Description
Business users and organizations need the ability to quickly analyze their data to identify issues, causes, and opportunities for improvement.
What every IT manager should know
about business users’ real needs for BI
Business intelligence
requirements for IT:
January 2011
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Business users and organizations need the ability to
quickly analyze their data to identify issues, causes,
and opportunities for improvement. Once these
analyses are identifed, they need to be monitored and
distributed often to others.
With traditional business intelligence (BI), creating and
maintaining effective analyses can take months to
defne and develop, requiring defne and develop and
require expensive resources to maintain. And by the
time they are created, the business situation will have
likely evolved, potentially doing harm to the business
and its customers.
In today’s marketplace, the half-life of BI is typically
shorter than the life of the project needed for its
implementation. This means that companies are getting
a continual negative return on their BI investment. It is
time to approach the problem from a new direction and
empower the business owners and knowledge workers
to quickly and easily fnd the answers to their questions.
In response, a new BI approach has emerged:
Operational Business Intelligence. It promises to
empower everyone within an organization to make
day-to-day decisions by using better analysis of sales
and marketing trends, customer interactions,
manufacturing plans, inventories, and other areas of the
business.
Some say this is a new trend in BI — except that it’s not
new. Many people in an organization might call it
“making do with Excel” or “the secret report that my IT
buddy runs for me,” but these are forms of guerrilla
operational BI. In fact, many organizations have already
found ways to enable employees with the access and
tools needed for operational BI – some sustainable and
some not.
The main question is, what are the business
requirements of an operational BI system? What does it
take to provide the environment and capabilities needed
for operational BI? Can an organization afford to wait
for a top-down operational BI initiative? Are there better,
more rapid options than disconnected spreadsheets
and disparate reports?
There are seven major requirements businesses need
to consider when evaluating this generation of BI:
1. Plug and play. Leverage existing data stores and
infrastructure.
2. See the answer. Help the business user see the
answer faster.
3. Beyond reporting. Provide the ability to rapidly
analyze and problem solve - not just report.
4. Any data, any time. Access data that IT doesn’t
have.
5. Self-service BI. Enable the business user to
create new reports and views without IT.
6. Collaboration. Deliver means for sharing and
updating analyses and fndings in real time.
7. Simplicity. Require no training to start and only
minimal training for sophisticated business users.
Plug and play
Traditional BI requires complex deployments in which
data are extracted, transformed, and loaded into yet
another format where security may become an issue. It
places a burden on IT to install and maintain these
repetitive systems and data stores.
Today’s BI should leverage the existing investment and
access data directly. There should be little for IT to
install or maintain – ideally, there would be no new
databases to install or confgure, no new middle tier
servers, no data modeling exercises, no extracting,
transforming and loading (ETL) data from source
systems into data warehouses, no training classes, and
no new certifcations for IT to achieve.
Most importantly, it should adhere to the existing
security and authentication models and not require new
security measures to ensure compliance.
1
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See the answer
Traditional BI tools produce volumes of text-based
reports, static charts and dashboards. In fact,
dashboards themselves have become the panacea for
many of the ills of BI output. But as Stephen Few, noted
BI author and pundit, writes, “Most dashboards that are
used in businesses today fail. At best they deliver only a
fraction of the insight that is needed to monitor the
business.” Few goes on to say:
“The root of the problem is not technology—at least not
primarily—but poor data presentation. To serve their
purpose and fulfll their potential, dashboards must
display a dense array of information in a small amount of
space in a manner that communicates clearly and
immediately. This requires design that taps into and
leverages the power of visual perception and the human
brain to sense and process several chunks of
information rapidly.”
Beyond reporting
Fundamentally, traditional BI provides basic access to
information that is only the start of the answer. These BI
interfaces are not built for problem solving. A typical BI
report or view may answer one question but it rarely
answers the next question. Today’s BI must allow for
the user to rapidly explore and analyze their data by
asking not only the question at hand, but also the next
question and the one after that and so on – essentially,
today’s BI must be able to answer every possible follow-
on question, and do it quickly and easily. Today’s
solutions must be able to query, summarize, cross-tab,
hypothesize, visualize and report on-the-fy depending
on where the analysis leads them.
