It’s critical for employees across companies to get access to timely information to make decisions that drive revenue, productivity and efficiency. Most large companies have provided executives and business analysts with business intelligence (BI) information in the form of dashboards and reports that allow them to drill down into data and better understand key performance indicator (KPI) trends and other key business data.
The problem is that traditional BI tools are so complex that it’s estimated that less than 20% of the people within companies that have them actually use them. That leaves 80% of the people in these organizations without a means to access information that can help drive business – no doubt effecting efficiency and the bottom line within these companies.
Companies have invested heavily on BI tools to help access and analyze data. Due to the inherent complexity of BI tools, they require a huge amount of IT resources to implement, run and maintain them. The cost that is associated with large BI purchases is enormous, especially when less than 20% of people within an organization actually can use them. Still, for large organizations, they play an important role in providing powerful analysis and reporting.
Some companies are seeing enterprise search as the alternative to complex BI tools. It’s simple to use, and ideal for conducting a text search for document retrieval. If you can’t find something, enterprise search offers the tools to help you find it. However, enterprise search falls short on delivering truly meaningful information because it does not allow analysis or the ability to bring information together to answer complex questions.
It’s not a surprise that in December 2007, it was written in CIO that, “Operational BI is the trend of 2008”. Operational BI focuses on delivering information to the masses – the 80% that don’t have access to complex BI tools. To be effective and fill the gap between the difficulty of BI tools and the simplicity of enterprise search, operational BI must deliver some key goals:
• Simplify data access for all
• Speed information access
• Provide access to more BI data
One approach to achieving these goals is to combine report search with ad hoc query to make BI as easy as Web search. This easily achieves the goal of simplifying data access for all. Using a search box as a query tool is a familiar concept to all, and requires no training.
By using a single, simple search box, users can ask a question and receive a list of relevant reports as well an ad hoc answer to the question. For example, a user in a toy company could ask, “What is the revenue this quarter for toys”?
Then they can build on that question and enter, “Compare the revenue for board games and dolls”? Or the user could further narrow down the question and add, “for inventory from items made in the U.S”. The user could also ask for a graphical display by adding “display in a pie chart” to the query.
These types of inquiries can be done by anyone in the company and the user can receive answers in seconds. Using traditional BI tools, requesting information such as this can take days to weeks—and some claim even longer!
The user may choose to save this information from these inquiries in a nicely formatted BI report for future use, share it with colleagues, schedule to have the report distributed daily, weekly, etc., or publish it to a repository for future use. This gives employees the ability to share and leverage valuable information and reduce redundancy within organizations. When publishing a report for others to use, some companies may choose to implement the option of IT certification of reports before they are published. This workflow can easily be implemented.
If the information requested is already available in a report, a list of relevant reports will appear and the user gets the ability to immediately access them if they have been granted access rights in the system.
You can see from this example that using a simple-to-use natural language ad hoc query approach opens up many possibilities. It allows users to find quickly information and build or refine queries on the fly. Empowering business line managers to get an immediate view of business they way they want to see it allows them to react quicker to the business and drive revenues and productivity.
Two additional notable differences between this approach and traditional BI tools is the cost and implementation time. This technology is a fraction of the cost of traditional BI tools and can be implemented in weeks. Many companies that have already invested in traditional BI tools are turning to this approach to leverage those tools. This is a complementary solution that is delivering ROI within weeks. If you are interested in learning more about how EasyAsk for Operational BI can help your organization achieve the goals discussed, please send us an email or visit www.easyask.com.
