Business Intelligence
The way it always should have been
Who would be interested?
- Anyone who wants Business Intelligence from a data source within a day or two
- Executives needing an integrated, global view across multiple data sources
- Underserviced departments or business units that are low on IT’s priority
- IT groups under pressure for higher server levels and lower infrastructure cost
Problem we solve:
Most corporations aren’t thrilled with their BI infrastructure. It’s patchy. It has layers of technology with different version numbers. It requires a cast of technical experts including data architects, DBAs, SQL programmers, stored procedure programmers. It’s a painful process right from the initial requirements definition step. The resulting deliverables and their delivery times are never certain.
How we attack the problem:
1. World-class Business Intelligence components – running on a new generation of associative information technology that handles all retrieval navigation automatically
Find Out! - Summary Analysis
- report or analyze summaries and trends
- see actual, budget, variance, percent
- chart any numbers of interest
- instantly display details under summary
- see counts of everything you work with
- only see filters that are relevant
Next Question! - Associative Query
- get lightning fast retrieval
- instantly shift between subject areas
- change columns, filter, sort, find
- pick any detail as a new point-of-view
- navigates system associatively on the fly
- doesn’t require or generate SQL
Heads UP! - Mobile Indicators
- use any mobile platform
- see rapidly changing indicators
- shift between subject areas
- get associated details by time range
- get associated details by indicator range
2. Speed – the start-to-finish process from requirements to an operational BI system can happen in a week
3. Business Analysts can do the whole thing – business analysts can design, build, maintain and administer the entire BI application themselves within minimal impact on corporate IT resources or priorities
Populate It! is the tool that sets up the BI components show above. The user:
- imports a concept map that captured the BI requirements (the concepts are show on the right)
- selects a data source (the columns from one source are shown on the left)
- drags data columns to concepts to show what the data is to populate
- selects another source and drags its columns to the same map, integrating a second – or any number of - sources (each source has its own color)
- hits the Populate It button to load the system
This short sequence designs and creates the “database” structure, creates associations between all of the concepts, creates associations between the relevant individual items within the concepts, and imports the data into the “database” design. Other tabs allow the business analyst to validate and clean the data, create BI Indicators that are valid across all applications, and select the indicators and filters that will appear in any of the BI components shown above.
Why it works:
The end-to-end process of creating a BI application takes place a single technology stack. The requirements, the ETL , the mapping, the metadata, the data, the relationships between data required for retrieval and the deployment of data into Find Out!, Next Question! and Heads Up! are all managed in a single model and a single elegantly designed technology framework. This design simplification dramatically reduces the technical skill sets and integration steps needed to get information to management.