Flying High With BI

Commercial aviation had to suffer through early hazards before it could become what it is today: a routine way to travel. The history of business intelligence (BI) software offers a similar story, including its share of "necessary" failures. Executive information systems (EIS) promised much but catered only to the few, presenting senior executives with stale, expensively acquired data. When IT gave users ad hoc data access, they were inundated with so much information that they couldn't take action. And when BI tools became the rage, organizations discovered that multiple toolsets could produce multiple sets of numbers.

For years, vendors and their customers have sought ways to make BI accessible to all. The once-revolutionary "BI for the masses" phrase has become a cliché. Yet, if there was ever a time when BI seemed poised to gain mainstream acceptance, it's now. In a July 2005 survey by The Data Warehouse Institute (TDWI), 594 respondents said they expect the number of BI tool users within their organizations will increase to 60% of total employees within three years — a projected annual growth rate of 21%. Respondents from information-intensive industries such as financial services and telecommunications expect even higher growth rates.

This article explores some of the key technology trends that have brought BI from the terminal to the runway. We'll also consider what you should look for in technology to ensure a safe and comfortable journey even for first-time fliers.

The Web: Expanding BI's Reach

Technology advances that respond to business and organizational trends are what will encourage higher and faster BI adoption. The Internet, of course, is broadening BI's reach and is significantly speeding implementation. Web-based BI means that every user with a browser has access to data at the push of a button. Ten years ago, a savvy software installer might get four users installed in a day. Today, thousands of Web-based users can be brought online within hours; the biggest bottleneck is the speed with which IT can grant data access.

BI vendors have raced to Web-enable their tools. Cognos ReportNet was the first to embrace the Web not only for information delivery but also as a full authoring environment.

Browser-based BI tools do pose some challenges, including usability and browser compatibility. The BI industry has by no means settled on the best approach. Microsoft and Business Objects, for example, continue to provide desktop tools for BI professional developers and position their Web-based authoring for business users. Customers who haven't designated a standard browser or who have slow intranets won't enjoy browser-based BI tools. Expect this to change: According to the TDWI survey, 55% of users access BI via the Web today. Survey respondents expect this figure to increase to 70% over the next three years.

Spreadsheets: Can't Beat 'Em

Over the years, BI vendors and users alike have tried to ignore, fight and disable spreadsheets, but most are finally acknowledging that it's best to manage BI-spreadsheet integration. The dominant product, Microsoft Excel, provides a familiar interface and an environment in which to sort, filter and chart data. On the downside, spreadsheets have become mini data marts offering multiple versions of the truth. To combat this problem, some companies have even disabled the ability to export data to Excel! The trend today, however, is to support the use of spreadsheets.

Hyperion has long been an Excel integration leader; the vendor initially provided a spreadsheet add-in as the sole interface to a consistent set of data from its OLAP server, Essbase. The Brio BI relational reporting product line, which Hyperion acquired in 2003, lagged behind in spreadsheet integration, offering only a data export from Hyperion Intelligence to Excel. With Project "Avalanche," Hyperion intends to bring the same tight Excel integration that Essbase had to its relational reporting tools. Hyperion's SmartView add-in (released in December) currently accesses content from Hyperion Planning, Hyperion Financial Management and Analyzer. With the new Avalanche add-in, Excel users will be able to open a spreadsheet, access analysis and refresh data links to any Hyperion content, whether managed by multidimensional (Essbase) or relational OLAP engines.

Nearly all BI vendors have made attempts over the years to address the needs of Excel users. Success was mixed, but recent innovations hold more promise. Information Builders' Web Focus lets users choose the display format at report runtime. Actuate's e.Spreadsheet Designer lets developers build spreadsheet-style reports from scratch. The latest add-ins from other BI vendors (MicroStrategy, Hyperion, Business Objects and Cognos) reuse reports users created within their main BI interfaces. Thus, many of the same formats, calculations and visualizations produced within Web-based BI tools will appear in Excel spreadsheets where users can enhance them. Reports are refreshed live within the spreadsheet, a vast improvement over a one-time, raw export. Business Objects and MicroStrategy have taken Office integration further by allowing live refreshes from PowerPoint as well. Using Microsoft's emerging Smart Client technology will address remaining difficulties with add-ins that have required manual, local installation.

Suite Inspiration and Lower Costs

BI convergence has been a dominant theme this year. While niche players remain viable, the big BI players market increasingly broad suites that address the needs of a diverse range of users. These suites run the gamut from data integration, query and reporting and OLAP to performance management dashboards and analytic applications. Customers who early on bought multiple products from one vendor may have enjoyed volume discounts, but rarely did they enjoy a lower cost of ownership. There have been exceptions (MicroStrategy has long had an integrated product line), but with most BI vendors, multiple products have meant multiple security, metadata and server environments.

In 2005, we've seen the following convergence efforts:

Convergence sounds great in theory, but it poses significant organizational challenges. Foremost is that business sponsors who fund most BI deployments care little about how the technology works under the covers. The cost savings may not be immediately obvious. IT must explain that integration and consolidation are critical to delivering more functionality to more users faster and with fewer resources.

The "fewer resources" part won't sit well in some organizations. If job security is tied to the formerly separate BI applications and tools, IT and business managers will face resistance to standardization and consolidation. Reducing the overhead of multiple BI tools and support teams could produce sizeable cost savings — at the expense of the very BI experts who understand the promise of consolidation best. Organizations must consider how to overcome turf battles, perhaps by changing incentives and job priorities to encourage valued BI experts to facilitate consolidation.

