Claudia Imhoff Intelligent Solutions, Inc. August 8,...

Claudia Imhoff

Intelligent Solutions, Inc.

August 8, 2012

I Can’t Believe I Ate the Whole Thing! Making BI More Consumable

Sponsor

3

Speakers

Claudia Imhoff President and Founder,


Brian Brinkmann Senior Director, Product

Marketing, MicroStrategy

Copyright © Intelligent Solutions, Inc 2012

Solve your business puzzles with Intelligent Solutions

SPONSORED BY HOSTED BY

I Can’t Believe I Ate the Whole Thing! Making BI More Consumable

Claudia Imhoff, Ph.D.


[email protected]

Phone: (303) 444-6650

Twitter: Claudia_Imhoff

Copyright © Intelligent Solutions, Inc. 2012


Topics

What is Self-Service BI?

Types of Information Workers

Architectural Components for Self-service BI

Best Practices for Information Consumption

5



Self-Service BI: Definition

Self-service business intelligence consists of the facilities

within the BI environment that enable BI users to become

more self-reliant and less dependent on the IT organization

Self-service BI ≠ BI self sufficiency

6



Drivers for Self-Service BI

Constantly changing business needs – 65%

Inability to match speed of business change

IT inability to satisfy new requests in timely manner – 57%

If IT cannot satisfy users fast enough, users will go around IT

Need to be a more analytics-driven organization – 54%

Users need more information faster

Slow or untimely access to information – 47%

Some users want unfettered access to data to create reports

Business user dissatisfaction with IT-delivered BI

capabilities – 34%

Long delivery times may result in BI capabilities that are no longer

relevant

7



Drivers for Self-Service BI

Use of BI for decision making continues to be a high

priority for organizations

Recent survey1 of 2,500 CIOs showed that 83% of CIOs see BI

and analytics as how they will enhance their organizations’

competitiveness

But reach of BI is often restricted to those users with

experience to exploit analytics for business benefit*

59% of users say that they miss information that might be

of value to their jobs because they can not find it

27% of managers time is spent searching for information

50% say the information they obtain has no value to them

BI must be more easily understood and consumed!

1 “IBM Global CIO Study: The New Voice of the CIO”

8

http://www.ibm.com/voiceofthecio



Topics





9



Information Producer

Improves business operations

and make tactical and strategic

decisions

Explores, analyzes, and

produces actionable BI

analytics

Builds customizable BI

components and publishes BI-

related information for use by

information consumers

Participates in self-service BI

governance committee

Users: power business users

and business analysts

10



BI/DW Builder

Traditionally responsible for

building data warehouse and/or BI

solutions

Due to budget, resource, or priority

issues are often bottlenecks in

deploying BI

For DIY BI are responsible for:

• Providing access to source data,

ideally via common business views

• Developing customizable BI

components for use by other IWs

• Participating in self-service BI

governance committee

• Monitoring use of self-service BI

solutions by other IWs

Users: central/business unit IT,

information producers 11



Information Consumer

Task-oriented business users who

consume BI to support day-to-day

operations

Gathers info to increase personal

knowledge, make decisions but

doesn’t have time, experience or

inclination to create needed inputs

Information may be delivered by:

• Operational applications, e.g.,

available services or products

• Analytical applications, e.g.,

report or dashboard

• Collaborative applications, e.g.,

e-mail, intelligent portal

Users: general public, customers,

partners, suppliers, employees 12




Largest audience for BI

Consists of non-technologists predominantly or those with little

time to produce reports or analytics

Woefully underserved in most BI environments

Environment is too complex

Not easy for information consumers to discover the information

needed for making decisions and taking effective actions

Business analytics should be as easy to consume as

applications are on the Apple iPhone

Put business analytics into a business context / make actionable

through use of alerts, recommendations, guided decision-making

workflows

13




Information Producers

(power business users & business analysts)

Information Collaborators

(subject matter experts & new/motivated IWs)

BI/DW Builders

(central/business unit IT)

Information Consumers

(task-oriented business users)

14



Topics





15



Self-Service BI: Four Key

Architectural Components

Make it easy

to access

data

Make DW solutions

fast to deploy & easy

to manage

Make BI tools

easy to use

Make BI results

easy to consume

& enhance DIY BI

16



Make DW Solutions Fast to

Deploy & Easy to Manage

Improves the productivity of both BI/DW builders and

information producers

Provides faster time to value

Enables applications to be built that were not possible with

earlier technologies

Enables a business unit to deploy its own solutions

Self-Service BI requirements:

Support lower-cost BI/DW solutions that are easy to administer

Provide good performance and scalability for complex analytical

workloads and high data volumes

17



Make it Easy to Access Data

Improves the productivity of both BI/DW builders and


Enables self-service BI by enabling motivated information

consumers to become information producers

Self-Service BI Requirements:

Make dispersed data easy to access without IT assistance

Support new types of business data and business content

18



Make BI Tools Easy to Use

Improves the productivity of BI/DW builders and


Enables self-service BI by allowing motivated information

consumers to become information producers

Self-Service BI Requirements:

Make it easy to report on and analyze data

Support more sophisticated analyses

Make results easy to publish in the required format

19



Make BI Results Easy to

Consume & Enhance

Enables information consumers to be become more self-

reliant and make faster decisions

Allows information collaborators to improve information

content and enable more informed decision making

Self-Service BI requirements:

Easy to discover, access and share

Published to a device and through a user interface of choice

Personalized, actionable and easy to use format

Clear business definition and data lineage

Increase information content and context through IW interaction

and feedback, track IW interactions & decisions

20



Information Supply Chain

21

Access Integrate

Manage

Analyze

Publish

Discover Enhance



BI/DW Builder

BI/DW Builder


Make it easy to access data

(60%)

Make DW solutions easy & fast to deploy

(31%)

Make BI tools easy to use

(78%)

Make BI results easy to

consume & enhance

(56%)

Slide compliments of Colin White, BI Research




Consume & Enhance

Easy User Interface

Interface best suited to the user: rich desktop UI, web browser,

information portal, e-mail

Device best suited to the user: desktop PC, mobile device

Format best suited to the user: advanced visualization, desktop widget,

office document, PDF file

BI objects (e.g., analyses) and BI results easy to find: search

Business context: business glossary, data lineage

UI needs depend on user skills and level of interactivity required

Pull approach: search for and consume results; search for and run

analyses; drill-up/down & slice/dice results; use business context; use BI

automation (decision workflows)

Push approach: consume results, drill-up/down; use BI automation (alerts,

recommendations)

Collaboration: share results; collaborative decisions; enhance results

22




Consume & Enhance

Business Glossary

Puts BI results into a business context

Developed jointly by IT and the business

Taxonomy could be a starting point

Tagging and folksonomy can help extend the glossary

BI results should be linked directly to the glossary

Data Lineage Tracking

Enables results to tracked back to source systems

Should ideally be connected to the business glossary

23




Consume & Enhance

Automation makes BI results more actionable and enables

faster decision making

Examples of automated BI actions for consumers include:

Alerts

Recommendations

Decision analysis workflows

Full-automated actions

Alerts, recommendations and decision analysis workflows

can be generated by BI tools and applications

Fully automated actions (e.g., to prevent fraud) can

generated by embedding BI in operational processes

Level of automation – match skills/needs of consumers

24



Self-Service BI: Topics


Information Worker Requirements

Technology Solutions for Self-Service BI

Getting Started

25



TDWI Survey Results:

Inhibitors to Self Service

26



Customizable BI Components

– Great for Consumers

Parameterized reports that can be tailored to change the data content of the

report contents, but not its layout

Report templates that can be tailored to change report contents and layout

Stored analyses for reuse by other users

Stored analytic models that are used at runtime to produce predictive analytics

Dashboard analytics that can be customized and manipulated by users

Web widgets are small applications that can be installed and executed within a

web page by a user

Mashups that blend and analyze data from multiple sources and present the

results using a web widget

Analytic functions that provide sophisticated analytic capabilities for use in BI

analyses

Removes need for specialized skill sets!

27



Best Practices for Information

Consumers

1. Don’t assume that simply installing easy-to-use BI tools

will make your environment self-service BI enabled

Support WYSIWYG design functions

Put analytics into business context / make actionable through use

of alerts, recommendations, guided decision-making workflows

Bottom line – your job is to make functions look easy, appealing

and understandable

2. Don’t give information consumers too much responsibility

Most really do not want entire responsibility for generating

information and reports – It is NOT part of their job

Strike a balance between self-service & IT-generated information

28




Consumers

3. Support collaborative business intelligence

Enable information consumers to easily share BI results and work

together to define new ways to view and analyze data

Use technology that they can understand and use easily – mimics

something familiar (Microsoft Office, for example)

4. Understand requirements of information consumers,

provide appropriate tools/reports/dashboards

Understand what consumers want to accomplish with BI –

motivations, skill sets, interests in SS BI

Most information users are consumers with little interest in creating

or generating own reports/queries, etc.

