Business Intelligence Solutions

1. Business Intelligence Solutions

2. What is Business Intelligence? • Business intelligence, or BI, is an umbrella term that refers to a variety of software applications used to analyze an organization’s raw data. • Made up of several related activities: • Data mining, • Online analytical processing, • Querying and reporting • Companies use BI to: • Improve decision making, • Cut costs and identify new business opportunities • BI is more than just corporate reporting and more than a set of tools to coax data out of enterprise systems. • CIOs use BI to identify inefficient business processes that are ripe for re-engineering

3. Who Uses BI? • Restaurant chains such as McDonalds, Wendy’s, and T.G.I. Friday’s are heavy users of BI software • They use BI to make strategic decisions: • What new products to add to their menus • Which dishes to remove • Which underperforming stores to close • They also use BI for tactical matters: • Renegotiating contracts with food suppliers • Identifying opportunities to improve inefficient processes. • Because restaurant chains are so operations-driven, and because BI is so central to helping them run their businesses

4. BI: Business Analytics • One crucial component of BI—business analytics—is quietly essential to the success of companies in a wide range of industries, • Famously essential to the success of professional sports teams • With an analytical approach, the Patriots managed to win the Super Bowl three times in four years. • The team uses data and analytical models extensively, both on and off the field. • Analytics help the team select players and stay below the NFL salary cap. • Patriots coaches and players are renowned for their extensive study of game film and statistics, and Coach Bill Belichick reads articles by academic economists on statistical probabilities of football outcomes. • Off the field, the team uses detailed analytics to assess and improve the "total fan experience." • At every home game, for example, 20 to 25 people have specific assignments to make quantitative measurements of the stadium food, parking, personnel, bathroom cleanliness and other factors.

5. Data, Data everywhere…. • 80% of business is conducted on unstructured data – Gartner • 2007 – First time data exceeded available storage • By 2011 the digital universe will be 10 times the size it was in 2006. IDC • Nearly half of all enterprises are using three to five different business intelligence analysis and reporting tools. And more than one out of five are running six or more. Forrester

6. Business and Market Changes Through 2012, more than 35 per cent of the top 5,000 global companies will regularly fail to make insightful decisions about significant changes in their business and markets* • The economic downturn forces businesses to: • Be aware of changes in their organizations, • Re-think their strategies and operating plans and • Face demands from stakeholders and governments for greater transparency about finances, operations, decisions and core performance metrics. • However, most organizations do not have the information, processes and tools needed to make informed, responsive decisions due to underinvestment in information infrastructure and business tools. *Analysts Discuss Business Intelligence Challenges and Opportunities at Gartner Business Intelligence Summit 2009, 20-22 January in The Hague, Netherlands

7. Business and Market Changes...continued “IT leaders in companies with a strong culture of information-based management should create a task-force to respond to the changing information and analysis needs of executives,” said Bill Hostmann, research vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. “IT leaders in businesses without such a culture should document the costs and challenges of adjusting to new conditions and propose a business case for investing in the information infrastructure, process and tools to support decision making.”

8. Business Intelligence Budget Ownership…continued By 2012, business units will control at least 40 per cent of the total budget for BI • Although IT organizations excel at building BI infrastructure, business users have lost confidence in the ability of them to deliver the information they need to make decisions. • Business units drive analysis and performance management initiatives, mainly using spreadsheets that create dashboards full of metrics, plus analytic and packaged business applications to automate the process. • Business units will increase spending on packaged analytic applications, including corporate performance management (CPM), online marketing analytics and predictive analytics that optimise processes, not just report on them. *Analysts Discuss Business Intelligence Challenges and Opportunities at Gartner Business Intelligence Summit 2009, 20-22 January in The Hague, Netherlands

9. Business Intelligence Budget Ownership “By making purchases independently of the IT organization, business units risk creating silos of applications and information, which will limit cross-function analysis, add complexity, and delay to corporate planning and execution of changes,” said MrRayner. “IT organizations can overcome this by encouraging business units to use existing assets and create standards for purchasing classes of packaged analytic applications that minimize the impact of isolated functions.”

10. Software as a Service Becomes Standard By 2010, 20 per cent of organizations will have an industry-specific analytic application delivered via software as a service (SaaS) as a standard component of their BI portfolio • Information aggregators will increasingly rely on SaaS to deliver domain specific analytic applications built from industry data they collect and shift the balance of power in the BI platform market in their favor. • Companies will only share their data with aggregators that can guarantee security and confidentiality so, while hundreds of information aggregators offering SaaS analytic applications will emerge, a virtual monopoly will persist within each vertical niche because of the high barrier to entry for others. *Analysts Discuss Business Intelligence Challenges and Opportunities at Gartner Business Intelligence Summit 2009, 20-22 January in The Hague, Netherlands

11. Software as a Service Becomes Standard… continued “IT leaders should work with business users to identify the information aggregators in their industry and plan to incorporate a manageable number into their BI and performance management portfolio,” said Kurt Schlegel, research vice president at Gartner. “They should work with the information provider to ensure the information tapped by the SaaS analytic application can be integrated into their internal data warehouses.”

