two years before IBM ac- knowledge management. quired the company. He founded Red Brick Systems “A lot of what is now part of KM traces back to P&G to develop a database that handled ad hoc queries in the mid 1980s,” suggested Bay, now the CEO of Vi- faster than transaction-oriented products like IBM’s sion Associates, a business intelligence services DB2 and Oracle. Red Brick went public in 1992 and provider in White Plains, N.Y. When retail scanners was later purchased by Informix. were introduced in the early 1980s, their most valuable Richard Tanler left Metaphor to found BI provider advantages seemed obvious: faster checkout lines and Information Advantage and create information-spe- perhaps better control of inventory. But large con- cific packaged solutions. Katherine Glassey also went sumer packaged goods companies like P&G realized on from Metaphor to cofound Brio, which successfully that there was a lot of potentially critical information unbundled Metaphor’s graphic query tool. Larry Bar- just lying around waiting to be put to strategic use. betta, still another Metaphor graduate, founded deci-

JULY 1999 KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT sion support specialist Prodea (in across multiple domains and the 1987), which was later acquired by collaboration of employees to pro- Platinum Technology, which in turn vide broad access to information was acquired by Computer Associ- assets in an organization. While BI ates this year. is more structured, problem-driven Meanwhile P&G went to veteran By the time Howard Dresner (left) was and focused on integration of data, software developers Cognos and coining the term “business intelligence,” analysis and specific business do- supported the development of Shawn Bay and Procter & Gamble (center), mains, knowledge management is PowerPlay, a tool for delivering with the help of Ralph Kimball and Metaphor event-driven and focuses on inte- OLAP slicing and dicing. Computer Systems (right), were already gration of disparate information Bay’s P&G colleague Bob Her- mining value from the data warehouse. sources, he said. bold, after 26 years at P&G—where “Once companies have decided to he was CIO—was hired by Microsoft to be EVP and decide, they use information from business intelligence to COO of worldwide operating groups and won high give knowledge management BI Meets KM praise for creating internal knowledge sharing systems perspective. BI analyzes data, worthy of an industry leader. and KM adds tacit knowledge Ten years after coining the term “business intelli- For his part, Bay moved on from P&G to Unilever be- forces,” Dresner added. gence,” how does the GartnerGroup view its con- fore starting Vision Associates in 1992 to provide BI ser- The expectation before nection with the newer field of knowledge vices and vertical-marketing BI solutions. Vision the Web was that data sim- management? Today, Gartner refers to a class of Associates worked with IBM to develop its BI strategy ply needed to be delivered, KM-enabled BI products, having the following set and has often collaborated with Howard Dresner and according to Kimball. Only of functional features: the GartnerGroup. five years later, half the U.S. • An environment in which analytic information “Few know how to get what they want and which expects instantaneous de- from data analysis, DSS and EIS systems is used products and technologies will get them there,” Bay said. livery of useful content in and applied by analysts and decision-makers; Technology is converging. and text mining the form of documents, • A Web-based repository for publishing reports are merging. Technologies and applications of tech- sound and video, sending IT from diverse sources, and an environment for nologies are coming together in integrated solutions.” professionals scrambling to reporting projects; provide infrastructures to Looking forward meet rising public demand. • Dynamic reports, which allow readers to ex- Building on the decade’s evolution of BI, knowledge The Web is creating an plore live data and alternative scenarios; management has emerged to depend on—and act astronomical market for • Reports available by subscription to those who on—the contents of the data warehouse. knowledge management need to know; “In the early days, people thought of business intel- and business intelligence, he ligence as all things to all people. But it is really the fix- said. Today’s consumers • Collaboration around reports, and any other ture on top of the plumbing, not the plumbing itself,” want a one-on-one experi- relevant information to make decisions; according to Dresner. “Today, BI is more specialized ence and expect sites to rec- • Capture of the results of decisionmaking, for and actionable than it was 10 years ago and is even ognize who they are, what the organizational history; more relevant for organizations. Microsoft legitimized they have ordered, what oth- • Shared organization of information so both data ACTION ITEM BI and turned it into something that is ers have ordered and then to and text can be navigated in a coherent struture. Vision Associates, Inc. useful to small and medium busi- make recommendations. Source: GartnerGroup, “Business Intelligence Meets Knowledge www.visionassociates.com nesses, not just the Fortune 500.” “The Web is as profound (914) 421-4400 Management,” March 1, 1999. Reprinted with permission. Dresner’s definition of business in- as the advent of inexpensive Ralph Kimball Associates www.rkimball.com telligence includes all the ways an en- postage, television and the telephone,” said Kimball. (408) 395-8778 terprise can explore, access and “We’re drawn into a real revolution—more in terms of GartnerGroup analyze information in the data ware- the way we communicate than the technology we use.” www.gartner.com house to develop insights that lead to Ten years from the day that Howard Dresner first (203) 316-1222 improved, informed decisions. So BI uttered the phrase, the field of business intelligence Brio Technology tools include ad hoc query, report is more relevant and business-critical than ever. Its www.brio.com (650) 856-8000 writing, decision support systems, ex- subsequent development and cross-fertilization with Information Advantage ecutive information systems and tech- the related field of knowledge management contin- www.information niques such as statistical analysis and ues to set the agenda for business technology in the advantage.com (612) 833-3700 online analytical processing (OLAP). Knowledge Age. To Dresner, knowledge manage- Cognos www.cognos.com ment, on the other hand, focuses on Andrea L. Nylund is a Los Angeles-based journalist spe- (408) 987-0700 the process of sharing tacit knowledge cializing in global business issues and strategies.

Reprinted with permission of CurtCo Freedom Group. KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT JULY 1999 For subscriptions, please call: (877) 818-4112.