Running business intelligence apps inside an IT firewall reduces the value. Providing access to business users, democratizing the use of analytics, can spur business intelligence.

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In a far-off corner of the Jameson whiskey facility in Midleton, Ireland sits a long-dormant warehouse. It’s an old one—the earliest evidence of the buildings’ existence can be found on a map from 1850—once used to store stacks of whiskey barrels three high.
But lately, this warehouse has been the site of something else: A sort of innovation lab that the company calls its Micro-Distillery, where the staid whiskey brand experiments and creates new concoctions that may never see the light of day. Here, distiller Karen Cotter (it should be noted; a woman in one of the world’s most male-dominated professions) plays around with different recipes and distillation techniques in the hopes of stumbling onto something great—or at least different.
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Innovation comes slow to the spirit world. Aged spirits such as whiskey can take years to produce, and laws and regulations that strictly define what a “Scotch” or “”Bourbon” is leaves precious little wiggle room with which to try new things. And if a company has been around for a couple of hundred years, the chances are pretty good that their customers are looking forward to their familiarity, and buying into the idea that a bottle produced in 2016 tastes strikingly similar to one produced in 1916.
These facts conspire to create a conundrum: How does a spirit brand innovate without alienating?
One approach is to look for the loopholes: The few parts of the whiskey-making process where the rules don’t specifically forbid distilleries from doing things differently. This is why whiskey brands so often tout the use of barrels that were formally used for, say, Sherry or Bourbon: Aging in interesting wood is one of the only things some spirit-makers can do, while maintaining their legal designation.
The approach taken byJameson, an Irish whiskey, is a bit more extreme: By creating a separate facility, the brand is able to cordon off its experimentations into a sandbox that is free of caution and worry about legal definitions.
“It’s almost like a distiller’s playground where ideas can be brought to life,” says Jameson master distiller Brian Nation, who serves as Cotton’s tutor and mentor. “Some of them may fail while some might be brilliant. That’s the beauty of having a space like this.”
Creating a separate facility is also a matter of necessity. Whiskey has never been more popular, and the main distillery facility is already operating at full capacity producing the company’s core brands, which include Jameson, Powers, and Redbreast.

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How a five-step development process can lead to better solutions and lasting client relationships.

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By Dinesh Sharma, Vice President of Marketing, SAP

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Yesterday, General Motors announced that its upcoming all-electric Bolt will have an EPA-approved range of 238 miles. This came as quite a shock to electric carmaker Tesla’s ardent fans. According to Reuters, the Chevrolet Bolt “will be launched in a few months, nearly a year before the Tesla Model 3,” it will have a starting price “similar to the announced starting price for the Model 3,” but it will outdistance the Model 3’s targeted “range of about 218 miles.” With those stats, and helped by the metal-moving moxie of some 3,000 Chevrolet dealers in the U.S. (compared with the 100 or so Tesla stores) the Bolt has everything to disrupt the erstwhile disruptor Tesla.

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