InetSoft Explains Why BI Applications Do Not Often Provide Data Mashup
Briggs: So those are some pretty compelling benefits to mashups. Why don't we see BI applications commonly providing data mashup capabilities? Is the concept just too new?
Igoe: I do think that it is relatively new, especially the combination of the formal and informal processes. For instance, data warehousing and Excel, they've been around for a while, and they address great needs.
But when you get into that gray area, in between, providing some amount of self-service and end-user capabilities while still having the controls that IT needs, like data management, performance concerns, trust in the data, security, filtering the data to make sure that people don't see what they're not supposed to, that in-between gray area is really what is difficult to address.
Data warehousing and Excel are two very powerful hammers, and they get used to bang a lot more than just nails. I think that data federation is also a relatively recent addition to the picture, which also exists in a sort of gray area - as mentioned before. And there are some great vendors out there who specialize in that.
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But then when you start throwing self-service into the mix, getting the user to define how that data is manipulated, how it's combined to solve the question that they have at that time, I think you really remove the possibility of a third-party vendor being able to address that need. On the one hand, it's not really a viable stand-alone product because data mashup is really a means to an end. Once you have combined that data, you then need to use that to do something. Analyze it, report on it, etc.
Data Mashup Has To Be Tightly Integrated
It's also not really that viable as a plug-in to a tool because with that level of self-service that you are trying to provide, it really has to be tightly integrated into the rest of the user experience. For maximum ease of use, you wouldn't want a separate tool with a separate interface providing the mashup and then having clunkiness around trying to get that resulting data to be a source for the reports or dashboards or scorecards, etc.
So that really leaves the BI tool vendors, themselves, and I think it's really just either stubbornness, or inertia, really just resistance to change that they opted for the old solutions of either data warehousing or Excel.
Briggs: Given that and what we have talked about today, what does InetSoft offer around data mashups?
Igoe: A couple of years ago we introduced a completely Flash-based interface for manipulating and combining data from different sources. Our practice has always been to pull real-time data, so the data federation in concept, but this end-user capability of simply dragging and dropping the data that you want and combining it in interesting ways. We really coined this term of data mashup; nobody else was providing anything like it.
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So the underlying sources can really be anything. For the most part you have got the enterprise sources: data warehouses, databases, Web services, etc. And then you can also add into the mix, like I said before, the user's data, so either copying and pasting data from Excel or typing in some data manually that you then change to run some what-if scenarios. Or copying some data from an email from one of your vendors. All kinds of different capabilities for bringing the users data which doesn't have to go through IT.
Then you have also got the ability to save all this information back to the server. The mashups as well as all the end-user content are all server-side, which means it's all very collaborative. If one person uses a data mashup to address one question, and another user has a similar, related question, they don't have to start from scratch. They don't have to build their own spreadsheet as they would have done in the past. They can leverage the work of their colleague and then be able to grow it from there.
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