Description
Data is increasingly critical to accomplishing your most important objectives and staying ahead of the competition, but as with most organizations.
Ellie Fields and Bob Middleton
January 2015
Rapid-Fire
Business Intelligence
2
You’re an innovator. Data is increasingly critical to accomplishing your most important
objectives and staying ahead of the competition, but as with most organizations, your
resources and leaders are short on time. You understand the details and nuances of your
marketplace, but don’t necessarily have the word “analyst” in your title. You put energy into
using software like Microsoft Excel or some other types of business intelligence (BI) tools,
and know frst-hand the excessive time commitment it takes to pull in data from different
sources, and share dashboards and reports to fnd meaningful insights.
Data-driven decisions are only helpful if you can understand and communicate insights in
time to take action. Across industries and the public sector, today’s employees who have
grown up with the Internet and social media are unwilling to wait in a months-long queue
for a new report or a change request. It’s time for a new approach to business intelligence.
This paper outlines a new approach to help you, your team and your organization easily
see and understand data 10 to 100 times faster.
Rapid-fre business intelligence gives you the ability to answer your own questions in
minutes. Whether you’re working with Hadoop, data in spreadsheets and warehouses, or
across disparate data sets, the entire organization is served—from executives to analysts,
across departments and geographic locations, and in the offce or on the go.
The following six attributes of rapid-fre business intelligence will beneft you, your team and
your organization. You’ll spend less time and use fewer resources to enable more self-
reliance, data discovery and better collaboration—all while tackling big data and scaling at
your organization’s own pace.
1. Speed
2. Self-Reliance
3. Visual Discovery
4. Blend Diverse Data Sets
5. Real-time Collaboration
6. Flexible and Secure Confguration
3
1.
Speed
Pushing through the bottleneck of IT-generated reports can seriously impair
companies needing to make critical decisions at the speed of business.
But how fast is the speed of business, actually? The hallmark of rapid-fre
business intelligence solutions is the ability to see and understand data analysis
at the speed of thought—allowing for the asking and answering of questions as
fast as business leaders and clients can think of them, even against massive and
divergent data sets.
Saving time in every step of your data workfow is fundamental. From installing
software, accessing and analyzing complex data sets, publishing interactive
dashboards, and sharing across your organization, for your data it to be impactful,
the insight-to-decision process must be swift.
Install Access Analyze Publish Share
10 X 100 TIMES FASTER
Speed at Every Stage of the Data Workfow. Compared to traditional business intelligence,
rapid-fre analytics is 10 to 100 times faster at every step in the data workfow, from installing
software and accessing data to analyzing complex information, publishing interactive
dashboards, and sharing across your organization.
The solution must easily combine many data sets from different parts of the
business on the fy. It must provide in-memory capabilities to speed up slow data
as well as be able to connect live to fast data infrastructures. And of course, it
starts with installation and deployment: the business intelligence solution should
take only hours or days to implement, not weeks or months.
If you answer yes to any of the following questions, your BI system is not moving
as fast as it could be:
• Does your business intelligence solution require weeks or months to deploy
or change?
• Does creating or modifying reports or dashboards require requests to the IT
department that result in a queue or IT department backlog?
• Does your BI solution require days or weeks of training before new users
can build and publish their frst dashboard or report?
4
• Is your BI solution reliant on elaborate scheduling or workarounds for slow
system performance?
• Does your BI solution force you to replicate data even though you’ve
invested heavily in an enterprise data warehouse or fast database?
• Does your BI solution force you to do specialized pre-integration work to
access your data?
• Are you constrained in your ability to blend data from multiple sources
including raw or unstructured data stored outside of relational databases?
Barclays, a global fnancial services provider, adopted new rapid-fre business
intelligence to leverage mixed data for deep customers insights.
Barclays’ senior Insight Analyst Peter Gilks explains how old school BI tools
slowed their business data systems down; “Analysis used to require lots of SQL
programming and moving data into Excel then into charts. It involved a lot of pre-
thought about measures to program. You’d come up with your charts later, and
then there was a lengthy iterative process.”
Now, the Barclays team utilizes new technology to create data dashboards with
zero programming needed, and shares them with their senior executives and
frontline stakeholders to get everyone on the same page. When they spot major
customer trends, their teams can immediately start to plan for them.
2.
Self-Reliance
Traditional business intelligence is a chore for IT: from installation, deployment,
and programming, to report writing, change requests, support, and maintenance.
This doesn’t even include the costly professional services that are required.
The solution of self-reliance, or self-service, provides a way for business people
to ask and answer their own questions, and generate their own reports about
their specifc stake in the business. It requires fewer resources from IT to install
or maintain. IT sets up the data architecture, security, and access controls, and
business people serve themselves with data dashboards in any size or format.
