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September 18, 2007

What's Most Important to Have in a BI Tool?

"Knowledge is Power" is such a familiar truism that even Chinese fortune cookies occasionally remind us of it. That certainly holds even more true for running a business than many other activities in life, and therein lies the power of business intelligence (BI) applications.

There's probably no such thing as perfect intelligence, but the BI tool vendors, bless 'em, are doing their best to inch closer to that goal every day. But if you're looking for a new BI tool, or at least a better one than you may already have, what you're missing is a snapshot of where BI product feature progress stands today. So here at -- System iNEWS -- and SystemiNetwork.com, we've decided to present a buyer's guide to BI applications this December to help you compare and contrast the functions and features of as many BI solutions for the System i as we can.

That brings up the interesting question of what functions and features are most important to have in a BI tool. "That depends," would be the standard answer, "on the business needs." Those are different for everyone, affected by such widely varying influences as market, business size, business age, the nature of your products, your competition . . . I won't go on with examples because it's seemingly an endless list.

Similarly endless-seeming would be the list of features you'd come up with if you trolled all the BI solution sites and wrote down every function you saw touted in the online documentation. For example, you can't just analyze data with a BI tool. Depending on which one you're talking about, you can also analyze trends, segments, workflow, business performance, and metadata, not to mention your sidewalk multidimensional cube.

From where do you want to get your input? Your ERP, CRM, GL, or other applications? A data warehouse or merely a data mart? Web services, flat files, text files, relational databases, databases on other platforms, "unstructured data," MS Excel? Metafiles made up of joined DB2 files?

How would you like to navigate? Drill up, drill down, drill through, drill across, "drill anywhere?" How do you want to secure your data? 512-bit encryption or just 128-bit encryption? Or would you rather simply control user access? By individual or group? Or perhaps it would be best to base access restrictions on the data itself . . . but would that be access to fields, records, models, dimensions, or summaries?

How do you want your output? In what kind of a file? Spooled, PDF, XML, XSL, HTML, DHTML, ASCII, Text, or CSV? MS Word, MS Access, MS Excel, or Lotus 1-2-3? XBRL for you finance afficianados? Should the data go to a thin client, fat client, browser, portal, dashboard, scoreboard, or merely a printed report? Would that be a batch report, a standard report, an interactive report, an ad hoc report, or a custom-designed report? Illustrated with charts, tables, gauges, maps, grids, pinboards, or graphs? Displayed in a star or a snowflake schema?

You get the picture.

It will be a tall order to find a package available that does everything I've just mentioned, and we haven't even gotten into realms such as data cleansing, query building, multidimensional calculations, auditing, and workflow controls, have we? What's best, then, at least from the buyer's point of view, is to find the product that has the best combination of features to match enterprise needs. To do that, we all need an accurate map of what feature sets are actually available to choose from.

So please help me out here. What's important to you? If you had to buy a BI tool next week, what would you want to be absolutely sure it could do above anything else? By extension, what features do you want to be sure we ask all the System i BI vendors if they've got? Please let me know. We'll ask for you, and then you can read all about it in December.

Posted by at September 18, 2007 2:17 PM

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Comments

Analytic functionality, user experience, and TCO being equivalent (which they never are), the most important considerations for a BI solution, from my perspective regard administration of security and metadata. With respect to security, I want multi-layered security administration where users can inherit permissions/restrictions from a role or from some other (organizational chart?) relationship where minor changes and mass changes can be made on-the-fly both within and across user profiles, and with functionality so that anything within the BI tool that a particular user owns or has authored can be migrated to a different user effortlessly. With regard to metadata, I want whatever data security permissions/restrictions I establish as administrator to be shared by all modules, components, add-ons, functions, etc. of the BI suite for all potential data repositories. Regardless of whether we're interrogating cubed analytics, data marts, operational data stores, or external data sources such as MS Access databases or Excel spreadsheets, I don't want to have to declare separate permissions for separate data repositories. If administration is painful, tedious, feature-poor, or just plain time-consuming, the value of the tool will be quickly diminished. Finally, traceability of the impact of changes is imperative. If I make a definition change to a metric, for example, I want to know every analytic that uses that metric (explicitly or as an underlying part of a calculation) and have the ability to automatically contact the affected users regarding the change (in advance if possible).

Posted by: Dirk at September 19, 2007 1:54 PM

Hi,
One big question should be usability for end-users. I recently worked on a project with 2 major BI tools and they were very different to use. One had more fine control available on the output but required in-depth SQL knowledge to do anything more complex. The other was more generic on output BUT generated simpler SQL and ended up being far simpler for 'power users' to develop their own queries and reports. If you are not careful, you can end up hiring in expensive consultancy just to develop simple reports. Much thought must go into Catalogue/Universe design too.

Posted by: steve curtis at September 19, 2007 5:03 PM

John,

Please try and cover the IBM "db2 web query for System i" product which GA's this month. Promoted as an upgrade to Query/400, the base level is free (to existing query/400 licpgm owners) and you pay extra for advanced functionality. It might be a good "simple" entry level bi which gets a foot in the bi door for some companies.

As for talking to vendors, i suggest you have a set of questions relating to the tools available to administrators to help control the bi usage. Managing the libraries / files / fields allowed to be queried by the tool (over and above i5/os security which is often not good enough), controlling allowed joins, reporting on usage, performance stats etc.

Peter:

We will send a questionnaire to IBM about DB2 Web Query, but traditionally the company doesn't respond to such questionnaires. For purposes of articles such as Buyer's Guides, we don't try to complete those questionnaires for vendors, so the products of vendors who don't respond won't be included. --jg

Posted by: peter kemp at September 19, 2007 8:23 PM

BI Tools:
Assuming all the tools have great basic features...including a scripting language to combine many selections of data from various sources (not all iSeries...) into a single process to be executed.
1. I know this may sound old school, but it's not. I'm serving some executives who do not want to point/click/drag/drop anything except open the email or an icon to a url, and it should not take some flunky building it for them - I need to create a great presentation in BATCH on the iSeries, on a job scheduler!, and have options to present graphically (web page), or to print (color) or to email (like pdf).
What if the requirement is to do this every day at 5am in whatever time zone. AUTOMATION (ie "batch")! I may want to base an execution on a triggered event instead of the job scheduler.
2. Need to deal with all the various date formats that exist in our population. Please base this on reality, not what it "should be."
3. need to substring parts of columns for calcs & joins
4. need to output results in many formats: text, csv, formatted excel, xml, html
5. if a windows server is involved, must be seamless up & download & again capable of batch driven
6. need to secure columns in a file, based on i5/OS security
7. totally support security level 50 and any other "highest standard".
8. a price structure the owner of a $15k System i will not choke on.
9. either instructor led education delivered onsite or video-many shops just can't send a group to another city.

Jim:

Although my blog often discusses what "should be," Buyer's Guides, including this one, only show features the vendors tell us actually exist in their products. --jg

Posted by: jim franz at September 19, 2007 9:45 PM

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