12. Software as a Service Becomes Standard By 2010, 20 per cent of organizations will have an industry-specific analytic application delivered via software as a service (SaaS) as a standard component of their BI portfolio • Information aggregators will increasingly rely on SaaS to deliver domain specific analytic applications built from industry data they collect and shift the balance of power in the BI platform market in their favor. • Companies will only share their data with aggregators that can guarantee security and confidentiality so, while hundreds of information aggregators offering SaaS analytic applications will emerge, a virtual monopoly will persist within each vertical niche because of the high barrier to entry for others. *Analysts Discuss Business Intelligence Challenges and Opportunities at Gartner Business Intelligence Summit 2009, 20-22 January in The Hague, Netherlands

13. How to Implement a BI System? • Companies should first analyze the way they make decisions and consider the information that executives need to facilitate more confident and more rapid decision-making, as well as how they'd like that information presented to them (for example, as a report, a chart, online, hard copy). • Discussions of decision making will drive what information companies need to collect, analyze and publish in their BI systems. • Good BI systems need to give context. It's not enough that they report sales were X yesterday and Y a year ago that same day. • They need to explain what factors influencing the business caused sales to be X one day and Y on the same date the previous year. • BI won’t yield returns if users feel threatened by, or are skeptical of, the technology and refuse to use it as a result. • BI, when implemented strategically, ought to fundamentally change how companies operate and how people make decisions, CIOs need to be extra attentive to users' feelings.

14. Seven Steps to Rolling Out BI Systems • Make sure your data is clean • Train users effectively • Deploy quickly, then adjust as you go • Don't spend a huge amount of time up front developing the "perfect" reports because needs will evolve as the business evolves • Deliver reports that provide the most value quickly, and then tweak them • Take an integrated approach to building your data warehouse from the beginning • Make sure you're not locking yourself into an unworkable data strategy further down the road • Define Return on Investment clearly before you start • Outline the specific benefits you expect to achieve, then do a reality check every quarter or six months • Focus on business objectives • Don't buy business intelligence software because you think you need it • Deploy BI with the idea that there are numbers out there that you need to find, and know roughly where they might be.

15. I Lied… There are More than 7… • Analyze how executives make decisions • Consider what information executives need in order to facilitate quick, accurate decisions • Pay attention to data quality • Devise performance metrics that are most relevant to the business • Provide the context that influences performance metrics. • BI is about more than decision support. • Due to improvements in the technology and the way CIOs are implementing it, BI now has the potential to transform organizations. • CIOs who successfully use BI to improve business processes contribute to their organizations in more far-reaching ways than by implementing basic reporting tools

16. BI Trends • BI continues to make businesses smarter, especially during these difficult economic times. • IT and finance departments partner with the business on analytics initiatives to address the growing demand for more personalized, relevant information and streamlined decision-making. • Through BI, they can capitalize on current and growing industry trends like green computing, social networking, data visualization, mobile, predictive analytics, composite applications, cloud computing and multitouch. • Following slides examine a few of these trends and their relationship to BI and organizational decision-making to improve business performance.

17. Trends: Green Computing • Companies are anxious to reduce their carbon footprint by slashing paper consumption. • Workers who have grown up in a digital age and view paper as an old-school irritation are helping to push this trend to the forefront of company agendas. • BI has been in the business of paper elimination for years, helping enterprises eliminate manual reporting and analysis, streamline personnel and electronically distribute virtualized paper reports on business performance over the Web. • By moving reports online rather than printing them, customers discover significant reductions in paper consumption. • Organizations can expand paper-elimination initiatives by linking their BI systems to modern mainframe systems that offer improved performance, reduced power usage, cooling costs and floor space requirements. • They can also run at utilization rates as high as 100 percent for long periods of time. • Power that is consumed is used for transaction processing, rather than just keeping the servers' lights on. • When you pair broad-ranging BI capabilities like monitoring, performance analysis and reporting with modern mainframes, organizations have the ability to transform their aging data centers with low environmental impact. • Result is a greener approach to transforming business information for improved decision-making with the ability to analyze and report on hundreds of millions of transactions directly on the mainframe, so workers across the organization can quickly identify and respond to critical business trends.