Even more troublesome, when business units require new functionality, traditional
BI often “breaks.” This causes organizations to upgrade late or not at all, reducing
the ability to adopt advances in technology. And when you do upgrade, it’s a
massive project involving many resources and risks.
Watch more of Peter’s story
“I can sit with my laptop
in a meeting and answer
questions on 20 million
rows of data basically
on the fy, fip my
laptop around and show
everyone the answers.
And because things are
quick, you can’t go too
far wrong. So if you try
something and it doesn’t
work, that’s only fve
seconds wasted; you just
start again… Things that
were taking me days are
now taking minutes,”
—Peter Gilks, Barclays
5
In the meantime, business people still need to make both critical and everyday
decisions, and if they cannot independently and directly ask the questions of their
data when needed, there’s a fundamental problem.
Self-reliant BI systems look like this:
• Allows anyone to easily build
dashboards and reports from
disparate data sources and make
modifcations on the fy.
• Provides built-in best practices
to support effective analysis and
save time.
• Opens desktop data such as text
fles and Microsoft Excel, without
having to reformat that data.
• Connects to all major databases
with a few clicks.
• Enables easy sharing through
web and mobile dashboards,
SharePoint, or visuals exported to
PowerPoint or email.
• Empowers informed skeptics
who fnd actionable insight from
the combination of the business
experience and analytics.
• Provides interactive functionality
on the web such as drill-down and
fltering.
• Provides role- and group-based
security for secure publishing.
• Allows users to connect to the
existing data architecture.
• Enforces the security and controls
set up by IT.
The University of California’s Irvine Medical Center is ranked among the top
50 American hospitals by U.S. News & World Report, and is the only university
hospital in Orange County. Their informatics solutions architect, Charles Boicey,
found that too much time is wasted waiting for the IT department to generate
timely reports with medical data old BI tools.
The folks at Irvine Medical Center’s IT department really didn’t want to be the
report writers, nor should they be. “From an IT perspective, if we can put analytics
where it belongs, in the hands of the folks that use the data and know the data, we
can orchestrate the best quality healthcare for our patients,” Boicey explained.
Bringing the data directly to the key players in organizations allows for issues to
be resolved as they come up, no bottleneck required.
Creating a self-reliant, agile data culture also frees time for other company
resources to do their jobs to the best of their ability, and thus allows for faster,
more accurate decision-making in every department.
“We’re dealing with
patients’ lives, and it’s
really, really important
that we know what’s
happening at the
moment that it’s
happening, or a little
bit before. 30 days
doesn’t do you a lot
of good. We needed
and really wanted a
self-service model.”
—Charles Boicey,
UC Irvine Medical Center
Watch Charles talk about giving
the power to the people.
6
3.
Visual Discovery
You’re thinking about the questions you need to ask your data — not about how to
use the software. Visualizations unlock the value of raw data. Much like crude oil
is processed into electricity, inevitably switching a light bulb on or igniting a spark
to set a vehicle in motion, visualization will transform data from its raw state into
forward-thinking insight and real-time action. A visual approach to analytics will
allow you to instantly spot anomalies, outliers and trends without sorting through
pages of spreadsheets.
According to Forrester Research: “Enterprises fnd advanced data visualization
platforms to be essential tools that enable them to monitor business, fnd patterns,
and take action to avoid threats and snatch opportunities.” A story unfolds as you
navigate from one visual summary into another.
Global IT leader, Cisco, creates and consumes mass amounts of data and found
that visual discovery improved departments across the company to increase
productivity and make data-driven decisions.
“When we talk to the marketing team, the engineering team or the channel
operation team, they are interested by data but, for their context. At frst, it
was pretty diffcult for them to have an analytic view on all those data points,
because all those data existed in a silo. But visually seeing data and identifying
the patterns of a graphic has really helped them to understand the story, to
understand what’s going on, and to understand what the action they have to take
in order to make a difference and create a business impact,” said David Baudrez,
Head of Business Insight at Cisco.
Consider these important elements when choosing your visual
discovery solution:
Easy-to-use user interfaces
Is the software easy to understand and have an initiative user interface? Can
anyone answer a broad range of inquiries with simple drag and drop actions?
Can they use touch screen interfaces on iPads and Android tablets to speed their
enquiries without keyboard or mouse?
Interactive for discovery and collaboration
Does the software offer interactivity within dashboards to enable users to
perform basic analytics tasks such as fltering views, adjusting parameters,
quick calculations and drilling down to examine underlying data? Can you share
visualizations that allow for others to drill through to the underlying detail in just
a few clicks? Is drill-down / drill-through an automatic occurrence requiring no
special scripting or advance set-up?
Watch David talk about
visual discovery.
“…visually seeing data
and identifying the
patterns of a graphic
has really helped them
to understand the
story, to understand
what’s going on, and
to understand what
the action they have to
take in order to make
a difference and create
a business impact.”
