Effective decision-making requires fast answers to off-the-cuff questions. More importantly, executives need a better understanding of the business through fast access to relevant, quality information - and they need it with minimal training or dependency on IT. This is according to SCT Services CEO, Victor van der Watt.
He says the following challenges stand in the way. “Traditional BI tools do not meet all business users' needs. To make timely business decisions, business users require simple and intuitive access to corporate data from anywhere in the organisation. Unfortunately, traditional business intelligence (BI) tools sometimes fail to meet the needs of many business users.”
Furthermore, BI tools require significant training and understanding of analytical methods that users simply do not have the time or patience to take on - underscoring why BI adoption among business users is so low.
According to one survey, less than 5% of business users actually use BI tools today - even though most of these business users believe they do not have all the information needed to make sound decisions. Instead, business users often rely on intuition when making decisions. They also depend on IT, which in turn faces a backlog of requests that prevent timely responses.
Intuitive decisions and dependence on IT support can result in an underperforming organisation, where a poorly informed workforce guesses at the right answers to key business questions. Slow-running queries and unpredictable response times frustrate business users.
Research clearly shows that slow query performance and unpredictable response times consistently are among the biggest complaints of business users when working with BI tools. As mission-critical enterprise applications feed new data into BI systems, organisations see a dramatic rise in volumes of new data.
Data generation will certainly increase in the years to come, making query performance and response times even more challenging to manage. The impact on the end-user community is significant, with productivity diminished as users wait for queries to return results. Since many users have yet to adopt self-service BI, by default they are dependent upon canned reports delivered by business analysts or IT report authors.
As a result, they may base decisions on partial or outdated data or simply not make decisions within the required timeframe. IT faces an unmanageable workload, spiralling costs, and fast-changing business priorities. Accustomed to the freedom and simplicity of the Internet, business users want the same self-service experience from their BI solutions.
However, if they find BI tools difficult to use, they look to IT for support. Thus, while dealing with an explosive increase in data volume, IT is challenged to meet the needs of a growing BI user population.
The accelerated version of SAP BusinessObjects Explorer software is a singular, unified offering that combines intuitive information search and exploration functionality with high performance and scalability.
SAP BusinessObjects Explorer employs high performance and scalability to give business users BI query response times that are five times faster than highly tuned queries, and up to 100 times faster when compared to non-tuned BI queries. It provides these stunning response times in a highly consistent and predictable manner by creating highly compressed index structures, which load into memory whenever your users request data.
Using high-performance aggregation techniques to process queries in parallel entirely in memory, the software can accommodate very large data volumes across as much of the data warehouse as desired. Business users can enjoy greater flexibility in the types of queries they make, and they can access full historical data.
Van der Watt says this functionality provides a significant advantage over traditional data warehousing, in which maintenance-intensive aggregations forced IT developers to be selective about the BI functionality and data sets they made available. “In those instances, only mission-critical data and applications could be deployed.”
“More resources to meet user expectations for fast access and quick response time rather than support strategic organisational needs, such as adapting to fast-changing business priorities in an increasingly competitive business climate, scarce budget allocations and resources wind up being spent on mundane, low-value tasks so IT can optimise and tune back-end systems.”
IT cannot react quickly enough to meet the dynamic needs of the organisation while keeping costs within budget. Therefore, organisations must find new ways to bring intuitive, fast, and cost-effective BI to everyone in the enterprise.
For more information, contact SCT Services on (012) 345-5669.
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