InetSoft Webinar: BI Solution for Dynamic User Requirements
This is the continuation of the transcript of a Webinar hosted by InetSoft on the topic of "What are the Benefits of a Visual Reporting Solution?" The speaker is Abhishek Gupta, product manager at InetSoft.
And then they talk about transforming a BI solution to fit the dynamic user requirements, implementing a formal methodology, agile software development and techniques and tools to accelerate development testing. Deployment should be ongoing. Scoping should be followed by rapid iterations. Allow for evolving requirements. Use scrum sessions. Do frequent thorough testing with communication with the business.
This is an IT managed process that uses a bunch of some of the new development techniques and tools that are proving to be really effective the most successful software companies and IT shops. And then the other aspect that keeps coming up is mobile devices.
As we read through the blogs, the conferences, they’re coming up a lot. In addition to this, there are new hardware platforms that users are getting that allow them to be far more mobile and able to access information basically anywhere, anytime any place because these things are going with them.
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So as we look at the technical side of the discussion, these are the themes that seem to come up, flexible, fast, varied options, mobile, and an IT centrally managed process. The other side of that is the end user side. And a lot of the writing has been about the technical side. The end user side seems to have had less coverage in at least what we surveyed, which was pretty broad.
And we see what end users want is quick and flexible access to data, and again there are more and more sources of data. They want an intuitive display and easy interaction. They want to be able to consume it on their own without having to go back to experts for help. They want access from anywhere, anytime which this whole mobile device thing.
It’s helping to enable this as new web base systems are available and data updates are frequent. End users have found legacy BI Systems too difficult to understand and interact with. It’s not that they want the same thing developed and deployed faster. The key point is it’s something different rather they’re looking for new paradigms with which to understand their information and easily interact with it.
So the counterpoint is yes we want implement business intelligence faster, and more flexibly, but we also want to implement something new and different that is more enabling. So that actually gets into the next section.
We’d like to launch a survey now just asking what is your role in your company, and if you are indeed using an Agile BI strategy right now. We are just interested in finding out what is your role in that? So that the survey’s up, we’re going to wait about 20 seconds for people to answer.
So while the surveys getting filled up and sort of transitions to the next section which is we’re going to talk about the end users and some of the view points on that. So we’ll let the survey run as we start to introduce this next bit from the Gartner BI Summit where they talk about fundamental changes in the delivery of business intelligence. Instead of what they would call structured decision making, it’s much more communal decision making. Instead of controlled and qualified access to data, it is open unqualified access.
So at the same time these development techniques are enabling faster more iterative BI delivery, there is a move to creating more empowerment. That’s almost how we would use the word information democracy where the user has a lot more ability to interact and explore than ever before.
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Underneath that there are four key driving technologies. Data management has enabled this kind of flexibility and access to tons of information that you can explore. Data visualization has enabled people to see and understand the data in ways never before, and if it’s interactive, it becomes the query tool to go back and drill and slice dice in ways that are just much easier than trying to do traditional queries on a database.
In addition social software is creating all kinds of new information relationships. Interest areas come up, and there is a ton of information that’s now being collected that wasn’t available just a few years ago. And then search is another technology they gets mentioned a lot, the ability to find things both in numeric and textual data such as comments.
There is tons of information that if it’s put in a form that you can easily search. It’s really key to creating new insight and knowledge and the Gartner Group in this summit talked about these kinds of things driving the penetration of end users up two and a half times from where it has been. So these would be enabling technologies that empower a whole lot more people to work with data than ever before.
We have some survey results. The survey results came in, and it looks like our attendance is 18% business users, 35% management, and 66% IT. There is a good balance between the technical side and the business side, which is good to see as we go into the end users side of the discussion.