—David Baudrez, Cisco
7
Pull data from all sources for full picture
Data blending, also known as data mash-up, is the ability to combine data from
multiple data sources on a single view. Can the software blend data on a common
feld? Can you see and understand related data in multiple data sources that
you want to analyze together in a single view? This ability will generate the most
accurate picture possible from your data.
Geographic intelligence
Geographic analysis is critical. Is mapping easy to use and complete, requiring no
specialty map fles, plug-ins, fees or third party tools?
A well-crafted visualization makes the light bulb go off. A spreadsheet requires you to
analyze data in rows and columns, choose a subset of your data to present, organize that data
into a table, and then create a chart from that table. Rapid-fre business intelligence skips those
steps and creates a visual representation of your data right away, giving you visual options and
immediate feedback as you analyze.
About Tableau maps: www.tableausoftware.com/mapdata
Scatterplot
(showing outliers)
Map
(geographic patterns)
Line Graph
(trend detection)
Tree Map
(relative proportions)
click
1
click
1
click
1
8
4.
Blend Diverse Data Sets
There is nothing about data today that is getting smaller; its absolute size is
growing, it lives in a greater variety of data stores, and more people need to use
it. The diverse data solution enables people to combine massive amounts data
easily from different systems and from all parts of the business. It must work with
data of any size, from hundreds of terabytes to petabytes and more. It must work
with unstructured or raw data. And of course, it must work with the spreadsheets
and text fles that exist in every business.
Traditional business intelligence made the assumption that all-important data can
be moved into consolidated enterprise architectures. But that’s not the reality for
most organizations, which have different databases in different places, which are
short on time and staff, and whose needs change constantly.
Rapid-fre business intelligence lets you blend different relational, semi-structured
and raw data sources in real time, without expensive up-front integration costs.
That means that users don’t need to know the details of how data is stored to ask
and answer questions.
Consider the following performance factors when evaluating
the ability to manage and beneft from large diverse data:
Allows users to augment data
Does the software allow users bring in data from outside the company on-the-fy,
like demographics and market research, to augment their corporate data?
Provides fast analytics, whether in-memory or via live connection
Does the software provide fast query performance, either via its own fast in-
memory software or by directly connecting to fast data stores?
Reduces demands on IT
Does the software let users work with the existing data infrastructure so that IT is
freed from creating ever-more cubes and “universes” and standalone marts? Does
it support data security by allowing users to work with data where it’s supposed to
be, rather than copying it into unmanaged and unsecure spreadsheets?
Scales to big data on commodity hardware
Does the software connect to the myriad of new database formats for raw,
unstructured and semi-structured big data?
9
Is architecture agnostic
Does your BI software work well with both centralized and decentralized data
architectures? Does the software support the increase in mobile devises and
applications? Does your BI software integrate seamlessly for all data types and
means of access?
Hanesbrands, Inc., the recognized global consumer apparel, T-shirt and
underwear company, utilizes data from billions of rows of data in many large
databases. The need for data blending and the insights it delivers continues to
spread like wildfre across the enterprise.
At Hanesbrands, everybody has access to rapid-fre BI tools. Santiago Restrepo,
Director of Business Intelligence and Analytics, explains,
“we have a good way to track the usage, make sure that the
data is secured and people have the right access. They’re able
to analyze a lot of information. We have point-of-sale data by
SKU, by store, by week or by day for all of our trade partners.”
By utilizing new rapid-fre best practices, Hanesbrands is making sense of all that
data, and making more and more fact-based decisions.
Rapid-fre business intelligence supports true ad-hoc query of large, complex data
sets, This means that you and your colleagues don’t have to determine in advance
which measures to aggregate or query.
Watch Santiago talk about how
Hanes makes sense of data.
10
5.
Real-Time Collaboration
This solution enables colleagues and authorized partners to access the data and
communicate, with group- and role-based data security; ideally supporting single
sign-on so colleagues don’t have to remember separate passwords.
If your reports don’t answer your questions, and you leave your meeting with more
questions than you went in with, you would normally go create more reports, and
then call another meeting. Which generates more questions and more reports.
Why not interact with data live during a meeting? With rapid-fre business
intelligence you can flter, sort, and discuss data on the fy and embed a live
dashboard in your SharePoint site or in Salesforce. You can save your view of
data and allow colleagues to subscribe to your interactive dashboards so they see
the very latest data just by refreshing their web browser. That’s real collaboration.
Large enterprises spread across multiple lines of business and geographies seek
to move past data silos and improve collaboration.
In order to scale from departments to business units and
across the largest enterprises, consider the following:
Natively mobile
You make decisions in meetings, at customer sites and on the go. Your business
intelligence should be natively mobile to support analytics anywhere and
everywhere for all of your stakeholders.
