Articles About BI Systems

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Completing the BI Project on Time - We complete the BI project on time. It’s how we deliver good BI solutions, and it is really about your business driven approach. If you like to learn more about us you can look visit www.inetsoft.com. We have invested in a lot of trainees or college graduates. If you want to read more about some of the agile scrum stuff you can read articles on The Agile BI Channel. The last poll question is how can we help the organization realize the benefits of agility. I am going to open the poll right now, and so the poll is open. If you could go ahead and answer that last polling question please. While people are responding to that, there are couple of questions that we can answer while we leave that poll open. The first question here is from one of our participants who asked what size of organizations are best suited for agile BI, and if there are certain industries where it works better than others...

 

Consistency Between the BI Layer and the ETL Layer - If we look at the product division we see the definition that the business has given to this thing called product division. That can then be used consistently with the BI layer in and the ETL layer and the database layer. And we can even take it as far as when you hover over it when you are actually in the BI layer in a report, this definition will actually show up as what this term really means. This is another one of the reasons we like the consensus tool so much. So if you can imagine, we haven’t really generated anything technically. We simply have this information package in the form of a business model that is in this screen. Then we take that back in Sprint 0 to the business, and we can answer these questions. These are the use cases that represent what the BI layer would be able to answer. We have not done anything except build the business model at this point. So if we can get the clarity and the playback and the feedback and we need to adjust things, we go back in and adjust the business model. And we have not spent a single hour creating a single report. What we have now is a meaningful semantic layer, or a single ETL process. We have done it very efficiently...

Containers and Kubernetes Implementation in BI - InetSoft's business analytics and dashboarding platform includes a built-in implementation of Kubernetes. This greatly facilitates the installation and management of the platform. This is due to: Automated, consistent, and repeatable deployment of containers Automatic scaling of containers Automatic system and resource management, including storage, networking, and security Automatic failover as non-responsive cluster nodes are automatically restarted. Examples of BI Dashboards Built with InetSoft's Kubernetes-based Solution...

Corporate Level BI Solution - Looking for a corporate level BI solution? InetSoft is a pioneer in self-service BI server software that can run in the cloud or on premise. View a demo and try interactive examples...

Create a Shared BI Support Organization - The other end of the extreme is where larger organizations create a shared BI support organization. That has negative connotations as well, or negative implications. Large centralized organizations inherently are bureaucratic with multiple levels of signoffs, and different conflicting priorities. Things start moving slower so as a result business users who can’t wait, remember in the age of the customer, customers rule, and customers don’t wait. So if customers don’t wait, your business users, your business analyst are going to go back to their home grown applications. Very often unfortunately we see that when you are already centralizing your BI support organization, you actually become less agile, and you proliferate the silos. So we offer some kind of a middle of the road approach where you get the best from both worlds. Absolutely empower individual contributors with self service BI tools so that they can produce up to 80% of their own BI content. You definitely need to co-locate business and technology staff...

Creating Database Reports - One of the fundamental steps necessary when creating a report is to gather a large collection of significant and relevant data for analysis. Acquiring a reliable and multidimensional database along with reporting tools can quickly surpass your organizations budget. At InetSoft, we provide multiple solutions for this problem. InetSoft's award-winning reporting tools incorporate a multitude of databases in addition to our flexible, powerful, and easy-to-use reporting software. Our reporting focused solution, Style Report™ Enterprise solution is a cost effective and time efficient software developed for organizations looking to create and analyze high quality reports. Style Report™ Enterprise is a Web-based reporting tool that provides production, interactive, and ad hoc reports, simplifying the work for your organization...

Creating Online Reports - Creating a highly effective report requires the aggregation of a collection of data that must be organized accurately in order for it to be coherent. Additionally, bringing together complementary data can become a complex process when analyzing the reports. InetSoft's Style Report™ Enterprise solution is a cost effective and time efficient software developed for organizations looking to create and analyze high quality reports. Style Report™ Enterprise is a Web-based reporting software that provides production reports, interactive reports, and ad hoc reports, simplifying the work for your organization...

Dashboards as a Type of BI Application - So, let's move onto dashboards as a type of BI application, and what I want to do is, I want to start with misconceptions. I want to tackle that one first, because that really troubles me when I hear it. Here's the misconception. Dashboards are just making data flashy. Some people seem to have to believe that data is boring, and that in order to make people pay attention, we need to load them into flashy graphics, things that move around, and with big dials. There is definitely importance to the look of a dashboard, but what I want to stress in the beginning is that dashboards are not just making data flashy. The goal is not to design things that are interesting and attractive. The goal is to really design things that solve real business problems. Now, in our case these problems are information problems, and beauty and aesthetics, these are just the byproduct of a great design, but they are not the goal. Dashboards are there to make our life easier. They are supposed to help you become better in what you do, and they are unique to solve problems that other forms reporting simply cannot...

Data Collection Via a Mobile BI Interface - Can data be collected and deposited into the repository through the mobile BI interface? Igoe: That’s an interesting question, and I am not sure the intent, but it actually turns out that part of our roadmap for the next release is to include data entry and collection forms as part of the viewsheet dashboard development cycle. So essentially you can create not only an analytic application like a dashboard to slice and dice but also a data collection application where you can enter some information via a form. It’s not just parameter filtering but actually be written back to the database. Obviously this is really our first foray into being more than just read-only, and so I envision that we probably will include support for mobile devices since we can go continue to develop the HTML side, as we develop the Flash side...

