On May 13th, 2010, from 2-3pm EDT, Forrester will host a tweetjam on the topic: “What BI is Not”. Blogs about the event can be find here and here, and the hashtag in use will be #dmjam, if you want to follow along.
There are two main reasons why I’m very curious about this event. First of all the topic itself. A solid definition of Business Intelligence is useful and helps vendors in their discussions with customers. I remember that it took Westbury several sessions with HP to make sure that our operational reporting solution for HP Service Manager/Center is fully complimentary to BI analytics solution HP has in this area. In the end a good understanding of all the various aspects of BI helped us to determine how the joint value proposition of HP and Westbury provides our customers a unique BI-solution for Service Management.
I’m also curious to see how a Tweetjam works out. I’ve never been in one and any new marketing tool using Social Media is exciting to me. So, if you like the topic or/and just fascinated by Social Media, this is the place to be on May 13th.
While studying massage I thought of some comparisons with my work at Westbury [bear with him, this is going somewhere interesting - Westblog Ed].
In the world of massage, anatomy is a very important part. Anatomy is the biological science concerned with the structure of the human body, including the human bones, muscles, ligaments and other structures. The most common functions are to hold the body together and to make it possible to move the body. The processes of how every structure of the body works together are very complex. Luckily we have a brain that’s taking care of all the complexity and a nervous system that’s taking care of all kind of communication between all structures. This saves us a lot of energy.
When I look at the HP ServiceCenter / Service Manager (SC/SM) database I see a similarity in the complexity. Maybe not that complex but when you think of reporting on the SC/SM database you need high skilled people (sort of like surgeons) to make reports and even then it’s not always possible to report on the subject you want to report on.
Westbury has created the ‘brain’ of SC/SM. This ‘brain’ is taking care of organizing the data from the SC/SM database into a relational database with a standard structure so you can easily report on it. Furthermore the ‘brain’ is doing all kind off calculations to enhance the ease of reporting. The ‘brain’ also contains a universe layer on top of the structured database. Next to the ‘brain’ Westbury created a nervous system. This nervous system is taking care of informing the right people at the right time by scheduling and publishing the reports.
And like the real brain, Westbury’s ‘brain’ and ‘nervous system’ can save companies that want to report on SC/SM a lot of energy, along with time and money.
I am wondering about the definition of end-users. Regarding reporting or BI, I find it difficult to define these. Taken literally the word ‘end-user’ seems too static and out of date to get around a real description.
However based on our extended experiences of more than 12 years of report building, BI implementations and end-user training I feel the following types are close to what we experience in day to day’s engagements.
Light users – The users who need static and reoccurring overviews. Real time information is not required and exploring data sets or ad hoc in-depth analyses neither. How? Static, free-of-charge pdf or html overviews. For managers and to support fixed and predefined arrangements on information sharing.
Dynamic users – Those who need real time refreshable information. For example they want a real time status of the performance of department during a specific period. How? Reports which could be refreshed and prompt you for the data set you would like to see. For example the report will prompt you for department, region, classification, period … before it refreshes. Process owners, workgroup managers, team leads, business users …
Explorers – Users who need to explore, navigate and visualize data themselves (googling your data). There are certain questions to be answered which need low profile data mining. How? Use a BI tool which provides you exploring data sources, the capability to define your data set by pointing/clicking and easily sharing your results (by iPhone)? It should be powerful, simple, intuitive and fast. Process owners, workgroup managers, team leads and your business for low profile data mining. But are you up for it? Mature enough yet to provide these access and responsibilities?
Power users - The users which need slicing and dicing data for specific answers. To empower route cause analysis when dashboards are telling you, you are under performing as a group or at your process. So not for answering questions on how we are doing it, but why this is happening. How? Use easy to use slice and dice functionalities together with application configuration knowledge to get there. By the way these are your colleagues which provide you also the above 3 information sources.
Working on our new web site really triggered me to focus hard on the benefits of SMI Suite, our reporting solution for HP Service Manager/ServiceCenter.
Our main goal with the new site is to make sure that the home page immediately makes clear what SMI Suite does and how it will help our customers. Result of three months of brainstorming and editing is the following intro block that will be prominent on our home page:
Westbury’s SMI suite is the self service reporting solution for HP Service Manager
Do you like it? Is it unambiguous?
The main benefit to extract from this sentence is “self service reporting”. SMI Suite will put the power of reporting in the hands of the power users, the ones really in need of the reports. With SMI suite there is no dependency on internal or external BI specialists, no need for technical, scripting knowledge or endless sessions explaining the reporting requirements to whoever will create them for you. SMI suite will do all the heavy lifting of extracting the data from the HP SM database for you and load it into our own SMI database. The Business Objects layer we created on top of our SMI DB will allow you – by just dragging and dropping the objects – to build your reports and distribute them to those who requested them.
