Volume 28 Best practices in business intelligence and data warehousing from leading solution providers and experts
IN enterprise business intelligence
POWERFUL CASE STUDIES and LESSONS LEARNED FOCUSING ON: Dashboards, Scorecards, and Visualization Enterprise Business Intelligence Open Source Business Intelligence Software-as-a-Service
FEATUREs The End of Enterprise Software: Open Source Finds an Opening Wayne Eckerson, TDWI Research The “faster, better, cheaper” mantra in today’s economy has led to an explosion in open source BI tools. PAGE 2
BI or Bust Study Highlights Best Practices for a Tough Economy James E. Powell PAGE 4
Text Analytics to the Rescue Stephen Swoyer PAGE 5
TDWI RESEARCH excerpt Analytical Tools for Business Analysts PAGE 25
TDWI best practices awards 2009 PAGE 29 Volume 28
Letter from the Editorial Director IN enterprise business intelligence
This new edition of What Works in Enterprise Business Intelligence offers a fresh, topically focused collection of customer success stories and expert perspectives. We’re proud to offer this resource to enhance your understanding of the tools, tech- nologies, and methods that are central to enterprise business intelligence today. We’ve arranged these case studies and lessons from the experts into specific categories to www.tdwi.org guide you through the articles: dashboards, scorecards, and visualization; enterprise President Rich Zbylut business intelligence; open source business intelligence; and software-as-a-service. Director of Research Wayne Eckerson Here’s what you will find inside: Director, Online Products & Marketing Melissa Parrish Managing Editor Jennifer Agee Editorial Director Denelle Hanlon CASE STUDIES Art Director Deirdre Hoffman What Works case studies are meant to present snapshots of the most innovative BI and Production Editor Roxanne Cooke DW implementations in the industry today. The case studies included in this volume Graphic Designer Bill Grimmer demonstrate the power of enterprise business intelligence technologies and solutions for industries ranging from restaurants to the YMCA.
LESSONS FROM THE EXPERTS President & Chief Executive Officer Neal Vitale Included in this issue of What Works are articles from leading experts in the services, senior Vice President & Richard Vitale software, and hardware vendor communities. These lessons provide perspectives Chief Financial Officer about enterprise business intelligence best practices and trends. executive Vice President Michael J. Valenti President, Events Dick Blouin FEATURE ARTICLES Vice President, Finance Christopher M. Coates In “The End of Enterprise Software: Open Source Finds an Opening,” Wayne Eckerson, & Administration director of TDWI Research, details why interest in open source BI tools skyrocketed as Vice President, Erik A. Lindgren Information Technology the economy plummeted. Eckerson writes that there will be an inexorable rise in the & Web Operations adoption of open source technologies due to their significant cost savings over estab- Vice President, Carmel McDonagh lished BI vendors. Attendee Marketing
This issue of What Works also features articles from TDWI’s bimonthly e-newsletter, chairman of the Board Jeffrey S. Klein BI This Week. In “BI or Bust Study Highlights Best Practices for a Tough Economy,” James E. Powell details Aberdeen Group’s latest survey, and “Text Analytics to the Rescue” by Stephen Swoyer offers a rundown of the 2009 edition of “Text Analytics: REACHING THE STAFF User Perspectives on Solutions and Providers.” Staff may be reached via e-mail, telephone, fax, or mail. E-MAIL: To e-mail any member of the staff, please use the following form: [email protected] TDWI RESEARCH RENTON OFFICE (weekdays, 8:30 a.m.–5:00 p.m. PT) There’s more from TDWI Research. What Works includes an excerpt from TDWI’s Telephone 425.277.9126; Fax 425.687.2842 1201 Monster Road SW, Suite 250, Renton, WA 98057 recent Best Practices Report, Beyond Reporting: Delivering Insights with Next-Generation CORPORATE OFFICE (weekdays, 8:30 a.m.–5:30 p.m. PT) Analytics, by Wayne Eckerson. Telephone 818.814.5200; Fax 818.734.1528 9201 Oakdale Avenue, Suite 101, Chatsworth, CA 91311
