Dashboards, Reporting & Business Intelligence

While the need for business intelligence is widely recognized, the use and implementation thereof can often be confusing, or misunderstood.

Most business intelligence initiatives start with the purpose of delivering the right information at the right time. This gives the correct priority to timeliness and accuracy of information, but does not indicate where said information should go. Though a real time BI software solution may deliver up to date information via dashboards or traditional reports, it may not be enough for employees who barely have time to log into their laptops when off visiting major customers. For such people, this information is not “real time” in the truest sense unless it is also readily accessible at the right place.

Another myth about business intelligence is that it provides analytical reporting while core transactional applications supply operational information. In actuality, a standard business intelligence software solution must meet both informational needs equally. Because information from both of these areas satisfies a diverse set of requirements, the most important ingredient for successful business intelligence implementation is getting the various parts of the organization properly aligned. It is critical that business analysts, in the early stages of implementation, interview all key stakeholders and document and reconcile critical business requirements from operational experts, analytical experts, line management, and staff management at multiple levels of the organization. Failure to understand internal customer requirements is one of the top reasons for failed business intelligence implementations.

Once requirements have been elicited and rationalized with each other, the proposed solution must be vetted with all stakeholders to ensure correctness and, even more importantly, drive buy-in so that all stakeholders will support and work towards a successful implementation rather than ignoring or, worse, actively resisting it. Once the initial requirements phase is complete, the next important step in an implementation is architecting a proposed solution and then piloting the solution on a small scale with key users to reduce any risks and prove out the implementation. During this phase, training plans can be created. A strategy for rolling out the implementation incrementally can be initiated and kinks in the implementation can be worked out.

Post-implementation, it is advisable to follow up with users to reinforce training and ensure that the full benefits of the business intelligence software solution are being realized. Any deferred features or capabilities can be addressed in the form of a small post-implementation revision project which takes an evolutionary approach towards continually improving the solution

Open source BI is gaining popularity as more and more companies start using open source as opposed to commercial software for their businesses. Evaluating an open source product is different from evaluating a commercial product. Because there is no sales force for distribution, gaining comprehensive information on the business intelligence product requires a different approach. Assuming all other things are equal, open source BI shoppers should start by looking at the support forums associated with the community, the source code for the software, and the documentation and training options offered on the website.

The Support Forums

The support forums for any open source software project are one of the project’s greatest assets. By visiting the forums, a CIO can begin to assess whether or not that particular project with work for their company. Each community has its own personality and it is important to learn more about how welcoming the forums are, how capable the main contributors can be, and how active members are in the community.

The Source Code

The nature of the source code is also very important to look at. The source code holds the secrets to what the product is like and what its functionality is.

Documentation and Training

Most open source BI projects will have some kind of documentation that will help those who don’t read code understand how to use the product. Often there are also training options available, as well. If these documents are difficult to understand or if the training is not comprehensive enough, neither will be much use to any company using the open source software.

Once a company finds the open source BI program that they want to use, they have a variety of options on how to proceed with their new product. They can start by actively becoming a part of their community in order to garner good will, with the hope that they can eventually have some influence on the applications that are developed by the community. Although becoming involved is a good idea regardless of a company’s situation, some companies may need to customize the software with urgency. In these cases, the company can use one of their IT people to develop the applications internally. If the applications are developed internally, the company will then need to decide if they want to release the new code to the community or if they should keep it in house. The third option for companies new to open source BI is to hire an outside developer to customize their new open source BI software for them. This option will cut into the upside of avoiding commercial licensing fees, but can end up being a great decision in the end for the right company.

Shopping for open source BI can be a challenge for the CIO who has never dealt with an open source software project before, but it is a task worth taking on. Because the source code is public, the assessment a CIO makes can be more accurate than relying on hearsay or the advertising pitches that are part of shopping for commercial software. The result can be a great program that is constantly improving and offers support and community to its users without a large initial cost.

With open source BI, users have access to the source code for the business intelligence software that they use. This gives them the ability to make changes and add applications in a way that they wouldn’t be able to with an out of the box platform. Commercial software does not give its users access to the original source code, nor does it give them any right to change or make modifications to the product. Users of commercial business intelligence must wait until the provider releases a new version of the platform or a new application to get added functionality for their system. With open source, users are able to make modifications to the code as needed as long as they adhere to the restrictions dictated by the license that governs the original code.