The new web site will be up before the HP Universe in Washington DC this June. This means that we will have several more brainstorm and editing sessions over the content and the layout of the web site. Although it will probably never be perfect, the main objective is to be absolutely clear about what we are doing and how it will help our customers. Once the web site has been launched I will definitely check with you all if we have accomplished this goal.
Our Westbury Service Management Intelligence Suite solution contains a lot of start-up reports. In the past we called them “out-of-the-box reports”, but we changed the name for one very important reason. When one of these report is missing one or more important fields specific to the customer in question, they only have to add the missing fields in to make the report suit their purpose. So “start-up reports” is more accurate because these reports can be modified, customized, copied and changed as much as you like.
It wasn’t until a year after I started working at Westbury that I found out that the out-of-the-box reports could be customized. Now we’re referring to them as start-up reports and that says it all. Hopefully it’s clear that the reports in our SMI Suite are a starting point for you to launch your own, customized initiatives.
You may remember a few months ago Gartner produced one of their magic quadrant reports on ITSM platforms – something we all read with interest here at Westbury Towers because we were keen to know how HP Service Manager fared against the competitors. We have, after all, hitched our wagon to Service Manager’s train, and the perceived value of Service Manager has a knock-on effect for us.
Fast forward a few months and another Gartner magic quadrant is out and again it’s looking at an area pretty close to Westbury: BI tools.
Our relationship with SAP Business Objects isn’t quite the same as our relationship with HP. After all, we’re an OEM reseller of Business Objects – it’s part and parcel of our Service Management Intelligence Suite product. But our solution is also somewhat platform independent when it comes to the BI tool – if you’re standardized on Cognos, for example, we can work with that, and SMI Suite is still very relevant.
So what’s the upshot from Gartner’s exercise in compare and contrast? Well, on their quadrant’s x-axis (“completeness of vision”), SAP Business Objects falls second only to IBM – quite an achievement in a field of fifteen big players. But on the y-axis (“ability to execute”) Gartner has it seventh – still good, but not as good. Overall this places Business Objects in the “leaders” quadrant.
On a more detailed level, Gartner says that “BusinessObjects’ reporting and ad hoc query capabilities continue to be cited as its top strength by its customers,” and that it provides “leading-edge capabilities, many [of] which complement its BI platform, in the areas of collaboration and decision support, text analytics, in-memory analytics, OnDemand BI (SaaS), search coupled with BI, data integration with lineage and impact analysis, and data quality.”
In the “cautions” column, however, Gartner warns that “customer support ratings for SAP are lower than for any other vendor in our customer survey”
Looks like Boris Evelson is quickly becoming Westbury’s most favorite analyst (see post below). In this post Boris explains what he is looking for in, what he calls, 2nd gen meta driven BI apps.
My excitement about blogs like these is obvious, because like 2nd gen BI apps, Westbury’s goal is to auto-generate as many steps as possible out of the ETL components necessary for our SMI suite.
I know, I know, hard to believe, right? Hard to accept that there are interesting things to be said about ITSM, BI and operational reporting that don’t have their alpha and omega right here in Westbury Towers…
Well, I hate to be the one to burst the bubble, but it turns out that someone calling himself BIguru (or is it Big Uru… not sure…) has been blogging about security within Business Objects. BIguru (or Maloy, as he seems to call himself in the real world) has written this piece, which combines a high-level, thematic view of the issues around BO security with specific examples of usage within the BO world. The actual application of security within Business Objects XI r3 is something of a black art which few can hope to understand, so it’s always useful to get a bit of insight from someone who, from the looks of things, is at the coal-face of BO every day.
The issue of security of operational data is, no doubt, going to become more important in the coming weeks, months and years as the world comes to terms with the effects of a financial crisis founded on non-regulation and non-transparency. I have a sneaking suspicion that corporate governance – already a burgeoning pseudo-industry in the noughties – is going to balloon into an obsession at the start of the new decade. Big players are going to bolt down every movable asset and bring in hordes of consultants to define security best practice in order to minimize financial risk wherever possible. And that means that even the weekly workgroup performance report is going to be audited for security soundness, so you need to make sure your understanding of BO security principles is up to snuff.
Well, we have a new video available for you all to view, called SMI Suite: Behind The Scenes. It’s been a labor of love, involving a multi-million dollar budget, a crew of hundreds, a shoot lasting over six months and directorial tantrums left, right and center. Alternatively, it was done with a green screen and many many hours of painstaking post production. Not to ruin the illusion or anything.
