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David Ferguson

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CEO & President, 5000fish, Inc

40 points

Founder and CEO of OakTree Enterprise Solutions, Inc. (1999) and 5000fish, Inc. (2009).

Passionate about improving how businesses leverage data to make decisions.

Hands on leader with experience from business start-up to operations. Experience providing direct management and/or oversight ...

Founder and CEO of OakTree Enterprise Solutions, Inc. (1999) and 5000fish, Inc. (2009).

Passionate about improving how businesses leverage data to make decisions.

Hands on leader with experience from business start-up to operations. Experience providing direct management and/or oversight for multiple core business areas including, Sales and Marketing, Business Development, Accounting, Human Resources, Information Technology, Services, Proposal Management, Legal, Security, and Research and Development.

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WEB: Blog

May 14, 2012

David Ferguson and 1 other person answered this question

Which BI tools that you are currently using? Why?

We use Yurbi (http://www.yurbi.com) but in full disclosure it's our flagship BI solution that we offer commercially (so I'm biased).
With that said I wrote a blog post a few weeks ago talking about the importance of a company using the software they sell (http://www.yurbi.com/blog/bi-thoughts/do-you-eat-your-own-dog-food) ... more

Business Intelligence

May 8, 2012

David Ferguson and 2 other people answered this question

What features do you expect from a good help desk software?

Good help desk software should have the same characteristics of good business software in general. Here are a few of things to look for:
1. they should serve their function in the organization with the least impact. Impact being defined as a low amount of ... more

Customer Service

Information Technology

Help Desk Software

May 7, 2012

David Ferguson and 1 other person answered this question

What are good examples of Knowledge Base software (for customer support)?

We use http://www.Desk.com (formerly Assistly) and they have a very good knowledge base component that allows you to post both internal and external with images, links, social media widgets, and more. You could start with the 1 free agent and evaluate and set it up ... more

Customer Support

May 7, 2012

David Ferguson asked a question

How do you currently measure the adoption and effectiveness of your BI solution?

Business Intelligence

May 7, 2012

David Ferguson and 4 other people answered this question

How do I create a very basic business intelligence environment?

Hi Adam,
Sorry I didn't see your post earlier, I'm the CEO of 5000fish, the makers of Yurbi. First thanks for taking a look at us. Yurbi does have a powerful ETL component called Yurbi Connect, but it is not available in the free edition ... more

Information Technology

Business Intelligence

Feb. 3, 2012

David Ferguson and 9 other people answered this question

What is the fastest and easiest way to implement a BI solution for a small client?

Free is always a good price point for small businesses and gives them a way to test the waters of a BI platform before investing a large amount of money into a solution that may not work for them, due to complexity for example.
Yurbi ... more

Information Technology

Business Analytics

Business Intelligence

May 11, 2011

David Ferguson and 6 other people answered this question

Can anybody recommend a reasonably priced BI tool for SMEs?

You didn't indicate your definition of reasonably priced, I think a lot of the answer depends on that but here are a few options for on-premise solutions.
There are free options out there like Jaspersoft, Pentaho, and even large vendors have some free options like Microstrategy ... more

Information Technology

Business Intelligence

March 22, 2011

David Ferguson and 2 other people answered this question

What factors are hindering growth in the BI market?

I agree to a certain extent. Price and Security issues are pain points that businesses see which give them reservations to moving forward with BI, but the actual pain is deeper and in my opinion is enterprise vendor fatigue.
Traditional BI has been dominated by a ... more

Information Technology

Business Intelligence

March 17, 2011

David Ferguson and 1 other person answered this question

Who are some of the most interesting, or noteworthy, business intelligence startups?

I'll talk about what I know best, what the 5000fish team is doing with Yurbi (www.yurbi.com).
We're tackling the challenge that most mid to large organizations are having, they have a lot of data spread across multiple repositories but no easy or cost effective way to ... more

Information Technology

Feb. 28, 2011

David Ferguson and 6 other people answered this question

How do you boost CRM end-user adoption rates?

It has to become a part of the culture and shown to be a priority from the top of the organization (very key, from the top). Here are a few best practices that I think boost adoption:
Training - you have to invest in training and ... more

Customer Service

Feb. 28, 2011

David Ferguson and 14 other people answered this question

Has anyone dropped salesforce.com and migrated to another CRM platform? If so, to who and why?