Combination of fexibility and compliance
As noted by the Gartner 2012 Magic Quadrant for BI Platforms: “… business
users demand easy to use, fexible products that put analytic power into their
own hands, against IT’s desire to maintain standards and create a supportable BI
environment with predictable performance and quality data.” It’s not a question
of choosing between fexibility or compliance — you need both. You need to
centralize data sources and apply metadata, yet still be able to extend it by adding
your own calculations, hierarchies, and aliases. Organizations that master rapid-
fre business intelligence let IT set up the data architecture, security, and access
controls, while giving business people the ability to serve themselves reports and
dashboards.
“… business users
demand easy to use,
fexible products that
put analytic power
into their own hands,
against IT’s desire to
maintain standards and
create a supportable
BI environment with
predictable performance
and quality data.”
—Gartner 2012 Magic
Quadrant for BI Platforms
11
Shared and extensible metadata
Rapid-fre business intelligence provides your organization with a centralized data
source and metadata layer — yet still enables you and your colleagues to add
your own calculations; create new groups, sets, and parameters; organize data
into hierarchies; and modify aliases. It’s metadata that just works: there’s no initial
setup and it adapts with your data.
Centralized data
The data server provides a centralized location to manage all of your
organization’s published data sources. You can delete, change permissions, add
tags, and manage schedules in one convenient location. It’s easy to schedule
extract refreshes and manage them in the data server. Administrators can
centrally defne a schedule for extracts on the server for both incremental and full
refreshes to save time and effort.
Publish Once. Share on the web. Interact and edit from your tablet. Rapid-fre business
intelligence dashboards are optimized to deliver touch experiences when accessed from mobile
devices and tablets. This touch awareness experience is integrated automatically, and no
additional or special authoring or design is needed.
12
6.
Flexible & Secure Confgurations
You can start small but scale big. Whether today’s need is one business analyst
with one data source, or 10,000 feld representatives on tablets accessing
many reports while on the road, this solution needs supports all stages of an
organization’s analytics evolution.
Today’s economy mandates that organizations spend wisely on software
licenses as they’re needed; but because traditional BI is so complicated to
install and maintain, very few BI vendors offer customers small user bundles.
Worse, modules for more functionality often mean additional license fees. But
organizations typically want to pilot analytics projects with a handful of users and
scale up over time.
Traditional BI forced too much, too soon. It required organizations to buy large
minimum-confguration licenses to meet potential needs — not actual needs.
Much of the software went unused.
Meanwhile, a new crop of boutique Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) BI vendors
enable static dashboards for departmental needs, but struggle to offer the
fexibility, scalability, and deep analytics required by multiple departments and
lines of business.
This challenge is changing many of the traditional concepts of governance. Data
is at the heart of any business operation, but it is only useful when it is being used.
The problem all organizations face is balancing data access with appropriate
security, as well as a way to differentiate certifed reports and data while still
providing business users a sandbox for new development. Simply locking down
business data and reports to a few means that organizations won’t get the beneft
of broad adoption of analytics.
Data Governance is not just about security, it is about making
sure data in accurate, available and audited.
Accurate
Any analysis and visualization is meaningless unless users can be sure, and
prove that they have the latest versions of data, and that the data is drawn from
approved sources.
Available
This is a complex subject in that, while the analyst may have access to all the data
available; there are often viewers of the analysis who can be given access to top
level views but not the underlying data.
13
Audited
Most organizational data has some level of confdentiality and it is important, and
often a legal requirement that a complete trail is available of who has had access
to data and at what level.
The Bottom Line
There is a sea change occurring in what enterprises and public-sector
organizations expect from business intelligence. The old business intelligence
models are slow and resource-intensive. When families bring a sick child to
Irvine Medical Center, they want help fast, and the right data software can
increase speed to action. The importance of speed is not limited to a hospital
— competitive businesses are unable to wait for months to make money or
save costs. At a pace that has outmatched competitors, M Financial Group
has launched over 20 M-priced proprietary products for North America’s most
recognized and respected insurance brands: “Using Tableau, I am able to quickly
drill down into large sets of data and fnd relationships that would have taken 10X
as long with traditional query tools,” noted Brandon Nichols, director of technology
strategy for underwriting and new business process.
“Using Tableau, I am
able to quickly drill down
into large sets of data
and fnd relationships
that would have taken
10X as long with
traditional query tools,”
—Brandon Nichols,
M Financial Group
14
About Tableau
Tableau Software helps people see and understand data. Providing rapid-fre business intelligence
with a consistent experience from the PC to the iPad, Tableau solutions generate fast, visual, and
self-service data dashboards with no programming skills required. See the impact Tableau can
have on your organization by downloading a free trial at www.tableausoftware.com/trial.