But be aware that information workers change roles frequently

29




Consumers

5. Create a starter set of standard BI components

Determine requirements to create library of standard BI

components

Make these customizable – these can replace 100’s of hard-coded,

customized reports and analyses

Makes the consumer feel like they really are self-sufficient – allows

them to pick and choose business attributes, KPIs, etc., to include

in reports

6. Allow DW system to be used with other sources of data

Extend BI environment to include “other” sources of data – e.g.,

consumer’s personal spreadsheets, unstructured data, etc.

Monitor their usage of these sources

30




Consumers

7. Buffer less experienced information workers from the

complexities of the BI environment

Use features such as web browsers, interactive graphics, wizards,

drop-down lists, prompts that guide through BI tasks

Adds to the flexibility of the overall BI environment

But beware – self-service BI is more than easy-to-use BI tools –

what’s intuitive to professional may not be intuitive to naïve user

8. Create easily configurable dashboards, distribution

mechanisms

Configurable dashboards using graphical drag and drop interfaces

Easy mechanisms to distribute personalized information to the

right users

31



Conclusions

Information volumes and complexity are increasing

Many information consumers are unhappy with the tools

they have for accessing and consuming information

Many lack confidence in accuracy of information delivered

Business intelligence is used only by a fraction of business

users that could benefit from it

We need to make BI products more usable and

information more consumable

Research and develop best practices to ensure your

success in self-service BI

32



Further Reading

33

The Information Contained In This Presentation Is Confidential And Proprietary To MicroStrategy. The Recipient Of This Document Agrees That They Will Not Disclose Its Contents To

Any Third Party Or Otherwise Use This Presentation For Any Purpose Other Than An Evaluation Of MicroStrategy's Business Or Its Offerings. Reproduction or Distribution Is Prohibited. 34

Brian Brinkmann

Senior Director – Product Marketing

MicroStrategy Visual Insight

Self-Service Dashboards and Analytics Turning Information Consumers into Information Producers



Do-It-Yourself Dashboards

• Multiple Visualizations on a

single dashboard tab

• Visualizations can filter other

Visualizations

• Multiple datasets

MicroStrategy Visual Insight Makes it Faster and Simpler for Business People to Understand Data

Visual Data Discovery

• Intuitive Visualizations

• Easy to Use

• Powerful Analytics

1 2



Visual Data Discovery is an Emerging Style of BI That Empowers Business People to Conduct Analysis without IT Help

Familiarize Visualize Analyze &

Explore Insight

Finish Visual Data Discovery Start

Data



MicroStrategy Visual Insight Makes it Simpler for Business

People to Answer Their Questions

Graph

Matrix

Maps

Table or

Crosstab

Heatmaps

Density

Maps

Image

Layout

Network

Visualization

Pie

Compelling

Visualizations

Drill

Sort

Thresholds

Metrics

300+

Calculations

Rank Filters

Short Cut

Metrics

Intuitive

Analytics

Checkboxes

Radio

Buttons

Sliders

1234 Text Input

Simple

Interactions

Marquee / Lasso

Select



Dashboards

(the new Reporting) 1 1

1

Multiple Visualizations

on a Single Tab 1

MicroStrategy Visual Insight Empowers Business People to Build Their Own Dashboards in Minutes Without Help from IT



Dashboards

(the new Reporting) 1 1

1


on a Single Tab

Visualizations-to-

Visualization Targeted

Filtering

1

2

2




1 1

1

Multiple

Datasets


on a Single Tab

Visualizations-to-

Visualization Targeted

Filtering

1

2

3

2

3 3

3




Business People Create and

Publish Dashboards… …So Frontline Workers Gain

Valuable Business Insights

MicroStrategy Visual Insight Transforms Business People into Information Producers



MicroStrategy Visual Insight lets Business People Take and Interact with Data Anywhere

Web Browser Apple iPad



Try Visual Insight Now for

Free with Your Data

Experience the Benefits of Visual Insight for Yourself

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is Powered by Visual Insight Gain New Insights about

Your Business

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BI Class

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45

Questions??

Contacting Speakers

• If you have further questions or comments:

Claudia Imhoff

[email protected]

Brian Brinkmann

[email protected]

Claudia Imhoff Intelligent Solutions, Inc. August 8,...

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