from reports to discovery: a new era in business intelligence€¦ · from reports to discovery: a...

From Reports to Discovery:

A New Era in Business Intelligence

CITO ResearchResearch to solve your problems

May 2011

Sponsored by QlikView

Contents

Executive Summary 1

Don’t Throw the BI out with the Bathwater 1

Apples, iPads, and Social Networks 3

Business Discovery 5

How to Make Business Discovery Work for your Business 8

1From Reports to Discovery: A New Era in Business Intelligence


Executive SummaryFor a long time, IT has been trying to put data into the hands of business users to en-able faster and better decision-making. And today, users refuse to settle for less than what they’ve become accustomed to outside the office—the simple, powerful, and easy-to-use consumer apps, social networks, and mobile technologies that are busy reshaping the computing landscape.

How can organizations reconcile the two? Augmenting BI for reporting and monitor-ing with Business Discovery offers a way forward—a way in which users are empow-ered to solve problems for themselves. Business Discovery systems enable users to make better-informed decisions based on data, using tools similar to the apps they’re already familiar with. Business Discovery ultimately changes the economics of BI by driving down the costs of users asking and answering questions, transforming IT’s mission from serving users to helping users serve themselves.

This white paper examines the challenges and benefits of Business Discovery plat-forms for IT.

Don’t Throw the BI out with the BathwaterTo clearly understand the way Business Discovery works and the benefits it can bring to an organization, it is important to review what reporting-focused BI has done well and what it has failed to deliver. The transformation that has taken place is like the transition from radio to television. Radio did not disappear when television arrived—it adapted. Dramatic serial shows left radio and migrated to television, which offered a richer form of storytelling. Radio continues to play an important role in broadcasting news and conversations and of course music.

Reporting-focused BI does a great job of consolidating information from many sourc-es into a consistent form and then producing reports. Reporting-focused BI supplies compliance reports, financial reports, and other reports designed to meet anticipated business needs. Everything hums along until things change and a new circumstance drives the need for new information or a different view of the existing information.



The IT department must then use reporting-focused BI tools to create new reports. In general, over time the following can occur: • Because there are too many requests for new reports, IT can’t fill them fast

enough

• As the number of special reports skyrockets, it becomes hard for users to find the right report

• By definition, static reports fall short. They only describe anticipated issues, problems, and business conditions. They don’t support innovative responses to dynamic business challenges

• Because getting information is difficult, the pace of asking and answering ques-tions slows dramatically

Combined, these mean that users can’t act fast or find the information they need.Worst of all, users stop asking questions that could spur innovation and fresh ap-proaches because they know they can’t get timely answers. The status quo becomes the norm.

Business Discovery offers a way to build on the foundation of reporting-focused BI and allows end-users to explore data and ask and answer their own questions rapidly. Although Business Discovery systems build on consolidated information in the data warehouses created for reporting-focused BI, the relationship between IT and the end-user is different. IT doesn’t provide a new report for every question but rather a collection of data and a system for exploration and discovery. The users can then find the answers they need directly. Business Discovery puts more data in front of more people and makes that data more useful. The people at the edges of the enterprise become more informed and empowered. Analysis and decision-making accelerate, making data-driven decisions the rule rather than the exception. Reporting-focused BI still plays an important role for monitoring, but it is not asked to play a role it is not suited for.

With these ideas in mind, we can now explain the pressures that are increasing the demand for Business Discovery systems in organizations of all sizes.



Apps, iPads, and Social NetworksSometime between the invention of Facebook and the Apple iPad, people’s expecta-tions of software changed. Consuming, exploring, and sharing information has been redefined by the search bar, status box, and multitouch screen. Three key trends have led to a worldwide explosion in home computing over the last five years, and now companies are rapidly adopting them.

Consumer Apps. Apps such as Google’s and Apple’s invite users to open a window, start clicking, and become instantly productive. Business users increasingly demand the same experience at work and are frustrated when confronted with cumbersome and complex systems.

