More Business Intelligence Product Information from InetSoft
This is a continuation of the table of contents of relevant product information about, and reasons for evaluating, InetSoft's business intelligence application for dashboards, reporting, and visual analysis:
Business Intelligence Industry - For those looking to find vendors in the business intelligence industry, information about why to include InetSoft on your evaluation list, including the fact that it can be learned by end-users with minimal training...
Business Intelligence Initiative Begins with Canned Reporting - Typically this is the way organizations start with some sort of business intelligence initiative. It begins with canned reporting. This could be a sales report, or it could be regular financial statements. Reports are really designed to answer a specific question or maybe a set of specific questions. Some of you may have experienced reporting packages like Crystal Reports. You might already understand the value of pure reporting; really just getting information in a pixel perfect format to your end user to answer those questions. However, there are situations when a canned report falls short of what you need. For example, maybe your business users want to get a deeper understanding of their data. They have questions that go beyond what’s shown in that existing sales or finance report. Your executives, they may also want access to data, but they don’t have a lot of time on their hands so they want a concise summary view. That is hard to derive from hundreds of pages of reports...
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Business Intelligence Integration - InetSoft CEO joins a discussion of business intelligence integration with business processes, part of eBizQ's Business Intelligence in Action Podcast series. We definitely see the emerging trend of the integration of business intelligence with business processes. As a firm, InetSoft focuses on operational business intelligence. This particular branch of business intelligence has a lot to do with business processes because this is essentially about business planning and execution. When we talk about operational people, we are talking about sales, marketing, everybody who is involved in delivering business execution. In our experience we have heard from our customers, a business intelligence system is no longer a stand alone application for analyzing performance in the rear-view mirror. They want to look forward and be able to take action. That is where we have put a lot of focus and been delivering BI solutions. The recent trend we have noticed is that people are no longer viewing those information needs as individual activities. They want to share information. They want it integrated into business processes. They want to collaborate. All of these needs point to a tighter integration between the business applications and the business operations...
Business Intelligence in IT - Usually the business side has demands for different BI solutions and those trickle down in IT to where I have had to support those business requirements. What we are trying to do more and more now is actually show IT or build custom solutions for IT so they can better manage their IT systems. Business intelligence is about getting access to information that can help you make better more relevant business decisions. So for example it spans across any role that you have inside your organization right down from somebody who’s working in a bank trying to decide whether or not to give somebody a loan, being able to feed them the information that they need to be able to make that decision all the way up to the CEO who runs the business and needs to know sort of high level metrics...
Business Intelligence is a Partnership - Business intelligence is a partnership between all of the people inside our company, IT, finance, operations, and marketing. It’s really a collaborative partnership. We do have a rich data warehouse of information as I mentioned that we extract from our POS system, and that’s where a lot of our information comes from. So it just tells us everything we need to know about our business transactions, how they are being used, when they are being done, who is doing them, and we do some pretty extensive reporting out of that. So yeah, we ride the herd, and we believe that all that information is very valuable. We have a lot of opportunity to improve that on our side as we continue to grow, as we continue to introduce new items into our menu. So there is some work for us do, but the intelligence and the partnership inside the company is really important. This SoMoClo is sort of a new term for me as a CFO, but being in a company that really believes in technology and really staying ahead of it, we take social media in two pieces. We take it as a customer experience, and by that I mean we can both take orders. So within Facebook and Twitter, on our Facebook and Twitter, which have, upwards of 10,000 likes or 10,000 followers on Twitter, you are actually able to, if you are following us, you are actually able to order through Facebook and Twitter...
Business Intelligence KPI - information for those looking for business intelligence software to keep track of KPI's, including its ability to provide eye-catching KPI dashboards that executives want to see...
Business Intelligence on Your Mobile Device - Previously only Flash enabled mobile devices could leverage InetSoft's mobile BI tools. Now, non-Flash enabled browsers such as those on Apple® devices are served via HTML5 - the new Internet markup language that supports rich interactivity...
Business Intelligence Has Remained the Number One IT Priority - And last introductory comment to make, I noticed a high level theme from the Garter business intelligence summit. Business intelligence has remained the number one IT priority. They believe that the penetration of end users will increase 2.5 times this year. That’s a huge increase. Why? Because of four key driving technologies: in-memory-data-management which we are going to talk about today, data visualization which we’ll talk about today, social software which tracks interaction between people, which we are not going talk about today, and search. There are promising new models that are emerging. One is called the information buffet. Structured decision making from the top goes to more autonomous decision making spread out throughout an organization. You go from controlled and qualified access to open and equal, or open, unqualified access. This is the concept of information democracy, and we believe this is fundamental for business decision making and the continued growth and penetration of business intelligence. So now let’s look at the sub pieces of this business intelligence model. The first is in-memory data management. I’m going to quickly get to an example here. The idea here is to support the concept of the end users’ analysis by enabling very fast interaction, slicing and dicing and calculation. No predetermined data structures are required. The analysis can be completely ad hoc against any combination of any elements of any table in the memory pool...
Business Intelligence Platform - When business intelligence software was in its infancy, most approaches were based on simple arithmetic calculations (summation, division, ranking, etc.) focused on the analysis of historical (last year, last quarter, last month) data. For those purposes, data warehouses were great at aggregating data in batches from different operational systems based on predetermined data models at certain intervals, but they suffered from latency; changes required retuning queries or time-consuming re-architecting of data models; most data warehouses weren't scalable enough to handle transaction-level data granularity. Another type of software that was used in the broader context of business analytics included rules engines. Rules engines were, in most cases, more flexible than data warehouses in providing support for transaction monitoring, but they required prebuilt rules. Case management systems were strong at managing workflows, but usually just took alerts from individual operational systems; their siloed data capture presented a deficiency in accuracy and insight...