BEST PRACTICES AWARDS 2009 SPONSORSHIP OPPORTUNITIES Scott Geissler, [email protected], 248.658.6365 This section features summaries of the winning solutions of TDWI’s annual contest, which recognizes organizations for developing and implementing world-class business REPRINTS: For single article reprints (in minimum quantities of 250–500), e-prints, plaques, and posters, contact PARS International. intelligence and data warehousing solutions. Phone 212.221.9595; E-mail [email protected]; Web www.magreprints.com/QuickQuote.asp We hope you enjoy this collection of case studies, best practices, and expert insight © 2009 by TDWI (The Data Warehousing InstituteTM), a division of 1105 focused on enterprise business intelligence. We look forward to your comments. If Media, Inc. All rights reserved. Reproductions in whole or in part are there is anything we can do to make this publication more valuable to you, please let prohibited except by written permission. Mail requests to “Permissions Editor,” c/o What Works in Enterprise Business Intelligence, 1201 us know. And please join me in thanking the companies that have shared their stories Monster Road SW, Ste. 250, Renton, WA 98057. The information in and successes, their technology insights, and the lessons they have learned. this magazine has not undergone any formal testing by 1105 Media, Inc., and is distributed without any warranty expressed or implied. Implementation or use of any information contained herein is the reader’s sole responsibility. While the information has been reviewed for accuracy, there is no guarantee that the same or similar results may be achieved in all environments. Technical inaccuracies may result from printing errors, new developments in the industry, and/or changes or enhancements to either hardware or software components. Printed in Denelle Hanlon the USA. Editorial Director, What Works in Enterprise Business Intelligence TDWI is a trademark of 1105 Media, Inc. Other product and company TDWI names mentioned herein may be trademarks and/or registered trade- marks of their respective companies. [email protected] Table of Contents
Features 4 BI or Bust Study Highlights 2 The End of Enterprise Software: Best Practices for a Open Source Finds an Opening Tough Economy Wayne Eckerson, Director, TDWI Research James E. Powell
The “faster, better, cheaper” mantra in today’s economy has led to an explosion 5 Text Analytics to the Rescue in open source BI tools. Stephen Swoyer
Case Studies and Lessons from the Experts 21 The Swiss Colony Harnesses Web Data for BI
6 Enterprise Business Intelligence Defined 22 Streamlining Selection and Budgeting for BI Success
D a s h b o a r d s , S c o r e c a r d s , a n d Visualization S oftware-as-a- S e r v i c e
7 BI on the Fly 2 3 Metro Atlanta YMCA Better Aligns Its Mission, Member Programs, and Marketing Activities with On-Demand 8 BI by Any Other Name Business Intelligence
24 Why On-Demand BI? E n t e r p r i s e B u s i n e s s I ntelligence
9 Enterprise BI Beyond the Enterprise: Customer-Facing TDWI Research: Best Practices Report Excerpt Business Intelligence 25 Analytical Tools for Business Analysts 11 Adopting an Enterprise BI Standard to Share Information on Students, Admissions, and Enrollment More Information 12 Fostering Departmental BI While Working Toward an Integrated Enterprise BI Environment 29 Best Practices Awards
13 Qualcomm Speeds Time to Business Answers 33 Solution Providers
14 Mobile BI Gets Interactive 38 About TDWI
15 Delivering Value of Half a Billion Dollars Annually 39 TDWI Partner Members
17 NetworkIP Dials Up Blazingly Fast Call Detail Analysis
18 Six Ways to Transform the Economics of Data Warehousing
O p e n S o u r c e B usiness intelligence
19 Monolith Serves SaaS BI to the Quick-Serve Restaurant Industry
20 BI in the Cloud: Getting Started
WHAT WORKS in enterprise business intelligence Volume 28 1 f e at u r e
The End of Enterprise Software: Open Source Finds An Opening
By Wayne Eckerson Director, TDWI Research
“The enterprise software market is breaking down,” proclaimed “Oracle recently reported it delivered 51 percent margins for the Mark Madsen at a recent meeting of TDWI’s Boston Chapter.1 quarter, yet I hear from countless senior executives that they can “And this opens the door for open source software.” no longer afford their current software maintenance contracts and are looking for options.” Gentile said these executives often Madsen said the business model for enterprise software vendors report that maintenance costs consume up to 80 percent of their has switched from selling licenses to selling maintenance and sup- IT budget. port. Maintenance fees now comprise 45 percent of revenues and a lion’s share of profitability. This is largely because the software As prices rise, IT executives are scrutinizing exactly what they are market has matured and consolidated, leaving customers hostage getting for their money. Many lament the “feature bloat” of enter- to a few big companies, Madsen said. prise software. “When I was a BI director,” said Madsen, “we used
Eager to echo this theme, Brian Gentile, CEO of open source BI 1 Visit the TDWI Boston Chapter page and download slides from the event here: vendor Jaspersoft, said the software market is ripe for disruption: http://www.tdwi.org/education/Chapters/display.aspx?id=8304
2 WHAT WORKS in enterprise business intelligence Volume 28 f e at u r e
Not all lookers are hooked, though. Open source isn’t for everyone.