Data compliance and consumer privacy regulations to become more stringent - In recent years, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) have made consumer data privacy more stringent. Now, consumers are empowered to take charge of their data destiny, with more choice on how, when, and where they share their personal information. As we move into an increasingly hyper-connected digital age, data compliance and consumer privacy regulations will become increasingly complex. This will make it more challenging for businesses across industries to interact with consumer information while staying on the right side of the red tape....

Data Mashup Driven BI Platform - If you can integrate all of your systems, and we have plenty of them, if you can integrate them into one central database or use a data mashup driven BI platform like InetSoft’s, and then have that information spread out, that’s great. It’s a delicate balance. I think it’s going to be challenging to eventually get there, but we are trying to do that sort of in small steps. There is value. The information that you can get whenever, wherever you want has significant value. And then I also think there is something that comes along with the sort of the user. We talked about engaging with our guests and our customers. We also have to make sure that we are engaging with our employees or managers, that we are giving them, just like we give a customer, the choice of experiencing the company the way they want. We have to be open to give our young workforce in the restaurants the choice on how they want to see information. Because people learn differently, people have different learning styles, and this group of managers that we are hiring or that are coming through our ranks in the restaurants are using this technology that has been their way of life, and it’s somewhat new to most of us, but it’s been their way of life. So you have to give them a choice to look at data...

Data Warehouse BI Solution Alternative - Looking for alternative BI DW solutions? InetSoft is a pioneer in self-service analytics whose platform makes a data warehouse unnecessary. The platform transforms and mashes up data from disparate source with live connections or high-speed caching. View a demo and try interactive examples...

Data Warehousing BI Roadmap - You know I’ve heard this so long before, and it scares me a little bit that we are leaving out this discussion the reason of why the business is asking for this. It’s amazing how MDM is following the data warehousing BI roadmap. I am old enough but I remember the days when IT said, we build the data warehouse, and the business users will come and use our data and do all these analytics and all that good kind of stuff. And I am hearing kind of the same thing with master data management. I will build the customer repository. The business will figure out how we use it, and that really does worry me. They are going down that same path of building something and waiting for the business to figure out how to use it. Now you have to have a business reason for building this and make sure that you follow through and incorporate master data in the entire business infrastructure, whatever it is. Look out in your analytical environment, or look out in your IT environment where the business is complaining. People might say, I don’t trust the data within your analytical environment. I am not going to do my roll up of my monthly sales based on that because I think those numbers are false. And they try to do it themselves and put it together in an Excel spreadsheet, etc. It's just not the method or not the path to take. I think the IT people challenge is how to convince business they actually need it. It seems like it should be such as intuitive no-brainer to have integrated customer data and integrated product data. In some ways, it’s stunning to me that the business doesn’t get that. It's almost an issue of priority. And what we have heard from a lot of people is that you have to insert MDM into the projects they are getting...

Data Wrangling as an Enterprise BI Tool - Data wrangling is the process of cleaning, transforming, and shaping raw data into a format that can be used for analysis and decision-making. In recent years, data wrangling has become a critical component of enterprise business intelligence (BI) as organizations seek to leverage their data to gain insights and make informed decisions. One of the key benefits of data wrangling as an enterprise BI tool is that it enables organizations to overcome the challenges posed by disparate and siloed data sources. By integrating, transforming, and standardizing these sources, organizations can gain a single, unified view of their data, which can be used to drive more effective and efficient decision-making. Another key advantage of data wrangling is that it helps organizations to overcome the limitations of traditional BI tools. Many of these tools are designed to work with data that is already in a structured format, but in today's data-driven world, much of the valuable information is unstructured or semi-structured, such as social media posts, customer reviews, and sensor data. Data wrangling tools enable organizations to extract and structure this information, making it usable for BI purposes...

Definition of Pervasive BI - To me, pervasive BI means getting the information to decision makers throughout the organization. Historically BI has focused on the corporate ivory tower, and there is value in that, clearly. That is where the strategies are set. But strategy without execution means nothing, and the execution happens on the front lines. So pervasive BI means getting the information to the front line. If you can’t get the information workers need to improve their jobs, that really limits the chances for making corporate objectives attainable. The C-level folks make millions to come up with the right strategy, but it’s the thousands of decision that get made every day by employees that really makes a difference in the execution of an organization’s plan. Pervasive BI means making those people who are making the thousands of decisions better than the competition. One area people are talking about has to do with new modes of BI data consumption. Mobile BI, particularly with larger screen devices like the iPad, are interesting to people. Another is being able to analyze and manipulate massive amounts of data much more quickly. And a third has to do with data mashup, being able combine disparate data sources and view them as one...

Delivering Agile BI Very Effectively to Our Customers - When we see the changes that are happening from an infrastructure standpoint and taking advantage of a lot of the generational changes that are happening with hardware and software and networking capabilities, this capability of delivering agile BI very effectively to our customers is something that we are very excited about. There are many factors that help us to make this thing really successful. So from a technology perspective, we are working on latest BI technology. We are including latest BI technology. Data warehouse and business intelligence projects typically tend to be very complex projects with a long time to get deployed and so on. So our interest was to get it as short as possible to make a real good experience, make sure that the software is productively deploy as quickly as possible...

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