Intelligence explained

By Maria Pollieri
Illustration: Lasse Skarbövik
Charts: John Sapsford

How can organizations make business insight pervasive at every level? Here’s a checklist that helps you adjust your strategies to meet company goals

A CFO of an Ottawa-based company wants to ensure that important information permeates every area of her company. “I have lots of data, where do I start?” she asks. A planning manager at a major corporation has a related question: “How can I help budget preparers become insight-driven contributors?” As trusted advisers, IT consultants are often called upon to help make business insight pervasive in an enterprise, enabling organizations to make informed decisions at every level. Organizations need to know how to get ready for business intelligence (BI) and want to find methods of delivering information to all levels within the organization so that every employee can see how he or she is contributing to the overall success of a company. Allowing them to make the right investments in products, people, projects and processes is just the beginning. They can also continuously assess operational performance based on key performance indicators and historical trends. It is useful to have the ability to adjust strategies as needed to achieve organizational goals and analyze profitability in real time.

How do you know you are ready for BI? Ask yourself: are you struggling to get timely data from core transactional systems? Are you overly reliant on spreadsheets to meet your needs? Are your spreadsheets becoming too complex? Do you have too much data and too little predictive information? Are you accessing outdated information? Are you duplicating and saving data multiple times? Do you rely on IT to write your reports? Does it usually take too long? If you answered yes to any of these questions, you are ready to select an appropriate BI tool.

First step: identify data sources
It should be relatively easy to take that first step. Many organizations already have mature enterprise resource planning investments with a strong base of operational data. In addition to prepackaged application sources, most have supplemented this investment with custom applications and home-grown repositories of information stored in disconnected data sources. How can all this data be leveraged?

Extending value
Organizations can easily extend their mixed architectures instead of replacing or duplicating existing investments. This heterogeneous extension is achieved via software known as middleware. Middleware acts as the glue or plumbing between two otherwise separate applications, and multiple sources can query and analyze data with it. The prominent middleware vendors offer interoperability, or the ability of their products to work with other systems and products. The most well-known middleware platforms are Oracle Fusion Middleware, Microsoft Net, IBM Websphere and SAP Netweaver.

Here’s a practical example of interoperable middleware. Let’s say your budgets are prepared by the finance department in MS Excel. Your product-level and geographical historical sales revenues are located in a data warehouse, and your current sales are located in an online transaction processing order-entry application. Now you need to piece this information together into a single analysis. The BI server generates queries for each data source, appropriately aggregates them and presents the results to users within easy-to- use dashboards and reports. The more popular BI platforms are built on open standards. An open standard is a published Internet standard that is possessed by no one and used by all.

Action-oriented analytics
BI offers powerful alerting, so notifications are routed for important business events, such as a sudden spike in sales orders. Delivery of alerts can be made available to dashboards, mobile devices, e-mail and messaging systems. Alerts can be tailored to customer-service agents, sales managers and executives. Dashboards can also be embedded with guided navigation paths and exception highlighting so that managers can receive proactive, actionable event-based information alerts. Users can easily configure the delivered guided navigation
or alerts to fit their business needs. Here is an example of a guided navigation alert message: “Expense reports are going to be paid this evening. Please encourage re-cent employee travellers to submit pending expense reports for approval prior to tonight’s cheque run.”

Let’s not forget data mining. Data mining enables enterprises to produce actionable predictive information. With data-mining tools, developers can quickly automate the discovery of predictions and patterns hidden in their data. Using data that your business generates, it is possible to predict a particular outcome. Extracts and complex analysis can be performed on massive amounts of ever-changing data to predict in advance potential sales and profit, which customers are most likely to leave, and the effect of price increases on customer loyalty.

Data mining permits you to leverage your data, save time and money and minimize business risk. Have you ever received a
call from your credit-card provider, concerned about suspicious credit-card activity? Data mining is commonly deployed to predict credit-card abuse/fraud.

Information delivery
There are four information delivery categories: reports, dashboards, ad hoc query and Microsoft Office Integration.

Interactive reporting enables users to create, display and save prompts that filter the data and layout of the report. Reports nowadays contain cascading parameters. For example, when a user drills down from an annual sales report to a monthly view, this monthly view should be maintained when navigating to another report.

A dashboard is a Web-based interface with an intuitive display of information, including dials, gauges and traffic lights. Dashboards provide a positive or negative trend indicator and a color-coded summary that indicates the state of each metric compared with an established goal or threshold. Dashboards are often updated in real time or via scheduled updates. Finally, dashboards often display alerts and notifications.

Queries enable end users to create their own reports on the fly. The more popular query tools are those that are business-friendly and hide the complexity of the underlying data sources. Performance or system speed is a major issue for users performing ad hoc queries. Finally, ad hoc queries can be developed by end users so that they can be easily turned into standard reports for sharing and publishing.

In many deployments, Microsoft Office, particularly Excel, acts as the BI client. Many BI platforms are able to render reports in Excel while maintaining the report format and enabling Excel users to easily refresh the data. Some BI platforms extend this functionality beyond Excel to include other Office applications, such as Word and PowerPoint.

The diagram on page 28 scores the major BI platform vendors on their ability to provide information delivery capabilities.

The magic quadrant diagram above shows the main software vendors that should be considered by organizations seeking to develop BI.

The criteria comprising the ability to execute axis include the organization’s financial viability, sales execution, market responsiveness, track record and customer experiences. The criteria comprising the completeness of vision axis include product strategy, vertical/industry strategy, geographical strategy and innovation.

On-the-go intelligence
Reports and dashboards need to be accessible even when users are not connected to the corporate network or even the Internet. Disconnected analytics allow laptop users on the move to continue to develop and analyze reports with all the features present from connected operations. With intelligent synchronization, work on the go is quickly kept current with changes on the corporate network.

Managing performance
This leads to the topic of corporate performance management (CPM), synonymous with enterprise performance management. CPM enables organizations to achieve world-class performance by aligning the right information and resources with strategic objectives. It helps managers formulate strategies for profitable growth, align strategies with operational plans and actively monitor day-to-day operations. Examples of packaged CPM analytic applications are activity-based management, global consolidations, planning and budgeting, project portfolio management, scorecards and supplier rating systems.

Finally, no discussion nowadays is complete without governance, risk and compliance. Auditability and traceability data enrichment can also occur for organizations with millions or even billions of records, and is essential for regulatory and compliance projects.

To summarize, BI enables organizations to gain complete and timely insight, distribute intelligence pervasively and drive more effective actions and processes.

Businesses can realize very tangible bottom-line benefits from BI. Management must be willing to look at how information can best be leveraged to enhance business performance. It must be willing to change. This is not a simple thing, but it can yield significant rewards.

Maria Pollieri, CA, CA•IT is a solution consultant specializing in financial and analytical applications at Oracle Corp. She can be reached at 905-501-2483 or maria.pollieri@oracle.com.