What Are the Advantages of Self-hosted Business Intelligence?
Self-hosted Business Intelligence (BI) refers to the practice of deploying and managing BI tools and platforms within an organization's own infrastructure rather than relying on external cloud-based solutions. There are several advantages to choosing self-hosted BI:
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Data Security and Privacy: One of the primary advantages of self-hosted BI is that it allows organizations to maintain full control over their data. Since data is stored and processed within the organization's own infrastructure, there is less reliance on external third-party providers, reducing the risk of data breaches and unauthorized access.
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Compliance and Regulations: Organizations in certain industries, such as healthcare, finance, and government, often have strict compliance and regulatory requirements for data handling and storage. Self-hosted BI can provide better control over data governance, ensuring that the organization meets these requirements without relying on external providers.
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Customization and Integration: Self-hosted BI solutions can be customized and integrated more deeply into an organization's existing IT infrastructure. This allows for tailoring the BI platform to specific business needs and integrating it with other systems, applications, and databases.
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Performance: Self-hosted BI solutions can offer better performance and faster data processing since they are deployed within the organization's own network. This can be especially beneficial when dealing with large datasets or complex analytical queries.
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Network Latency: In cases where organizations have a high volume of data and need real-time or near-real-time insights, self-hosted BI can help reduce network latency and improve responsiveness in data retrieval and analysis.
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Cost Control: While self-hosted BI may have higher upfront costs for hardware, software licenses, and IT infrastructure setup, it can lead to cost savings in the long run. Organizations can avoid ongoing subscription fees associated with cloud-based solutions.
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Scalability: Self-hosted BI allows organizations to scale their infrastructure according to their specific needs. They have full control over hardware upgrades and resource allocation, enabling them to adapt to changing data volumes and user demands.
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Offline Access: In scenarios where internet connectivity might be unreliable or unavailable, self-hosted BI can provide uninterrupted access to business intelligence tools and reports.
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Data Ownership: With self-hosted BI, an organization maintains ownership of its data, reducing concerns about vendor lock-in or potential challenges if the organization decides to switch BI solutions.
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Long-Term Viability: By investing in building and maintaining their own BI infrastructure, organizations can ensure the longevity and availability of their BI tools, even if external vendors discontinue their services or change their pricing models.
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Training and Support: Internal IT teams can have more direct control over training, support, and troubleshooting for the BI solution, leading to quicker issue resolution and a better understanding of the system.
More Resources and Articles about InetSoft's Self-hosted Business Intelligence Product
Automated Decision-Making - Automated decision-making or at least automated alerts when a decision is necessary can produce savings in cycle time. Business users have more confidence in their decision-making because all the necessary self-service data preparation is available to them...
Best Companies Use Business Intelligence - How do the best companies use business intelligence? First, I'll explain what we mean by the best companies. We mean those companies that use business intelligence the best are the ones who also have the best measures in several areas: fastest speed to accessing information, highest usage rate of BI assets, highest employee productivity, and lowest effective cost of BI applications per employee...
Best Practice for Self-Service Business Intelligence - I came across a best practice report about self-service business intelligence. It said that for the main reasons for implementing self-service BI, 65% said constantly changing business needs, so you can see the need for flexibility there. 57% said the inability of IT to meet user demands. We've been talking about that. And again you can see right here on the screen some of the key reasons for self-service BI to be important to organizations...
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“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
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BI Analysis Software for Salesforce - Style Intelligence for Salesforce is based on the same patent-pending Data Block data access infrastructure that is the foundation of InetSoft's award-winning on-premise software applications for reporting, dashboards and analysis. Style Intelligence for Salesforce is an application built for Salesforce.com customers. If you are currently using Salesforce, this application will take your analysis and dashboarding to the next level...
BI Program Perspective - For example, if you are a company that is going to be successful because of superior customer service, or excellent customer support, then maybe from a BI program perspective, that's where you want to start because it's the way you differentiate the company in your business strategy. Maybe that's where you actually want to start with your BI program and start measuring things related to customer service...