Any data, any time
Because each employee’s analytical needs are
different, not all of the data needed for every analysis
will be in the data warehouse, regardless of size. In
order to be effective, today’s BI needs to recognize this
and offer solutions for accessing and analyzing that
external data.
Next generation BI solutions should connect to and
read the usual data warehouses (OLAP, ROLAP,
HOLAP) but also be able to utilize desktop data such as
text fles, Excel fles, or other data stores that reside
outside of BI, without having to reformat or migrate that
data into the data warehouse.
Self-service
Generating the exact views and reports that each
employee needs to be successful in understanding and
utilizing information requires far more resources than any
IT department has available and creates an IT bottleneck
for new reports. And even if the resources were available,
most business users cannot anticipate every possible
view or report they will need going forward.
Today’s BI must enable the user to defne new views and
reports for themselves – in other words, there must be an
element of self-service.
Collaboration
Traditionally, BI has excelled at generating automated
reports that could be distributed across an organization.
In fact, one could argue that automated report creation
and distribution were the major benefts of traditional BI.
3
4
Figure 1. Seeing data provides more insight
Dashboards provide a better and faster way to see
and understand patterns and trends. State-of-the-
art data visualization techniques and good design
must be embedded to help deliver answers sooner.
5
6
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– Stephen Few
“ To serve their purpose and
fulfll their potential, dashboards
must display a dense array of
information”
“in a small amount of space in a manner that
communicates clearly and immediately. ”
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Today’s BI needs to go three steps further. First, not
only must it create and distribute automated reports, it
must also allow business users to defne those reports.
This means they must be able to not only design and
set up the report or view themselves but also be able to
easily confgure which recipients can see which views
of which underlying data. Then they need to be able to
publish them where recipients (with the proper
permissions) can access them.
Second, it must allow the recipients to engage in
light-weight Q&A sessions with those reports and
analyses. The intended audience often has additional
questions which must be served without having to rerun
the entire analysis or involve the publishing analyst.
And third, these analyses must update in real-time in
order to make sure everyone is getting the right
answers to the right questions each time they look.
On-demand updates also eliminate the need to
constantly re-generate analyses.
Simplicity
Traditional BI often requires multi-day, in-person
training courses even for business users who would
only be light users of the BI system. In today’s world,
this isn’t just unrealistic, it’s a guarantee that only a
fraction of potential BI users will ever get any value.
Today’s BI must be easy enough to use so that nearly
any business user can conduct a broad range of
inquiries without any training. Naturally, for people who
want to learn more sophisticated functions, training
should be available pervasively via means that are
easily accessible, such as: online training courses,
on-demand training courses, tutorials, etc., and not just
high cost in-person classes.
In the end...
In most of today’s business environments, two things
are clear: people want the ability to ask questions of
their data and get answers real-time, and they are
disappointed in the status quo. Analysis is a crucial part
of any business and any job title - from an HR
representative at a Fortune 500 company to a sales rep
at a small start-up.
In this day and age of endless information, it’s crucial
that businesses take the necessary steps to update or
deploy BI solutions that will be accessible, useful,
effective, and easy to understand for the entire
organization. Operational BI promises to be a core part
of the answer but only when it meets the 7 key
requirements of business users. Tableau allows
companies to leverage their data assets in
unprecedented ways.
About Tableau
Tableau Software helps people see and understand
data. Ranked by Gartner in 2011 as the world’s fastest
growing business intelligence company, Tableau helps
individuals quickly and easily analyze, visualize and
share information. With more than 6,500 customers
worldwide of all sizes and across industries, Tableau is
used by individuals throughout an organization, in an
offce and on-the-go. See the impact Tableau can have
on your data by downloading the free trial at www.
tableausoftware.com/trial.
7
© Copyright Tableau Software, Inc. 2011. All rights reserved. 837 North 34th Street, Suite 400, Seattle, WA 98103 U.S.A.
doc_318198564.pdf
Business users and organizations need the ability to quickly analyze their data to identify issues, causes, and opportunities for improvement.
