Tying the BI tool to the user
June 29, 2009 by btaub
Filed under All, business intelligence, data warehousing, management reporting
Yes, a 747 and a Cessna can both be used to transport you from point A to point B but, isn’t the 747 a bit of overkill for the pilot who just wants to fly himself to the next airport for a $100 hamburger? Well, in Business Intelligence (BI), many organizations buy a fleet of 747s when all they need is a few Cessnas – they buy tools that are powerful but overkill for most of their users. A great example of this is when a company buys 7,000 licenses of an expensive, powerful OLAP tool, intending to outfit their entire staff with OLAP. Is there a need for advanced online analytical processing (OLAP) in the company? Almost certainly. Are there 7,000 users who are going to slice and dice through their data? Almost certainly not.
You can think about BI needs as a pyramid, small at the top and large at the bottom. At the very top are a few analysts who use data mining tools to identify unexpected relationships and build predictive models by looking at huge data sets (Can you remember when the data mining companies were looking to put mining on every desktop? Mining on every desktop? Really?).
Just below the data miners is another, slightly larger, layer of folks who need to slice and dice through their data – the OLAP users. These folks are looking for things like what products are selling well, in what regions and by which salespeople.
Next is the bulk of the pyramid – the folks in the field who are just trying to get their jobs done. The folks who need BI to execute specific business processes: to see which customers receivables are over 30 days old; to see where maintenance crews have been assigned for the week; to do the actual day-to-day work of the company. Do these folks need to slice and dice through huge quantities of data? No. These folks generally need a set of predefined reports which have a few flexible parameters for users to complete to specify exactly what data to report on.
While the major BI tool vendors sell their tools as allowing users to create their own reports and to slice and dice their data, the bulk of the pyramid never uses this capability. Instead, when these tools are released to users they are released with libraries of pre-configured reports. Most users never do more than use these reports or, occasionally, request new ones.
Once you understand this reality, you start to look at the concept of BI tool standards quite differently. More on this in a future post.
Think you’re overbuying in BI? Drop me a line.
– Ben
The vision of a computer on every desk worked for Microsoft:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft
Let’s hope someone’s not throwing this post back in our face in 30 years (actually, let’s hope they are).
Finally, someone who understands!
Reporting environments differ from company to company. The combination of informational needs (and wants), technologies utilized, the quality of the data environment, benefits obtained, and skill sets of the information analyst(s) all play a vital role in the success of a particular business intelligence (BI) footprint – not just BI standards.
I often wonder why BI tool vendors continue to come up short meeting the differing needs of companies. Are the BI standards driving business decisions and changing business processes for companies that utilize BI tools? Or should this be the other way around – the business decisions and relevant business processes drive BI standards? My vote is the latter.
On many occasions, I have been successful in trading off the benefits of a large BI implementation for a substantially smaller environment (MSAccess and a good VBA programmer). In these cases, the ETL and data warehouse was all that I needed – not the existing BI environment(s). Another example is the concept of a “temporary sandbox” for information analysts to experiment – most production BI environments do not support this idea, what a shame.
…Glenn
Thanks, Glenn!