Business Intelligence 2013

Chapter 2
Elements of Business Intelligence Solutions

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Chapter 2 - Elements of Business Intelligence Solutions

Business Query and Reporting
Business query and reporting tools are often referred to as ‘ad-hoc query tools’. In the rapidly changing
business environment, the business users often demand the ability to create queries and reports
themselves, instead of an IT person. Business query and reporting tools allow for this and are most often
used for decision making and management purposes. Such a tool is a key module to provide users with
self-service information access.

Getting to the data is just one capability of the business query tool; the other aspect is presenting and
formatting the data in a meaningful way, loosely referred to as ‘reporting’.

The most basic of formatting capabilities allow for changing the font of column headings and making them
bold and centered. Simple report styles include displaying information in a cross-tab report, a chart or a
master-detail report with groupings and subtotals. Tools may provide a set of templates to create nicely
formatted reports that use a consistent corporate look and feel. More complex formatting capabilities
include the ability to present multiple charts on a page, perhaps coming from different data sources.
Examples of business query tools include,

 Cognos Query Studio

 Business Objects Web Intelligence
 SAS Web Report Studio

An ad-hoc query may be exploratory in nature as users try to find the root cause of the problem. As users
explore the data, corollary ad-hoc queries may arise as shown below. It is important to recognize the
iterative nature of business intelligence and therefore, the necessity of flexible tool.

First Query Purpose Related Ad-hoc Query

Inventory by product To determine whether the Is the product available in
order can be fulfilled on that other branches/elsewhere?
day.
Regular top 10 customers. To find out what products they Anybody has dropped off?
are interested in. And any new entry? If so what
product they are interested in.
Patients in hospital per hour. To understand busy periods Is there adequacy of staff?
and wait times.

Business query tools allow business users to access a data source via business terms without having to
write any SQL (Structured query language). The data source could be a data warehouse or it might be
direct access to an operational system.

A key feature of a business query tool is that it has a business view that hides the complexity of the
physical database. It uses business terminology rather than the physical field name in RDBMS. Business
query tools will generate the SQL behind the scenes so that users don’t need to learn how to write SQL
code.

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Reporting
Whereas business query and reporting tools allow for basic report formatting, production reporting tools
have much sophisticated formatting and design capabilities. Sometimes, this category of tools are known
as pixel perfect, operational or enterprise reporting.

Examples of production reporting tools include,

 Cognos Report studio
 Business Objects Crystal Report
 Microsoft Reporting Services
 Oracle Publisher
 Information Builders Web Focus.

Production reporting tools also develop management style reports.

Key differences between business query tools and production reporting tools.

Characteristics Production Reporting Business Query and

Reporting
Data source Operational transaction Data warehouse or Data
system. mart.
Scope Operational Tactical, Strategic.
Usage Often embedded within an Most often BI as separate
application. application.
User base Tens of thousands. Hundreds of thousands.
Primary purpose Document preparation. Decision-making,
management.

Analyzing and exploring data in OLAP

Online analytical processing (OLAP) is a capability that focuses on ‘ analyzing and exploring data’ where
as query and reporting tools put greater emphasis on ‘accessing data’ for monitoring purposes. In other
words, OLAP focuses on ‘why something is happening’ rather than ‘what is happening’. To find out that
‘why’, users will have to navigate and ‘drill’ within a data.

OLAP provides interactive analysis by different dimensions (ie., geography, product, time etc.) and different
levels of detail (ie., year, quarter, month etc.).

As the technology and users have evolved and matured, the distinction between OLAP and reporting have
increasingly blurred. OLAP users want highly formatted reports that are based on multidimensional data,
whereas ‘reporting’ users immediately want to drill when they see a problem with a particular metric in a
report.

The following characteristics distinguish between OLAP tools and business and query tools.

OLAP Tools Business query and Reporting tools

Multidimensional analysis of numerical values One dimensional such as list of product price

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from different dimensions. (geography, product at one point in time.

etc.)
Consistently fast. Not so fast.
Highly interactive. Non-existent, to, only recently possible.
a) Drilling
b) Pivoting – It gives users the ability to view
information from different perspective such as
by geography or product.
c) Slicing – It allows users to filter the data
within the dimensions (such as sales for a
particular place).
Varying levels of aggregation of data in a At the lowest level of detail.
different way.
Cross-dimensional calculations; such as Rely on simple sub totals or calculations of
details as per actuals versus budget, this year values that are displayed on the report itself .
versus last year or for a particular group of
products. These calculations must be
performed in a particular order.