BI Strategy Development - We have developed a business intelligence methodology that focuses on the business strategy and help customers focus on that. This is what I want to take you through today because we believe that building a solid BI strategy is vital to your success. So, we have seen many BI implementations, and we believe that we have the expertise to help you with the BI strategy development...
Customized Dashboard and Reporting Capabilities - InetSoft empowers Bison Analytics with customized dashboard and reporting capabilities. "The true beauty of this partnership is that QuickBooks companies get real analytics and dashboards with little to no effort. Growth-centered companies can compete more effectively with the deep analytics power this partnership provides. QuickBooks ProAdvisors are finally provided the necessary tools to consult with their clients instead of having to wrestle with building complicated reports...
Deeper BI Capability - 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...
Enterprise BI Product Information - This is a continuation of the table of contents of product information relating to InetSoft's enterprise BI solutions. Since 1996 InetSoft has been delivering easy, agile, and robust business intelligence software that makes it possible for organizations and solution providers of all sizes to deploy or embed full-featured business intelligence solutions. BI Dashboard Solution for Progress DataDirect - With any business intelligence solution, it is important to have full access to all relevant data and information within a company. These data sets are stored in databases where dashboard reporting software can retrieve and compile information in order to build data visualizations...
Experience with KPI Dashboards - After a few weeks of experience with those KPI dashboards, identify the users who want more self-service, and give them a short training on how to modify existing dashboards and reports. After a few more weeks, give them a short training on how to develop dashboards from scratch. Ask them to identify in advance one that they have been wanting and make the building of it the in-class activity...
Embed BI into a Particular Department - There are more roles than the number of full-time equivalents. So you might have two-three, maybe four people and embed them into a particular department. You might also look at this and say you know what, maybe I want all my training to be done locally. Instead of having a very formal classroom kind of style training, what if we had people embedded in the departments locally, walking around and doing more analyzing with folks and answering questions in that way...
Free BI Software Evaluation - Are you looking for free business intelligence software? InetSoft offers a version of its commercial BI software that requires no download. This cloud-based BI tool is called Visualize Free. Upload your xls or csv file and use the intuitive BI analysis creator to make interactive visual analyses with advanced chart types. If you are looking for BI tools to download and install on-premise in your organization, Or if your data goes beyond uploaded spreadsheet data, InetSoft's offers a commercial solution. There are many capabilities included that are not found in the free version...
Host a BI Platform - Having a BI solution available via a web browser enables expanding organizations to make BI accessible to offices all over the globe. The ability to host a BI platform on a single server or server cluster and make it available to an entire organization eliminates the added costs of hosting individual solutions at different locations...
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Read what InetSoft customers and partners have said about their selection of Style Report as their production reporting tool. |
Increase Self-service BI - As I mentioned before we're moving from an age of the data getting in, to more of the data getting out. And so there is a new kind of balance that's needs to be achieved there. Future BI would increase self-service BI, put more technology in the hands of users to personalize their experience with access and analytics...
Integrated Big Data Environment - InetSoft offers a cloud-ready, fully scalable enterprise-grade platform that can access an existing big data source or use its own built-in, dedicated Spark/Hadoop cluster to turn an organization's data warehouses, relational databases, and almost every other on-premises or cloud-hosted data source into an integrated big data environment...
Knowledge of Which Reports - Okay let's dive into the first key issue on strategy. I want to start with a case study that I wrote several years ago but I thought it was just a good example of what the folks of a government agency did in their self-service BI program. And I think with most problems the first step is recognizing and understanding the problems. You can read through on the left hand side of this slide, the current state and challenges at the time. Number one was just a lack of understanding of which reporting tools to use and when, and then number two, there was just a lack of knowledge of which reports...
Look at the KPI Approach - Look at the KPI approach. KPIs are not directly related to technology, but, if you will, they will indirectly correlate with the technology, and you can see here that the ability to achieve what we call time to information, that is to access critical business information within the timeframe required. This is almost a factor of two to one across the board, both in terms of time to information, in terms of the increase in year-over-year sales revenue growth, the change year-over-year in operating profit, and customer retention...