We left the TEAM edition of Salesforce.com which is priced very reasonably (I think they market it as GROUP now), but we left because many of the security features we needed was in the higher cost professional tier and that was price prohibitive at the ... more

Feb. 27, 2011

David Ferguson and 1 other person answered this question

In #cloud-based #ERP, is integration with existing systems generally a problem?

It's a problem if you don't have the resources and budget to develop the integrations. Most of the products have a robust Web Services API that can be used to do tight two-way integrations, but that assumes that you have the internal knowledge and skills ... more

Information Technology

Cloud Computing

Enterprise Resource Planning

Feb. 26, 2011

David Ferguson and 2 other people answered this question

How can I create and develop a customer service from scratch in a B2B Company?

You have to create a culture of customer service in your organization, it is not the role of 1 person or a team of people, but it's the responsibility of everyone in your organization.
You didn't indicate the size of your business or type, but for ... more

Customer Service

Business 2 Business Marketing

Business to Business

Feb. 25, 2011

David Ferguson and 3 other people answered this question

Are we on the verge of a "business intelligence revolution" and if so why?

The word revolution brings up recent events in the middle east where I think we're seeing a union of how technology is enabling communication between a large segment of society which is being empowered by this real-time information to do great things.
I bring that up ... more

Information Technology

Business Intelligence

Feb. 25, 2011

David Ferguson and 4 other people answered this question

What are some things that need to change in the BI industry in order to see a higher adoption rate?

I wrote a 3 part blog series on this concept a few weeks ago that goes into depth on 3 essential qualities of self-service BI that would increase adoption, those points were:
Users have to have an interface they find comfortable - http://www.yurbi.com/blog/bi-thoughts/3-essentials-of-your-self-service-busin...
The BI solution must ... more

Information Technology

Business Intelligence

Business Intelligence Implementation

Jan. 13, 2011

David Ferguson and 1 other person answered this question

Do you like this sales dashboard?

This could be a good dashboard for the high-level guy who just wants to see top level info at a glance, but as a sales VP or manager this dashboard wouldn't do me a lot of good as it doesn't let me do analysis of ... more

Information Technology

Business Intelligence

Jan. 13, 2011

David Ferguson and 9 other people answered this question

How can the sales team benefit from having a Business Intelligence system in place?

One component of BI for the sales team that I find is often missed is providing salespeople direct access to customer service information. A lot of organizations will have a CRM system in use by the sales team but a separate Service Desk for support ... more

Information Technology

Business Intelligence

Business Intelligence Applications

Jan. 7, 2011

David Ferguson recommends this answer by Fred Blauer

Why would you argue that BI has become a commodity?

I believe that BI might be moving to more of a service than a product. It is true that there are tons of different products available, including low cost, open source ones. The important thing is how they are implemented. Also, they seem to becoming ... more

Information Technology

Business Intelligence

Business Intelligence Solution

Jan. 6, 2011

David Ferguson is now following

Jan. 6, 2011

David Ferguson is now following

Jan. 6, 2011

David Ferguson is now following

Jan. 6, 2011

David Ferguson is now following

Jan. 6, 2011

David Ferguson is now following

Jan. 6, 2011

David Ferguson is now following

Jan. 3, 2011

David Ferguson and 6 other people answered this question

Should business analytics reside on the IT or Business side?

IT will manage and hold the "keys" to the data repositories and system that contain the information needed for analytics, so they have to be included and an active participant. However, the lead role should be someone from the business side who understands the importance ... more

Information Technology

Business Analytics

Business and IT Alignment

Business Intelligence

Nov. 22, 2010

David Ferguson and 2 other people answered this question

What up-and-coming business intelligence vendor has the most promise?

Disclosure, I am completely biased as the CEO of this company, but I feel really strongly that our approach to business intelligence and our execution in terms of customer service put us squarely in the "up and coming" and "most promise" categories related to BI. ... more

Information Technology

Business Intelligence

Business Intelligence Leaders

Business Intelligence Systems

Nov. 15, 2010

David Ferguson and 4 other people answered this question

What can BI delivered though the cloud give me that I can't get from an on-premise solution?

There are obvious advantages to the SaaS model, specifically some of the items that Kirsty mentioned in her answer. However, separating the business model and underlying infrastructure from the core BI technology, there is nothing inherently technical that Cloud BI provides that on-premise does not. ... more

Information Technology

Business Intelligence

Business Intelligence Applications

Business Intelligence Software Solutions

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