telephone:More BI Intelligence Information from InetSoft
This is a continuation of the table of contents of product information relating to BI, or Business Intelligence, products and solutions from InetSoft. Application highlights include visually-compelling and interactive dashboards that ensure greater end-user adoption plus pixel-perfect report generation, scheduling, and bursting. InetSoft’s patent pending Data Block™ technology enables productive reuse of queries and a unique capability for end-user defined data mashup.
Aberdeen Group's Agile BI Benchmark Report - Business intelligence technologies are well established in many organizations - half of the organizations that Aberdeen surveys have been using BI for 5 years or more. But, despite this wealth of experience, Aberdeen has found that only 43% of business intelligence projects are delivered on-time or early. Agile BI is business intelligence that can rapidly adapt to meet changing business needs. As emerging business events require managers to have access to new or different information, an agile BI implementation can quickly deliver that information - through manipulation by the business users themselves or by IT professionals...
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Click this screenshot to view a five-minute demo and get an overview of what InetSoft’s BI dashboard reporting software, Style Intelligence, can do and how easy it is to use. |
Advances in Mobile BI - Our agenda today is pretty brief. We will start with a little bit of an overview of the company so everyone has a common background and understanding of our product offering at a high level, and we will stress the new highlights of the Version 11.1 release. Then we are going to demo the version. We will give you an overview of the product as well as highlight what's new. And at the end we will have time for questions and answers so go ahead and type your questions in the q&a panel to your right that you see there on the GoTo Webinar panel. So here is a quick slide about the InetSoft the company. We have been around since ’96, and now the company is over 125 employees in three locations around the world. The product offering is sold to both enterprise customers for their internal use, for the internal BI and dashboard and reporting needs as well as an OEM solution...
Agile BI - Agile BI, agile data access, really agile data access is all about virtualizing access to disparate heterogeneous data assets that are resident in a data warehouse or in your online transaction processing systems or throughout your ETL and other data integration investments. Really the idea is to enable very responsive, flexible, pervasive information as a service and to deliver all those capabilities into your business intelligence and development efforts. So agile business, which is really what we’re striving for here, making your business model ever more flexible to be able to see new opportunities and fend off threats and turn them to your advantage. Agile business really requires agile data access because really data is at the core of every business and every business model...
Agile BI and Business Requirements - Over the past year, there has been a lot of talk about agile BI again. It seems to have become a buzz word for what is a requirement, a business requirement actually, that needs to be supported in IT and by pretty much everybody in the organization and that’s agility, time-to-market, the ability to adjust deal with dynamics in the market and so forth. You can think of it more broadly than the original term for agile software development. Agile software developers have been around for a long time. And if you just take the software development side, you flip that over to business intelligence and data warehousing, you are probably not going to be real successful with it. You have to look at it much more broadly. There’s a difference between being agile versus doing agile. If we just do agile, we are probably going to be less successful than if we be agile. How can you look at agile as a word versus a methodology? Where do we need to be more agile? Because one of the things that agile doesn’t do a very good job at is looking at the data model...
Agile BI Best Practices - In preparation for this webinar on agile BI, we did quite a bit of research read various industry reports, talked to customers, and read many blogs. The idea for this webinar was generated because our customers have been asking us a lot about agile BI, mobile BI, all these topics that are out there. It seems this is one of the most discussed topics in 2010, and we certainly heart that from our clients, but there remains a lot of confusion as to what exactly it is and today we have synthesized the research. There are several aspects of agile BI that kept coming up. Some thought agile BI referred to applying agile principles, and there are a bunch of agile development principles applicable to BI environments, things like scrum, extreme Programming, and so forth. Well, others thought that it should mean the ability of BI to help an organization become more adaptable, especially to the needs of the end-user...
Agile BI Responding to Cycle of Pain - Agile BI is basically responding to that “cycle of pain” that exists within the industry. The cycle of pain is felt by the operational folks, the tactical staff are dealing with systems that had been designed for senior management. And in fact what happens is, this is sort of something we have been using quite a bit because it captures what a lot of our customers feel, is the customer report requests that the end users come with to answer questions, they take a while they are hard to interpret. They can be interpreted different ways, so you might go back for a segment for mailing, and you need 30,000 names or something, and it ends up with 10,000. It's not enough, so you have got to circle back and may be change the parameters on the prior purchase history or something to get the numbers up, and that’s just as back and forth. The other side is end users will download data into Excel and try to manipulate it there, which is what they are comfortable with. Excel is the number 1 end-user business intelligence tool today, but it’s limited. It’s got some of the data, but it can't bring all the tables in, and it’s hard to slice and dice in more than a couple of fields. It keeps being used because it was hard to get the people give it up. It becomes the shadow data system...
Agile BI - Transforming the Enterprise BI Application Life Cycle - Our mission here with agile BI is to really radically transform the enterprise BI application life cycle. We are seeking to lower complexity and improve productivity and lower cost, especially TCO. From a technology infrastructure perspective, we are helping at the data access and data integration levels. We make it possible to skip ETL processes and other data integration pieces typically used for building data models and data warehouses. Our BI platform offers direct access to almost and data source with the unique data mashup capabilities that other vendors sell as data virtualization. So in one solution you have the necessary data modeling tools plus multi-dimensional or OLAP analysis functions plus advanced data visualization tools plus traditional reporting plus interactive dashboarding...
Aligning BI Strategy with Business Strategy - When we started this Webinar we talked a little bit about BI in general what you can get from it and why a BI strategy is really critical and important. You probably all have seen data like what you see on the slide here today. Clearly, companies who take a more data-driven, fact-driven approach to how they run their company, their organization, they do perform better compared to the competition. And this is certainly why BI is essential. It lets you understand what’s going on and also see the impact and the outcome of decisions in business strategies that you are implementing. So if you take a more data-driven, fact-based, less gut-feel based approach to running your company, definitely, you can expect a competitive differentiation...
Aligning the Right BI Technologies to the Business Needs - In aligning the right BI technologies to the business needs, it’s important to understand change, how to not just deal with it, but embrace it. Be able to adapt to those things faster than the competition and likewise take complexity and make it a friend. I mean use that agility to provide competitive advantage but tame it down to the point where people can actually deal with it. With that kind of a focus on agility, what’s happening again in enterprise architecture is there is sort of a shift away from the classic boxes application, infrastructure, information, data architecture. Fundamentally there is a more of a business capability oriented thinking that might actually live in the business organization. You may call it business architecture because it answers the quetsions, what do we need, what should we be able to do? They may come from product management kinds of folks, strategic planning kinds of folks etc. who then drive the creation of solutions based on their knowledge of what technology should be able to do. In this scenario, IT focuses on how to deliver that BI solution based on the expertise that they have on the different BI systems available...
BI Application - Information for those looking for a standalone BI platform, or to embed an application in a BI portal. Benefits include: easy enough to be, deployed in weeks, not months, learned by new users with minor training, and used without the aid of a BI expert...
BI Best Practices - An industry analyst offers these best practices when considering and deploying BI: 1. Place a broadly defined BI process, one that goes beyond dashboards to include analytics front and center of all CRM activities. Insist that businesses, in partnership with IT own CRM data and metrics "If firms look at BI as just another technology and tool and relegate management of BI activities to IT department that is a sure recipe for disaster," he points out. 3. Practice top-down CRM performance management (define strategy; define supporting goals and objectives, and identify metrics needed to monitor goals and objectives...
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