18. Trends: Social Networking • Social networking describes a class of software, usually Web-based, that recognizes human activity and relationships both as interesting and important data, and as a way for users to interact. • A key component of Web 2.0, examples of social networking programs such as Facebook and Digg dominate the consumer space. • Social networking programs are increasing in use within the enterprise because collaboration through human activity, input and relationships are as important inside the enterprise as they are in the outside world. • Newer BI capabilities such as the ability to add annotations or notes with commentary on business reports comes an understanding of user activity, popularity and relationships to IT, as they drive increased collaboration and sharing of trusted information through analytical systems. • Expect to see more advances in social networking and BI. • Small, ad hoc teams of decision-makers will need to rally themselves, share artifacts, make decisions and disband in a simple and repeatable way. • Decision artifacts will become part of the corporate memory, be able to be mined for future decisions and provide a useful decision trail.

19. Trends: Data Visualization • Data visualization is the discipline surrounding the ability to visualize data and communicate information about the data in a clear and effective manner. • Data visualization should not be confused with graphics or charting • The best visualizations do not necessarily involve the most complex graphics or charts, but rather the best representation of the data. • An element of elegance and aesthetics plays a role in an image’s ability to effectively communicate its message. • Many data visualizations involve interaction beyond simple static images, such as controls or direct manipulation gestures, to aid in the exploration of the information being visualized. • Data visualization has long been associated with BI, from early software offerings that let employees create advanced data visualizations for their dashboards to the interactive charting and visualization capabilities found today across modern BI reporting, analysis and dashboarding capabilities. • Continued exploration of effective and highly interactive presentations through visualization will be a focal point of analytics solutions for years to come.

20. Trends:Mobile • Mobile is used to indicate applications that extend outside of the traditional office environment on devices other than traditional desktop or laptop computers. • The message-focused approach of mobile solutions lets short, smart messages be delivered through BI event notification technology to mobile clients. • The fairly recent intersection of wireless devices and BI lets mobile business users and executives more easily view and interact with the same analytics they would find on their desktop via their mobile device for efficient decision-making.

21. Trends: Predictive Analytics • Predictive analytics is the branch of data mining concerned with the prediction of future probabilities and trends. • Predictive analytics applies diverse disciplines such as probability and statistics, machine learning, artificial intelligence and computer science to business problems. • It encompasses a variety of mathematical techniques that derive insight from data with one clear-cut goal: find the best action for a given situation. • When mining future scenarios and probabilities, organizations use different BI analytics strategies. • One common approach is to use predictive analytics or predictive modeling. Predictive modeling is at the far end of the analytics spectrum – following analytic reporting, trending and forecasting. • Companies can take statistical models, analyze results, and push them to decision-makers through reports and dashboards. • As a BI capability, predictive modeling can inform and improve performance in areas such as churn analysis, fraud prevention, demand forecasting and new product ideas. • More companies are looking toward building a predictive organization by combining statistical and predictive analytics with current and historical data analysis, and communicating the results across the organization using a common platform. • With predictive analytics capabilities now embedded in modern BI solutions, organizations can take advanced statistical models, analyze results and push them to decision-makers using highly consumable reports, analysis, dashboards and scorecards. • Businesses benefit most when they understand what has happened and what will happen. BI gives them the ability to analyze past and present trends. Predictive analytics provides future insight. This ability can add huge value to an organization’s ability to respond to changes in markets, business risks and customer trends.

22. Trends: Composite Applications • Composite applications are built from a variety of different available services within a service-oriented architecture. • Mashupsare a particular variety of composite applications that seamlessly but loosely combine content from disparate (often third-party) applications. • Mashupsmay source content through Web feeds, API interfaces, JavaScript and other online sources. • The combination of the core architecture, flexibility and Web focus of BI platforms allows for an impressive range of composite application possibilities, including embedding RSS feeds and other unstructured Web content, into BI reports and portlets. • More casual users are becoming comfortable plugging together parts of an application to create very customized new applications that serve their needs and this is expected to continue.

23. Trends: Cloud Computing • Cloud computing emerged from the Web 2.0 movement. • In a nutshell, it covers the concept of having Internet-accessible and always available resources "in the clouds", so that the physical location of a user or device becomes irrelevant. • The core technologies that support cloud computing allow corporate data centers to act with the efficiency of the Internet • Virtualization, • Automation, • Open standards • Web-based computing • Cloud computing intersects with BI and performance management as users become more mobile and have multiple Internet-enabled devices, but require access to their information no matter where they are.

24. Trends: Multitouch • Multi-touch is a computer interface technique that, unlike traditional interfaces that track a single point on a screen, allows users to use multiple points on the screen. • The use of multiple points allows more sophisticated gestures, such as the ability to resize an area on the screen by placing two fingers on the corners and then stretching or pinching. • More natural use of hand gestures for performing complex navigation, manipulating mobile devices, or interacting with large surface-mounted displays are only a few of the possible ways BI solutions will intersect with this area in the future.