Accelerated Approach of BI
Guest post by
Samrat Vangari, Systems Engineer, Oracle Practice, Enterprise Solutions, Infosys Technologies Ltd.
Amidst soaring competition, meeting needs of a customer no more solely define Business. There is an addition "Accelerated Approach" to complete the definition of business. Adaptively, Business Intelligence restraining its familiarity and to curve it upwards, is all set with its comprehensive and Accelerated Approach.
BI with its accelerated approach ensures quickest and easiest way of analysis and reporting. Let's understand the scenes behind the screen that make it happen.
- Pre-Built Application: Built application is provided by pre-mapping the required tables with the application. This helps the users to avoid designing or modeling from scratch and turn out to be efficient and time saver.
- Interactive User Interface: Users can create interactive dashboards and reports based on the requirements. This helps to be specific and provides the users comprehensive, interactive and a better application.
- Download and Deliver Facility: Reports and queries can be downloaded to various applications such as Power Point, Text, Excel, Word and PDF. Constitutes the ability of delivering reports to users through email or on their mobile devices. Also provides a facility of viewing reports online. Hence avoids the necessity of logging into the application to view the required information.
- Hierarchies: Dimensional hierarchies are provided or can be created. This facilitates drill down into data from high level of detail to the lowest level of detail. Few examples are as follows: i) Drill down from year, to quarter, to month and to the day. Ii) Drill down from product team, to product group and to product detail.
- BI Tool Guide: Detailed information about the BI tool is provided to help the users to explore the application and to clarify in doubt. Hence, leaving no room for confusion or doubt.
- Social Media: This is one of the keenly focused areas by BI, endeavoring to provide analysis on unstructured data available on various social sites on net. This facilitates a better understanding between consumers and producers.
- Embedded business intelligence: Ability to navigate to the different applications or sites from the report where the users can modify or update the information considerably reducing the risk and time.
Equipped with all the above mentioned facets, BI is well placed on the track of acceleration providing sophisticated features, interactive and intelligent application. The beginning of approach is frictionless and highly appreciated leaving only space for glad acceptance of any new ventures by BI.
Comments
We need to understand the key value driver of an Accelerated approach for BI. Key users look at BI to enable them understand thier business and operations in an environment that changes pretty frequently. The questions that are valid today wont be the questions that are valid tomorrow. In an increasingly dynamic business environment, it delivers a lot of value reduce the deployment cycle time of a business solution (fro concept, requirements to go-live).
It is here that Accelerated BI Apps delivers the maximum value
Another big advantage of accelerated BI is the out of the box BI solutions incorporate best in class practices and processes in the BI solution. This is very similar to the argument used for ERP solutions. As time goes, OOB BI is only going to get better, more robust and deployable with less and less changes. Hence Out of the box BI is expected to have a very bright future.
Oracle and SAP are right now the best poised to deliver on OOB BI for medium and large enterprises. Each have acquired companies over hte last few years which would allow them to provide their customers and end to end BI solution that is quickly deployable and delivers significant value. It would interesting to see how thier solutions eveolve and mature over the next few years. Oracle is already working towards enhancing its data models in their OOB BI sginifcantly. We need to see whats SAP's equivalent response.
Posted by: Shantanu Bagchi | May 2, 2011 2:51 PM