In understanding OLAP requirements, it is important to distinguish between OLAP platform issues and
OLAP user interface issues.

OLAP platforms

The OLAP platform is about how the data is stored to allow for multidimensional analysis. On the one
hand, the users should not have to worry at all about how the data is stored, replicated and cached. And
yet, the OLAP architecture affects the users in their analyzing and how. The OLAP architecture also
influences what OLAP front end, the user, can use.

There are four types of OLAP architecture.

 Relational OLAP platform (ROLAP).
 Multidimensional OLAP platform (MOLAP).
 Hybrid OLAP platform (HOLAP).
 Dynamic OLAP platform (DOLAP).

Architecture Primary difference Vendors

ROLAP Data is stored in a relational Oracle BIEE.
database. So data is not SAP Netweaver BI.
necessarily replicated into a Microstrategy.
separate storage for analysis. Cognos 8
Business Objects web
Calculations done in relational intelligence.
database.

Large data volume.

Less predictable drill time.

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MOLAP It replicates data into a Oracle Hyperion Essbase.

purpose-built stores that Microsoft Analysis services.
ensures fast analysis. TM I.
SAS OLAP.
Calculations performed in a Cognos power cubes.
server based multidimensional
database.

It performs what-if analysis.

HOLAP Uses a combination of storage Microsoft analysis services.
techniques. Aggregation in a SAS OLAP.
cache but with seamless drill- Oracle Hyperion Essbase.
through to relational.
DOLAP Automatically generates a Business Objects web
small multidimensional cache. intelligence.
Mini cache is built at query Oracle Hyperion Interactive
runtime. Reporting.

Just as business query and reporting tools allow users to retrieve data from relational databases without
knowing SQL, OLAP viewers allow users to access data in an OLAP data box without knowing
multidimensional expressions. (MDX is also a query language, similar to SQL).

Many of the leading BI suite vendors offer OLAP viewers to third party OLAP data sources, sometimes via
the business query and reporting tools, or via a production reporting tool or via a special OLAP viewer.
(Microsoft ProClarity and Panorama Novaview).

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OLAP tools in the BI architecture.

Dashboards and Scorecards Development

‘A dashboard is a visual display of the most important information needed to achieve one or more
objectives, consolidated and arranged on a single screen so that the information can be monitored at a
glance’ (Stephen Few).

BI dashboards are similar to car dashboards- they provide multiple indicators or reports in a highly visual
way. A dashboard may be comprised of

 A map that color codes where sales performing well or poorly.

 A trend line that tracks stock outs.
 A crosstab of top selling products.
 A key performance indicator (KPI) with an arrow to show whether sales are according to plan.

A key characteristic of dashboards is that they present information from multiple data sources.

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Development
In the late 1980s, Executive Information System (EIS) tried to deliver similar capabilities. They were often
customer coded, inflexible based on quarterly data. Nowadays, new dashboards are user-built, flexible and
sometimes updated in real time. They also increasingly leverage advanced visualization capabilities that
facilitate greater insights and conveying more information in less space.

While some dashboards may offer general packages, others provide specialized controls that focus on
certain areas of the business. But most dashboards share a set of common features.

 Global navigation feature.

 Appealing and differing graphics.
 Interactivity.
 Custom made interface.
 Embedded content.
 Browser based capabilities.

Right kind of dashboard for you

 It all starts with two simple questions.

 What is the scope of what you are measuring?
 What king of data will you be displaying?
 The key performance indicators (KPI) should be selected wisely.
 Start with your business objectives, then look at the available operational data to find appropriate
metrics and not the other way around.
 Dashboards should show essential information only.
 Don’t overload it.
 Dashboards are at their most effective, if they are used in conjunction with other BI components,
such as OLAP- driven querying and reporting.
 Take dashboard design seriously.

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Figure – A typical dashboard.