less than 40 percent of the features in our BI tools. And while open source product. “If Jaspersoft were to disappear tomorrow, our source products may not have all the bells and whistles, they pass code would live on for a very long time because there is a strong the ‘good enough’ test.” developer community that has contributed to the code and is invested in its future.” Will Interest Translate into Sales? Not surprisingly, interest in open source BI tools has skyrocketed Leading Adopters as the economy plummeted. Many BI teams are looking for ways Small companies are leading the charge into open source BI, to reduce costs while still delivering value. Speaking from the according to Madsen, but medium and large companies are not far audience, Doug Newton, a data warehousing manager at The Math- behind. Small companies are deploying open source BI tools on an works and a coordinator for TDWI’s Boston Chapter, said that open enterprise basis while large companies are using it in departmental source software makes it really easy to “kick the tires” before com- pockets, usually to augment existing BI tools or fill a vacuum where mitting to a purchase. He told the audience he downloaded open no BI tools exist, Madsen said. source software from Infobright, among others, and liked what he saw, although his company has yet to start using open source tools. Kevin Haas of OpenBI—a BI consultancy that helps companies build applications with open source BI tools—said most of his Evidently, Newton is not alone. Gentile says Jaspersoft averages clients use the free community edition of open source BI products. 250,000 downloads per month for its free community edition However, the clients with the biggest applications—those deployed and has had 9 million downloads since its inception six years ago. on an enterprise scale—implement the commercial or premium “Most aren’t paying us anything… yet,” said Gentile. Infobright, an versions of the tools, which offer additional functionality for enter- open source columnar database vendor that also presented at the prise deployments as well as support, scheduled release cycles, event, has had more than 10,000 downloads, a number that should and indemnity. jump as more people hear about the company. While adoption by end-user organizations is growing slowly, uptake To date, there has been more tire kicking than usage, but many by independent software vendors (ISVs) has been sizable. Open experts (including myself) predict this will gradually change. source makes it easy for ISVs to enrich their own applications The TDWI Boston Chapter surveyed its users and found that by embedding open source reporting or analytical tools into their 55 percent had yet to deploy open source software. Among those products. In fact, Gentile said hundreds of thousands of people that have implemented open source BI tools, 35 percent have are using Jaspersoft without knowing it because it’s embedded in deployed MySQL, 20 percent Pentaho, 10 percent Jaspersoft, other applications. The nascent market for software-as-a-service 6 percent BIRT, and 6 percent Talend. Their primary reason for applications has been a particularly robust market for open source deploying open source BI tools is cost (75 percent), followed by BI vendors. quick deployment (30 percent) and unhappiness with incumbent BI tools (14 percent). Inexorable Rise If the mantra of business today is “faster, better, cheaper,” then it’s Free Isn’t for Everyone inevitable that companies need to explore alternatives to traditional Not all lookers are hooked, though. Open source isn’t for everyone. enterprise software. Currently, open source BI tools offer significant “Just because it’s free doesn’t mean it’s right for you,” Madsen said. cost savings over established BI vendors. As open source BI tools It’s important to evaluate open source tools like any other BI tool. mature and undercut established players on price and flexibility, we “Missing features,” “lack of scalability,” “need for internal expertise,” will see an inexorable rise in the adoption of open source BI tools. and “switching costs” are the most common reasons companies pass on open source tools. Wayne W. Eckerson is the director of TDWI Research at The Data Warehousing Institute. He is an industry analyst and the author of Most open source BI vendors are small start-ups, which raises the Performance Dashboards: Measuring, Monitoring, and Managing question of vendor viability. Gentile deflected this issue by point- Your Business (John Wiley & Sons, 2005). He can be reached at ing to the rich community of developers that surrounds each open [email protected].
WHAT WORKS in enterprise business intelligence Volume 28 3 f e at u r e
BI or Bust Study Highlights Best Practices for a Tough Economy
By James E. Powell
Using BI as a tool for surviving the recession requires a combina- tion of “strategic actions, organizational capabilities, and enabling technologies,” according to the latest survey from Aberdeen Group. The firm’s latest report examines how businesses have been able to “insulate themselves from the effects of the eco- nomic recession” using insights from BI. The survey is based on responses from 259 participants actively using BI technology.
