If you’ve followed my startup rules, you might remember this one (JJSR 8) — Find salespeople who love to spend money: watches, cars, houses. The more they spend, the better your prospects.

But you have to set them up for success, too. That means making sure they’re spending most of their time actually selling and not filing reports or digging for data, which as you can see from the Domo infographic below, is a more common problem than you might think.

As it turns out, wasting time searching for data is a common problem. In fact, the average information worker spends nearly nine hours each week just looking for information. That’s almost two hours a day!

What would you do if the information you needed was readily available, giving you back part of that two hours every day? Check out this Domo infographic to see some of the most common – and surprising – answers.

Turns out, I wasn’t alone in feeling that our business intelligence was lacking. Not by a long shot. And if you listen to Gartner, it sounds even worse: 70 to 80 percent of business intelligence projects ultimately fail.

Now, that stat obviously falls in the “grain of salt” category. Do 80 percent of BI projects really implode, causing big financial losses and a rash of firings? Probably not.

Surely that failure rate has something to do with high expectations and aggressive timelines. But still, it illustrates an important fact: Whether grounded in reality or not, there is a prevailing perception that traditional BI is broken. Why that is depends on who you ask. But I’d like to suggest three leading reasons why business intelligence is broken, as well as three ways to fix it.

While I’m more of a Jay-Z/Kanye West man myself, I’m going to channel a little Mick Jagger to help me highlight the issues. Nobody sings about wanting more, getting less or riding clouds quite like the Stones.

Problem #1: Can’t get no satisfaction. Unless you’re a data analyst or an Excel geek, you’re probably not getting much satisfaction — or value — from your BI system. The user experience in most business intelligence solutions is lacking, to say the least, relying heavily on tables and text or a patchwork of disconnected charts and graphs. And don’t even get me started on the timeliness of most of that data. Regularly scheduled reports are great for regularly scheduled meetings (which I hate and never do by the way), but like most executives, I don’t have a 9-to-5 schedule. And when the inspiration comes, it comes. If I have a flash of insight and want to see our latest sales numbers at 3 a.m., don’t make me wake up my sales VP to get that information. Which I have done. Just last week.

The Fix: Make the experience more engaging. Think of it this way: the data doesn’t matter. What matters is what you do with the data. This means putting intuitive, timely, self-service tools and dashboards in the hands of business leaders. It’s time for BI implementations to stop relying on dull, uninspired pivot tables and start presenting data in compelling visuals that are easy to understand, delivered in real time and loaded with insight.

Problem #2: You can’t always get what you want. Too many organizations define BI success according to the amount of information they can stuff into one data warehouse. But the reality is that no company will ever get 100 percent of relevant data in a single box. In fact, an executive at one Fortune 50 company, with whom I was recently talking, said his company was more advanced than anyone in business intelligence, and they had practically every BI system available. Yet despite all that investment, only 85 percent of the data they wanted was housed within their data warehouse. The single box model just doesn’t work. Business moves too quickly and markets change too often to capture it all.

The Fix: Aggregate, don’t migrate. Given: there will always be critical data that doesn’t make it into the central warehouse. Rather than force the migration of data into a single bottomless pit, it’s time for companies to embrace solutions that can seamlessly provide a window into various information sources, without actually moving or copying the data.

Problem #3: Get off of your cloud. Or I should say, find a better cloud. Cloud-based business intelligence is loaded with promise and has the potential to deliver lower-cost solutions that are more accessible, especially for business users. But in almost every case, today’s cloud solutions want to force customers into their own flavor of vanilla. It’s kind of like waiting in the lunch line. You start to get a little excited when you think about all the choices and what you might pick. But when you get to the front of the line, the lunch lady just hands you a tray of whatever she decides you’re going to get. That’s the current state of cloud BI. It’s like “Here are the five apps we work with and the three dashboards you can choose from. And no, you can’t have Jell-O.” Not good enough.

