May 11, 2005

Business Intelligence (BI) and B2B have been around for a good number of years. People have been working with various forms of data and management reporting is certainly not a new concept.

What is new is that companies are looking to win in their markets by delivering business intelligence (BI) in near-real-time to all key decision-makers throughout the organization, from senior- and middle-management to front-line employees. Portals should be on your radar screen because they play a key role in harnessing this new approach to business intelligence.

The integration of portals with BI tools to make enterprises more intelligent, agile and efficient, is the latest significant step in the history of business intelligence. Technology solutions for business intelligence first took hold in the 1960's with mainframe-based decision support systems.

These systems evolved into today's standard BI solutions, which generally comprise online analytical processing (OLAP) technologies and provide Web-based interfaces to data. These solutions provide rich functionality and allow proficient users to perform sophisticated analysis relatively quickly and easily.

However, organizations do face challenges associated with standard BI systems. The first problem is that, because these systems often are confined to a small audience, users who potentially could take action based on BI data do not have access to the information.

Additionally, the interfaces for standard BI systems tend to be too complex or too simplistic. They either are complex enough that only a small group of potential users actually master the tools and gain benefits from the system, or so simple that they provide some basic metrics, but no real ability to dig deeper to discover important business trends and causes.

Finally, in most BI systems the key performance indicators (KPI's) are not visible to the users. This means that it's hard for users to determine when an action that has been taken in response to a KPI has had an effect on that KPI, either because of time lag in the response or because of latency in the data.

To address these issues, organizations are turning to a new and more powerful form of BI that extends solutions to many levels of management throughout the enterprise. The result is that middle management and front-line employees are empowered with actionable data in near-real-time, and upper management has the ability to make business goals visible and monitor performance on a company-wide basis.

Driving this more robust and pervasive form of BI are flexible portals and dashboards that deliver several key benefits:

* Enables all key users to gain personalized views of the data. A portal gives decision-makers throughout the organization single-point-of-access to personalized content that enhances their ability to take relevant action. This personalization is based on who employees are, the specific roles they play in the organization, and the specific KPI's that fall into their area of responsibility. An added benefit is that management will be able to display the various KPI's in order to evaluate performance.

* Provides rich features for BI users that need them. Some users may need more complex tools to explore undefined relationships in the data or to develop ad hoc reports. Portals have the flexibility to deliver more full-featured interfaces with BI data. For example, if an ad hoc report is requested often enough, it can be turned into an additional view in the dashboard application for users that need the data. In this way, portals help a pervasive BI system to evolve over time as users' and management's needs change.

* Delivers actionable data in near-real-time to users who can make a difference. Combining data that is stored and refreshed in near-real-time with the Web-based, personalized information delivery capabilities of today's portals enables organizations to deliver the right information, to the right people, at the right time. This includes delivering information via multiple devices including different types of PC's and mobile devices. This flexibility can result in more timely, intelligent decision making.

Let's take a look at an example of how this new approach helped one organization to better meet its business needs. The enterprise is a global trade bank operating in more that 60 countries providing integrated trade solutions for importers and exporters by offering risk mitigation, settlement, financing and information solutions. The bank needed a more efficient way to monitor and manage its trade processing operations, quality metrics, costs, sales performance and risk exposure across its global network of offices.

The solution needed to enable managers to quickly understand activity as it was happening during the day so that they could proactively address issues instead of waiting for static, end-of-the-month reports. The system needed to be Web-based to ease deployment and support executives on the road, and it needed to be simple to use but provide power to do more in-depth analysis as needed. The system also needed to be deployed in less than six months.

Key to the solution was a data warehouse sourced on the hour from the bank's operational mainframe system with two user interfaces: an easy to use Web-based dashboard interface for quick access to KPI's and drill-down capabilities, and an analyst interface that allowed for more powerful ad-hoc queries and complex analyses. The system was developed and deployed to all users in North America in three months.

The Web-based dashboard uses color-coded charts to visually display KPI's to each user. Each chart is the top level of a drill-down path users can navigate by clicking on chart elements to see more detailed information on the performance trends displayed. Users in different levels of the bank's hierarchy see different KPI's or see them at a different level of detail as appropriate to their position.

The bank uses the system in many ways, such as balancing workload across regional processing centers; pinpointing operational weak spots and evaluating the success of steps taken to address them; analyzing trends in customer behavior and identifying internal areas that need training or additional support.

Other organizations are leveraging this new form of business intelligence, which provides the ability to take information that often is only reported up to senior management and distribute it to middle managers and front-line users. Portal and dashboard solutions are a key part of this development, which is enabling enterprises to make better decisions faster.

Source: Line 56