InetSoft Webinar: Promoting BI's Practicality

This is a copy of the transcipt of a Webinar hosted by InetSoft. The speaker is Mark Flaherty, CMO at InetSoft, and he discusses the topic of “Embedded Business Intelligence.”

Mark Flaherty: Embedded BI has increased as a common and a proven deployment strategy for getting business intelligence into the hands of more users. Companies that leverage this type of an embedded BI strategy have been able to leverage those existing applications to piggyback that analytical capability on top of those solutions and drive that faster visibility, get more engagement from the user community and as a result, they have proven to be able drive substantial and measurable operational performance improvements.

So for those considering business intelligence as an addition to their toolset, there are a couple of things to think about; one of the things is I would recommend providing users with deeper BI capability: as you think about that value chain from collection to assembly to delivery, where can the right tools be applied, where do the users need that technology to help support better decision making whether it's on the improvement of the quality of the data, or assembling that data into better insight or faster delivery to those key decision makers.

Another key is to work to enable that self-service delivery model. Companies need to have the ability to generate, to have their line of business managers and decision makers pick up analytical solutions by themselves, ask questions of their data, generate their own views of the data that makes sense to them, monitor their own performance metrics, create their own views, all that good stuff so that they can make better decisions based on the idiosyncrasies and intricacies of their particular business function.

And then lastly, I’d talk about promoting BI as a tactical tool because one of the things we have seen is as business intelligence sort of grew organically as a strategic tool for forecasting, planning, and budgeting, really. A lot of times recently, we have been seeing it used more as a tactical tool for that operational visibility and operational decision support. I talked about that decision window, companies are seeing that shrinking in that decision window, they need to make decisions faster and a lot of companies are leveraging that type of analytical capability to make those operational decisions and drive operating performance as a result.

There are your mundane applications that you see everyday but there are a lot of cases where a small group or even a big group under time pressure or other pressures really have got to change the way their users see their applications or even their jobs. And we believe that we provide the tools and technology to help you do that. And we think that if you look around today, there is couple of key aspects of a breakthrough application.

Let's step back for a second and talk a little bit more about what we mean. All of your users know what breakthroughs are, because they are all using iPhones, and iPads, Facebook, and all of these things, but then they come into work and they go, gee, why are my corporate applications the same old applications that I have been using for 20 years? I mean yeah maybe they are running on web page now and not in a PC, but they are fundamentally the same. And we think that your users, no matter what industry you are in, are going to start demanding from your enterprise applications, the same types of things that they are seeing in their mobile apps.

And we have just pulled this down to really three things, the first is, your solution has to deliver mass personalization and what we mean by that is that your users are going to connect to your application in a variety of different ways, you don’t know what kind of system it’s going to be, whether it’s mobile, whether it’s web, whether it’s desktop PC, they are going to want to see information, whether it’s traditional business intelligence, whether it’s transactional, whether it's reports, whether it’s graphics, they are going to want to see what they want to see, the way they want to see it.

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We also believe that data is not just rows and columns, so a typical relational database is only going to handle about 5% of the data that you have in your organization. We believe that you need to handle all of the data in your organization in a unified way, be that unstructured textual notes or images, video, whatever that may be. And tying this all together is this idea of driving intelligent action, which was alluded to earlier in this presentation.

And that’s the idea of that all of this information is in the hands of the people making the decisions and if you can help them to make the decisions at the point, they are doing the work rather than reading a report at the end of the month, you are going to be a lot more successful.