Scorecards
The terms ‘dashboards’ and ‘scorecards’ are often used interchangeably, although they are indeed
different things.

Scorecards are designed to measure progress towards meeting strategic business goals, dashboards are
only designed for ongoing monitoring of specific activities. Dashboards are not meant to convey
information about how close, operations match the intent of the business and associated targets.

A scorecard focuses on a given metric and compares it to a forecast or target.

A scorecard usually appears as a graphical list of specific, attainable strategic milestones, combined with
metrics that serve as benchmarks. Measurements of how well the company actually executes specified
activities are linked to the scorecard; the resulting display is the status of each goal, often with a graphic
indicator.

Scorecards are designed to help managers and executives quickly identify company initiatives that need
extra attention. They are also an excellent way to distribute accountability to mid-level managers.

Strategic scorecards contain metrics from four key areas that drive the success of a business (people,
customers, financial, operations) and will include strategy maps to show how the metrics relate to one
another.

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Fig. 1. Balanced scorecard measuring health services to displaced persons in Aceh, Indonesia, August
2007 (Source: WHO)

Metadata models
Metadata is ‘data about data’. It defines the contents and locations of the data (or data model) in the data
warehouse, relationships between the operational databases and the data warehouse and the business
views of the data in the warehouse as accessible to the end-user tools. Metadata is searched by users to
find the subject areas and the definition of the data. A repository is a place where this data is managed and
maintained.

An enterprise data warehouse normally includes data from various sources. These sources include
operational data as well as third party external data. Metadata can be extracted from the various tools,
applications and vendor solutions that are used to supply data to the warehouse. RDBMS, modeling tools
and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems are all examples of and important contributions to
metadata.

As the data is stored and propagated throughout a typical warehouse environment, each physical data
adds more metadata. Further, each component of warehousing like ETL, data management and data
access impacts the type of metadata being generated.

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The metadata structures the information in the data warehouse into categories, topics, groups, hierarchies
etc. It provides information about the data within a data warehouse.

Metadata is ‘subject oriented’ (eg. Project, customers, organization)

Metadata defines how the transformed data is to be interpreted, for example whether 5/9/99 means
September 5, 1999 or May 9, 1999.
Metadata gives information about related data in the data warehouse.

Metadata estimates response time by showing the number of records to be processed in a query.

Metadata holds calculated fields and pre-calculated formulae to avoid misinterpretation and contains
historical changes of a view.

The data warehouse administrator’s perspective of metadata is a full repository and documentation of all
contents and process within the data warehouse; from an end user perspective, metadata is the road map
through the information in the data warehouse.

Metadata provides the pointer to data warehouse for decision support. Therefore, it acts as a logical link
between the decision support system application and the data warehouse. Thus, any data warehouse
design should assure that there is a mechanism that populates and maintain the metadata repository and
that all access paths to data warehouse have metadata as entry point. In other words, there should be no
direct access permitted to the data warehouse data (especially updates), if it does not use metadata
definitions to gain the access. The software tool will provide a facility for metadata definition in a metadata
repository.

 Metadata repository is a place to share metadata.

 In addition to the obvious requirement of a physical area to accommodate metadata the repository
should be capable of managing and maintaining this metadata such that it can be used to better
understand the contents of the data warehouse.
 It should be architected such that the contents of the metadata repository are continually
synchronized with the data in the enterprise data warehouse.
 All data in the warehouse should be accounted for in the repository. This should include both
internal and external data, structured and unstructured data.

Automated Tasks and Events

Obtaining data and using them to make business decisions is the foundation of growth for any business.
Web data extraction through manual process or scripting is time consuming and error prone. Maintenance
of such a process is very expensive.

Automating data gathering and analysis is crucial for enterprises to retain or gain a competitive edge.
Some of the main automated tasks are summarized below.