What every IT manager should know
about business users’ real needs for BI
Business intelligence
requirements for IT:
January 2011
p2
B
u
s
i
n
e
s
s
i
n
t
e
l
l
i
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n
c
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m
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B
I
Business users and organizations need the ability to
quickly analyze their data to identify issues, causes,
and opportunities for improvement. Once these
analyses are identifed, they need to be monitored and
distributed often to others.
With traditional business intelligence (BI), creating and
maintaining effective analyses can take months to
defne and develop, requiring defne and develop and
require expensive resources to maintain. And by the
time they are created, the business situation will have
likely evolved, potentially doing harm to the business
and its customers.
In today’s marketplace, the half-life of BI is typically
shorter than the life of the project needed for its
implementation. This means that companies are getting
a continual negative return on their BI investment. It is
time to approach the problem from a new direction and
empower the business owners and knowledge workers
to quickly and easily fnd the answers to their questions.
In response, a new BI approach has emerged:
Operational Business Intelligence. It promises to
empower everyone within an organization to make
day-to-day decisions by using better analysis of sales
and marketing trends, customer interactions,
manufacturing plans, inventories, and other areas of the
business.
Some say this is a new trend in BI — except that it’s not
new. Many people in an organization might call it
“making do with Excel” or “the secret report that my IT
buddy runs for me,” but these are forms of guerrilla
operational BI. In fact, many organizations have already
found ways to enable employees with the access and
tools needed for operational BI – some sustainable and
some not.
The main question is, what are the business
requirements of an operational BI system? What does it
take to provide the environment and capabilities needed
for operational BI? Can an organization afford to wait
for a top-down operational BI initiative? Are there better,
more rapid options than disconnected spreadsheets
and disparate reports?
There are seven major requirements businesses need
to consider when evaluating this generation of BI:
1. Plug and play. Leverage existing data stores and
infrastructure.
2. See the answer. Help the business user see the
answer faster.
3. Beyond reporting. Provide the ability to rapidly
analyze and problem solve - not just report.
4. Any data, any time. Access data that IT doesn’t
have.
5. Self-service BI. Enable the business user to
create new reports and views without IT.
6. Collaboration. Deliver means for sharing and
updating analyses and fndings in real time.
7. Simplicity. Require no training to start and only
minimal training for sophisticated business users.
Plug and play
Traditional BI requires complex deployments in which
data are extracted, transformed, and loaded into yet
another format where security may become an issue. It
places a burden on IT to install and maintain these
repetitive systems and data stores.
Today’s BI should leverage the existing investment and
access data directly. There should be little for IT to
install or maintain – ideally, there would be no new
databases to install or confgure, no new middle tier
servers, no data modeling exercises, no extracting,
transforming and loading (ETL) data from source
systems into data warehouses, no training classes, and
no new certifcations for IT to achieve.
Most importantly, it should adhere to the existing
security and authentication models and not require new
security measures to ensure compliance.
1
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See the answer
Traditional BI tools produce volumes of text-based
reports, static charts and dashboards. In fact,
dashboards themselves have become the panacea for
many of the ills of BI output. But as Stephen Few, noted
BI author and pundit, writes, “Most dashboards that are
used in businesses today fail. At best they deliver only a
fraction of the insight that is needed to monitor the
business.” Few goes on to say:
“The root of the problem is not technology—at least not
primarily—but poor data presentation. To serve their
purpose and fulfll their potential, dashboards must
display a dense array of information in a small amount of
space in a manner that communicates clearly and
immediately. This requires design that taps into and
leverages the power of visual perception and the human
brain to sense and process several chunks of
information rapidly.”
Beyond reporting
Fundamentally, traditional BI provides basic access to
information that is only the start of the answer. These BI
interfaces are not built for problem solving. A typical BI
report or view may answer one question but it rarely
answers the next question. Today’s BI must allow for
the user to rapidly explore and analyze their data by
asking not only the question at hand, but also the next
question and the one after that and so on – essentially,
today’s BI must be able to answer every possible follow-
on question, and do it quickly and easily. Today’s
solutions must be able to query, summarize, cross-tab,
hypothesize, visualize and report on-the-fy depending
on where the analysis leads them.
