InetSoft Webinar: The Ability to Accelerate Business Performance Metrics

This is the continuation of the transcript of a Webinar hosted by InetSoft on the topic of "Business Intelligence Agility." The speaker is Mark Flaherty, CMO at InetSoft.

And that leaves me at the last topic here. It’s about the ability to accelerate business performance improvements and the ability to continuously repeat them. It’s like the old saying, ‘rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat.’ It’s a continuous process improvement. The key idea is the ability to document processes and understand them. This helps ensure the building of a knowledge base that can be passed on.

Next, be sure to provide the visibility so that you can understand the reporting and understand the impact that your changes are having. Open the community of influencers. The more people who are invested in the project the better. The last recommendation has to do with learning from others. Some times much of the new innovation may not happen within your organization, but you need to be able to pull in that information and that content. That includes experiences that are happening outside the organization.

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Here comes the sales pitch. When it comes to information reporting, InetSoft is uniquely able to provide a unified view of multiple processes that are tracked in multiple operational data sources. This gives you the ability to identify and measure change. Whether it be in banking, finance, insurance, telco, retail, government, public, all the way through universities, and healthcare, our BI solution can help.

Question: Speaking of the information architecture, it seems to me one of the goals in outlining that architecture is to marry it with SOA, services oriented architecture. The initial promise of SOA, it seems to me, revolves largely around, things like reuse, but really it’s around agility right?

Yes, I think that’s correct. I don’t think there’s any doubt that to a certain extent, SOA has not delivered what that a lot of people thought it would, but one of the things it has delivered in a big way is reuse. Reuse is about agility. Reuse is about how we want to do something slightly differently, so we just put in a few components, extra Web service interfaces, connect this to this, and all of a sudden you’ve got fairly useful applications, doing what you couldn’t do before.

In terms of the information architecture, data integration is key. Information architecture really is about that. It’s about adding data integration to the mix and particularly serving up a kind of automated architecture for data integration. A BI application nowadays is becoming much more a part of, rather than separated from, the transactional applications. Embedded BI is probably the next big thing.

Question: What About the importance of having agility in your organization process wise?

I think it’s through the understanding of their processes and understanding of their customers and being able to provide that visibility and any innovative ways that they use technology. I think that is the things that really set off winners are how they continuously evolve the use of technology. The value of SOA and these approaches is in the reuse. Quickly getting your systems up and running, the ability to quickly introduce new services, and that’s true among news vendors. You see it in communications space with all the cellular providers, in banking, insurance. Those who can get new offerings into market quicker are the ones that are going to stay ahead. So that’s why I think it’s that question of how quickly can you change, but it’s the rate and pace that you change and that’s why agility is so important.