Companies are clearly under pressure. Of the 330 organizations participating, 39 percent have seen sales revenue fall, and are feeling pressure to align costs with their falling revenue forecast. (Pricing pressures from customers and increased output to meet customer demand rounded out the top business pressures.) $$ The researchers used three performance criteria to identify Best-in- $ Class companies—the top 20 percent of performers in the group.$ The companies excelled in several metrics, including an 11 percent increase in operating profit since September 2008, a customer order to keep cash-flow strong.” They should “improve their insight retention rate of 96 percent, and providing access to BI software to into the sales pipeline and marketing performance, [and] consider 56 percent of its workforce. whether it is appropriate to establish a Business Intelligence Com- petency Center.” Best-in-Class companies should consider using What do these companies have in common when it comes to BI? “corporate performance management to enhance planning, budgeting, More than three-quarters (82 percent) monitor their receivables and forecasting capabilities.” performance, identifying slow payers and following up; only 72 per- cent of all other companies did so. The companies also are more BI investment remains strong. Aberdeen found that 64 percent likely to monitor the sales pipeline (79 percent versus 66 percent of respondents indicated their enterprise will invest in new or of all others). Almost two-thirds (61 percent) can track sales back upgraded BI applications for sales and marketing in the next year. to marketing leads; only 43 percent of the lowest group (“Laggard” Those plans span companies of all sizes: Of the 24 percent of companies) can do this. respondents who say they’ll deploy advanced analytics within the next 12 months, 38 percent are small companies (with revenues No matter what class an enterprise is in—Laggard, Industry Aver- of no more than $50 million), 36 percent are midsize enterprises age, or Best-in-Class—the top two strategic actions are the same: (from $50 million to $100 billion in annual revenues), and 45 “analyzing sales and focus on the strongest markets” and “optimize percent are organizations with revenues of $1 billion or more. for growth without adding capital,” the report points out. “The Best- Twenty-three percent of respondents plan to adopt dashboards in in-Class are under pressure to increase demand while countering the next 12 months, and 22 percent are planning to implement pricing pressure from their customers. So, the intent of the Best- real-time BI. in-Class is to focus on the strongest market segments where there is less pricing pressure, less competition, and sustainable profit James E. Powell is the editorial director at TDWI. margins,” David White, the report’s author, explains. This article appeared in BI This Week e-newsletter August 26, The report advises enterprises to “closely monitor receivables 2009. For more information or to subscribe, visit performance and take action against late paying customers in www.tdwi.org/publications/newsletters.
4 WHAT WORKS in enterprise business intelligence Volume 28 f e at u r e
Text Analytics to the Rescue
By Stephen Swoyer
Text analytics guru Seth Grimes, a principal with consultancy One downside to text analytics success is hype. Grimes found that Alta Plana, recently published the 2009 edition of his “Text potential adopters often have unrealistic expectations on the text Analytics: User Perspectives on Solutions and Providers” survey. analytic tip. For example, he notes, prospective text analytics users Like its predecessor, the 2009 version is chock-full of intriguing tend to cite a different—and, not surprisingly, more explicitly remu- nuggets—particularly on the demand side. nerative—set of ROI drivers than do existing practitioners. This is both good and bad, he explains. Not only is text analytics usage increasing (along with an ever- expanding constellation of applications), but the number and variety “Of prospective-user respondents, almost a quarter are already of sources that text analytics practitioners say they’re consuming using ‘increased sales to existing customers’ as an ROI measure, also continues to expand. which make[s] sense. Sales are easily tracked and analyzed by current systems where items such as satisfaction ratings are not,” All in all, the most recent Text Analytics survey suggests a clear Grimes writes. and inescapable increase in the consumption—and importance— $ of unstructured data. On the other hand, he continues, a total of five ROI drivers are accorded disproportionate weight (cited by 38 percent or more For example, Grimes notes, nearly half (47 percent) of current text of respondents) by prospective adopters, which suggests that analytics practitioners say they’re consuming data from blogs or prospects tend to be more exuberant—irrationally so—about the social networks; slightly less (44 percent) cite data from news arti- perceived benefits of text analytics than do seasoned users. “These cles, e-mail messages (36 percent), online forums (35 percent), or prospective users, and the folks who advise them, would do well to customer/marketing surveys (34 percent). All of this suggests that manage and focus their expectations.” such unstructured data—which has been viewed as a potentially valuable (but nonetheless unverified) information source—is begin- Stephen Swoyer is a technology writer based in Athens, GA. ning to pay off. “These are on-line and other feedback-rich sources. Their high rate of selection suggests that veteran users have found This article appeared in BI This Week e-newsletter August 12, significant benefit in these sources,” writes Grimes. The rub, he 2009. For more information or to subscribe, visit says, is that shops that aren’t currently using text analytics probably www.tdwi.org/publications/newsletters. don’t know what they’re missing.