 BI alerting, is where a BI application automatically compares operational BI metrics to user

defined business thresholds and rules. Based on this comparison, the application may send an
alert to a business user to warn them of a potential business problem or issue that requires action.
This alert may be sent to a business dashboard, mobile device via e-mail. Alerts reduce the need

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for business users to constantly monitor business information. (eg) Inventory falling below a
certain level.
 BI guided analysis, is an extension to BI alert by giving additional supporting information about
the business issue that raised the alert (eg) A work flow that leads the business user through a
series of steps that helps them investigate the problem in more detail.
 BI-driven risk analysis. It evaluates an alert and makes recommendations on what action could
be taken to address the situation. (eg.) Risk assessment of granting a loan or credit card.
 BI-driven decision agent. It automatically takes action to fix the problem. (eg)Stopping the use of
a fraudulent credit card

 Automated processes and Integration with other Business application.

 In addition to putting and presenting information in a report, developers can set up automatic
database updates from within the report.(eg) Users can update inventory levels right within their
inventory reports.
 Developers can seamlessly integrate the BI output in any of the other business applications using
web services. (eg). If a customer fills out a form on the hosted web site and clicks ‘submit’, it can
be ensured that the information can be sent straight to CRM application.

 Automated Report Scheduling

 Developers can set up automatic export and delivery of a report to specific subscribed users on a
regularly scheduled basis. (eg) If sales managers need a weekly sales report, developers can
automatically schedule the creation and delivery of the report to Sales every Monday and also to
the file system and e-mail attachment.

Mobile Business Intelligence

Mobile business intelligence is one of the emerging trends in BI today, with the flooding of smart phones
and handheld devices in the market.

Types

There are 2 types of mobile BI: passive and active.

Basically, passive mobile BI involves around a ‘push’ technique. Passive mobile BI can also be divided into
two parts.
 Event based alerts sent to a mobile device.
 Reports ‘pushed’ to a mobile device after being refreshed.

However, passive mobile BI was not enough to support the real-time analytical requirement that the users
run into.

For example, a salesman in the field may be able to look at the latest price for a service but he will not be
able to efficiently sort through information for different customers, to arrive at a competitive price.

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Users
There are four categories: Executives, Field workers, Business analysts and Clerical staff. Passive type
only caters to clerical staff. Active mobile BI is required for the other three.

Usage models
There are three distinct models: Exception based, Pushed information and Pulled information :

Exception based: Workers receive alerts, passive types.

Pushed information: Reports or summaries of KPI (key performance indicators ), passive type.
Pulled information: Mobile workers specify the information they need via SQL or natural-language and they
get the response.
Readiness for mobile business intelligence

Before an enterprise decides to enable mobile BI as part of IT solution, the following factors need to be
evaluated for success.

 BI maturity – The enterprise needs to have a working business intelligence solution in place.
 Need for mobility.
 Cost of handsets – affects ‘return on investment’, if the user base in large.
 Cost of mobile client – again affects ‘return on investment’ if the users are on varied types of
mobile devices.
 Cost of the solution and availability of the sponsors.

Mobile business intelligence delivery

A mobile device communicates with an application server using a wireless network offered by mobile
service provider via secured network. Users can work with data and applications both online and offline
from application servers.

Data components can be stored on mobile device to allow users to work independently, despite
connectivity and bandwidth issues.

Users can get live alerts on business critical KPIs. Client based applications have more access to the
peripherals, allowing more elaborate functionality, storage access, multimedia display etc.

Disconnected BI

This is about viewing analytics data, interactive dashboards and queries even when the mobile device is
not connected to the network. Typically, disconnected users connect their personal machines (usually
laptops) to a server, hosted by the vendor. After downloading a BI Disconnected Analytics application, they
can disconnect their laptops from the network (for example, to travel on a business trip) and still view
dashboards and queries on their laptop machines.

This approach has limited capability in terms of availability of data and its interactivity due to concerns of
making the data available on the mobile device itself.

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The way to make disconnected BI to work is to make reports accessible from mobile browser as a
distributable minimal content that makes the business user to make insight at a glance. They are called the
downloaded offline reports. This can give a snapshot of the intended content and does not replace the
connected version of the reports, at least for now.

Collaborative BI

Collaborative BI is a growing trend that merges BI and social media tools and amounts to business users
determining what the most valuable and relevant data in their organization is and sharing it to improve
decision making across the board.

There are various emerging BI systems nowadays. Among them are the following characterizing trends.
BI as a service, where BI applications are hosted as a service provided to business users across the
internet.

Real-time BI, where information about business operations is delivered as they occur, with near zero
latency.

