This is a continuation of the transcript of a Webinar hosted by InetSoft titled "What's New in BI." The speaker is Mark Flaherty, Vice President of Marketing at InetSoft.
Mark Flaherty: Today we’re going to dive into four innovations in BI. The first is rich reporting, what is it and what’s changing. Next we’ll look at advanced visualization as a way to speed that time to insight. Third is in-memory analytics, and last is mobile BI as a way of making BI more pervasive, more accessible whenever and wherever somebody needs BI.
When you consider BI innovations to evaluate or deploy in your enterprise, there are three dimensions to consider: maturity, TCO, and BI pervasiveness. When it comes to maturity, you’re talking about managing risk. You want to understand how mature the technology is. In terms of value and TCO, think about in two ways. Either the innovation will help you lower the cost to serve. This is something that is critical as IT departments are being asked to do more with less budget. So can you lower your total cost of ownership, or will that innovation speed that time to insight. So that time to insight measure is a way of helping your company or your department boost their revenues, improve customer service, or if you’re in the public sector, better serve the public at a lower cost.
The last area is pervasiveness or positioning. Sometime you just want to make BI better for the existing users. Help those existing users have a faster time to insight or a faster time to value. Think about these dimensions as we go through each of the four innovations.
One more thing to do is to assess the challenges in your own BI environment. Where is your organization situated versus the three challenges listed in the beginning, adoption, time to insight, and relevance, because if you need to address one more than the other, then that can sway your decision on which innovation to pursue.
When you think about BI adoption, first think about where is your company today. When you think about the full potential of all employees in your company having access to BI, and that doesn’t just mean a business query tool or a power user tool. It means access to data that supports whatever decision they need to make. What is that percentage? Where do you stand versus the rest of the market?
"The trend long term for performance management, even business intelligence, for that matter, is allowing us to do more. It’s allowing users to do more for themselves. Nowadays there's a buzzword for it: self-service BI. Certainly we’re a big proponent of that. But a key is to spend less time within the solution, and get more value. That ends up being the perennial challenge.
That’s why there is so much left to be done. With other BI solutions, they still require a fair amount of training to get up to speed on them. Therefore companies using them have needed fairly skilled individuals. They have had to invest in training programs to give them the skills. So that is changing somewhat with easier-to-use solutions like ours.
Instead of forcing user to adapt to the technology, we’re trying to make it as intuitive as possible, using point-and-click controls, going heavy with visualization as a means to explore the data, et cetera." - Mark Flaherty, CMO, InetSoft
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