BI is shedding its staid reputation as a report-generating tool for an elite squadron of executives and financial managers.
Although no one is forsaking the value of those reports for evaluating business goals and forecasting growth, data culled
using big BI apps from vendors such as Business Objects, Cognos, and Hyperion -- along with mini-BI applications embedded
in other enterprise systems, including ERP and CRM -- are bringing BI to the masses, from line-of-business managers to call-center
or support-desk workers.
Results from the InfoWorld Business Intelligence Report 2005 bear this out: During the next year, 70 percent of respondents plan to increase the number
of employees who have access to BI solutions.
Rather than BI being used as a separate, disconnected mechanism for analysis -- the ultimate example being CPM (corporate performance management) systems -- BI applications integrated with other apps are delivering the capability to
display and interact with BI data in its native form, in real time. A call-center upsell application with an embedded BI app,
for example, can predict which of a handful of products would be best-suited for a particular customer based on that customer’s
recent transactions and credit history, as well as on the company’s inventory.
Bill Gassman, principal analyst at Gartner, observes, “BI is showing up at deeper levels of the organization. It’s a shift
toward directed BI, where you’re guiding people through decisions.” The InfoWorld Business Intelligence Report reveals that 45 percent of companies surveyed now use BI solutions to guide employees through
decision-making processes.
Our survey, administered via the Internet between Feb. 24 and March 9, also revealed that 32 percent of respondents think
that the most important feature of their companies’ BI solution is prepackaged integration with existing enterprise applications.
Analysts expect those numbers to grow.
Alaska Airlines is forging ahead toward its goal of getting “business intelligence down to the customer-facing level” by using
Siebel Business Analytics, says James Archuleta, director of CRM at Alaska Airlines. The challenge is controlling the flow.
“We’re still working on the metadata layer to define what all the business rules are because we don’t want ad hoc BI gone
crazy,” he says.
The trickling down of BI is reflected in several terms. Noted expert Keith Gile, principal analyst at Forrester Research,
calls it operational BI: analytic functionality built into the procedural interface of an enterprise application -- the screens
and applications used by sales personnel, for example -- that makes or recommends decisions for end-users, thereby shrinking
operational response time to minutes or seconds.
“We are witnessing a shift away from merely seeing BI as tactical or strategic” at high levels in the organization, Gile says.
In some instances, BI apps are embedded to add value to the existing enterprise apps; in other instances, data from BI apps
is “surfaced as a meaningful component of the enterprise app,” he says.
By any name, BI’s expanding role is changing work cultures across the enterprise by delivering timely information to frontline
workers, typically through customized dashboards, industry observers say (see “Customized Dashboards Deliver,” page 50).
Keeping up with the times
The proliferation of operational BI is getting a boost from a rising demand for sophisticated composite applications. Vendors
such as Actuate, Cognos, and IBM are focusing efforts on delivering BI services and components to allow them to embed their
core technologies within external apps from the likes of Oracle, SAP, and Siebel Systems.
Siebel Business Analytics is one platform that leverages operational BI. “We have Web services interfaces so you can take
any analytical result from Siebel Analytics and inject it into a Java application or .Net application, and so on. That lets
us display analytical results in another application,” says Paul Rodwick, vice president of marketing for Siebel Business
Analytics at Siebel. But aside from that, the secret to success is “rich, deep integration of analytics into [CRM apps] to
direct workflow and get more real-time information flowing,” he says.
Application developers are relying on EII (enterprise information integration) software, which provides an abstraction layer
over information assets that allows for a single, composite view of data derived from disparate sources. EII technology allows
for virtual joining of data from disparate, unrelated sources for the purpose of surfacing information directly from enterprise
apps or non-data-warehousing sources.
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