telephone:InetSoft Product Information: Analysis Functions
This is a table of contents of useful product information about, and benefits of, InetSoft's analysis capabilities built into its business intelligence software for dashboards, reporting, and analytics:
Achieving Analytic Agility with Data Mashups - The need to react quickly to a rapidly changing business climate is forcing organizations to make faster business decisions. But being able to quickly ask questions and get answers is not a simple task. While business intelligence (BI) tools and applications have emerged as viable solutions, traditional approaches to building and deploying these systems are complex, cumbersome, and expensive and often fail to keep pace with BI end-user demands and expectations. More often than not, resource-constrained IT departments are overburdened with BI requests, sometimes taking days, weeks, or months to fulfill them. The challenge is to deliver a BI system that breaks the mold of traditional BI solution deployments by removing this IT bottleneck and shifting the analysis to business users. What's needed is a more agile approach that allows business users to self-service their BI needs. Ovum believes a key enabler for achieving self-service BI agility is data mashup technology...
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Advanced Analytics - Its Definition and Current State - How do we define advanced analytics? Well, advanced analytics, you can think of it as the deeper dive, a type of more ad hoc analytics that you don’t necessarily know ahead of time. that you haven’t necessarily standardized. As opposed to say a typical BI environment where you have standardized reports. They may have some prompts or options, but they’re pretty well boxed in and canned and standardized. The advanced analytics is when you start to get into deeper dive ad hoc analytics, all the way up and including data mining, predictive modeling, trying to really get more proactive, predicting rather than retroactively reporting. So what we see as the tie between the two is that as you look at a standardized report in a BI environment, you might see an anomaly, positive or negative that you want to learn more about. That could kick off some advanced analytics to dig under, diagnose what’s causing it. Is that a good or a bad thing? What might you do next? At the same time you might start with something that’s an ad hoc analytic to begin with. Data visualization is pretty valuable, and over time you could end up transitioning the results into a reporting environment once that logic is defined. So advanced analytics and BI are distinct but inter related, and if they’re both used appropriately, you can get more from both those areas than you would individually...
Analysis and Reporting for OLAP Cubes - InetSoft's analysis and reporting software can access OLAP cubes and many other data sources. The business intelligence application, Style Intelligence, supports popular OLAP servers such as Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services, Hyperion Essbase, and SAP NetWeaver...
Analysis Software - a description of the benefits of InetSoft's analysis software, how it is easy to deploy and easy to use. How it can be deployed in weeks, not months, learned by new-users with minimal training. The visual analysis capabilities of InetSoft's software enable replacing dozens of individual reports or static charts with a single interactive analysis screen...
Analysis Tools - a description of the benefits of InetSoft's analysis tools, how they are easy, agile, and robust. How they satisfy different business users and fulfill the demands of power users
Analytic Software - A description of the benefits of InetSoft's analytic software, what distinguishes InetSoft from other analytic software. Multi-dimensional analysis with coloring and sizing make pattern and outlier identification easy, and filter boxes, selections lists, and drop-down menus pack access to loads of data from one well-built analytic view...
Analytic Software Vendors Have Improved Interfaces - And I think some of the analytic software vendors have improved interfaces to facilitate this trend towards less specialized users doing data mining. The number of people who are statistical analysts has not increased in recent years, but the demand to apply predictive analytics to business or government domains has increased dramatically. And as this new group of people has become involved, they have required simpler user interfaces. They have worked collaboratively, to achieve better outcomes working together. They may have been tapped into for business knowledge, but they didn’t really understand how predictive analytics works or how you get a lot of value out of the data, what the process is. Now that they are more hands-on, and the simpler interfaces are available, things have really changed. I think that that is in a sense, a best practice, if you want to get more transformative results. Moderator: Let's focus on the other side of best practices, if you will, worst practices, what are some of the biggest mistakes that you have seen people make when either launching a data mining program...
Analytic Tools - A description of the benefits of InetSoft's analytic tools that are simple to use and deploy. Self-service extends from the data access layer where analysts or power users can assemble the data blocks they want to use, mashing up data from disparate data sources, even if they were not previously modeled by a database analyst or BI admin, to the visualization creation and editing, where a drag and drop WSYWIG editor is easy enough for the average business user who is familiar with Excel and PowerPoint...
Analytical Challenges - First and foremost is the culture of analytics cannot thrive in a culture that is not conducive to it. And by that I mean the culture has to be fact-based decision making driven from the top. Where executives understand the value of information, they use information to validate their decisions, validate their instinct. Or vice-versa, they go with their instinct or use the data to make decisions, and use their instinct to validate those decisions. There is a lot to be said there but we are not going to dwell on that today...
Analytical Sandboxes - A little bit about analytical sandboxes, this topic got kicked off two years ago at a conferences geared to BI directors and BI sponsors. People talked about how they had hundreds and hundreds of these spreadmarts. They called them desktop databases. They were clearly much bigger than just a simple spreadmart. Someone estimated that each one was costing the company $500,000 or more. To get ahead of this, what they decided to do was to give each analyst his or her own partition in their enterprise data warehouse. And allow them to upload their own data into that partition and mash it up with warehouse data...
Analytics Technologies Being Employed - Now let’s talk a bit about the analytics technologies being employed. How is analytics infused within an enterprise business process? What business value or ROI can be gotten by good analytics? It’s a question that on the surface is pretty straightforward, but I think it's a good question. We would encourage that question to be peeled back several layers by our clients. I think if they do, what they are going to find, I think that the true return on investment within a business intelligence platform may or may not be the initial price tag, right? It’s a total cost of ownership play. The questions are what is our ability to get a solution to market, to support that solution overtime, and to deliver incremental improvement as well as step change innovation over a three to five year period. And I think from our perspective, we recognize that that our a very unique BI platform, that you have an ability to start with a very cost effective core but then layer incremental value on it overtime, and that’s the way we have tried to go to the market. We will continue to challenge ourselves to go to market with solutions that have a very short return on investment per today’s measurements...
Analyzing and Exploring Data - Now, what they’ve discovered is when you get beyond a certain point of response time, of interaction time, where you say or do something, and then there’s an expected response that you have to wait for, it breaks your brain. Basically the model of your brain building up a memory buffer of what you’re thinking about, your next thought, your next input, your next task, gets derailed if you have to wait too long, and you have to start over. And so, what you would expect to see is response time and how you thought are directly correlated. You do something, and something happens. It is a straight line graph. And now in general this wait time needs to be less than three seconds, and it’s a cross-cultural thing. And what happens when you don’t have that ability to interact in real time, you have a disruption of your work. And when you have that disruption of work, you have this interrupted flow of work which means an interrupted flow of thought, which makes it very difficult do analysis. When you’re trying to analyze things then you can’t get into what’s called flow. And these different places you can end up with are charted out on this graph which based on the skill level and the challenge level. At least initially, you can end up in these different points where the skill and the challenge are matched. That’s the first precursor to be able to get into a state of flow which you can think of as that mental state where you’re in the zone, where you’re in an optimal state of what’s called intrinsic motivation. You’re immersed, and you can work. And the tools or the things that you’re using or working with come naturally exactly when you need them. You lose track of time. Things work...
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