New Approaches to Business Intelligence
From Internet News, an article on how Web 2.0 is not the only new kid on the block.
“BI is getting bigger, growing from a departmental solution or application to an enterprise resource, so it needs an infrastructure that can support thousands or tens of thousands of users, not hundreds,” Microstrategy vice president of products Mark LaRow told InternetNews.com.
The traditional method of building reports on request consumes a lot of resources, and an IT department would have to build more than a million designs to cover a modest data warehouse, according to LaRow.
Now, IT designs “a small number of reports — maybe 1,000,” and users can take one report, click on different rows and columns to drill down, LaRow said.
He said they can surf the data they want, adding the data they need dynamically and either saving their version of the report or using it online.
For example, one of Microstrategy’s customers, the Loews (NASDAQ: LTR) hardware retail store chain, has 94,000 reports anyone can use. Only 3,000 were “explicitly designed by IT,” and the rest are variations of those with additional data added by users, LaRow said, adding that some of the derivative reports are “much larger than the originals.”
None of these approaches is fast enough for Terry Cunningham, the founder of Crystal Decisions, which sold the Crystal Reports BI tool. He is often considered the father of business intelligence.
BI is “evolving into what we call continuous BI; it never rests,” Cunningham told InternetNews.com. “Things need to be understood, and decisions need to be made in real time,” he explained. “There’s no such thing as ‘I’m going to run the report tomorrow and see how we did today.’”
The article has
no responses yet