Additional Resources
Download Free Trial
Related Whitepapers
An IT Roadmap For Scaling Self-Service Reporting
Data Governance for Self-Service Analytics
Tableau Secure Software Deployment
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Tableau and Tableau Software are trademarks of Tableau Software, Inc. All other company and
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doc_481471870.pdf
Data is increasingly critical to accomplishing your most important objectives and staying ahead of the competition, but as with most organizations.
Ellie Fields and Bob Middleton
January 2015
Rapid-Fire
Business Intelligence
2
You’re an innovator. Data is increasingly critical to accomplishing your most important
objectives and staying ahead of the competition, but as with most organizations, your
resources and leaders are short on time. You understand the details and nuances of your
marketplace, but don’t necessarily have the word “analyst” in your title. You put energy into
using software like Microsoft Excel or some other types of business intelligence (BI) tools,
and know frst-hand the excessive time commitment it takes to pull in data from different
sources, and share dashboards and reports to fnd meaningful insights.
Data-driven decisions are only helpful if you can understand and communicate insights in
time to take action. Across industries and the public sector, today’s employees who have
grown up with the Internet and social media are unwilling to wait in a months-long queue
for a new report or a change request. It’s time for a new approach to business intelligence.
This paper outlines a new approach to help you, your team and your organization easily
see and understand data 10 to 100 times faster.
Rapid-fre business intelligence gives you the ability to answer your own questions in
minutes. Whether you’re working with Hadoop, data in spreadsheets and warehouses, or
across disparate data sets, the entire organization is served—from executives to analysts,
across departments and geographic locations, and in the offce or on the go.
The following six attributes of rapid-fre business intelligence will beneft you, your team and
your organization. You’ll spend less time and use fewer resources to enable more self-
reliance, data discovery and better collaboration—all while tackling big data and scaling at
your organization’s own pace.
1. Speed
2. Self-Reliance
3. Visual Discovery
4. Blend Diverse Data Sets
5. Real-time Collaboration
6. Flexible and Secure Confguration
3
1.
Speed
Pushing through the bottleneck of IT-generated reports can seriously impair
companies needing to make critical decisions at the speed of business.
But how fast is the speed of business, actually? The hallmark of rapid-fre
business intelligence solutions is the ability to see and understand data analysis
at the speed of thought—allowing for the asking and answering of questions as
fast as business leaders and clients can think of them, even against massive and
divergent data sets.
Saving time in every step of your data workfow is fundamental. From installing
software, accessing and analyzing complex data sets, publishing interactive
dashboards, and sharing across your organization, for your data it to be impactful,
the insight-to-decision process must be swift.
Install Access Analyze Publish Share
10 X 100 TIMES FASTER
Speed at Every Stage of the Data Workfow. Compared to traditional business intelligence,
rapid-fre analytics is 10 to 100 times faster at every step in the data workfow, from installing
software and accessing data to analyzing complex information, publishing interactive
dashboards, and sharing across your organization.
The solution must easily combine many data sets from different parts of the
business on the fy. It must provide in-memory capabilities to speed up slow data
as well as be able to connect live to fast data infrastructures. And of course, it
starts with installation and deployment: the business intelligence solution should
take only hours or days to implement, not weeks or months.
If you answer yes to any of the following questions, your BI system is not moving
as fast as it could be:
• Does your business intelligence solution require weeks or months to deploy
or change?
• Does creating or modifying reports or dashboards require requests to the IT
department that result in a queue or IT department backlog?
• Does your BI solution require days or weeks of training before new users
can build and publish their frst dashboard or report?
4
• Is your BI solution reliant on elaborate scheduling or workarounds for slow
system performance?
• Does your BI solution force you to replicate data even though you’ve
invested heavily in an enterprise data warehouse or fast database?
• Does your BI solution force you to do specialized pre-integration work to
access your data?
• Are you constrained in your ability to blend data from multiple sources
including raw or unstructured data stored outside of relational databases?
Barclays, a global fnancial services provider, adopted new rapid-fre business
intelligence to leverage mixed data for deep customers insights.
Barclays’ senior Insight Analyst Peter Gilks explains how old school BI tools
slowed their business data systems down; “Analysis used to require lots of SQL
programming and moving data into Excel then into charts. It involved a lot of pre-
thought about measures to program. You’d come up with your charts later, and
then there was a lengthy iterative process.”
Now, the Barclays team utilizes new technology to create data dashboards with
zero programming needed, and shares them with their senior executives and
frontline stakeholders to get everyone on the same page. When they spot major
customer trends, their teams can immediately start to plan for them.
2.
Self-Reliance
Traditional business intelligence is a chore for IT: from installation, deployment,
and programming, to report writing, change requests, support, and maintenance.
This doesn’t even include the costly professional services that are required.
The solution of self-reliance, or self-service, provides a way for business people
to ask and answer their own questions, and generate their own reports about
their specifc stake in the business. It requires fewer resources from IT to install
or maintain. IT sets up the data architecture, security, and access controls, and
business people serve themselves with data dashboards in any size or format.