The Fix: Expect more from the cloud. I ran one of the world’s largest cloud companies for 14 years. Suffice it to say, I know a little bit about what can and can’t be done. And there’s no reason cloud-based business intelligence solutions can’t deliver the kind of experience, flexibility and value that CEOs and other executives and managers expect. I think InfoWord said it well: “The use of BI in the cloud is a game-changer. Through the use of cloud computing, BI is finally affordable and available.” But…you have to expect more, know what you want, and most of all, choose wisely.

Can I get an “Amen?”

(…and if you actually just said the word “amen” out loud, then you might want to talk with my team here at Domo. There’s a good chance they can help.)

Just how much data is being generated? Can your data make you more competitive? What are the best practices to get your data working for you? Check out our infographic on the data EXPLOSION.

The venerable publication reached its apex in the mid-90s but had been sinking fast as the Web began to explode. Two-hundred and forty-four years later, the 4,000 remaining copies of the weighty collection quietly sunk into storage.

Good riddance, you might say. It was Britannica’s determined refusal to accept the realities of an online world that undermined its future. The writing had been on the, uh, browser for years. For Britannica to go all digital now was too little, too late.

To the casual observer, it would have been easy to write the obituary for Britannica under the headline “Print Is Dead, Web to Blame.”

But Britannica had been online since 1999—almost at the beginning of the Internet boom. And, they were free to all at the start, nearly two years before anyone had even heard of Wikipedia.

But the Web didn’t directly kill Britannica. It was the powerful cultural shift that the Web brought with it: The death of a single point of view.

Seemingly overnight, the world moved to a crowd-sourced model of the truth. Blogs, Facebook, Twitter and even SMS left any notion of traditional journalistic authority in the dust. Things happen, people tweet, you decide.

This cultural tide is now lapping at the doors of enterprise. Over the next few years, crowd-sourced BI will be the way smart companies uncover and solve business problems.

The others? They’ll be history.

Check our infographic on the cost of manual reporting and see if you can relate.

According to Gartner, the reign of the personal computer is coming to an end and the personal cloud will replace the personal computer by the year 2014, and the National Inflation Association predicts cloud computing to become a $150 billion market by 2013. This shift will impact an organization’s business intelligence strategy and performance solution. As cloud and SaaS solutions continue to boom, a big consideration for an organization and its IT team is how to approach this impending wave.

No one understands the explosion of mobile better than the business user. The daily desktop now consists of at least three platforms—tablet, smartphone and PC—and the lines among them are blurring. Additionally, tablets are becoming workhorses not just show ponies especially among the sales team. Mobile makes it easy to access reports and platforms on the go, and mobile BI improves employee productivity, increases employee engagement, and hastens decision-making.

In the business intelligence, space, we are challenged with the goal of engaging customers in new ways. Gartner estimates that no more than 20% of business users actually use BI proactively. Enhancing the user experience is not just about generating greater employee productivity. It’s about the user and the application, and the user and the enterprise itself. A business intelligence platform should make it easier for employees to solve problems and the user experience can be a BI roadblock if ignored or not designed with a bit of magic.

What do you think will emerge as the latest trend for the business intelligence world? Stay tuned as we cover the Gartner BI Summit.

At first there’s so much excitement about the insights you might glean spending a lot of time together. Every table and chart feels exciting, and the future is filled with promise. But too often that excitement begins to fade as you get bogged down in incomplete information, old data and spreadsheets with unholy numbers of rows.

Of course, with any relationship, there are always clues that your significant other might be…wandering. Your critical business information is no different. Here are five warning signs that your data might be cheating on you:

#1 – It’s showing up late—There are few things more frustrating than a loved one who constantly arrives late for important relationship events, like dinner with the parents, your engagement party, or your wedding. Slow, infrequent or stale data can be just as irritating. If your key business metrics are always late or out of date, you run the risk of making some very bad choices. Not every piece of data needs to be refreshed every second of the day, but as a general rule, the more timely the data is, the more valuable it is.

