Getting a BI Vendor or a BI Expert - But we also need to know that what business intelligence applications we have. We’re going to go out and get a BI vendor, a BI expert, and they’re going to give us the cool visualization software, and once we’ve invested in the new analytic tools, we’ve invested our time and our money and so on, it’s going to work, or we’re just going to put it aside, but we’re not going to test something else. There’s plenty out there to test and see and then you can go and if you find reporting tools that work for you and are meaningful and then you can either develop them internally or have other people develop them. But there are great, fantastic visual analysis tools and, you know, a whole wave of visualization applications, aids, data modeling tools and so on. It’s, you know—but people, be innovative and creative within the organization especially when it comes to data because it’s so valuable. As a reminder, if you have some questions, just submit them in ‘Ask the Question’ field. Also you can download the slides. A few people have asked. Now let’s talk about real time analytics and how long can this take. So what we’re talking about now is basically a real time automated reporting solution for interpreting data and for creating decisions so for really acting on the data. There are many decisions that we understand such as what country should I sell my product in. That’s not a real time decision, but there are just thousands and thousands of decisions made every day where you can actually automate these and make them in real time. And if you’ve heard of the concept of straight through processing, then what we’re doing is we’re basically taking a process that used to be done in part by humans, and we’re automating this process, but we’re automating with expertise...
Global BI Provider -With the increase of outsourcing, mergers and acquisitions, companies need to ensure that they can share and collaborate effectively, regardless of where they are. A state of the art business intelligence solution will present all of your data in a way that gives end users the power of analysis, and updates in real-time to enable the accurate tracking of performance conditions...
Going Down the Road of Implementing Agile BI - Now for the realistic side of agile BI. It's not a silver bullet. There are some potential bumps in the road as you go down this road of implementing agile BI, and I want to point those out. So we will talk about some of the do’s and don’ts. And then I will come back at a later point and talk about how we can get started with this agile BI environment. So let's talk about the top do’s, the first do. Focus on the business needs. I can't say it enough. You need to understand what your business users want. You need to understand what they are trying to solve and then stick with it. The second sub-bullet here is something that I find a lot of BI implementers doing. They try to not only implement the basics of a BI solution to meet the first level requirements, but they dream too big, trying to reach too far. Unfortunately, the scope can expand very rapidly in that kind of an environment, and it can get out of control very, very quickly...
Good BI API - Business applications can interface with end users either through a graphical user interface (GUI), a thin client (usually a web browser) or an exported report (PDF, RTF, Excel etc). Developers can use the JFC libraries, Swing or a large number of commercial GUI component libraries to build sophisticated, platform-independent, internationalized GUIs. Alternatively, developers can use web programming with JSP’s and/or servlets to develop ‘thin client’ applications. InetSoft supplies a tool set to facilitate business report application development in a Java environment. These report development tools are provided in a family of three products, namely Style Report Enterprise Edition, Style Intelligence, and Style Scope...
Good BI Enterprise Solution Examples - Searching for the good BI enterprise solution examples? InetSoft, a pioneer in business intelligence, provides samples from its highly-rated, easy to use enterprise BI platform...
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Google Sheets BI Dashboards - Are you looking for a better solution for business intellignce dashboards for Google Sheets? InetSoft, a pioneer in dashboard reporting, offers the ability to mash up your Google Sheets data with almost any other data source, cloud-based or on premise. The easy to use drag-and-drop designer helps you build a dashboard in minutes. Any dashboard is shareable with full control over access permissions by user or role. Continue reading below to learn more about InetSoft's solution for Google Sheets. Charts are the easiest to understand visualization tool, and InetSoft offers many choices. Tables, as spreadsheets have demonstrated, can pack information in their special ways. InetSoft offers extremely flexible tables that can embed sophisticated inter-cell calculations. Beyond charts and tables, many other familiar user interface components are equally useful in a dashboard setting. InetSoft treats all these components as first class citizens. That gives each component extensive functionality of its own...
Graphical Reporting Software - A properly implemented and highly visual reporting software solution will increase your business's analytical capabilities, helping you make better decisions. The Problems with Data Management Information, by it's very nature, is messy. Every time a sale is made, that's a data point; every time someone is late to work, that's a data point; every time an email is sent, that's a data point. Do you see where I'm going with this? Data is the output of everything that happens in an organization, making tracking key information vitally important. By understanding cause-and-effect relationships in business, you are able to create positive outcomes (in the form of good decisions). With all this endless and constant information being produced, how can you possibly keep up with or manage your data...
