Below is the continuation of the transcript of a Webinar hosted by InetSoft on the topic of Business Intelligence Trends and InetSoft Innovations. The presenter is Mark Flaherty, CMO at InetSoft.
Mark Flaherty: So, the big question is how do you really align those very often different and opposite requirements. Well, it's not all bad news, and there are lots of next-generation BI technologies in addition to some of the best practices that can help. There are definitely these next-generation technologies that can indeed bring business and IT closer together and can align them.
The two key ones that we are spending time talking about today are the next-generation technologies that make business intelligence and analytics environment much more agile and that do indeed enable end-user self-service. And among some of these specific technologies, I can name lots of them, but very relevant to today’s discussion are databases that are built from the ground up for analytics, not for transaction processing.
When we look at traditional databases, they were all invented thirty or forty years ago for transaction processing, and sometime optimizing them for analytics is almost like trying to have a square peg into a round hole. So we definitely need analytical platforms that are designed from the ground up for business intelligence, not for transaction processing.
Businesses also spend a lot of time modeling data, and that’s precisely what IT does very well. They collect requirements and they transform those requirements into data models. But there is one problem with that. It takes too long, and by the time you are done, the requirements have changed. And my point is that if you didn’t foresee some of the requirements, and you didn’t model them, well then, guess what, you can't really analyze that condition. So we definitely need environments that are driven by the data content itself, not by the data models.
I can keep going on and on, but another key feature for agility and self-service is a point-and-click user interface. For many years, vendors have been promoting products that have point-and-click and drag-and-drop, especially for those of us who are old-timers who are used to green mainframe screens and even working with punch cards, obviously graphical user interfaces with point-and-click, drag-and-drop interfaces are much more user friendly. But to non-technical end-users, you really have to design the application smartly to make them really user friendly.
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