Business intelligence: A new toolkit approach

After 30 years, the promises of decision support are still mainly unfulfilled. It`s rare to find a chief financial officer who can quickly and easily determine the impact of changes in customer payment terms on the company`s net cash flow or how changes in raw material costs affect customer profitability.

While business intelligence vendors mainly focus on making information available and accessible, the complexity of the current business environment and new management approaches require the ability to answer complex what-if questions to effectively budget and forecast, and to support processes that span across different departments and outside a company`s boundaries.

Now the concept of using a software toolkit approach is emerging to develop and deliver custom solutions to business information questions.

As an example, AC Nielsen in Italy uses the toolkit approach to help the retail industry analyse loyalty-card data. It has 200 000 product codes and several million loyalty-card codes, and stores the information by product and loyalty card. This is truly something beyond what is normally believed to be the size that can be managed with traditional BI software or a standard multidimensional database.

We believe there are thousands upon thousands of very clever people with valuable know-how and experience in the marketplace, but they are facing all sorts of difficulties in bringing their expertise and added value to companies. The toolkit approach helps them do this.

Developing a custom analytic application from scratch may sound like a challenging task. However, by allowing people to focus on the business issues, this approach removes the common problems that can be generated by the complexity of the infrastructure and limitations of software. The application generation process is programming-free, simple and real-time.

It enhances standard data analysis with the ability to model information and rapidly develop advanced analysis and analytic applications. It provides an alternative to pre-packaged analytic applications by providing, in one integrated product, the tools to easily build highly scalable and flexible custom reporting, analysis and analytic applications, without any programming.

It delivers clear and measurable savings to organisations in operational and organisational efficiency through its fast development, easy access to information and low application development and maintenance costs.

Because companies differ in size, structure, management style and function, among other things, it is not likely that pre-packaged analytic applications will fit all the company requirements right out of the box. Rather, applications may require customisation, software development kits (SDKs) and other third-party tools, which increase complexity and come at a cost. Through hundreds of customers, Board has shown that fully customised solutions can be built completely from scratch at a fraction of the time and cost of traditional BI products.

The toolkit approach is naturally appealing to both sophisticated information analysts and those who live with the data day in and day out. However, there is an even larger audience of people throughout an organisation who could benefit from this same information if it was easy to access and understand.

In recent years, businesses have acknowledged the need to supply decision-makers at all levels, from the CEO to a departmental manager or salesperson, from sales and marketing to finance and manufacturing, with the tools to access and analyse data.

Suppliers must recognise that not every business intelligence user is going to be a technology expert. Because of this, there is a strong need for solutions to be easily and affordably customised and tailored to user requirements.

Finding an efficient and effective way to use information to support management processes where traditional BI software has proved limited and expensive is a tall order. It requires the combination of formal reporting and interactive/ad hoc analysis, support to every level of the organisation, end-user flexibility, handling of large volumes of data and rapid application development all in a solution that is simple, flexible, affordable and has a quick time to application. Two components of the toolkit approach make possible the fulfilment of these requirements.

To begin, this approach provides an integrated multidimensional database engine that is designed to fully exploit the multidimensional model. Its multi-cube architecture makes it easy to integrate data from different sources. The data is compressed and the analytic meta data guarantees the consistency of analysis and manipulation. The net result is that it is possible to manage large volumes of data, such as millions of customers, at amazing speed and also utilise a number of native simulation functions, which further maximise speed and efficiency.

The ability to fully exploit the structure of the data, provided by the product`s multidimensional database engine, is fundamental for allowing analysis interactivity and flexibility, guaranteeing a consistent use of information across the organisation and providing a high-speed framework for modelling and iterative application development.

The second unique component is the application development environment. The database, data analysis and modelling functions are made available. Applications are built using a wide variety of objects including reports, charts, worksheets, calculation models, pictures, gauges and multi-file viewing objects. To build applications, users simply drag and drop these objects from a toolbox onto the screen and then configure them, without any programming.

The product`s functionality is similar to Lego pieces that snap together to build a range of solutions at amazing speed, from reporting and ad hoc queries to complex analytics and what-if simulation.

The strategy is not to provide pre-packaged modules, but rather to deliver an integrated toolset that is continuously improved and enriched based on the vision and the input from customers and partners. The result is the organic growth of an integrated solution, thereby avoiding the challenge of traditional BI systems that consist of countless numbers of layers and modules.