Even more troublesome, when business units require new functionality, traditional
BI often “breaks.” This causes organizations to upgrade late or not at all, reducing
the ability to adopt advances in technology. And when you do upgrade, it’s a
massive project involving many resources and risks.
Watch more of Peter’s story
“I can sit with my laptop
in a meeting and answer
questions on 20 million
rows of data basically
on the fy, fip my
laptop around and show
everyone the answers.
And because things are
quick, you can’t go too
far wrong. So if you try
something and it doesn’t
work, that’s only fve
seconds wasted; you just
start again… Things that
were taking me days are
now taking minutes,”
—Peter Gilks, Barclays
5
In the meantime, business people still need to make both critical and everyday
decisions, and if they cannot independently and directly ask the questions of their
data when needed, there’s a fundamental problem.
Self-reliant BI systems look like this:
• Allows anyone to easily build
dashboards and reports from
disparate data sources and make
modifcations on the fy.
• Provides built-in best practices
to support effective analysis and
save time.
• Opens desktop data such as text
fles and Microsoft Excel, without
having to reformat that data.
• Connects to all major databases
with a few clicks.
• Enables easy sharing through
web and mobile dashboards,
SharePoint, or visuals exported to
PowerPoint or email.
• Empowers informed skeptics
who fnd actionable insight from
the combination of the business
experience and analytics.
• Provides interactive functionality
on the web such as drill-down and
fltering.
• Provides role- and group-based
security for secure publishing.
• Allows users to connect to the
existing data architecture.
• Enforces the security and controls
set up by IT.
The University of California’s Irvine Medical Center is ranked among the top
50 American hospitals by U.S. News & World Report, and is the only university
hospital in Orange County. Their informatics solutions architect, Charles Boicey,
found that too much time is wasted waiting for the IT department to generate
timely reports with medical data old BI tools.
The folks at Irvine Medical Center’s IT department really didn’t want to be the
report writers, nor should they be. “From an IT perspective, if we can put analytics
where it belongs, in the hands of the folks that use the data and know the data, we
can orchestrate the best quality healthcare for our patients,” Boicey explained.
Bringing the data directly to the key players in organizations allows for issues to
be resolved as they come up, no bottleneck required.
Creating a self-reliant, agile data culture also frees time for other company
resources to do their jobs to the best of their ability, and thus allows for faster,
more accurate decision-making in every department.
“We’re dealing with
patients’ lives, and it’s
really, really important
that we know what’s
happening at the
moment that it’s
happening, or a little
bit before. 30 days
doesn’t do you a lot
of good. We needed
and really wanted a
self-service model.”
—Charles Boicey,
UC Irvine Medical Center
Watch Charles talk about giving
the power to the people.
6
3.
Visual Discovery
You’re thinking about the questions you need to ask your data — not about how to
use the software. Visualizations unlock the value of raw data. Much like crude oil
is processed into electricity, inevitably switching a light bulb on or igniting a spark
to set a vehicle in motion, visualization will transform data from its raw state into
forward-thinking insight and real-time action. A visual approach to analytics will
allow you to instantly spot anomalies, outliers and trends without sorting through
pages of spreadsheets.
According to Forrester Research: “Enterprises fnd advanced data visualization
platforms to be essential tools that enable them to monitor business, fnd patterns,
and take action to avoid threats and snatch opportunities.” A story unfolds as you
navigate from one visual summary into another.
Global IT leader, Cisco, creates and consumes mass amounts of data and found
that visual discovery improved departments across the company to increase
productivity and make data-driven decisions.
“When we talk to the marketing team, the engineering team or the channel
operation team, they are interested by data but, for their context. At frst, it
was pretty diffcult for them to have an analytic view on all those data points,
because all those data existed in a silo. But visually seeing data and identifying
the patterns of a graphic has really helped them to understand the story, to
understand what’s going on, and to understand what the action they have to take
in order to make a difference and create a business impact,” said David Baudrez,
Head of Business Insight at Cisco.
Consider these important elements when choosing your visual
discovery solution:
Easy-to-use user interfaces
Is the software easy to understand and have an initiative user interface? Can
anyone answer a broad range of inquiries with simple drag and drop actions?
Can they use touch screen interfaces on iPads and Android tablets to speed their
enquiries without keyboard or mouse?
Interactive for discovery and collaboration
Does the software offer interactivity within dashboards to enable users to
perform basic analytics tasks such as fltering views, adjusting parameters,
quick calculations and drilling down to examine underlying data? Can you share
visualizations that allow for others to drill through to the underlying detail in just
a few clicks? Is drill-down / drill-through an automatic occurrence requiring no
special scripting or advance set-up?
Watch David talk about
visual discovery.