“By contrast, only three information-type categories [e.g., e-mail and correspondence, customer or marketing surveys, and con- tact center notes/transcripts] were selected by over 26 percent of respondents who are not yet using text analytics,” Grimes contin- ues. “It’s easy to infer that the value of online materials … has not yet become clear to prospective users. That only a minority chose any particular category suggests … [that] prospective users are more broadly distributed across application categories … [or that] prospective users are cautious about how many different sources they tackle initially.”
Such sources will undoubtedly come later, Grimes suggests, after text analytics adopters first master traditional materials: “[T]he plu- rality—the largest portion—of prospective users will focus initially on materials they have on hand that involve interactions with known stakeholders. Web sources can come later.”
WHAT WORKS in enterprise business intelligence Volume 28 5 Enterprise Business D a s h b o a r d s , S c o r e c a r d s , S oftware-as-a- S e r v i c e Intelligence Defined a n d Visualization pages 23–24 pages 7–8 Software-as-a-service is a new way of deliver- To help you make your way through These are techniques for visualizing data. ing applications when a third party hosts your the many powerful case stud- Dashboards typically visualize operational or applications or infrastructure on a platform tactical metrics, while scorecards visualize outside your firewall. The service provider ies and lessons from the experts strategic ones. Visualization represents a range hosts all customers on the same application articles in What Works in Enter- of techniques for visualizing data. and platform, achieving economies of scale and simplifying administration and upgrades. prise Business Intelligence, we have arranged them into specific E n t e r p r i s e B u s i n e s s categories: dashboards, scorecards, I ntelligence and visualization; enterprise busi- pages 9–18
ness intelligence; open source Enterprise business intelligence involves business intelligence; and soft- deploying query, reporting, and analysis capa- bilities to all employees who can benefit from ware-as-a-service. What do these them as well as to customers and suppliers. terms mean, and how do they apply to your organization? O p e n S o u r c e B u s i n e s s intelligence pages 19–22
Open source business intelligence consists of query, reporting, and analysis tools built on an open source foundation; in other words, they are free to download and use.
6 WHAT WORKS in enterprise business intelligence Volume 28 d a s h b o a r d s, scorecar d s, a n d v isualization
c a s e s t u dy
BI on the Fly
Commentary by Mark Seward Vice President, Software Development, E•SPONDER
Background The Solution The city of St. Louis hosted the 2009 MLB The city contacted ESRI and Microsoft part- “Using MapIt and Microsoft All-Star Game, which was expected to draw ner E•SPONDER, which helped manage technology, we reduced our nearly 50,000 fans and thousands of sup- the 2004 presidential debates in St. Louis. port personnel for five days of game-related E•SPONDER studied the city’s requirements development costs and delivered events. Occasions like the All-Star Game for the project and proposed a solution a new solution in record time.” are not taken lightly by cities; they require based on many of the existing Microsoft Mark Seward a tremendous amount of planning and are applications and ESRI’s MapIt. Vice President, Software Development, E•SPONDER expected to generate revenue. Furthermore, there are security requirements on a scale Many readers are familiar with the various that most businesses don’t encounter. components of the Microsoft business intel- development relationship, the integration ligence stack, but MapIt is probably new to of the two existing application environ- The Challenge most. MapIt is a lightweight mapping solution ments was much simpler and quicker than To ensure a successful event, the city designed to prepare, serve, and use geo- anticipated. “Using MapIt and Microsoft tech- needed access to a tremendous amount of graphic data stored in SQL Server 2008 and nology, we reduced our development costs data from more than 35 city, state, federal, displayed through SharePoint and Silverlight and delivered a new solution in record time,” and private organizations. Much of this Web-based applications. MapIt utilizes Micro- said Mark Seward, vice president of software data was dynamic, updated in real time by soft Bing Maps to provide the aerial imagery development for E•SPONDER. public safety and maintenance personnel. In and street data for mapping. addition, data was continuously updated in The success of the project has been vali- various facilities throughout the area, such The Benefits dated by the city’s adoption of the application as hospitals. The E•SPONDER solution provided a map- as their ongoing incident and event manage- centric environment for interacting with data. ment system. A further challenge was the requirement This approach had a track record of quick for user interfaces that would ensure quick acceptance by diverse groups of end users. For a free white paper on this topic, click here and adoption by all stakeholders. The interfaces Microsoft Surface was used to provide a highly choose the title “GIS and Business Intelligence: The Geographic Advantage.” For more had to be tailored for various work environ- interactive “big picture” view of the entire information about ESRI, click here. ments and not disrupt established work event. High-level decision makers could rap- flows. Field workers had to interact with the idly access all levels of personnel, asset, and data via portable devices; analysts worked incident data in a highly collaborative environ- with data on desktop computers; and deci- ment. Personnel in the field could access sion makers needed the data presented in and update data by interacting with maps on a way that fostered rapid collaboration and rugged tablet PCs and handheld devices. interactivity. The system also had to create and distribute action and contingency plans Leveraging existing application and data as well as current status reports. assets helped the city of St. Louis optimize the return on their investment in the event. To be cost effective, the end solution should Because ESRI and Microsoft have a close utilize existing applications and resources wherever possible. Many agencies involved in the project were using Microsoft applications and ESRI GIS in their day-to-day operations. These existing applications presented both an opportunity and a conceptual framework for a solution that could successfully manage a large event.
