Implementing Operational Business Intelligence Best Practices
InetSoft's business intelligence software takes a unique approach to improving operational and business performance by incorporating three fundamentals beyond the typical reporting and analytical tools available today. These fundamentals: collaboration, exploration, and integration, allow companies to employ operational best practices for the BI environment.
Collaboration through Building Blocks
Traditional collaboration, achieved through a mixture of business intelligence reports, desktop application files, e-mails, and other means, is the equivalent of collaborative document editing. The limitations of this approach become apparent as the number of parties involved grows. Moreover, collaborating parties cannot easily build upon each other’s work. Wikipedia is a perfect example, where collaboration is the foundation, instead of the consequence—domain experts participate by building upon existing work in a uniform and open editing environment.
InetSoft’s operational BI solutions are designed with the same concept, where domain experts bring their knowledge of a business area and the associated “Data Blocks,” reports, and visualization. These objects are not only intelligence themselves, but also the building blocks for future intelligence needs. The uniform infrastructure exposes the needed data and intelligence while leaving the details to the respective domain experts.
This approach drives direct productivity gains throughout the organization and minimizes both the initial IT investment and ongoing maintenance. It also leverages existing investments in business intelligence for new uses.
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Exploration through Visualization
Traditional BI invests expensive IT resources to incorporate new data into the BI infrastructure before any analysis is possible. The dynamic of operations makes data exploration an essential component in making sense of today’s quickly changing environment.
InetSoft operational BI combines Data Block technology with visualization for highly dynamic exploration and visual analysis. Atomic Data Blocks are assembled from disparate data sources including databases, data warehouses, Web services, and flat files for data exploration. Visualization uses intuitive presentation and interactivity to allow users to analyze and view data from new angles. This low-overhead approach opens the door for a wide range of BI needs that otherwise would be too expensive to serve. Building advanced requirements from the results of exploration drastically improves the efficiency and effectiveness of the entire BI implementation.
Integration: People, Process and Technology
Integration is not only a technological concern; it is more about the people and the processes. In addition to highly trained analysts, operational users are a diverse group that includes basic knowledge workers and sophisticated managers. An operational BI solution must be easy to use so that every member of this population can play a role. Operational BI needs to deliver immediately actionable items tightly linked to existing systems. This requires an unprecedented degree of integration between operational BI and business processes. In fact, operational BI often becomes a seamless part of everyday business applications.
InetSoft’s operational BI platform integrates people and processes through open standards based technology. Data analysts and domain experts collaborate through InetSoft’s Data Blocks allowing exploration and visualization of complex data. Managerial dashboards, scorecards, and alerts focus on distilled, high-level KPIs identified through exploration.
By focusing on delivering innovation, InetSoft has established a new approach that incorporates best practices of traditional BI with real-time information flow. The end result transforms BI from a predominantly IT centric initiative to a more business user directed initiative that offers a low TCO and rapid ROI.