5 Questions to ask before opting for a Business Intelligence [BI] Solution

Translating information into intelligence to take faster and fact based decisions is becoming the next logical step of e-governance right from Municipalities to Ministries. With the growing demands of delivery from the electorate empowered by the easy & elaborate access of information, the public representatives are increasingly coming under the perennial pressure of performance to be able to keep their promises. In order to meet this all, diligent decision support systems are warranted for. Nevertheless, despite the availability of innumerable tools and technologies for business intelligence by the top vendors of IT industry, the decision to opt for one of them remains procrastinated. One of the reasons probably is the underlying complexities involved in understanding the use of these systems by the end users. In order to extract out actionable & meaningful information from these powerful systems, it generally requires the induction of a new creed of professionals in an organization called analysts which have very little domain knowledge. The interfacing between the analysts & the real end users create a kind of a tussle leading to a low return on heavy investments. A self-service Business Intelligence paradigm is therefore taking shape whereby the real end users can take on the task of analyzing their very own information through simple and easy to use self-service BI tools. Following are some questions to ponder while picking up a BI solution of your organization. Simplicity How simple is the BI tool that it would require minimal deployment of expert support staff for unraveling its intricacies? Has the BI system been designed whereby a large set of business users can use it with little or no support from IT/MIS teams? Are the interfaces of the BI system intuitive enough like the usual internet experience which the end business users are accustomed to? Usability The usability of the system comes from its data discovery process. Instead of the business users requesting the IT/MIS team to create specific data marts, build OLAP cubes or pre-defined reports, they should be able to do a multi-dimensional analysis comprising of drill-down, drill-through, roll-up, sort, group, filter & calculation operations. The various what-if scenarios analysis

and data animation & mobile capabilities would further enhance the usability of the system. More the boundary between the static report viewers and analyzers is dissolved in a system, the more usable it would become. TCO & RoI The Total Cost of Ownership of a BI solution over the entire lifecycle comprises of not only upfront licensing, implementation and investment on hardware but also the recurring costs related to running & maintaining the same. The more the TCO, the lesser are the chances of high RoI. Delivery The time for delivering & deploying a BI system must be as low as possible so that it gives maximum RoI, reduces the implementation costs, has lesser training requirements and promotes instant usage. Empowerment Would this tool really empower the employees in analyzing their own pieces of information for taking faster and fact based decisions rather than being dependent on their intuitions and gut feelings? This should be the bottom line in making any BI system related decision. If the employees would find themselves empowered in taking better & more informed decisions, the RoI on such a BI system would find its own way.

Comparative analysis of the top 5 BI systems on SAP Business Objects X1 3.1; OBIEE Plus Oracle; Microsoft BI Suite; Cognos 8.4 IBM; QlikView QlikTech on 5 parameters of System Administration & User Privileges; Metadata & Reuse of Logic Across Reports; Web Interactivity for End Users; Automatic Drill Anywhere; Analysis & Reporting; Dynamic Report Personalization

SAP Business Objects X1 3.1

OBIEE Plus Oracle OBIEE Plus is an integration of former Siebel Business Analytics Platform, Hyperion BI and Oracle Business applications. Due to the various acquired disjointed Technologies, they system does not offer a unified BI platform with a single code base.

Microsoft BI Suite Microsoft requires several administration points for its BI platform components including: SQL Server, SharePoint Server, Performance Point Services. These multiple servers dramatically increase complexity of administration and prevent Microsoft from allowing centralized distribution of all administrative tasks

Cognos 8.4 - IBM

QlikView QlikTech

System Administration & User Privileges

Other BO content is not accessible; BO Universes are not accessible to Crystal Xcelsius, Dashboard Builder cannot access Voyager content

Cognos offers administrators limited granularity for setting group and user privileges. This limits the control administrators have and forces them to place users under full Studio access profiles.

Security profiles are defined locally within each document, and not in a centralized metadata. In a BI environment with multiple QlikView applications, it is difficult to maintain a consistent set of security profiles across multiple QlikView documents.

Metadata & Reuse of Logic Across Reports

BO technology requires far more IT personnel for a given amount of BI users because its report developers cannot reuse the metadata they create across reports and thus must create multiple one-off reports and objects.

OBIEE Plus requires more IT resources to maintain disjointed technologies with multiple metadata repositories and products, each with separate administration tools.