WHAT WORKS in enterprise business intelligence Volume 28 7 d a s h b o a r d s, scorecar d s, a n d v isualization
lesson from the experts
BI by Any Other Name
By Steve Trammell ESRI Alliance Marketing
In July of 2009, ESRI introduced MapIt, a The differences between BI and incident program that helps organizations quickly dis- management are more a matter of degree The lesson for BI users: There cover and exploit the geographic aspects of than applications. For instance, collaboration are probably other units in your their data. MapIt plugs into Internet Informa- in the decision-making process is extremely tion Server to create connections to Microsoft important. The analysis and status of an organization facing challenges SQL Server 2008 databases and deliver unfolding event is typically presented on that can be addressed with highly interactive maps through SharePoint multiple screens. Many are touch sensitive, and Silverlight Web-based applications. With so map-based views of an event can be your skills and knowledge. MapIt, you can put interactive maps that zoomed, panned, and queried rapidly by a display your information virtually anywhere team of people. Drill-down to granular asset within your organization. In short, MapIt was and resource data is achieved by tapping may use terminology that seems unrelated developed to bring geographic analysis and symbols on the map. to your skills, but a discussion may reveal map-based reporting to the Microsoft busi- issues that can be resolved with your help. ness intelligence environment. Wireless updating of data in the field is the This offers the potential of improving your norm rather than the exception for incident organization’s overall performance and also End users were already using many of management. Tablets and handheld devices gives you new stakeholders invested in the MapIt’s individual components, and some with map-based interfaces are used to maintenance and expanded usage of your developers were using prerelease versions access and update asset data and readiness applications and skills. of MapIt to address specific opportunities. information for various resources in real time. We were surprised to hear that one of these For a free white paper on this topic, click here and developers had quickly implemented MapIt The lesson we learned with this particular choose the title “GIS and Business Intelligence: The Geographic Advantage.” For more for a large incident management project project was that our preconceived ideas information about ESRI, click here. (described in “BI on the Fly,” page 7). Since regarding BI users were in fact too narrow. MapIt was ostensibly built for the BI market, We also learned that our new application was we were naturally curious why it had been not just a BI tool but a solution that could used on this particular project. address a wide variety of challenges faced by many different types of organizations. We discovered that incident management requires input of data from many operational The lesson for BI users: There are prob- units within an agency, as well as outside pri- ably other units in your organization facing vate organizations. This disparate but highly challenges that can be addressed with your relevant data should be presented to decision skills and knowledge. These departments makers as a comprehensive “big picture” view into the overall status of an event. At the same time, this view must provide an intui- tive means of accessing granular asset and readiness data for all available assets. Finally, decisions based on information derived from the data should be distributed to those who can act quickly and effectively. Access, anal- ysis, and communication are the hallmarks of successful BI projects, so incident manage- ment can be viewed as a very specialized form of BI.
