Business Intelligence

With the advent of the Internet, small, medium and large businesses can market their products around the world at a fraction of the normal cost. The playing field has become level for any business, whether large or small, wishing to market their goods and compete with any other company on a global basis. Competition is at an all time high, which means you have to be first to market or definitely not lag too far behind. In addition, the economy of today dictates that you structure your business as lean and mean as possible with regards to running the business. With all these new business pressures, the question is, “How do you keep up on the trends of the business, stay competitive, and predict the future?” The answer is Business Intelligence!

Various forms of BI have been around for years. Companies have used historical data to manage inventories, or determine new product acceptance along with product life. But as businesses grow and accumulate more and more data, the businesses that can interpret not only the historical data but the current data in a short period of time will tend to be the market leaders. The business market continues to react to events and fads. If your business is not up to date on the latest events and fads, you will be left behind and be just another statistic.

There are three major reasons to use the current BI technology:

• Stay ahead of the competition or catch up with the competition
• Steamline business practices
• Evolve the business

If you are leading the pack, you want to continue to lead the pack. In many cases this is the most precarious position to be in since all your competitors are trying to knock you off. If you are not the leader, you need to work harder and smarter to gain ground on the leader, and in order to do this you need the appropriate tools and strategy.

Every business needs to evaluate and eliminate any areas that are not contributing to the bottom line. In large enterprises, this can be come very time consuming and resource intensive. With the right “intelligence”, the weak areas can be recognized and either eliminated or improved.

Lastly, every business needs to grow and evolve. In many cases, the evolution of the business is mandatory for its continuing existence. As old products or offerings live out their usefulness, new products or offerings must be discovered, developed, and productized to sustain and grow the business.

HRG believes that Business Intelligence is a key factor in driving business success. Each business needs to determine their specific needs and match them with the appropriate BI offering. There are a number of BI applications and technologies in the marketplace today claiming to do everything for everyone. Obviously, this is not the case. In many cases, the BI applications address specific areas of business intelligence, which may not be the area that is most important for every business.

What is Business Intelligence?

Most companies collect a large amount of data from their business operations. To keep track of that information, companies use a wide range of software programs, such as Excel, disparate databases like Oracle, DB2, and Access, and different database applications for various departments throughout their organization. Using multiple software programs makes it difficult to retrieve information in a timely manner and to perform analysis of the data.

The term Business Intelligence (BI) represents the tools and systems that play a key role in the strategic planning process of the corporation. These systems allow a company to gather, store, access and analyze corporate data to aid in decision-making. Generally these systems will illustrate business intelligence in the areas of customer profiling, custom support, market research, market segmentation, product profitability, statistical analysis, and inventory and distribution analysis to name a few.

Why BI Applications?

Instead of developing and maintaining the necessary tools to analyze the business data, like in the past, a better way is to buy an application that provides the information needed. In addition, the BI applications provide all the new technologies that allow businesses to mine data in real-time, generate appropriate dashboards, and produce a wide variety of reports for CXOs to Technical Consultants. These applications have the technical and analytical smarts to process and extract large amounts of data and present the results in a clear and meaningful way.

Business Intelligence (BI) applications are decision support tools that enable real-time, interactive access to and analysis of mission-critical corporate information. Business intelligence applications bridge the gaps between information silos in an organization. Their sophisticated analytical capabilities and access to corporate information resources, such as data warehouses, transaction processing applications, & enterprise applications such as ERP enable users to access and leverage vast amounts of data to analyze business relationships and trends, gaining insight into potential sales opportunities and areas for business process refinement.

Businesses must consider what specific purpose the BI solution is going to address. BI generally does not work well if it is used for general analytics.  The starting point for creating a BI solution is when you identify a project that will solve a specific problem by gaining access to information in a timely fashion and in the right context. Your motivation for purchasing BI software, or building a data warehouse should never be general purpose. If you want success, understand the problem, define the requirements, and state what type of results are expected.

The majority of end users in a company tend to find BI tools far too cumbersome to use. BI report design, ad hoc query, and OLAP analysis tools have hundreds, if not thousands, of features and complexity. Data Warehouses can have hundreds to thousands of columns of data. Most end users when faced with all this data and hundreds of features will simply give up trying to use the tool. Organizations need BI solutions that are easy to use for the entire user population.