In Microsoft Reporting Services, report designers cannot save and reuse newly created metrics, filters or prompts outside the definition of the report. There is generally a lot of metadata or business logic built within the report definition that users would like to reuse across other reports as building blocks to create more advanced report objects. This increases the requirement of far more IT personnel for a given amount of BI users because Microsoft report developers cannot reuse the metadata across reports

Cognos Metrics Studio uses a separate repository from Cognos BI. Cognos PowerPlay Cubes require their own definition through Transformer. Cognos recent acquisitions Celequest and Applixrepresent stand alone platforms without plans for integration with Cognos BI beyond their use as external data sources

Business logic for each report is defined and contained within the report, and cannot be reused across reports. Moreover the security needs to be repeatedly defined on each document, making security management tedious and error- prone. Metadata objects typically cannot be used as building blocks to create more complex objects. This forces report developers to spend more time redundantly creating report objects.

Web Interactivity for End Users

Web user interactivity differs widely between multiple BO products and even within Web Intelligence report panels. HTML and ASP versions provide limited filtering, sorting, pivoting, subtotaling and formatting

Answers users have limited interactivity with the data. In order to pivot columns and rows, users are likely to go through tedious design workflows and switch to the Table View. Users cannot interact with the grids on dashboards.

Microsoft lacks a userfriendly web authoring environment, mainly due to Microsofts focus on Excel 2007 as its user front end. Most report design tasks must be performed by IT using desktop programming environments

Cognos provides an SDK for its BI Server with very limited options for customizing its web layer. User interface customization is difficult at best. Cognos BI has five different products called Studios. These Studios contain overlapping functionality, requiring users to learn different paradigms.

The zero-footprint Web interface does not support all functionality available in QlikView. Users who need the full breadth of QlikView functionality require an ActiveX download, which in turn forces users to use Internet Explorer. WYSIWYG formatting requires the installation of an ActiveX plug-in, thus forcing users to use Internet Explorer. In order to make a QlikView dashboard available over the Web in a zero-footprint interface, the dashboard is first designed on the desktop client, and then a Web page must be generated from that design. Depending on formatting requirements, the generated Web page must then be further customized via HTML code before being published to a Web server. Any changes to the dashboard design must go through a similar publishing process in order to make the changes available to Web users. This makes Web deployments difficult to maintain. Creating and modifying charts and laying out dashboards require either a desktop client or an installation of an ActiveX control, and is not possible in a zero-footprint Web client. This makes it difficult to push out ad hoc report creation capabilities to a large user

population, as the ActiveX control is dependent on an Internet Explorer browser and some users may be restricted from installing ActiveX controls. As a result, QlikView deployments typically give ad hoc report creation capabilities to a few power users, while end users with Web access are limited to filtering, sorting, and pre-defined drilling

Automatic Drill Anywhere

BO does not provide automatic drill anywhere. Drilling across hierarchies require IT hard coding to report destination

Oracle BI Answers is mainly designed as an ad hoc query tool and provides limited OLAP analysis capabilities through the interface. Automatic drill anywhere is not supported out of the-box. Users generally must drill down one level at a time within the same hierarchy. In order to drill across, IT must predefine drill paths or hard-code links to reports. Drilling up is achieved with the browsers back button.

End users need to ask IT to set up drill paths for more detailed analysis. Microsoft limits end user investigative analysis to drilling only within a defined hierarchy

Report developers must predefine drill sequences for each chart.

Analysis & Reporting

WebIntelligence and Polestar analysis and ad-hoc query cannot be easily incorporated into formatted reports. Highly formatted Crystal Reports do not support interactive drill anywhere for additional dynamic analysis.

Oracle Answers does not provide OLAP functionality such as create derived elements, custom groups or consolidations.

Microsoft business users find it difficult to create or edit analytical reports.

Business users in Cognos find it difficult to create or edit analytical reports.

Dynamic Report Personalization

BO does not provide on-the-fly hierarchical, object or column prompts such as selection of attributes, metrics, and filters. Neither Dashboard Builder nor Crystal Xcelsius supports key interactivity features such as automatic drill anywhere and multiple levels of analysis and Xcelsius users cannot pivot data.

OBIEE Plus report developers need to maintain more reports and metadata layers which are largely disconnected due to the limitations in prompting capabilities each product offers.

Microsoft does not allow users to easily author reports at run time, mainly because Microsoft lacks dynamic prompting. Microsoft offers limited options for users to dynamically choose what they would like on reports. Microsoft does not offer object or column prompts such as selection of attributes, metrics, and filters on-thefly.