Success in the e-business world requires widespread information access and analysis, enabling knowledge workers, line-of-business managers, and executives to turn corporate data into actionable intelligence. As businesses co-operate on B2B initiatives, partners and vendors need access to information across enterprise boundaries to make instant decisions.
With this e-business expansion, IT organisations face increasing challenges to provide growing numbers of decision-makers access to higher-quality data.
Data warehouses and data marts improve information availability but by themselves do not assist the organisation in leveraging enterprise business intelligence - nor in extending information access beyond the corporate boundaries. Data analysis and access products are required to effectively empower end-users with a range of needs, skills and responsibilities. These needs can be analysed and understood with reference to a supply chain model, in which some end-users are information manufacturers or producers, and others are information consumers.
While the World Wide Web and intranet technology affords some relief from the cost of providing client/server data warehouse access to large numbers of users, data analysis and access products must embrace client/server, intranet, and extranet models. They must also provide a meaningful return on investment for IT and support the organisation as a whole, in the areas of enterprise integration, solution scalability, and IT impact.
Enterprise business intelligence is critical - but to be successful, access/analysis products must:
* Fit into the larger IT landscape by integrating with existing enterprise systems.
* Scale to serve the entire information supply chain.
* Minimise impact on IT systems and personnel.
Furthermore, the tools and applications utilised must meet the business demands:
Critical enterprise integration
Access and analysis products for end-users must meet three criteria for integration into the enterprise. First, they must leverage existing hardware and software systems, especially the range of desktop operating system found in the typical organisation. Access tools that do not connect with all desktop operating systems are like telephones that work only with certain telephone exchanges.
Second, access and analysis products must take full advantage of other products important to business intelligence, specifically including the data warehouse, its server platform and metadata, and middleware.
Third, they must present a consistent interface, file structure and documentation across versions for all types of decision-makers. When a Report Viewer evolves into an Active Analyst, for example, she should find that nothing has changed except the level of her access to information and the tools available to her.
Solution scalability
Similarly, access and analysis tools must meet three criteria for overall solution scalability. First, they must scale functionality along the entire information supply chain, so that individuals can change their level of data access as their jobs change or their level of sophistication evolves. Products that restrict user evolution tend to restrict the growth of overall enterprise business intelligence.
Second, price points should scale along the supply chain, to keep costs in line with overall impact. Organisations should be able to give everyone Report Viewer status at a low cost per seat, while investing in other levels of user access at the level their impact warrants.
Third, access and analysis products must be able to scale to support large databases and large numbers of users. Growth in user sophistication leads to growth in the warehouse solution and the number of people who wish to benefit from it.
Low IT impact
Finally, access and analysis products must minimise their impact on the existing IT organisation and infrastructure. First, they must provide short "time to market" for IT and for users. Both installation and training should be simple and quick.
Second, IT resources required to support the access and analysis products should grow more slowly than the number of users and the number of applications.
As the solution scales up, IT resources required should be proportionately reduced. Third, data warehouse access and analysis products must support a high degree of manageability, auditing capability, and security. These qualities are absolute requirements for hardware and software investments elsewhere in IT; they should not be passed over here.
Functionality
Finally, with the above critical success factors in mind, the Access and Analysis product must include the following functionality:
- . Deliver a fully integrated suite of products/modules designed to provide the complete spectrum of integrated business intelligence functionality, from next-generation analytic reporting capabilities to enhanced interactive OLAP query and analysis tools to a visual application designer for building and delivering analytical applications.
- . The product should support client/server, Web/intranet, and HTML access to warehouse data with functionality tailored to the needs of each group of users.
- . Have native access and compatibility with a wide array and combination of operating systems, platforms and databases.
- . Plus, integration with an enterprise information portal and data transformation technology will deliver a powerful combination of business intelligence, enterprise reporting, and Web-enabled information access capabilities to support your strategic e-business initiatives.
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