HHS BI Example - The purpose of the Department of Health & Human Services (HHS) is to "enhance the health and well-being of all Americans, by providing for effective health and human services and by fostering sound, sustained advances in the sciences underlying medicine, public health, and social services." Over 6,000 hospitals report daily medical data to HHS, which gives this agency a uniquely cyclopedic view of the overall state of American health. In addition to using business intelligence systems to track internal operation of the agency related to employee job function, training, etc., HHS also has unique responsibilities to convey health and wellness data to the public, and to try to encourage healthy behavior and lifestyle. Business Intelligence analysis and data presentation can be hugely influential in achieving this goal, as illustrated, for example, by the department's efforts to effectively communicate the state of Covid transmission and management on a national and local level. (See https://public-data-hub-dhhs.hub.arcgis.com/.)...
Headline Feature of New Product Release is Mobile BI - Welcome to InetSoft’s Webinar on what’s new in our version 11.1 release. The headline feature is mobile BI. My name is Mark Flaherty and I head up marketing here at InetSoft and with me is Byron Igoe, Principal Technologist. So we have a pretty simple agenda today. First, we are going to start off and talk about a couple of InetSoft news items and then some trends we are seeing among our users that might be interesting to you. And then we will give you a preview of the highlights of the new features in this release and spend a little time on a live demo that will be a review and also stress what is new with new release. And then we will have time for question and answers, and so you may note to just go ahead and type in your questions inside in GoTo Webinar question panel. We will answer those at the end. And also, just to remind you we are recording the webinar and we will send out a link to the recording sometime next week, so you will be able to share it with your colleagues...
Hosted BI Cloud Flexible - Cloud computing and software-as-a-service are quickly evolving into a mixture of public cloud, private cloud, and hybrid cloud environments. InetSoft's business intelligence solution is a highly versatile platform for different application scenarios in this new computing era. InetSoft Hosted Cloud Flexible BI InetSoft's cloud flexible business intelligence solution delivers the benefit of cloud computing and software-as-a-Service while giving you maximum level of control. In terms of software-as-a-service, BI software is unique because it inherently depends on the data not being embedded in the application. Novice SaaS BI vendors have created a cloud platform where you must transfer and update all data. This can create severe new issues because of bandwidth limits and updating-logic complexity. Even though some might offer traditional an install-your-own option, you will lose the benefit of SaaS that offloads the infrastructure management to the BI vendor. InetSoft's BI allows you to choose the platform and the location that is best suited for you....
How BI Systems Relate to Finance - We’re switching gears now. That was our background on business intelligence. Now we’re going to talk about BI systems and how they relate to finance. It’s my attempt to depict what I think people in finance departments do as their finance system or the BI systems that they tend to interact with on a daily or weekly basis starting with operational systems. Those are the systems that run the business on a day to day basis, be it general ledger, your accounts payable, accounts receivable, sales, invoicing, things like that. Operational reporting is a confusing term. It means different things to different people and can be actually implemented in many different ways. But at a high level it’s about running reports off of individual operating system. We have business intelligence which is all about generating reports off of a data warehouse or a data mart. It’s obviously a little more than that, but that captures its essence in terms of the strategies and benefits of BI. And then there are other systems: the planning, the budgeting, the forecasting and the consolidation systems that Finance uses...
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How Business Intelligence Becomes Performance Management - Something like performance management is fairly strategic. You need to have business support, but literally the ownership has to be by senior management. It’s not something that an individual in the bowels of an organization can start to implement. So much of business intelligence is about building a data warehouse and giving users a tool. That’s all well and good, and for InetSoft, that is a successful sale, and the enterprise might actually get some value right away. But the question is does it really move the business forward? What are the users looking at? Maybe we’ll give them a dashboard. What should be in the dashboard? I don’t know, whatever the users want in that dashboard. Is there a cause and effect relationship associated with what’s in the dashboard? Well, often not. What is it we’re actually tracking? That’s why planning, for instance, is a real critical piece. Let’s explain it in a slightly different way. One kind of model to explain this is the “management system.” Any management system, it doesn’t have to be based on technology, has four things in it. There are four things that a management system actually does...
How Can a Large Enterprise Take Advantage of Agile BI? - There are a lot of questions coming in as we move into the discussion section of our webinar. A question, how can a large enterprise take advantage of agile BI, and is there a preferred method or process that is recommended? One thing about empowering end users and especially if it's empowering by supporting this data discovery and visual analysis, it’s department and problem centric generally. I am sure some of these problems span the enterprise, but most of them get focused. Like in marketing it could be promotional analysis. Or, it might be sales force performance, pipeline movement and so forth. So even in a sales group, we can have different kinds of problems. That’s why I think you need these teams where the end users work together with the IT group, and often there are BI people in the functional unit, like there is a sales team BI person who works with central IT. There is marketing BI person to understand the problems and those questions about what are the end users exactly trying to answer? Who are they? Because what gets delivered has to be set in the frame where those people can consume it reasonably...