Situational BI, where information in an enterprise data warehouse is completed and enriched by co-relating
it with the external information that may come from the corporate intranet.

Pervasive BI, where information can be easily and timely accessed through devices with different
computations and visualization capabilities and with sophisticated and customizable presentations, by
everyone in the organization.

Collaborative BI, where company information assets are empowered thanks to co-operation and data
sharing with other companies and organizations, so that decision making process is extended beyond the
company boundaries.

Collaboration is working together to achieve a goal. Teams that work collaboratively can obtain greater
resources, recognition and reward when facing competition for finite resources.
Indeed, cooperation is seen by companies as one of the major means for increasing flexibility,
competitiveness and efficiency so as to survive in today’s uncertain and changing market. Companies
need strategic information about the outer world, users need to access information anywhere it can be
found. In inter-business corroborative contexts, this is particularly relevant, since the companies organize
and coordinate to share opportunities, respecting their own autonomy and yet pursuing a common goal.

Data warehouse integration is an enabling technique for collaborative BI. It provides a broader base for
decision support and knowledge discovery than each single data warehouse could offer.
Benefits of collaborative BI

 Faster and more informed decision making.

 Knowledge sharing.
 Employee satisfaction.
 Stake holder involvement – stake holders can respond at a time that is convenient to them.
 Decisions and conversations can be saved and referred back.

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Challenges

Too many conflicting voices can make it difficult to come to an agreement on an issue.

Collaboration capabilities

Corporate data is made easier for business users to access.

A common infrastructure for producing and developing enterprise reports, scorecards, dashboards, ad-hoc
analysis and OLAP analysis.

Rich visualization, interactive dashboards, a vast range of animated charting options, to increase user
adoptions.

Web based service oriented architecture that integrates with existing IT infrastructure.

Ranking of BI collaboration features

Rank By Desire . (%)

1 Annotate content 67
2 Threaded discussions 62
3 Shared workspaces. 60
4 Comments. 58
5 Save current views. (snapshots) 52
6 Statistics of values/comment. 50
7 Suggest causes of alerts. 47
8 Recommended next steps. 47
9 Attach content to a comment or workspace. 44
10 Wikis 39
11 Publish content to a server. 39
12 Send ‘live’ content via e-mail. 39

Rank By Actual Usage . (%)

1 Publish content to a server. 35
2 Shared workspaces. 28
3 Send ‘live’ content via e-mail 26
4 None 25
5 Comments. 22
6 Annotate content. 16
7 Attach bookmarks and links to content. 16
8 Threaded discussions. 15
9 Favorites. 14
10 Statistics. 13
11 Attach content to a comment. 11
12 Wikis 7
13 Instant messaging or chat 7
14 Ratings 6

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(Wayne Eckerson)
Real-time monitoring capabilities

In today’s competitive environment, analyzing data to predict market trends of products and services and to
improve the performance of enterprise systems is an essential business survival activity. However, it is
becoming clear that business success requires such data analysis to be carried out in real-time and that
actions in response to analysis results must also be performed in real-time in order to meet the rapid
change in demand from customers and regulators alike.

There are two main reasons that make real-time BI a necessity. Firstly, the conditions and environments in
which businesses operate are in a constant state of flux. Sales patterns change from place to place and
from time to time. Currency valuations shift and alter profit margins. Suppliers change delivery schedules
and their process. Customers become more educated and therefore more demanding.

Secondly, advances in technology, especially the internet, make real-time business seemingly achievable.
Indeed the internet has revolutionized information sharing. Vast amounts of data are available. Almost all
company data sources could be made accessible over an internet. And, it is easy to capture all sorts of
data and store them cheaply.

However, real-time data, analysis and actions pose a great challenge to the vendors.

‘Real-time’ can mean

 The requirement to obtain zero latency within a process.
 That a process has access to information whenver it is required.
 That a process provides information whenever it is required by management.
 The ability to drive key performance measures that relate to the situation at the current point in
time.

Based on these descriptions, real-time business intelligence could comprise

 Real-time information delivery.
 Real-time data modeling.
 Real-time data analysis.
 Real-time action based on insights.