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Read what InetSoft customers and partners have said about their selection of Style Scope for their solution for dashboard reporting. |
Make BI Better - The last area is pervasiveness or positioning. Sometime you just want to make BI better for the existing users. Help those existing users have a faster time to insight or a faster time to value. Think about these dimensions as we go through each of the four innovations. One more thing to do is to assess the challenges in your own BI environment. Where is your organization situated versus the three challenges listed in the beginning, adoption, time to insight, and relevance, because if you need to address one more than the other, then that can sway your decision on which innovation to pursue...
Mashup Driven Dashboards & Reports - Wherever the InetSoft application is deployed, mashup on-premise and in-cloud data with diverse formats and structures into high performance, analytic-ready data blocks for both business intelligence and machine learning. SQL databases, JSON/REST, Salesforce.com, and Google Analytics are just a few example sources...
Moving to Self-service BI - They actually pull us in completely different directions. So if we think about something like an ability to react to ever-changing business requirements, obviously the world doesn't stand still, and every day you have a new competitive threat, or you have new merger-and-acquisition activity. So businesses need to react on a dime to be able to address all of these changing conditions and be able to analyze them...
People Measure the KPI - When you see the customer product index, or how many products you sell to a particular customer rise, it gives some indication that you are using your intelligence to help them buy more and feel comfortable with those products. Some people measure the KPI of average revenue per customer. Is that on the rise or decrease. Or look at the other metric, retention. Some customers put a lot of emphasis on loyalty as a good indicator for intelligent customer interactions working. Is that going up or down...
Phased Roll-Out Plan - The fourth step, after the selection of the software, is to create a phased roll-out plan with a goal of getting some deliverables completed sooner, rather than trying to address all the requirements and projects across the organization at once. With quicker success, the project keeps moving and avoids the risk of getting bogged down. What are some of the challenges organizations face when trying to move to a self-service BI model? You need to create an information-centric culture. And to do so it is critical, but also challenging, to create a strong data governance framework...
Practice of Managing Information - DAMA is dedicated to promoting the understanding, development and practice of managing information and data as a key enterprise asset," states Andrea Thomsen, Education Officer at DAMA-MN. "This presentation is an example of the type of educational opportunities we provide to our local chapter members each month. At our chapter meetings members can exchange problems, ideas, and experiences related to information and data resource practices." Information management professionals...
Self-service BI Is Intuitive - While InetSoft has been providing reporting software for fourteen years, our BI platform, Style Intelligence has been in the market for four years now. The adoption rate is growing. And part of the reason is because of the feedback we are receiving from customers so along the lines of this: they start to put the software into the hands of certain people in one department, others start to see the use of that dashboard and reporting tool by their colleagues, and then the usage grows in a kind of viral fashion because there is really no training involved...
Self-service Data Solution - With more and more businesses relying on data analytics tools to measure performance, self-service data is proving to be a crucial part of day-to-day business tasks. But what exactly is self-service data and how can it help your business? Self-service data is an approach to business intelligence and data analytics that is made so that business users can work with and manipulate data without having to rely so heavily on IT...
Self-service Exploration of Data - Also, some solutions out there have been built by acquisition and led to a fragmented user experience and you do not really know what application you need to be using at a given time. Also the original BI solutions aren't known for offering high levels of self-service, and that is something we really aim to overcome. And I mentioned it before, but being able to adapt to changes, being able to add new data sources or even let end-users add their own data sources, that hasn't been a hallmark of the original BI solutions. Neither has been giving the ability for a self-service kind of exploration of the data, something that's a key feature for our software...
Strategy Self-service BI - The same thing could be done with the support and the help desk. That's the last bullet point you see. Maybe what if we had a lot of the initial support being done locally? So I'd encourage you as part of your self-service BI strategy to think of which of these roles you actually want to have done locally versus in a more of centralized team structure. And my last slide for this key issue is this notion of a cross-functional team that blends IT and business skills. It's just such a beautiful slide. As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words. Here you are seeing in this company, all the people with red circles around their head are from IT, all the people with blue circles around their heads are from the business...