Social Networks. A growing majority of workers now use Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn at home to share news, crowdsource ideas, and trade files. Social network-ing is becoming more prevalent in organizations too, as it helps to flatten them by decentralizing decision-making and enabling collaboration among previously siloed people and groups.

Mobility. First smartphones and now tablets (led by the iPad) offer engaging, intuitive, and powerful capabilities that finally deliver on the promise of business-on-the-go.

Where is IT in all of this? Stuck tending to ERP, CRM, BI, and other monolithic sys-tems (as well as facing the task of integrating all this new technology securely into the enterprise). While users don’t expect enterprise applications to be as easy to use as Google, they have been trained to think that asking a question is as simple as enter-ing a couple of keywords and instantly receiving an answer—without having to know where or how the underlying data is stored. All that matters is that their questions are answered fast so that they can act decisively. End users have lost the innocence of their previously low expectations.



Figure 1. Consumer Technology Means Users Want More

The bar for enterprise software has been raised, and IT knows it. IT is increasingly be-ing held accountable for why corporate data is so inaccessible and why it takes a week to deliver a report or re-spin an info cube or any other types of delays that deprive users of the answers they need when they need them. People want to solve their own problems and meet their own needs. Reporting-focused BI is leaving users with unmet needs and, as a result, frustration.

But IT is frustrated, too. It’s been challenged to explain itself and make a business case for all the complexity under the hood when there isn’t one—it’s simply a byproduct of the software architecture. There’s no compelling reason why users should have to wait months for reports to be created or for information cubes to be modified to answer new questions. Reporting-focused BI is fundamentally incapable of being rendered as something as simple as a consumer app because it was not designed to be simple and flexible.

Consumer Apps Social Networks Mobility

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Consumer Technology Leads Us To Want More from IT Solutions

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This isn’t to say that the lessons of Facebook and the iPad have been lost on vendors. Jive Software and Salesforce Chatter have already brought secure social networking to the enterprise, while Cisco and Research in Motion are readying tablets specifically designed for mobile collaboration. As a result, the bar is being raised again. Users expect these devices to be as portable and effortless as the ones they have at home, with all of the data and analysis tools that they need when they need them.

That doesn’t mean loading an entire database onto a tablet. It means giving people the tools and information they need, exactly when and where they need it. It means sharing the apps as well as the data to drive collaboration. Most of all, it means bring-ing the data needed for decision-making closer to the customer and the task at hand. In practice, it means thousands of sales reps taking tablets with them on a visit, taking customer orders on the spot, and sending an instant electronic proposal rather than following up later. In the end, it’s about business process transformation—eliminating unnecessary steps so that time, money, and opportunities aren’t wasted.

IT can’t deliver on the promise of BI without changing the way it thinks and the tools it uses. Enterprise systems are too complex and inflexible to put in users’ hands, never mind on tablets. And even if this were possible, IT has neither the time nor the re-sources to go at it alone. At the same time, enterprise systems are not going away; they just need to be leveraged in a fresh and flexible way. A new software paradigm is needed—Business Discovery. Business Discovery augments reporting-based BI, of-fering new tools users can learn and support themselves, empowering them while taking the burden off IT.

Business DiscoveryThe emergence of Business Discovery is a response to users’ mounting frustrations and unmet needs. It’s a new kind of productivity software putting users in control of exploring and exploiting their own data, allowing IT to focus on core processes rather than attending to their every need. Business Discovery bridges the gap between re-porting-focused BI solutions and standalone applications like Excel. It enables users at every level of the organization to find tailored insights addressing their individual needs and deadlines. In essence, Business Discovery transforms everyone into a high-ly informed business analyst.



In many ways, Business Discovery aims to fulfill the original promise of BI, which proved to be impossible due to the limits of the architecture, forcing IT to shoulder the burden. But Business Discovery improves upon reporting-focused BI because there is no predefined path to follow and no questions to formulate ahead of time. Users ask what they need to ask, and they explore—aggregating up, down, and side-ways—rather than simply drilling down.

Using lightweight tools that marry connectors to the underlying databases with fluid interfaces reminiscent of apps, Business Discovery systems drive down the cost and complexity of aggregating disparate data sources, which can then be combined and correlated in different ways to discover waste or opportunities.

