A BI Tool That Empowers End-users
Self-service and user empowerment are among the rapidly emerging requirements of modern operational BI. The reason for this is that business people often cannot know in advance what questions they may need to answer. They cannot foresee the business changes that may require looking at data in new ways. If business users are allowed to become locked into yesterday's dashboards and reports, their ability to harness new opportunities is significantly impaired.
Users need to be able to rapidly adapt reports and dashboards to changing business conditions. Yesterday's business questions may not be today's business questions. Yesterday's data sources may not be today's data sources. Users need to be able to adapt rapidly and confidently.
Traditional BI software has failed to address this need for flexibility and adaptability. Indeed, traditional BI solutions make integrating diverse data sources so overly complex that frustrated users often resort to exporting operational BI data into Excel spreadsheets in order to combine it with external data. This is the very institutionalization of wasted effort. Every time the user needs to update their analysis, they will manually repeat the same set of tedious steps, creating multiple duplicate databases, and multiplying opportunities for error.
This kind of data mashup is becoming so common in enterprise applications that these error-prone methods, such as Excel export, are no longer acceptable to business users. InetSoft's BI tool addresses the need for rapid integration of data sources by supporting full end-user data mashup. This means that end-users, on their own, can combine diverse data sources to create automatically updating reports and dashboards, and can share these easily with others in the organization, all from within the primary BI software application.