#2 – You’re data is giving you the runaround—Everyone enjoys a little game of “hard to get.” But when hard to get becomes impossible to get, people tend to get upset. The same is true of data. If your critical information resides in dozens of places—business intelligence tools, applications, spreadsheets, emails, etc.—you’re probably spending too much time chasing and not enough time getting. Ultimately, data should work for you, not the other way around.

#3 – You’re living in the past—People have a tough time letting go. But a successful relationship is about moving forward. You and your data are no different. In your relationship together, you have to find new ways to measure and improve your performance. For instance, there’s no reason to rely solely on slow, patchy feedback mechanisms like customer surveys to gauge client satisfaction when there’s a wealth of immediate feedback on Twitter and Facebook. Effective measures must evolve with the business.

#4 – Communication breaks down—Honest and open communication is the foundation of any successful relationship, and a breakdown in communication is usually one of the first signs of a major relationship problem. Similarly, if an organization or department has a habit of spinning or massaging data before it goes up to the executive ranks or out to the public, trouble can’t be far behind. For a healthy and productive data relationship, honest communication in the form of direct and unfiltered access to the information that matters most is a must.

#5 – There’s just no spark—Even if you do everything right, if there’s no magic, a relationship is doomed to fail. Data needs a wow factor as well. Just like a hot new look can make the sparks fly anew, visualizing data dramatically improves the insight you’re able to glean from it, according to research from TDWI. And that advantage is even more pronounced when the visualization is rich and interactive, beyond just simple charts and graphs.

So what can you do if you’re seeing the signs?

Suffice it to say this is one relationship Dr. Phil can’t mend. Instead, you could start by downloading the complete executive brief “Is Your Data Cheating on You? Five Signs You and Your Data are Growing Apart,” created by business intelligence innovator Domo. It not only offers a more in-depth discussion of each of these data-relationship red flags, but it also provides some guidance on finding the “magic” once again.

Download the executive brief today and let us know any experiences you’ve had with “cheating data.”

NOTE: A form completion is required to download this executive brief.

• No songs
• No “I want” moments
• No happy village
• No love story
• No villain

What seemed like a recipe for failure to a Disney animation producer turned out to be gold for Pixar. And isn’t that why we all loved Toy Story? It was different. Edgy. Charming. Memorable. Finally, we had an animated film that captured the human spirit without songs, “I want” moments, or love stories. Going against the norm altered the course of history and established Pixar as a household name.

In the business intelligence world, too many companies stick to the old way of doing things. Insisting on songs, happy villages, and villains…I mean spreadsheets, IT, and clunky dashboards only limits the possibility of obtaining relevant data. The world of smart data analysis more closely resembles stagnate business decision movie making.

It’s time to follow the example of Pixar. Cast off the old. Look at business intelligence with a new eye. What should this new view of business intelligence contain?

• A range of self-service options
• All available data sources
• A transparent culture
• A visual approach

What else would you include on this list?

Joe Gibbs, NFL hall of fame football coach and only coach to win three Superbowls with three different starting quarterbacks, is credited with being the first to use the trips formation. Trips is an offensive formation where one side of the field is overloaded with three offensive receivers.

The first time I saw the trips formation, I was playing defensive back in a zone cover configuration and found myself wondering how was I supposed to cover three receivers who had just lined up across from me. I called time out and ran over to the coaches and asked, “Can they put three receivers on one side like that?”

Unfortunately for me the answer was yes and the trips formation resulted in our opponent scoring four touchdowns in the first quarter and three in the second quarter, and was the worst whooping I have ever experienced. As a result, I have never forgotten that innovation can lead to significant and even overwhelming advantage.

The status quo in business intelligence is being challenged and venture capital is flooding into the space where there is both hype and promise. “The New School of Dashboards” outlines a new “formation” for the BI dashboard space. Companies who deploy their dashboard’s following this formation can reap great advantage over their competitors. And just like Joe Gibbs—who also invented the single back, double or triple tight end sets to slow down Lawrence Taylor—the companies that will win are the ones who are willing to embrace change and constantly innovate.

NOTE: A form completion is required to download this executive brief.