How Business Intelligence Software Works and a Brief Overview of Leading Products

1
How Business Intelligence Software Worksand a
Brief Overview of Leading Products

• Jai Windsor
• MIS 5973
• December 8, 2005

2
What is Business Intelligence (BI)?

• Yet another IT buzzword?
• Software that enables users to obtain
  enterprise-wide information more easily
• A strategy to ensure the right information is
  available to the right decision makers at the
  right time
• Working definition- products that are designed to
  extract and present data from a data warehouse
  (ideally)

3
Extract and present data

• Querying capabilities
• Reporting capabilities
• Analysis
• Using reports
• Using Excel
• Using OLAP
• Ideally from a data warehouse, but can be from
  other databases, spreadsheets, flat files, etc.

4
BI Vendors

• Business Objects
• Cognos
• Actuate
• Applix
• Information Builders
• Informatica
• MicroStrategy
• Microsoft
• Oracle
• SAS

5
Querying Capabilities-The Business View

• Business view, or metadata layer
• Safe, user friendly environment for business
  users
• Generates SQL queries for the user
• IT users can modify or write their own queries
• Universe, Package, Project

6
Querying Capabilities-Prompting the User

• Helps users design their own queries
• Asks users what data they want to see and how
  they want to filter it
• Standard report templates with hundreds of
  variations
• Dos
• Donts

7
Querying Capabilities-Complex Business Questions

• Might seem innocent enough but cause a huge
  problem for the BI
• Limited SQL functionality in some cases-
  subqueries, multipass SQL, new functions like
  RANK
• Proprietary methods are sometimes slow and
  inefficient

8
Reporting Capability

• Reporting transforms query results from raw data
  to meaningful information
• Report design
• Charting

9
Interactive Reporting as an Analysis Tool

• The least complicated method of data analysis
• Investigate trends or exceptions
• OLAP-lite
• Formulas and functions

10
Report Delivery Push Strategy

• Report generation scheduled by IT
• Pushed to users
• Bursting
• Users can be overwhelmed and stop reading reports
• Alerts

11
Report Delivery- Pull Strategy

• Users log on and request (pull) reports
• Can create a burden on server
• Schedule-and-pull recurring, heavily used,
  complex reports
• Web portals and interactivity

12
Analysis by Excel

• Excel remains the most popular BI tool in use
• Familiar
• Massage data
• Bursting
• Cheap!

13
OLAP

• Online Analytical Processing
• MOLAP Multidimensional OLAP
• Multidimensional data cubes
• Multidimensional and cross-dimensional
  calculations
• Response times are fast and predictable

14
Other variations

• ROLAP relational structure
• HOLAP hybrid between MOLAP and ROLAP
• DOLAP dynamic OLAP, personal temporary cubes

15
More on OLAP

• Drill down, drill across
• Drill to detail
• Reporting integration

16
Cognos Enterprise BI Series 7

• Query Studio and Report Studio tools
• Web-based
• Automatic data ranking
• No problem with date dimension
• Good user-defined report scheduling

17
Actuate Actuate 8

• Analytics Cube Designer
• Cross-join data from heterogeneous sources
• eSpreadsheet analysis tool
• No problem splitting data fields
• Good user-defined report scheduling

18
Information Builders WebFocus 7

• No OLAP architecture, no cubes
• Must learn native scripting language
• Accordion reports

19
Applix TM1

• Newcomer to market
• Seamless integration between OLAP and reporting
• Displays data in Excel
• Must supply own SQL to build cubes

20
MicroStrategy 8

• Heavily dependent on proper data warehouse
  design. Must have star schemas to properly
  create cubes
• Must use lookup tables to create the date
  dimension
• Not tolerant of dirty data
• Integrates directly with Microsoft Office
• Better for data warehousing and data mining than
  reporting and OLAP analysis

21
Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Reporting Services and
Analysis Services

• Analysis services supports MOLAP, ROLAP, and
  HOLAP
• Easy to configure and define cubes
• One fact table per cube
• Reporting Services is an extension to Visual
  Studio.NET 2003 and best left to developers
• Surprisingly poor integration with Excel!

22
Business Objects Enterprise 6.1

• Unique DOLAP architecture
• Flexibility and low IT maintenance

23
Conclusion

• Frees IT staff from being report writes
• Business power users may know better what they
  want to know than IT can
• Business users can explore data in new ways
• Pure players vs platform vendors

24
Any questions?