Post on 21-Apr-2015
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?
UsabilityThe 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.
DeliveryThe 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.
EmpowermentWould 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
ObjectsX1 3.1
OBIEE Plus –Oracle
MicrosoftBI Suite Cognos 8.4 - IBM QlikView – QlikTech
System Administration &
User Privileges
Other BO content is not accessible; BO
Universesare not accessible to
Crystal Xcelsius, Dashboard Builder
cannot access Voyager content
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 requires several administration points for
its BI platform components including: SQL Server, SharePoint
Server, Performance Point Services. These multiple
servers dramaticallyincrease complexity of
administration andprevent Microsoft from
allowing centralizeddistribution of all
administrative tasks
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 reportdevelopers 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
ITpersonnel for a given
amount of BI usersbecause Microsoft report
developers cannotreuse 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
Applix—represent 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 cannotbe 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 betweenmultiple BO products and even within WebIntelligence “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 user-friendly web authoring
environment, mainly due to Microsoft’s focus
on Excel 2007 as its user front end. Most reportdesign tasks must be
performed by IT usingdesktop programming
environments
Cognos provides an SDK for its BI
Server with very limited options for
customizing its web layer. Userinterface
customization is difficult at best.
Cognos BI has five different products
called“Studios”. These
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
“Studios” contain overlapping
functionality, requiring users to
learn differentparadigms.
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 browser’s 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 pre-
define drill sequencesfor each chart.
Analysis & Reporting
WebIntelligence and Polestar analysis and ad-hoc query cannot
be easily incorporated intoformatted reports. Highly formatted
CrystalReports 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.
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DynamicReport
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 asautomatic drill anywhere and
multiple levels ofanalysis 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 inprompting 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 todynamically choose what
they would like onreports. Microsoft does
not offer object orcolumn prompts such as selection of attributes,
metrics, and filters on-the-fly.
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