“…visually seeing data
and identifying the
patterns of a graphic
has really helped them
to understand the
story, to understand
what’s going on, and
to understand what
the action they have to
take in order to make
a difference and create
a business impact.”
—David Baudrez, Cisco
7
Pull data from all sources for full picture
Data blending, also known as data mash-up, is the ability to combine data from
multiple data sources on a single view. Can the software blend data on a common
feld? Can you see and understand related data in multiple data sources that
you want to analyze together in a single view? This ability will generate the most
accurate picture possible from your data.
Geographic intelligence
Geographic analysis is critical. Is mapping easy to use and complete, requiring no
specialty map fles, plug-ins, fees or third party tools?
A well-crafted visualization makes the light bulb go off. A spreadsheet requires you to
analyze data in rows and columns, choose a subset of your data to present, organize that data
into a table, and then create a chart from that table. Rapid-fre business intelligence skips those
steps and creates a visual representation of your data right away, giving you visual options and
immediate feedback as you analyze.
About Tableau maps: www.tableausoftware.com/mapdata
Scatterplot
(showing outliers)
Map
(geographic patterns)
Line Graph
(trend detection)
Tree Map
(relative proportions)
click
1
click
1
click
1
8
4.
Blend Diverse Data Sets
There is nothing about data today that is getting smaller; its absolute size is
growing, it lives in a greater variety of data stores, and more people need to use
it. The diverse data solution enables people to combine massive amounts data
easily from different systems and from all parts of the business. It must work with
data of any size, from hundreds of terabytes to petabytes and more. It must work
with unstructured or raw data. And of course, it must work with the spreadsheets
and text fles that exist in every business.
Traditional business intelligence made the assumption that all-important data can
be moved into consolidated enterprise architectures. But that’s not the reality for
most organizations, which have different databases in different places, which are
short on time and staff, and whose needs change constantly.
Rapid-fre business intelligence lets you blend different relational, semi-structured
and raw data sources in real time, without expensive up-front integration costs.
That means that users don’t need to know the details of how data is stored to ask
and answer questions.
Consider the following performance factors when evaluating
the ability to manage and beneft from large diverse data:
Allows users to augment data
Does the software allow users bring in data from outside the company on-the-fy,
like demographics and market research, to augment their corporate data?
Provides fast analytics, whether in-memory or via live connection
Does the software provide fast query performance, either via its own fast in-
memory software or by directly connecting to fast data stores?
Reduces demands on IT
Does the software let users work with the existing data infrastructure so that IT is
freed from creating ever-more cubes and “universes” and standalone marts? Does
it support data security by allowing users to work with data where it’s supposed to
be, rather than copying it into unmanaged and unsecure spreadsheets?
Scales to big data on commodity hardware
Does the software connect to the myriad of new database formats for raw,
unstructured and semi-structured big data?
9
Is architecture agnostic
Does your BI software work well with both centralized and decentralized data
architectures? Does the software support the increase in mobile devises and
applications? Does your BI software integrate seamlessly for all data types and
means of access?
Hanesbrands, Inc., the recognized global consumer apparel, T-shirt and
underwear company, utilizes data from billions of rows of data in many large
databases. The need for data blending and the insights it delivers continues to
spread like wildfre across the enterprise.
At Hanesbrands, everybody has access to rapid-fre BI tools. Santiago Restrepo,
Director of Business Intelligence and Analytics, explains,
“we have a good way to track the usage, make sure that the
data is secured and people have the right access. They’re able
to analyze a lot of information. We have point-of-sale data by
SKU, by store, by week or by day for all of our trade partners.”
By utilizing new rapid-fre best practices, Hanesbrands is making sense of all that
data, and making more and more fact-based decisions.
Rapid-fre business intelligence supports true ad-hoc query of large, complex data
sets, This means that you and your colleagues don’t have to determine in advance
which measures to aggregate or query.
Watch Santiago talk about how
Hanes makes sense of data.
10
5.
Real-Time Collaboration
This solution enables colleagues and authorized partners to access the data and
communicate, with group- and role-based data security; ideally supporting single
sign-on so colleagues don’t have to remember separate passwords.
If your reports don’t answer your questions, and you leave your meeting with more
questions than you went in with, you would normally go create more reports, and
then call another meeting. Which generates more questions and more reports.
Why not interact with data live during a meeting? With rapid-fre business
intelligence you can flter, sort, and discuss data on the fy and embed a live
dashboard in your SharePoint site or in Salesforce. You can save your view of
data and allow colleagues to subscribe to your interactive dashboards so they see
the very latest data just by refreshing their web browser. That’s real collaboration.
Large enterprises spread across multiple lines of business and geographies seek
to move past data silos and improve collaboration.
In order to scale from departments to business units and
across the largest enterprises, consider the following:
Natively mobile
You make decisions in meetings, at customer sites and on the go. Your business
intelligence should be natively mobile to support analytics anywhere and
everywhere for all of your stakeholders.
