It Just Has to Work

Have you ever had the experience where you are hunting within your favourite BI portal for how to do such a simple thing like sending a link to a report to your business analyst? Have you ever wanted to scream at your monitor that "It shouldn't be this hard!!!"?

Welcome to the lack of attention to design that blights many BI portal implementations!

If we take a lesson from Google, we see the opportunity to focus on core functionality and to not over-engineer our BI implementations. The one frustrating thing I noticed when I started using Google's online tools was that I couldn't find out what the application was capable of without the standard menu bar we are used to in traditional desktop applications. Now I am a died in the wool IT geek, so I am definitely the exception in this case. Most users just want to do the basics and find all the options overwhelming.

Another point on designing for simplicity is that over time I found the Google suite does have advanced functionality. The key is that I didn't have the option to launch the piece of functionality until I needed it. The application was aware of my context, and showed me what I needed when I needed it. Thankfully we are starting to see more attention to design in software, Microsoft has started the quest for a simpler design with the ribbon bar in Office 2007.

This applies to BI in 2 ways, first the design from the vendor, and then the design of your information architecture. We need to demand from our vendors that they pay close attention to their user interface design, to understand how users interact with the software. and customize the interface accordingly. To continue the widespread adoption of BI information in the enterprise, it is critical that we design for the basic user, but still provide the functionality for the power user. When we place our own organization's information architecture on top of our BI platforms we need to ensure we continue this attention to design, so that we can make the information easier and more intuitively to navigate.

Keep it as simple as possible, and your key measures for use of your BI portal will leap off the chart!

Mark

P.S. We all have stats on our BI portal usage don't we? ;)

Will the BI portal last?

Almost all vendors have been moving to a consolidated web portal to expose BI assets to end users. I have to question the validity of making our users come to a portal when they clearly need to integrate intelligence into other aspects of their computer use. Is there a need to change the paradigm of "come and get" it BI?

I think to some extent there is a need to change how we think about building BI applications. We tend to extract out just the information requirements from our end users and neglect to capture their overall business process in the picture. If we look at this bigger picture, we will see opportunities to potentially automate decisions and to make the Business Intelligence technology more transparent in the process.

Today's BI platforms have capabilities to integrate directly within office applications, and through a service oriented architecture can expose any type of BI asset to any other application or service. There are even capabilities to expose reports as RSS feeds, that can even deliver content such as a fully rendered reports directly to the users reader software of choice. Let's use these capabilities to delivery more effective solutions and make the end user experience simpler.

We are hearing the catch phrase "pervasive BI" in the industry more and more. As people get busier and busier in their working lives, we need to provide them with the right amount of data to make the right decision at the right time. This is the promise of pervasive BI, take the strategy out of the board room and bring it to the front lines.

Yes, we will likely always have some type of BI portal to provide access to reports and other content. Let's not lose sight of other ways for our end users to interact with corporate information. By taking their overall process into account, we can integrate the required information in the most effective way for the organization.

Article on Pushing the BI Limits

This is a link to a great presentation by Timo Elliot a Senior Director with Business Objects. This is one of the best presentations I have seen on pushing BI to the limit!

http://www.timoelliott.com/blog/2008/06/delivering_results_with_busine.html

Mark

Predictive Analytics - There is a time and a place

Predictive analytics have been touted as the holy grail of Business Intelligence for quite some time now. However, how many organizations are actually using predictive analytics? In a recent survey conducted by TDWI only 21% of organizations have a full or partial predictive analytics deployment, while another 19% are in the process of developing it.

http://www.tdwi.org/News/display.aspx?id=8699

What does this mean to the majority of organizations? In my opinion it means that we need to apply the techniques of predictive analytics as the business case warrants. For example, if we can understand customer behaviours and predict what actions will appeal to each type of customer, we will be able to produce significant ROI for the organization. In order to increase the adoption of predictive analytic deployments, we need to take this out of the back room analyts hands and into the hands of the employees working directly with the customer. The trend towards operational business intelligence is a great way to inject targeted intelligence directly into the work processes of these individuals.

To think about it another way, does this intelligence absolutely require human interaction at all? If you have a rules based engine in place, you can directly take action by plugging in the different variables to the model, retrieve the scenario with the highest score and take the next logical step of implemention directly. If you don't require a decision from the knowledge worker (and we are nearly all knowledge workers), why add another piece of information to their already overwhelmed senses?

Predictive Analytics have a time and a place but the organization and technology need to be ready for it. If you don't have ready access to data, business stakeholders, and modelling expertise take 1 step back. If you don't have a way to take direct action from your predictive analytics solutions take 2 steps back!

Mark

Costco - Operational BI in Action

We were recently at our neighbourhood Costco on our bi-weekly expedition to buy bulk and ran into a situation where a very simple application of operational Business Intelligence was successful with me and my wife.

We were standing in line at the checkout when a Costco employee came up to upsell us their Executive membership. Normally we aren't interested in paying more for a membership, especially when we already pay $50 a year. The executive membership is another $50 a year for a total of $100. However, on this day we were feeling charitable so thought we would give him a chance.

First of all, he scanned our current card. After scanning our card he was able to show us that if we spend the extra $50 to upgrade the membership we would save at least $65 a year! This would pay for itself! Now, lets think about the BI process in the background:

• Rep scans our current membership card on his handheld / wireless device
• Last year's purchases are accessed online, and then a formula is applied to determine the rebate we would of gotten if we had the membership last year
• Rep lets us know the savings and is able to sign us up for the Executive Membership on the spot!

As BI goes more mainstream and is embedded in more applications, we will see many other examples of Operational BI in action as consumers. How many memberships has Costco been able to get because of this? Probably a lot considering their is always a line up for the checkouts!

Until next time,

Mark