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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