InetSoft BI Webcast: Different Requirements for Business Intelligence

This a continuation of the transcript of a Webinar hosted by InetSoft titled "What's New in BI." The speaker is Mark Flaherty, CMO at InetSoft.

Mark Flaherty: It’s true that each type of user has a different requirement for BI. In a given organization, you may have a handful of statisticians. You may have a greater number of IT developers, and then analysts and information workers.

The numbers keep on going up as you move into the business departments, executives and managers, then front-line workers, and then external to the company, customers, suppliers, and regulators.

The challenge with this spectrum of BI users is that feature requirements are often inversely related. For instance, customers and suppliers need to view reports but they only need simple capabilities such as sorting and filtering. On the other end, the statisticians might need access to multiple data sources, data mashup, or the ability to create predictive analytic models. So feature complexity is inversely related to the number of potential BI users.

If you look at the innovations we are talking about today, each of them serves a different user segment. Mobile BI is the one that serves the most. While the sweet spot might be traveling executives and managers, who just want access to their existing reports and dashboards when they are traveling. But front-line workers can definitely take advantage of it, as well as analysts and information workers.

Dashboards are positioned between executives and managers and front-line workers depending on if we’re talking about an operational dashboard, which is something that would clearly benefit a front-line worker, or if we’re looking at a management-style or strategic dashboard that is more high-level.

Rich reporting benefits both front-line workers and executives and mangers. In-memory analytics benefits everyone but particularly the analysts and information workers who are spending a lot of hours in their workday using BI, so anything that speeds up the query processing time and helps them ask the harder questions in an easier way, is of value.

Advanced visualization also has a sweet spot with information workers, but it can make it easier for executives and mangers to consume the results of these analyses, then that is a good thing.