Any data, any time
Because each employee’s analytical needs are
different, not all of the data needed for every analysis
will be in the data warehouse, regardless of size. In
order to be effective, today’s BI needs to recognize this
and offer solutions for accessing and analyzing that
external data.
Next generation BI solutions should connect to and
read the usual data warehouses (OLAP, ROLAP,
HOLAP) but also be able to utilize desktop data such as
text fles, Excel fles, or other data stores that reside
outside of BI, without having to reformat or migrate that
data into the data warehouse.
Self-service
Generating the exact views and reports that each
employee needs to be successful in understanding and
utilizing information requires far more resources than any
IT department has available and creates an IT bottleneck
for new reports. And even if the resources were available,
most business users cannot anticipate every possible
view or report they will need going forward.
Today’s BI must enable the user to defne new views and
reports for themselves – in other words, there must be an
element of self-service.
Collaboration
Traditionally, BI has excelled at generating automated
reports that could be distributed across an organization.
In fact, one could argue that automated report creation
and distribution were the major benefts of traditional BI.
3
4
Figure 1. Seeing data provides more insight
Dashboards provide a better and faster way to see
and understand patterns and trends. State-of-the-
art data visualization techniques and good design
must be embedded to help deliver answers sooner.
5
6
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– Stephen Few
“ To serve their purpose and
fulfll their potential, dashboards
must display a dense array of
information”
“in a small amount of space in a manner that
communicates clearly and immediately. ”
p5
B
u
s
i
n
e
s
s
i
n
t
e
l
l
i
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e
n
c
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Today’s BI needs to go three steps further. First, not
only must it create and distribute automated reports, it
must also allow business users to defne those reports.
This means they must be able to not only design and
set up the report or view themselves but also be able to
easily confgure which recipients can see which views
of which underlying data. Then they need to be able to
publish them where recipients (with the proper
permissions) can access them.
Second, it must allow the recipients to engage in
light-weight Q&A sessions with those reports and
analyses. The intended audience often has additional
questions which must be served without having to rerun
the entire analysis or involve the publishing analyst.
And third, these analyses must update in real-time in
order to make sure everyone is getting the right
answers to the right questions each time they look.
On-demand updates also eliminate the need to
constantly re-generate analyses.
Simplicity
Traditional BI often requires multi-day, in-person
training courses even for business users who would
only be light users of the BI system. In today’s world,
this isn’t just unrealistic, it’s a guarantee that only a
fraction of potential BI users will ever get any value.
Today’s BI must be easy enough to use so that nearly
any business user can conduct a broad range of
inquiries without any training. Naturally, for people who
want to learn more sophisticated functions, training
should be available pervasively via means that are
easily accessible, such as: online training courses,
on-demand training courses, tutorials, etc., and not just
high cost in-person classes.
In the end...
In most of today’s business environments, two things
are clear: people want the ability to ask questions of
their data and get answers real-time, and they are
disappointed in the status quo. Analysis is a crucial part
of any business and any job title - from an HR
representative at a Fortune 500 company to a sales rep
at a small start-up.
In this day and age of endless information, it’s crucial
that businesses take the necessary steps to update or
deploy BI solutions that will be accessible, useful,
effective, and easy to understand for the entire
organization. Operational BI promises to be a core part
of the answer but only when it meets the 7 key
requirements of business users. Tableau allows
companies to leverage their data assets in
unprecedented ways.
About Tableau
Tableau Software helps people see and understand
data. Ranked by Gartner in 2011 as the world’s fastest
growing business intelligence company, Tableau helps
individuals quickly and easily analyze, visualize and
share information. With more than 6,500 customers
worldwide of all sizes and across industries, Tableau is
used by individuals throughout an organization, in an
offce and on-the-go. See the impact Tableau can have
on your data by downloading the free trial at www.
tableausoftware.com/trial.
7
© Copyright Tableau Software, Inc. 2011. All rights reserved. 837 North 34th Street, Suite 400, Seattle, WA 98103 U.S.A.
doc_318198564.pdf