8 WHAT WORKS in enterprise business intelligence Volume 28 enterprise business intelligence
lesson from the experts
Enterprise BI Beyond the Enterprise: Customer-Facing Business Intelligence
By Jake Freivald Vice President of Marketing, Information Builders
A few decades ago, gas stations transformed There’s nothing conceptually difficult about publishers with information that they themselves by supplying “self-service” customer-facing or revenue-generating BI. can’t get anywhere else in the industry pumps and employing just one person You have to access enterprise data sources as quickly,” according to their CFO. That to staff a station and collect money from and make their information easily accessible information includes which titles are customers. It was a win-win situation: The to external end users. But you can’t give selling, where, and in what quantities. stations reduced payroll costs and earned these users complex tools; you have to focus The CFO told Information Builders, “This higher profits even as customers paid lower on highly parameterized BI applications, puts us in a completely different light fuel prices. Stations that offered self-service the sort of thing people can tackle without with our partners.” also gained market share over those that training. They have to see everything in didn’t. It was the difference between cod- context. Ideally, users should be able to find • A major automobile manufacturer built dling people, which is expensive and slow, the information through keyword searches, a warranty management application that and empowering people, which is cheaper simple forms, and basic Web-interface capa- allows each dealer in its network to moni- and faster. bilities such as drop-down boxes and radio tor how much its warranty performance buttons. The old usability paradigms (drag varies from the average performance There’s an opportunity today to achieve and drop, slice and dice) have to give way to of others within the same region. More similar results with customer-facing busi- simpler user experiences that are still power- than 14,000 dealers rely on the system, ness intelligence. We’re so used to thinking ful enough to provide any permutation of the including all the company’s dealerships of BI as an inward-facing activity that we data that your users want. worldwide. The application has been don’t think about providing it to our custom- deployed in 14 languages and more ers, partners, and suppliers. When we do And of course you’ll need to scale securely. are planned to support the Asia-Pacific give them information, it’s frequently in hard With any luck, there are a lot more people markets. It helps the manufacturer copy reports and fancy brochures, or maybe outside your company than inside who can instantly identify numbers that are out spreadsheets and flat files. It feels like we’re use your information. Many of our clients of line while creating an environment of giving them what they want—like we’re cod- report tens or hundreds of thousands of healthy competition between dealers. The dling them—but in fact they could get more users, and the largest applications run into application—and the behavior changes value by accessing the information that they the millions. You still need to manage who it caused—have saved the manufacturer want, in the way they want it, directly. can ask for what. That’s not something you $40–60 million per year based on better can take for granted in a BI platform. warranty repairs. If you think about the kinds of information you collect already, you’ll see a lot of things At Information Builders, our effort to create • Canada’s leading processor of credit card that you could share with third parties to large-scale, pervasive BI applications has and related transactions, Moneris Solu- your mutual benefit. Product information, led to the recognition that these applications tions, generates revenue by repurposing package delivery status, and billing details are ideally suited to support customer-facing information it would have collected come to mind—they already form the basis initiatives. Here are some examples of Web- anyway. Like most credit card proces- of self-service applications for large compa- FOCUS applications that reach beyond the sors, Moneris charges a small percentage nies—but there are other large, untapped enterprise: of each sale for electronically processing information resources inside your enterprise. and authorizing credit card purchases. Sometimes those resources can even be • A premier distributor of paperback and In addition, the company built a WebFO- exploited for profit, creating revenue-generat- hardcover books built a self-service CUS-based application called Merchant ing BI, of all things. reporting environment that “provides Direct that allows merchants to view their
WHAT WORKS in enterprise business intelligence Volume 28 9 enterprise business intelligence
lesson from the experts
Visa and MasterCard transaction data tricity and gas companies in the UK, is online, including consolidated statements enhancing customer service while cutting Customer-facing BI apps need to and reports and a customized view of support costs with a self-service portal be scalable: Many of our clients card payment activity. This is incredibly built on WebFOCUS. The application is valuable to its customers, who are willing helping the company’s customers reduce report tens or hundreds of thou- to pay a fee to gain insight into the buying their energy consumption expenses—a sands of users, and the largest patterns these transactions provide. With benefit to both the individual company more than 1.7 billion transactions annu- and to the environment. Its Business applications run into the millions. ally and more than 300,000 customers, Energy Centre (BEC) Web site provides the application needed to be highly scal- 420,000 corporate customers with online able and extremely easy to use. retrieval of “day plus one” billing and felt pressure knowing their inspection usage data, which is dynamically updated results were easy to find, and inspection • One client, the nation’s leading profes- every 24 hours. It provides accurate, scores rose. This application can be seen sional employer organization (PEO), detailed intelligence that helps organiza- online at http://tinyurl.com/nycrestaurant. manages