InetSoft Webcast: The Promise of Agile BI and of Style Intelligence

This is the continuation of the transcript of a Webcast hosted by InetSoft on the topic of "Business Intelligence Today." The speaker is Mark Flaherty, CMO at InetSoft.

Flaherty: Well, and that’s the promise of agile BI and of Style Intelligence, is that it can really transform the organization from the democratizing of the data and the intuitive user interface. And in our last couple of minutes, what learnings can both of you share with people out there who might be considering implementing this BI solution but are a little intimidated. They might be worried that it requires a lot of time and effort as you both illustrated.

Henshon: People have said to me, “you keep talking about how you are able to do this in days, weeks and a month or two, and I don’t know that I really sign off on that. Are you guys just kind of talking or whatever?” And my response was, “Well, listen, these BI products are rapid application, rapid deployment products, but it’s not going to solve the problem of having bad architecture or poor data modeling and poor data design underneath the hood.

If you are a organization that has a good solid foundation, and you really want to jump to the next level, especially in the usability and high user adoption, you really can’t do that in days, weeks and months, if you have the right people focused on it and you have a good use case.

And the other lesson learned was, “don’t try to boil the ocean.” Take a use case that you know is a quick win, that has some payback, that you can use as a catalyst to create more demand out there for the product, because you want to be able to make sure that your first use case is going to be very, very successful and people are going to talk and get excited about it, and you don’t have to try to provide all things right out of the gate at once. Barrymore: Sure. The biggest thing I would say is stop looking at all the glossy brochures and all the PowerPoints, you can only learn so much from those. You actually have to get in and start using the dashboarding tool. Bring it into your development department, your sandbox environment, whatever you may call it. Actually bring in the data mashup tool and actually see what it takes to develop with it.

The learnings that you will get in a very short period of time will far exceed all the PowerPoints that you have read. So to me, that’s been the biggest learnings with all of the reporting tools is once we wanted to connect them to a data warehouse, bring them in house, work with InetSoft, work with whoever your business intelligence vendor might be, get something up and running in the development environment and learn. And then from there, you could start to develop a road map to how to deploy this in production.