Business Intelligence Infrastructure Provider InetSoft Joins a BI Podcast

This is a continuation of eBizQ's Business Intelligence in Action Podcast

Ross: BPM is just a natural fit into that, where that data, those business intelligence dashboards, are feeding into something that at the point in time, as someone mentioned earlier, that is where they need the information the most. That is where the natural synergy comes in. So it just depends how complex the organization data needs are, the information needs are, how they want it structure it.

Do they want to put a process infrastructure strategy in place and then from that process see the key points where the business intelligence infrastructure can naturally feed into it, or are they already getting the information, and now they need to put it into a context which is where BPM comes in.

Goldstein: OK. Next, now, Lothar, you talked about driving business intelligence and collaboration and also driving business intelligence best practices. Can you explain how you do that with your BI solution? Certainly. One area that we see is a focus on standardization of the BI platform. If you look at how traditionally BI has been deployed across organizations, it was of a mix of different BI tools and technologies which were driven by individual business demands, but often lacking overall a cohesive information strategy.

Challenge of Changing Business Needs for BI

The challenge of this kind of business intelligence strategy was it was very hard to maintain and adapt to changing business needs. Many resources went into just managing this complex BI infrastructure.

So organizations are now moving towards standardization of BI platforms and looking for a platform not just for the business intelligence needs but also to integrate it with business processes capabilities integrated with applications from multiple vendors and technologies such as search. That kind of standardization on one BI platform, it definitely helps to drive efficiency. The other area is to have service level agreements with the business, an information foundation where information is extracted via service oriented Web services, enterprise services, with guaranteed service level agreements such as response times.

That is an area that we have been heavily investing in together with business partners to leverage in-memory technology to deliver rapid response time independent of any type of query or business request. It certainly helps with agility.

“Flexible product with great training and support. The product has been very useful for quickly creating dashboards and data views. Support and training has always been available to us and quick to respond. - George R, Information Technology Specialist at Sonepar USA

In terms of best practices, a couple of other speakers alluded to it, information has to be deliverer in the context of processes in terms of best practices for organizations because they don’t want to start from scratch. They want to work with business KPIs and business models that make sense to their specific industries.

So that is where we and our partners work together to deliver best practices, business templates, data models, and such for over 25 different industries. With our suite, or similar BPM suites, you can get the data in a simplistic form from the actual process, maybe if it’s at a departmental level, but if you already have a business intelligence suite in place, you’re already gathering those valuable key metrics, and you already have BI dashboards set up.