Heading into the fall, the BI industry is anticipating another force that will put pressure on licensing fees: Microsoft's SQL Server 2005 release with BI enhancements. Right now, a 1,000-user deployment of a full BI suite typically lists in the $450,000 to $700,000 range. Microsoft Analysis and Reporting Services lists for about $80,000 for 1,000 users.

Granted, no two vendors offer the same functionality in their packages, and differences in platform, application and database support are important to product selection. Still, pricing pressure is already apparent. Business Objects now offers a Crystal Reports server for midsize business customers at a much lower price than its full BI suite. SAS, a latecomer to the BI suite market, comes at about half the price of suites from other BI vendors. MicroStrategy appears to be the only vendor resisting this trend; however, it can command higher fees in the niche sector of the market where the scalability of its relational OLAP architecture is a decisive advantage.

Ease-of-Use Conundrums

Business conditions change so quickly that it's often hard for users to say what they want. The technology can all look pretty cool, which makes it hard for IT to prioritize: And IT hates to appear unresponsive. The BI industry thought ad hoc query tools would solve the problem of changing user requirements and IT backlog. They didn't. Staring at blank report screens or, alternatively, trying to choose from every data element in the warehouse didn't fulfill dreams of user empowerment.

Greater ease of use is a key to putting BI successfully in the hands of more users. IT often forgets that users already have other means of making decisions: gut feel and best guess, for instance. And they have ways of getting at information: They might ask controllers or analysts for it. The point is that if BI tools aren't better and faster than established methods, users won't bother with them.

Vendors have taken many paths to improving ease of use. Many offer dashboards that users can customize so they see only relevant indicators for their jobs. The days of coding for each EIS are giving way to graphical icons that users can drag and drop to build dashboards in a few hours (See the "Field Report"). In a few clicks, they can find out which customers are more likely to churn or which products are running low on the shelves. Dashboards make users' lives easier, but they put a wrinkle into the benefits of BI suite integration: All the leading BI suite vendors have some kind of dashboard capability, but more robust capabilities are more often found in products from niche players such as Celequest, arcplan and ProClarity, to name a few.

Business Objects is tackling ease of use from many angles, particularly in its upcoming interface called "Intelligent Question." This will make BI more question-centric than data- or report-centric. Users choose from a number of questions, including "Which suppliers are shipping on time?" Intelligent Question lets you toggle on elements of preset questions to change, for example, "shipping on time" to "shipping incomplete orders." Business Objects designed the interface to ensure that there are no wrong questions or questions that return no results.

Vendors are also giving customers the ability to match functionality to user profiles. SAS, long criticized for overly complex software, has been a leader in this area with its Web Report Studio interface. With business users clearly in mind, SAS intentionally limited the features offered through this interface. More powerful capabilities are reserved for the SAS desktop product, Enterprise Guide, intended for power users. Business users can still access the powerful analytics when Enterprise Guide users publish their stored processes to Web Report Studio.

MicroStrategy takes the concept further by offering a series of "privileges" through a single, Web-based interface. Executive users, for example, access the same software as business analysts. Executive users, however, might only see run, sort and print report options, while business analysts could choose from a menu of all options.

Of course, feature-laden products represent only one side of the problem. On the other side are the customers, who need to become better at prioritizing according to what will deliver the biggest impact. For example, report-based interactivity gives users the ability to fine-tune existing reports by sorting and filtering. When BI products don't deliver such interactivity, both IT and end users feel the strain. IT is forced to develop variations of the same reports, increasing the backlog. Users, meanwhile, resort to exporting data to Excel: acceptable once, but a labor-intensive, data-quality-damaging mess when used for recurring reporting requirements.

The point is you can overlook simple yet valuable features if you focus too much on power-user stuff that makes a difference to only an exclusive group of users and their reports. Vendors and users still focus too much on giving users as much as possible--dense pages full of numbers rather than simple, visual graphs highlighting trends and exceptions. All BI products provide at least basic charts; some include (or partner with specialized software providers to provide) more advanced visualization capabilities such as maps, gauges and scatterplots. Yet many users don't know how to use the visualization features and fall back on a thick presentation of numbers.

Business and IT in Partnership

Technical innovation won't alone bring BI success. Technology only gains value when used adroitly. BI must support better and faster decision-making activities that technology alone can't improve. For executives, that means giving IT better direction and prioritizing the metrics and information that truly drive business initiatives. And for IT managers, this means prioritizing rather than responding to whoever shouts the loudest--or feels most threatened by technology change. Given that surveys still show that business and IT seldom share common goals, you'll no doubt encounter turbulence while flying high with BI.

When Howard Hughes first envisioned commercial aviation, people thought he was crazy. Fifteen years ago, executives thought that only they needed access to information. Today, most realize that quality, timely information is a necessity at every level of the organization. That means that BI should be poised for mainstream adoption — as long as vendors, IT and business users agree on what's important and don't get distracted by bells and whistles that aren't useful.

Cindi Howson is the president of ASK, a BI consultancy. She teaches the Data Warehousing Institute's "Evaluating BI Toolsets" and publishes independent BI research on BIScorecard.com. Write to her at [email protected].