The video is all about architecture, and as a companion piece to the video I wanted to write a blog entry about the same topic, just so the messages from the video are clear. After all, you might find it hard to focus on what I’m saying when you’re confronted with my boyish good looks in all their glory…
Sometimes we find it a little difficult to sum up neatly just how clever SMI Suite is, but we often find that when we get the chance to talk to experienced ITSM professionals in depth – and explain what’s going on behind the scenes, both with SM7 and with SMI Suite, that we almost always get a ‘gasp moment’ from whomever it is we’re talking to. It’s that moment when something suddenly makes sense and it usually falls into one of two camps. Either the person we’re talking to has just spent a month trying to understand why reporting from SM7 is so difficult, or they know precisely why reporting is so difficult, but were convinced that there was no possible solution. Remember the first time someone showed you the Rubik’s Cube? You probably thought that either there was no way a stupid toy could out-fox you, or you took one look and declared that even the greatest minds of our time could never crack such an intellectual nut. If I was going to stretch the analogy any further, I would tell you that SMI Suite is David Singmaster.
So we wanted to take some time to explain in some depth the key concepts around the architecture of SM7 and what SMI Suite does to solve the issues that the architecture raises.
First up is the simple fact that where Service Desk used a fixed, relational database to store its data, Service Manager uses a flat database structure. One of the upshots, from a reporting point of view, is the changeability of field names. So, say you have a field in Service Desk called “Priority”, the corresponding field in the SD database might be called “Priority”, or “Prty”, or “isd3y7j23hh2″ or whatever, but that back-end name would not change once it was set. Not so in Service Manager – everything is subject to change, even after initial setup. So if you were writing a SQL query to call that data, you would need to reference the field name, which might have changed since last month or last week or two minutes ago, and might change again in two minutes time. Also there’s a key difference in the way custom fields are handled – in SD they were custom only in the front end, so no matter how you renamed them in SD, the back-end fields were still called “CustomField1″, “CustomField2″, and so on. In SM7 custom names can be applied to the back-end as well.
SM7 also makes pretty extensive use of CLOBs, BLOBs and comma-delimited array fields, all of which are efficient ways for an application to store its data, but also efficient ways of making that data unintelligible to anyone or anything other than the application that wrote the data. You can think of it like a journalist who has developed his or her own form of shorthand to use when conducting interviews. It works great when the journalist wants to write up the article and can refer to the shorthand notes and quote the subject verbatim, but if the journalist’s editor wants to fact check the article and make sure the subject wasn’t quoted out of context, everything suddenly becomes very difficult, because the shorthand is gibberish.
If we accept that all of these factors make reporting from SM7 very difficult, then we’re going to need to see something pretty special from SMI Suite to solve these problems.
Well, actually, what makes SMI Suite so special is that it is designed, from the ground up, to deal with the particular challenges of SM7 – something that no other (and certainly no one-size-fits-all) application can boast. We already had a solid base in the sense that we had developed a robust, fully featured reporting solution for Service Desk – which, as you’ll remember, uses a fixed, relational database – so the challenge was really to get the SM7 data into a similar format as the SD data that we were used to reporting from.
So included with SMI Suite is a powerful ETL layer that parses the SM7 data into a separate, relational reporting database. And this isn’t just a straight dump, there are some pretty clever things going on, like data cleansing and translation of those BLOBs, CLOBs and array fields into a human-readable format. The mapping of data is based on the standard SM7 configuration, meaning that customers who make minimal customization to the SM7 implementation need only make minimal customization to the SMI Suite implementation. And for larger, more complex organizations with lots of SM7 customization, there’s a user-friendly, drag-and-drop GUI so the data mapping customizations can be easily and quickly without too much technical knowledge.
All of which basically gets us to the point where we started off with Service Desk, which is with good-quality data in a dedicated, relational reporting database, allowing us to bring in our years of experience in this kind of thing, which means standardized reporting universes, out-of-the-box reports and all the benefits of the market-leading BI software.
Which, when you think about where we were just four short paragraphs ago, is pretty awesome. Not only is it possible to run reports out of SM7, but it is possible for staff with no SQL query-writing experience, no database experience – in fact, no technical experience whatsoever – to write reports, refresh them, distribute them and so on. Which is really where SMI Suite sits head and shoulders above products like Crystal Reports or Cognos, which require you to directly query the SM7 database (potentially affecting performance), and to do so in the peculiar, techie way that the SM7 database understands. SMI Suite is all about dragging and dropping, it’s about using obvious and familiar terminology rather than interminable strings of code and it’s about adapting to the changing SM7 structure without you, the end-user, ever having to be aware of it.
Luckily we have a brain that’s taking care of all the complexity and a nervous system that’s taking care of all kind of communication between all structures. This saves us a lot of energy.
Well, I hate to be the one to burst the bubble, but it turns out that someone calling himself BIguru (or is it Big Uru… not sure…) has been blogging about security within Business Objects. BIguru (or Maloy, as he seems to call himself in the real world) has written 
Well, we have a new video available for you all to view, called SMI Suite: Behind The Scenes. It’s been a labor of love, involving a multi-million dollar budget, a crew of hundreds, a shoot lasting over six months and directorial tantrums left, right and center. Alternatively, it was done with a green screen and many many hours of painstaking post production. Not to ruin the illusion or anything.
