Five Killer Trends that Would Redefine Business Apps

Continued from page: 5

Thursday, January 03, 2008

BI Tools Become Easy to Use

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For any organization, the value of getting reports about its various performance metrics is extremely critical, as it helps make the right decisions at the right time. This reporting reflects the status of assets that can include customer databases, supply chain information, personnel data, manufacturing, sales and marketing activities, as well as any other source of information critical for the organization's business operations.

But all these business functionalities have their own data sources, due to which extracting a report based on over two or more functional areas becomes complex and a tedious job for the IT department.

Business Intelligence (BI) software steps in here. It allows you to integrate disparate data sources like supply-chain and customer databases into a coherent framework for real-time reporting and detailed analysis. Equipped with BI an organization can have the facility to gain insights into their business or operations by understanding their company's information assets.

Every organization, small or large can benefit from BI. Because of this BI applications can be found deployed in every other organization. Today BI is no longer a tool meant for top executives alone. Its usage has trickled to others in the organization as well, ie the salesforce can also use BI to get data about their prospective customer leads. This is mainly because BI reporting and querying has become easier to use. For instance, today BI applications use user interfaces that represent a familiar spreadsheet like environment, but are packed with more advanced features.

Decision-makers of an organization have always expected BI applications to present them the most current information from the data warehouse or from the operational data in order to evaluate their business plans, product's performance or consumer behavior and also how to lead business processes. Business Analytics helps in evaluating such reports generated mainly by the enterprise's BI system from the data repository.

BA is a tool with which scenario based and predictive analysis could be done on the information to describe a business opportunity better. Organizations need such analytics tools that could help to optimize business processes like identifying best customer, selecting the ideal price, and calculating demand–supply requirement etc.

A BI application does an overall organizational information retrieval through a central data warehouse which tracks all departmental data stores

Taking cue from this, now many BI applications have integrated the analytics facility also along with the reporting.

BI Apps integrating BA tools
The past year saw many significant acquisitions in this space. Many vendors in the BI domain acquired companies with Business Analytics expertise. The major news-makers were SAP for its acquisition of Business Objects, and IBM's acquisition of Cognos. As a result, these BI firms can now offer a complete solution to the customer, right from reporting to data analysis.The advantage of integrating BA tools with BI applications is obvious.

BA tools provide dashboard functionalities whereby the KPIs can be tweaked to see their projected outcome

BI applications are based on pre-determined key-performance metrics and planning assumptions on which automated reports are generated. Whereas BA tools are not meant for simple report generation,but rather work and interact on data from generated reports of BI to do calculative analysis to help in decision-making processes.

For instance, Business Objects has a BA tool called Xcelsius. With it users can evaluate BI-generated reports with graphical data representation, which is easier to interpret, and also conduct on-report business analysis in a spreadsheet like interface. This helps in execution of business decisions instantly from the report itself.

This is in stark contrast to the earlier days, where the report generated from the BI application had to be pulled out onto a spreadsheet and handed to data analysts for generating business model or for analysis summary.

With such easy to use reporting and analysis tools a business decision maker can not only query a BI app for a report, but also do predictive analysis on it to make a business decision out of it. With that he can not only save time but also make better decision in the competitive business arena.

In addition to distributing the right data for reporting, BI solutions present that data in visualized format like a graph for ease of understanding. These tools have options that allow you to create dashboard reports to present data in various formats like charts or diagrams.

Viewing graphically presented data results in easier and quicker evaluation of reports. Also this visualized data can be used for doing analytics and reviewing purposes whereby the scenarios of a change to a particular metric and its impact can be judged easily. Such dashboard functionality results in ease of use for the end-user of the BI application.

With the BA tools being integrated into an enterprise's BI solution it has empowered the organization's employees to make faster and better decisions by having an accurate view of the organization and the actionable items based on defined key performance metrics.

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