Success Stories Using InetSoft - Read about the benefits of business intelligence. Hear how organizations are using business intelligence solutions. Some provide their managers performance management dashboarding. Others use data mashup technology to combine disparate data sources to provide comprehensive dashboard reporting. All of them leverage InetSoft's business intelligence technology to derive intelligence from their data. Nebraska Educational Service Unit #1 selected InetSoft's business intelligence software. The state organized support agency uses InetSoft's Style Scope business intelligence application to gain advanced analytics and reporting on student performance and programs run by the special education department...
Task to Replace a Database - Sometimes we'll help a prospect with a proof of concept, and they'll tell us, "Don't remove it. We would like to take it into production," Especially the midsize companies who are thinking about replacement of a database because the database load was too high. And then we brought in our data mashup engine. It's a complex task to replace a database. But with this agile data access engine and with our data grid cache technology, you may have a benefit in performance...
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Read how InetSoft saves money and resources with deployment flexibility. |
Tell Me What Is Self-Service BI - Definition: Self-service Business Intelligence (SSBI) allows employees to access and work with data analytics without the help of the information technology department. This approach allows users to generate custom reports and analytical queries without the help of the IT department, which will allow them to focus on other tasks at hand. Traditionally most business users have had to rely heavily on IT to get access to information the need to make business decisions. This...
Top-down BI Design - Once you are done with organizational alignment, then we will recommend following some of the BI process best practices such as using a combination of bottom-up and a top-down BI design and architecture. Bottom-up calls for serving all of the source systems, reconciling the data, and creating some kind of a normalized historical data warehouse. Sometimes that bottom-up approach suffers from the disconnect from the real business requirements. So some folks try the top-down approach where you go through the classical decomposition of performance management staffs. This mean, let's take a look at our strategy and decompose it into goals and objectives, and let's decompose those into specific metrics that we need to monitor every month to understand what our goals and objectives are, and then let's see where we get the raw data for those metrics...
Unification of BI Functions - With current BI technologies, if you look at historical analysis versus predictive analysis, for instance, they are typically totally different applications. If you look at a traditional BI solution based on data warehousing, ones using disk-based technologies versus real-time in-memory BI, where, let's say, a trader on Wall Street, needs to make an instantaneous analysis with no time allowed whatsoever to access a database on a disk, traditionally those are a couple of examples of separate technologies where you had to install several applications and choose which tool to use, today you're seeing more and more unification of functions in a single BI application like InetSoft's...
Velocity Drives Big Data - That's right, great okay, our next trend, variety not volume or velocity drives big data investments, and this kind of gets down to those three Vs by which we define Big Data. Holly, do you want to kick us off on some thoughts on this? Holly: Yes, so as data government defines Big Data or differentiates Big Data from other data originally is by the three Vs or the scale of the issue...
Way to do Visual Discovery - But this is an example of a great way to do visual discovery and then combine it with quantitative modeling to get a feel for the overall makeup of a portfolio and now again it can predict, and it will run the model against the rest of the field to put two more fields in the table and put a field for predicted in a score. Then I could go and look at which of these other fund had the same characteristic. It would be predicted to have the same behavior. Obviously this kind of capability can be used in a whole wide range of areas from impact on sales results, to impact on giving, to impacts that breakdown in a factory floor process on yields. When we use it, the mind can really probably envision a lot of things here...
Which Reporting Tools to Use and When - Okay let's dive into the first key issue on strategy. I want to start with a case study that I wrote several years ago but I thought it was just a good example of what the folks of a government agency did in their self-service BI program. And I think with most problems the first step is recognizing and understanding the problems. You can read through on the left hand side of this slide, the current state and challenges at the time. Number one was just a lack of understanding of which reporting tools to use and when, and then number two, there was just a lack of knowledge of which reports existed and both of those things resulted in number, which was this uncontrolled propagation and replication of data. You can see what that did in terms of the business impact, the cost and the complexity and the increased business risk there...