Combination of fexibility and compliance
As noted by the Gartner 2012 Magic Quadrant for BI Platforms: “… business
users demand easy to use, fexible products that put analytic power into their
own hands, against IT’s desire to maintain standards and create a supportable BI
environment with predictable performance and quality data.” It’s not a question
of choosing between fexibility or compliance — you need both. You need to
centralize data sources and apply metadata, yet still be able to extend it by adding
your own calculations, hierarchies, and aliases. Organizations that master rapid-
fre business intelligence let IT set up the data architecture, security, and access
controls, while giving business people the ability to serve themselves reports and
dashboards.
“… business users
demand easy to use,
fexible products that
put analytic power
into their own hands,
against IT’s desire to
maintain standards and
create a supportable
BI environment with
predictable performance
and quality data.”
—Gartner 2012 Magic
Quadrant for BI Platforms
11
Shared and extensible metadata
Rapid-fre business intelligence provides your organization with a centralized data
source and metadata layer — yet still enables you and your colleagues to add
your own calculations; create new groups, sets, and parameters; organize data
into hierarchies; and modify aliases. It’s metadata that just works: there’s no initial
setup and it adapts with your data.
Centralized data
The data server provides a centralized location to manage all of your
organization’s published data sources. You can delete, change permissions, add
tags, and manage schedules in one convenient location. It’s easy to schedule
extract refreshes and manage them in the data server. Administrators can
centrally defne a schedule for extracts on the server for both incremental and full
refreshes to save time and effort.
Publish Once. Share on the web. Interact and edit from your tablet. Rapid-fre business
intelligence dashboards are optimized to deliver touch experiences when accessed from mobile
devices and tablets. This touch awareness experience is integrated automatically, and no
additional or special authoring or design is needed.
12
6.
Flexible & Secure Confgurations
You can start small but scale big. Whether today’s need is one business analyst
with one data source, or 10,000 feld representatives on tablets accessing
many reports while on the road, this solution needs supports all stages of an
organization’s analytics evolution.
Today’s economy mandates that organizations spend wisely on software
licenses as they’re needed; but because traditional BI is so complicated to
install and maintain, very few BI vendors offer customers small user bundles.
Worse, modules for more functionality often mean additional license fees. But
organizations typically want to pilot analytics projects with a handful of users and
scale up over time.
Traditional BI forced too much, too soon. It required organizations to buy large
minimum-confguration licenses to meet potential needs — not actual needs.
Much of the software went unused.
Meanwhile, a new crop of boutique Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) BI vendors
enable static dashboards for departmental needs, but struggle to offer the
fexibility, scalability, and deep analytics required by multiple departments and
lines of business.
This challenge is changing many of the traditional concepts of governance. Data
is at the heart of any business operation, but it is only useful when it is being used.
The problem all organizations face is balancing data access with appropriate
security, as well as a way to differentiate certifed reports and data while still
providing business users a sandbox for new development. Simply locking down
business data and reports to a few means that organizations won’t get the beneft
of broad adoption of analytics.
Data Governance is not just about security, it is about making
sure data in accurate, available and audited.
Accurate
Any analysis and visualization is meaningless unless users can be sure, and
prove that they have the latest versions of data, and that the data is drawn from
approved sources.
Available
This is a complex subject in that, while the analyst may have access to all the data
available; there are often viewers of the analysis who can be given access to top
level views but not the underlying data.
13
Audited
Most organizational data has some level of confdentiality and it is important, and
often a legal requirement that a complete trail is available of who has had access
to data and at what level.
The Bottom Line
There is a sea change occurring in what enterprises and public-sector
organizations expect from business intelligence. The old business intelligence
models are slow and resource-intensive. When families bring a sick child to
Irvine Medical Center, they want help fast, and the right data software can
increase speed to action. The importance of speed is not limited to a hospital
— competitive businesses are unable to wait for months to make money or
save costs. At a pace that has outmatched competitors, M Financial Group
has launched over 20 M-priced proprietary products for North America’s most
recognized and respected insurance brands: “Using Tableau, I am able to quickly
drill down into large sets of data and fnd relationships that would have taken 10X
as long with traditional query tools,” noted Brandon Nichols, director of technology
strategy for underwriting and new business process.
“Using Tableau, I am
able to quickly drill down
into large sets of data
and fnd relationships
that would have taken
10X as long with
traditional query tools,”
—Brandon Nichols,
M Financial Group
14
About Tableau
Tableau Software helps people see and understand data. Providing rapid-fre business intelligence
with a consistent experience from the PC to the iPad, Tableau solutions generate fast, visual, and
self-service data dashboards with no programming skills required. See the impact Tableau can
have on your organization by downloading a free trial at www.tableausoftware.com/trial.
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