A BI platform leverages BI tools along with other technologies, including databases, data integration, and portals to provide an end-to-end solution for a defined business problem or set of business problems. While BI platforms are usually implemented by IT, which should be transparent to the end user, the BI tools used must be easy to use for the entire end user populations. The success factor is whether the tools will be embraced in the day-to-day operations.

There are new technologies available today that can bridge many disparate databases and file types without having to first extract, load and transform the data into a data warehouse.  While these technologies use operational data as the data source, with processing speeds increasing exponentially, this should have little effect on the responsiveness of the day-to-day operations. In addition, extra storage for the data warehouse is not needed. The data and trends retrieved by the end user is current, unlike using a data warehouse that may take minutes, hours or days to load. This gives companies a competitive advantage.

Use of Data Warehousing

The process of transforming data into information and making it available to the end user in a timely manner is known as data warehousing. The concept of data warehousing dates back to the late 1980s. A data warehouse is a repository of an organization's electronically stored data. Data warehouses are designed to facilitate reporting and analysis.

The classic definition of the data warehouse focuses on data storage. Other components of a data warehouse include the ability to retrieve and analyze data, and to extract, transform and load (ETL) the data. Many references to data warehousing use this broader context. Thus, an expanded definition for data warehousing also includes business intelligence tools, tools to extract, transform, and load data into the repository, and tools to manage and retrieve metadata.

There are many ways to integrate data and applications to provide important and timely information to the end user.  Each business challenge and/or process should be analyzed to understand whether a data warehouse or another type of information access tool presents the best solution. The key thing is to identify the best information integration and access method for your needs first, and not to assume that a data warehouse is the solution before assessing all options.

Start by evaluating the information need and selecting the data integration option that best fulfills your requirements. You may find that a data warehouse suits your needs, or it might not.

Need for Scalability

Scalability is of the up most importance in Business Intelligence systems. Scalability is the ability to handle growing amounts of workloads that can be readily enlarged without issue.  Scalability of BI products is generally difficult to define because of the large number of variables at work and some vendors' lack of experience deploying their products in enterprise environments.

Typically the best way to determine scalability requirements for a BI system is to run a proof-of-concept in your own environment using your own queries, reports, and data. If you are trying to consolidate across a large enterprise scalability and performance will probably be the deciding factors in which product to select. Scalability is a lot like performance, where each application has different requirements. You must determine the requirements of your application as it relates to scalability. To better understand the capabilities of a tool, ask the vendor if other companies in your market spare are using their product, and get references. If they are not, ask them what companies are using their product and how are they using it. Again, references can be very enlightening, especially if you talk to the references with out the vendor present.

Evolving Technologies - Content Management

A Content Management System (CMS) is typically used for editing, creating, managing, searching and publishing various kinds of data, digital media and electronic text. Content Management Systems are used to store, version, control and publish various types of documentation including collateral, computer files, images, audio, video and various other content.

Content Management Systems and Business Intelligence systems have typically been used separately but that view is changing.  Content Management Systems organize unstructured data, such as text documents, while Business Intelligence software usually analyze structured data, stored in databases as discussed above.

Research firm TDWI recently released a study outlining the potential benefits of unstructured data technologies, such as text analytics, in a BI software stack. A new term has been coined - "Content intelligence" which is a combination of BI software and content management technologies.

Content Intelligence (CI) combines Business Intelligence (reporting & analysis, performance management, and data warehousing), Content Management (search, document and records management, web content management, and forms management), and Communications and Collaboration (workspaces and portals, messaging, presence, and web conferencing.

Companies are starting to see the importance of using CI but it is a major development project. CI promises the compelling promise of data and text integration. There is investment being focused on this market by vendors, including BI vendors, Content Management vendors, Document Management vendors, Search vendors, and enterprise software vendors. Market leaders have yet to emerge because of the inherent complexities of enterprise deployments.  Keep watching the CI market, as there are many more interesting plays and market developments yet to come.

Conclusion

There is a vast array of BI and CMS solutions on the market today. There are many Business Intelligence vendors such as: Actuate, Business Objects, Cognos, Hyperion, Information Builders, Microsoft, MicroStrategy, Oracle, SAP, and SAS.  Remember, Business Intelligence is a process, not a product.

You’re an expert in your business – and you shouldn’t have to become an expert in Business Intelligence. HRG can become a core part of your team and assist you to weave through the maze of solutions and help you find the right solution for your company.
Choosing the right solution will truly strengthen your business. It will not only create efficiency but will  provide you with a number of opportunities to create competitive advantages, revenue opportunities, and new avenues for customers and partners to communicate with you.