Posts Tagged ‘self-service BI’

Human-centric BI & The Wall

October 28th, 2010

For information to be useful, we must explore it, analyze it, communicate it, monitor it, and use it to predict the future, but the BI industry’s attempts to support these activities with few exceptions have been tragically comical.

The technology-centric, engineering-oriented perspective and skill set that has allowed the industry to build an information infrastructure is not what’s needed to support data sense-making. To use the data that we’ve amassed, a human-centric, design-oriented perspective and skill set is needed. All of the traditional BI software vendors and most of the industry’s thought leaders are stuck on the left side of the wall.

The software vendors that are providing effective data sense-making solutions—those that make it possible to work in the realm of analytics on the right side of the wall—have come from outside the traditional BI marketplace. Highlights from http://www.perceptualedge.com/blog/?p=820

And at the same time we enable effective data sense-making by providing choices of data being cleaned, transformed and integrated when that’s absolutely necessary to increase the possibilities of exploring and analyzing.

With Westbury there’s no wall!

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Strategies for Doing More BI with Less

August 4th, 2010

Is there a second economic downturn coming up? When will it be possible based on the first downturn to do more with more? Will this ever be the case in the near future?

Interesting research from TDWI among BI adopters shows the following popular strategies to squeeze more out of existing BI investments:

1. Use more BI Self-Service as this offloads reporting from IT and empowers users to get the data they need & when they need it;

2. The implementation of a BI Competency Center and/or the use of small-inter disciplinary teams;

3. Reduction or elimination of spreadmarts;

4. Using existing tools instead of purchasing new ones as well as cutting-edge approaches such as the application of agile or spiral development techniques.

5. BI tools consolidation.

Especially 1 and 2 were rated as the most important strategies to do more with less. From our engagements we notice the same. Our product is a typically a self service solution and attracts more and more attention this year. We earlier choose the path of self service and based on experiences and customer requests most of our development efforts are heading that way.

An interesting downside mentioned in this research is report chaos which occurs when BI teams implement self-service BI without governance or controls.

Together with the second important strategy mentioned above it more and more shows that the organization and processes around BI are crucial. This underlines our vision that successful reporting and day to day BI practice should be embedded in a governance structure (BI strategy, reporting process, organization and roles).

Are you ready to Do more BI with Less?

Feel free to respond or to contact us.

Source: TDWI report – Getting the Greatest BI Bang for Your Buck http://tdwi.org/Articles/2010/08/04/BI-Bang-for-Your-Buck.aspx

Martijn

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Self Service Reporting for ITSM delivered!

May 21st, 2010

My favorite BI analyst Boris Evelson of Forrester discusses in his latest blog the alignment between the business and IT for BI. The question on the table is if the main requirements for the business (BI should be fast, agile and easy to use) with regards to BI can ever be fulfilled by IT? Because of the business requirements BI vendors are very much focused on developing tools for Self-Service Reporting to put the power of BI in the hands of the end user. Although there is a long way to go, Boris predicts that Next Gen BI tools will close the gap between business and IT.

For Westbury closing the gap between business and IT for IT Service Management is what we do! Like Boris mentioned in his blog, BI vendors like Westbury take care of the back end (ETL, reporting database) of the BI solution and provide the end user (IT process owners) with an easy to use, non-technical user interface (see diagram)

The main challenge for our customers (the IT process owners) in getting the data out of their Service Management tooling is that they are fully dependent on either their internal BI team or some external BI consultants. This dependency is expensive and causes a huge delay  in getting the right reports out to the requesters (the business). Exactly like Boris predicts in his blog, the end users (again, the business) want to create or modify the reports themselves. IT (in our case Westbury) delivers the technical environment and out of the box BI tooling (SMI foundation) that moves the reporting power in to the hands of the end user.

Self Service Reporting for IT Service Management delivered!

Floris

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Information at your fingertips

April 26th, 2010

Do end-users really exist?

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.

  1. 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.
  2. 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 …
  3. 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?
  4. 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.

Do you agree?

Step in the future and enjoy it now at:

http://westbury-it.com/media/product-demos/part-1-introduction-to-report-building

http://www.sap.com/netherlands/solutions/sapbusinessobjects/large/business-intelligence/search-navigation/explorer/index.epx

Martijn

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Around the interwebs: self-service BI

January 13th, 2010

“Self-service BI” is a bit of a watchword these days, and certainly one that we’ve been taking a long hard look at from a marketing standpoint because it describes pretty neatly what SMI Suite is and does, and draws a nice dividing line that separates out the sort of BI that requires written reports in triplicate and fifteen different meetings with the “BI specialists” before you can get your hands on a simple report.

So it was with much interest that I read James Kobielus’ piece on Self-Service Business Intelligence: Dissolving the Barriers to Creative Decision-Support Solutions.

The whole piece is of interest, but the first paragraph struck a resounding note:

Self-service is all the rage in the world of business intelligence (BI), but it’s no fad. In fact, it’s the only way to make BI more pervasive, delivering insights into every decision—important or mundane—that drives your business. It’s the key to empowering users with actionable insights while removing many mundane BI development and maintenance tasks from IT’s crushing workload.

I think we probably need to hire James to sell SMI Suite for us, because what he’s talking about is exactly the same thing we’ve been banging on about for years: operational BI is not (or, at least, should not) be about the same dry reports run week in, week out. It should be about spotting a trend, or spike, or glitch in a particular report and then immediately running off to run a slightly different report that zeros in on that one particular detail. And then spotting a spike in that report and starting the whole process again. It should be about exploring the complexity of the data and about the data inspiring you to want to understand more about where it comes from and what it means. That’s the key to BI being a truly effective tool for saving money, working more efficiently, improving customer satisfaction and all the other things that we all strive to do every single day.

And as James so succinctly points out, self-service is at the heart of that concept.

Tom

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