What is Open Source Code?

Open source code is software that has been written by a person or a company and copyrighted, but is also licensed to include a large user population, who is able to make changes and fix bugs in the code. As users need different applications from their open source software, they can change it to fit their demands without facing the repercussions of copyright infringement. There are a couple of different licenses that designate code as open source and users must adhere to the guidelines put forth by these licenses in order to use and modify the software.

Open Source Licenses

There is a variety of licenses that have been approved by the Open Source Initiative or OSI. Two common licenses are the Berkeley License and the GNU General Public License (GPL). The Berkeley License allows users to take the source code and make changes to it before releasing it again under a separate propriety license. With the Berkeley License, the original creators of the code would have to be acknowledged publicly when the new software is released. With GPL, if derivative software is created using the original code, it has to be made available as a GPL product, allowing other users access to the new code and allowing other users to modify it for their needs.

Freeware vs. Open Source

Open source is different from freeware, in that the actual code is made available to users, not just the software. Freeware is software that you can download for free for a trial period or permanently, but has to be used as is without any modifications. There is some very reliable freeware that can be downloaded permanently, but freeware is also used by commercial software providers to entice buyers to buy their product after the trial period is up.

Because they have ability to make changes to the code in open source, users can customize their business intelligence software to best serve their company. Users also have access, the majority of the time, to upgrades and applications that other users have developed, in addition to any bug fixes. This means that there is no waiting on the parent company to come out with an upgrade or develop add-ons.

For both software users and software creators, the advent of open source business intelligence has created much controversy. Since 1998, when the Open Source Initiative was formed, a steadily increasing wave of commercial and non-commercial licensed software has been developed and distributed over the internet. Currently, in the realm of open source BI software, over 60% of companies and governments are active users, with these numbers steadily rising. But even with such statistics, some potential users still prefer closed source software to its open source competition. On the other hand, some new software creators also prefer the world of closed source applications, with little interest in developing software for open source business intelligence.

For these closed source minded software users and creators, there are a few common misconceptions about open source software that should be examined more closely.

Concerns about Open Source Software

In the case of business intelligence, potential users may worry about the safety and security of software that is free for download over the internet. Would valuable and potentially damaging business intelligence information really be safely filtered through free software? Also, such potential users may also be worried about bugs within the open source software, or even a “back door” for the software creator to access the user’s information.

For software creators looking to tackle business intelligence, the open source software model may look like a worthless investment of time and expertise. Why would anybody make business intelligence software available as a completely free download? How would a software creator make any money if the source of his or her labor is freely distributed to anybody who owns a computer?

The Truth about Open Source Software

For those users worried about the safety capabilities of open source business intelligence software, they can rest easy. Since its inception, the creation of open source software has been targeted towards benefitting users, not scamming them. Also, there can be no such thing as a “back door” in open source software, because all of the software’s coding is fully available for everybody to see. If large companies and corporations are using open source business intelligence software, you can be sure that it is a safe and reliable alternative to any of the pricy closed source competition. In addition, open source business software allows users to come together over forums and discussions, where everybody can work together and troubleshoot to update the software into an even better free business intelligence tool.

Hesitant software creators should also realize that they can make big profits from creating something that everybody downloads for free. Unlike closed source companies, open source companies make money by shifting the commercial value away from their business intelligence software “product,” and instead, generate money from something called the “Product Halo.” This means software creators offer the open source software for free, but charge money for such valuable services such as tutorials, technical support, and system integration. Basically, if the open source business intelligence software creator is the most knowledgeable about his or her product, then users and companies will pay them for help in maintaining and updating the free software.

Though closed source software is here to stay, new software users and creators are wise to look into the benefits of the increasingly popular open source business intelligence software model.

To understand the benefits of self-service business intelligence, you first need to know what self-service BI is. It is, as it sounds, a way for business users to easily access the data that they need and create the necessary reports by themselves without having to involve the IT personnel or power users at their company. In essence, it is user-friendly business intelligence that any business user can operate.

Who Can Use Self-Service BI?

The whole point of self-service business intelligence is that anyone who needs to use it can use it. While BI tools are normally used by management or the key decision-makers in a company, it is now also being used by project managers to improve day-to-day performance and by real-time users in an operational capacity. Self-service BI doesn’t cut out the need for your IT personnel: they are still very necessary in creating applications and dealing with the more complicated business intelligence issues. But self-service BI does offer the benefit of streamlining the reporting process and allowing business users to handle much of it themselves.