Current BI systems suffer from two bottle-necks in realizing this vision. First, the transition from data into
information is handled by analysts, and therefore takes time. Second, current BI solutions do not go
beyond generating reports. Transitions from information to actions can only be manual and require long
periods.

The challenge is, therefore, to use intelligent technologies to model the manual intervention present in
current systems and automate both the flow of information from operational to tactical to strategic layer,
representing data to the information stage and the actions necessary to translate strategic objectives back
to operational drivers and effect strategic decisions in real time. Additional challenges exist in areas of on-
demand infrastructure configuration, data integration, unified datamodels and on demand data
warehousing.

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Keeping all these in mind, IBM has developed IBM Cognos real-time monitoring tool, which is an
actionable business intelligence solution which addresses an enterprise’s real-time monitoring needs for
the operational front lines. It delivers self-service, interactive dashboards with easy to develop operational
KPIs and measures to support the organization’s operational and time-sensitive KPI monitoring agenda. It
also provides analysis and exception management through proactive alerts.

The business managers and analyst gain immediate insight into up to the moment changing conditions
within an organization’s operational environments. In addition business users can view real-time
information for a holistic view of their business.

Other capabilities include,

 Drill down capability – quickly determining the root cause of an issue.
 Business defined alerts – alerting all parties to sudden issues to address and manage exceptions
based on business rules.
 Robust self service query reporting and analysis – creating self service reports and queries against
any data source.
 Flexible report authoring environment – creating user’s own ad-hoc queries, analyses, formatted
reports without IT assistance and employing analyst to discover underlying trends and anamolies..
 Reducing the burden on IT resources.

Software development kit (SDK)

“Software development kit is a comprehensive development environment that enables easy customization
and integration of the BI platform with enterprise business applications. Through documentations of the
application programming interfaces (API), sample code, utilities and developer tools, the SDK empowers
developers to implement highly customized, functional and powerful web reporting BI applications, meeting
all the BI requirements of the organization.”
(Microstrategy)

The BI SDK provides positional data and information on events generated by the people, equipment and
sensors associated with business rules in location-based applications.

The SDK is designed to provide developers with all the tools and level of information they need, to build
powerful, custom applications to suit the needs of any enterprise. Whether for security, personal safety or
logistics processes optimization, the SDK provides event data to create custom location-aware
applications.

The BI SDK allows third party systems to fully exploit the events that occurred in the location aware
applications. As an example, airport customers used the system to automatically direct camera towards the
zones where alarms are triggered in an office, the removal of anti-theft key triggers an alarm installed on
the floor. In a hospital, a message is sent to the head nurse when the number of intravenous pumps on a
specific unit reaches a minimum load.

The SDK comes with several source code examples and uses the Microsoft Net Framework
(www.purlink.ca)

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The SDK provides a platform independent automation interface for working with IBM Cognos services and
components. The developers can create custom reports, manage deployment and integrate security and
portal functionality to suit the needs, locale and existing software infrastructure. The SDK uses a collection
of cross-platform web services, libraries and programming interfaces.

By SDK, we can choose to automate only a specific task or can program the entire process from modeling
through to reporting, scheduling and distribution. (IBM Cognos)

Through the SAP business intelligence java SDK, analytical applications can be built that accesses,
manipulates and displays both multidimensional (OLAP) and tabular (relational) data. It provides additional
capabilities and simplifies the task of implementing client applications based on these interfaces. (SAP
Java SDK).

Making BI results easy to consume and enhance

From an information consumer perspective, the main objective of self-service BI is to make BI results
easier to consume and enhance. This is achieved by publishing BI results through enhanced user
interfaces that are tailored to each information worker’s needs, that is, interfaces that an information worker
is familiar with and comfortable using.

Easy user interfaces

Using a workgroup portal

This portal provides shared access to the BI results, enables better governance and reduces the network
overhead of publishing results to individual information consumers. Authorized consumers can retrieve BI
results from the portal on an as-needed basis. One product that dominates the workgroup portal market
place is Microsoft Sharepoint, which is supported by most BI vendors.

Web applications

Communication and information disseminations can be done using e-mail, instant and text messaging, and
through web conferences and seminars. Social networking and associated communities and profiles
enable the sharing of expertise and best practices. Desktop application, is another easy to use interface.

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