For example, a question as simple and as random as whether there’s a correlation be-tween the size of a product shipment and the number of units placed on backorder may require data from three separate databases. IT knows all too well that combining those three would take six months and cost upwards of $250,000. So the answer to most questions is usually, “Forget it; it’s not worth it.”

But what if it cost $5,000 and a day’s worth of work? Users would have an answer the next day, with enough money in the budget left over to commission another dozen or more projects just like it. If only one results in significant savings, the scattershot approach will have been worth it. By driving down the opportunity costs for IT and users alike to ask questions and make better-informed decisions, users are in a better position to capture market share, drive revenue growth, and cut costs because they no longer have to wait for the data they need.

The evolution from a reporting-focused BI paradigm to Business Discovery has pro-found implications for IT, replacing its traditional delivery role with a support and en-ablement one. Rather than building applications day in and day out, they dispense tools and training to users while refocusing on larger issues such as data governance, security, and the underlying enterprise systems.



Figure 2. How Business Discovery Systems Create Value

The key to Business Discovery is that it leverages the entirety of organizational capital. It takes a bottom-up, enlightened IT approach, allowing every employee to contrib-ute and collaborate on insights that move the organization forward. It’s an approach that reflects how businesses and workgroups make decisions in the real world.

Business Discovery Systems allow end users to more deeply explore and understand the information available to them

As a result, a new paradigm of user driven analysis takes hold. IT is no longer a bottleneck. Data starts to create value. A culture of sharing and reuse appears

The best dashboards and applications are captured and propagated throughout the company

The result is that the entire company has more information to make decisions

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How to Make Business Discovery Work for Your BusinessBusiness Discovery takes its cues from consumer apps. Like Google, it encourages us-ers to hunt for and explore data without worrying about or even noticing the underly-ing technology. Their entire experience is working within an intuitive interface to get real-time, self-service results with only minimal training.

It’s based on delivering lightweight apps—much like Apple’s App Store—that anyone can use to instantly deal with a specific business problem. Like Apple’s, these apps are simple, single-purpose, and as intuitive as a spreadsheet. But they’re also easy to create, modify, mash up, and share, enabling employees to create them on their own. This is where Business Discovery breaks with the centralized nature of traditional busi-ness systems that make software and users alike dependent on IT.

Business Discovery systems embody the principle of zero wait, which has multiple meanings. There is zero wait to ask and answer questions, à la Google Instant; zero wait to navigate data at different levels of detail and aggregation; and zero wait to change search parameters, add new data sources, and follow the train of analysis in any direction. Zero wait is what differentiates Business Discovery from reporting-focused BI.

A Business Discovery platform allows you to remix and reassemble information to cre-ate new views and new ways of looking at information—and new ways of collaborat-ing on decision-making. It eliminates silos of information within its interface and lets users derive insights from their data in an intuitive, straightforward way.

Business Discovery also enables true mobility. Until now, mobile business software has been hamstrung by tiny displays, minimal access to real-time data, and handi-capped interfaces. This was the unsatisfactory result of retrofitting applications for mobile use and shoehorning their functionality into devices for which they were nev-er intended. Business Discovery tools, on the other hand, are native to the mobile era and tailored to their hardware limitations. They’re portable and embeddable, offering users access to their relevant data, analysis, and visualization anywhere and any time they need it, whether it’s on an iPad, iPhone, Android, or Blackberry.



CITO ResearchCITO Research is a source of news, analysis, research, and knowledge for CIOs, CTOs, and other IT and business professionals. CITO Research engages in a dialogue with its audience to capture technology trends that are harvested, analyzed and communicated in a sophisticated way to help practitioners solve difficult business problems.

This paper was sponsored by QlikView and created by CITO Research

Placing the tools for innovation in the hands of users extends the power of IT to every corner of the enterprise. Business Discovery takes your investment in traditional BI and turns it into a dynamic tool for empowering users to help you make your business better.

from reports to discovery: a new era in business intelligence€¦ · from reports to discovery: a...

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