Taking Advantage of the Benefits

Because self-service BI users don’t have to rely on your IT team to gain access to data and create reports, the decision-making process in your company can become that much faster. When a business user sees a problem that requires data to analyze the problem and strategize for a solution, that business user no longer has to first approach the IT department to access the data and build the necessary report. Removing that step in the process brings your business user to a solution much faster and improves the performance of your company on a much more immediate basis. Another benefit of self-service business intelligence: it frees up your IT personnel to work once again on the larger picture, rather than getting bogged down in the reporting needs of business users.

The Tools You Need for Self-Service Business Intelligence

How can you get your hands on self-service BI tools? Find a vendor that utilizes rich internet applications in its BI software. This allows for a user-friendly interface, web-based tools and reports, and reporting formats that will look and feel familiar to the user.

Business intelligence can be complex, but more and more, vendors are creating tools that are more user-friendly and allow business users to work directly with those tools. Take a look at self-service BI and streamline the decision-making process in your company.

Using the business intelligence programs that you are already familiar with to extract useful information from customer interactions can turn out to be difficult. Most business intelligence analytics like OLAP (On Line Analytical Processing) and data warehousing function very well when dealing with structured data, but when faced with unstructured data like customer comments these tools are not helpful in and of themselves. The question is how to make customer comments, whether collected through surveys, customer service calls, comment cards, or other means, assessable to these tools. These comments can include information on everything from performance to service quality to cost to reliability. The key is to organize the unstructured data.

In order to structure this data, a few questions have to be addressed:

• What kind of information is your company looking for in the comments?
• What categories should the comments be broken down into?
• What kinds of terms are important to categorize these comments?

The types of categories for a comment can usually be broken down into complaints, either about the product, delivery, shipment, and/or cost; questions about the product, delivery, or billing; compliments about the product or service; and suggestions for how to improve service. Using techniques for text mining, you can find the most important terms and phrases in the comments to add a new level of analysis to your current business intelligence findings. This process will find the names of products or people, dates, times, and monetary amounts. There is a variety of entity extraction tools on the market, including a number of open source versions that can be starting points for your company to build a custom version.

Nouns, verbs, and adjectives will all be identified and can be used to identify the type of comment and its tone. The comment can then be categorized and the unstructured data begins to take on a structure that can be analyzed by your business intelligence program. Using fixed categorization, the comments can be used in existing structured data elements in mining and statistic analysis.

Since the words and terms will vary from customer to customer and region to region, the different versions of the same concept will have to be recognized as one and the same and processed as such by the tools that you use. The same applies to semantic rules. Once you find a text mining technique that can deliver the structured information that your company can use to make strong decisions based on business intelligence you can rest assured that the information you have from your customers could be used to enhance your business.

Finding the focus of your business and monitoring your success in that particular area is the key to success in today’s diverse market. You can monitor how well your company is maintaining strategic focus by defining your Key Performance Indicators and investing in a business intelligence software program that will help you keep track of your progress. Your Key Performance Indicators, or KPIs, can show you which areas you’re executing well and which need improvement.

Choosing Your KPIs

Depending on your business’ focus, your KPIs will be different. Once you narrow down which KPIs are important to your business you can set up your business intelligence software to start collecting the necessary data you need to keep track of your strategy.

· Cost-focused Businesses – The KPIs for cost-focused businesses include cost measurement, cycle time, ability to conform to market standards, quantity, and quality.

· Product-focused Businesses – You’ll be looking at new products in the pipeline, research and development, time to market, and product customization when you select your KPIs for a product-focused business.

· Customer-focused Businesses – Your KPIs will be knowledge of customers, environmental appearance, complaint management, employee empathy, product expertise, and responsiveness in a customer-focused business.

A cost-focused business might benefit from having some knowledge of its customers, but it is not an important KPI for the company overall, while the opposite is true for a customer-focused business. You can mix and match these KPIs if you find it necessary, but most of the time this categorization will hold true.

Setting Up Your Business Intelligence Software

Armed with KPIs specific to your business, you can set up your business intelligence software to collect the data that will show whether or not you are on track with your company strategy. For cost-focused businesses, you will need to collect data that shows cost for the entire process, from materials to labor. Product-focused businesses will need to collect data that shows how the company is moving forward with new products and customer-focused businesses will have to collect more information on customer satisfaction. This will require the business intelligence program to mine different data sources, depending on the information required.

It may even be useful for you to determine your KPIs before you purchase your business intelligence software. That way, you’ll be able to purchase the best package for your data tracking requirements knowing what you need to collect.

Data problems can severely affect the quality of your business intelligence analysis, but they are often hard to detect. Because they don’t stop your analysis process right away, they can slowly become more and more of a detriment until they finally destroy your BI project. Because of how destructive unreliable data can be, one of the most important things you can do to ensure that your business intelligence software runs correctly is to make sure that your data is easily accessible and accurate. If you have duplicate or incomplete information, you will end up with results and eventually initiatives that are baseless. If you use the information to reach out to your customers for marketing campaigns or up-selling opportunities, you run the risk of looking disorganized and incompetent.

You can fix your data problems by following these basic steps:

• Detect and correct potential issues before they do any damage. Before adding any raw data to your business intelligence software applications, use reconnaissance software tools to determine the quality and reliability of your new data. This software is usually more accurate than checking the data manually and can detect and correct mistakes before they get lost in your existing data.
• Eliminate duplicates and standardize all your data as it comes in. This will give you a more comprehensive view of what kind of data you are actually collecting from the get go. By establishing procedures for data processing as it comes in, you can standardize the data as it enters the system.
• Make sure that any new data that applies to and affects old data can be categorized with the older data to create a more complete information history on a specific topic, be it customer buying habits or updating ROI.
• Set up a data “dictionary” so that data from separate sources with different phrases that share the same meaning are identified as belonging to the same category. For example, “manager” and “mgr” are spelled differently, but share the same meaning and should be treated as such.
• Use the tools available to you to automatically extract data from different sources, interpret it, and transform it into a form that can be used by your business intelligence software. This will save you the time and money required to translate your data manually.

Once you know your data is in the right format and contains information that can be used successfully by your software, you can concentrate on the results of your business intelligence analysis and how they affect your company. Take a second look at how reliable your data is now, before the wrong information affects your investment in your BI program.

Companies large and small can benefit from a well thought out business intelligence strategy, but developing that strategy can sometimes be more challenging than implementing a business intelligence program.  To make sure that your company is getting the most out of your BI program, make sure that you define your goals and have a plan for the information you generate before you start collecting and analyzing data. 

First Steps

Assess your current system of data collection.  How you collect your data will make a difference in how complete your information is, which will in turn affect the results of your business intelligence program.   Make sure that if you need historical data on your company or customers that you know where it is and how to access it.  You’ll also need to take some time to understand your business needs and make a rough road map for how you would like your business to transform.  Focus your attention on a few operational objective that can be achieved both short and long term.

Planning Your Strategy

Start with your vision of where you would like your company to be in 3 to 5 years.  Pick specific goals that can be achieved with the assistance of a good business intelligence program.  These goals should have measurable success rates or key performance indicators.  You will use your key performance indicators (KPIs) as milestones for how close you are to accomplishing your goals.  You can then set up your information infrastructure to collect the necessary data that can be analyzed and turned into information, which can be used to make effective decisions for your company. 

In order to pick the most worthwhile goals, you must understand what the desired end result is.  You will have to ask yourself what you will do with the business intelligence information your program generates once you have it.  Otherwise, you will have a vast amount of information and no way to strategize around it.  In companies without a comprehensive long-term plan, decision makers react to the information they get from their data without understanding the far-reaching consequences of their actions. 

Another important thing to think about before you implement your program is what your options are once you have the information.  Often companies have an idea of how they want to move forward and are looking to the business intelligence information generated by their BI program to support their current strategy.  They soon learn that the information is not always in line with their current plan.  Brainstorm all possible outcomes of your business intelligence program and think of ways that your company can improve based on the different results.  You probably won’t be able to come up with every single possibility, but you will be prepared to think creatively when your BI program starts to generate useful information.

Lastly, remember why you are implementing this program.  Business intelligence can be a huge asset to your business, but if you focus on the data and not on what the data can do for your company, your energy is misplaced.  Before you become overwhelmed with data warehousing and data integration initiatives, take a step back and refocus on your company’s goals.