more than 100,000 work- tions identify usage peaks and troughs, ers—professionals who specialize in spot trends, and take prompt action to You get the idea: The possibilities are mind everything from accounting to administra- reduce consumption levels. The informa- boggling. Many of the best applications can tive support—for thousands of clients tion provided helps companies cut costs be made with data you already collect. It’s and tens of thousands of worksites. This and meet environmental sustainability just a matter of looking for ways to empower allows its clients to avoid the arduous targets through smarter, more conserva- your customers and partners—looking for the tasks in recruiting, hiring, and paying tive gas and electricity usage. win-win situation that only self-service appli- employees directly. A large component cations can provide. of this involves information sharing: • As part of its commitment to the pub- providing access to self-service, client- lic’s right to know about health-code For a free white paper on this topic, click here facing reports for payroll, benefits, and compliance, the New York City Depart- and choose the title “The World’s Best Business Intelligence Applications: Customer-Facing, employee information. ment of Health and Mental Hygiene Revenue-Generating BI.” For more information allows access to inspection records for about Information Builders, click here. In effect, the company acts as a full- any of its 20,000 restaurants. Providing service human resources department for the information online helped eliminate small- and midsize businesses, offering paper-based processes, reduce the time payroll and taxation processing, workforce to look up inspection results (it originally management, benefits administration, could take up to four days), and reach and workers’ compensation. By providing thousands more people with information staffing and full reporting and analysis related to their potential health risks. Per- capabilities, smaller firms maximize their haps more importantly, the restaurants productivity by leveraging the same type of formal HR processes as their larger counterparts without maintaining their own staff or expensive infrastructure.
• Scottish and Southern Energy (SSE), one of the largest vertically integrated elec-
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Adopting an Enterprise BI Standard to Share Information on Students, Admissions, and Enrollment
Commentary by Daniel E. Thomas Director, Applications Development, University of Miami
The University of Miami (www.miami.edu) current numbers and allows for comparisons is a private educational institution with an to previous year totals. enrollment of 15,600. The students are enrolled in 120 bachelor, 108 master, 49 In addition, the financial aid area can ana- doctoral, and 2 professional programs in lyze student data to determine the number the university’s five campuses. To create an receiving aid and the type of aid. This can effective and diverse educational environ- be critical data in both recruitment and ment, the university needed a uniform way to retention; students’ ability to finance a col- manage and access student information from lege education significantly affects their the admission process through graduation. academic performance and the continuation data to help attract and retain qualified indi- of their studies. viduals from different backgrounds. Users can In 1997, the University of Miami selected view trends and use predictive analytics to see MicroStrategy for its BI needs, and today it The University of Miami also created what attracts these individuals. has deployed this platform across the institu- a human resources data mart on the tion to anchor multiple BI applications. End MicroStrategy platform to meet its human Since implementing MicroStrategy, the users are able to access a single BI interface resources needs. The university employs human resources department has been able that reaches a number of data marts across more than 16,000 faculty and staff who work to run queries faster and analyze data in the university. These data marts are available with students. Their hiring, professional pro- more ways than before. The new methods to all departments that might have an inter- gression, and achievements affect both the of analyses allow the department to look for est in either prospective or current students. university as well as the students. trends, predict needs and opportunities, and Most users have access to prompted grid plan strategies to meet the needs of these reports to ensure personalization and data The purpose of HR analyses is twofold: to turbulent economic times. security. Since the user base has grown aid in finding and retaining the best talent more proficient with the product, the queries and to serve as a feedback mechanism to New data marts are being developed to are more sophisticated, including predictive the university and the federal government. support space management activities and analysis and trending. The HR data marts can be used to analyze benefits administration. Reporting for the the recruitment and retention of the most American Recovery and Reinvestment Act The admissions department relies on talented professionals in each field, giving the (ARRA) utilizes many structures already MicroStrategy to track the qualifications and university excellent faculty and staff, as well available in the data marts. Future initiatives diversity of each incoming class. As a result, as a good reputation in professional circles. include broader tools for supporting financial admissions offices can segment the prospec- aid and the budgeting process. tive student population to more effectively The human resources department must also customize its interaction with students in a report on affirmative action and equality to the For a free white paper on this topic, click here particular demographic or qualification group. federal government. Users can analyze the and choose the title “Evolving from Departmental Islands of BI to a Cohesive hiring, career progression, and compensation Enterprise BI Environment.” For more Building classes that meet admission of individuals from different groups to iden- information about MicroStrategy, click here. goals depends on predicting and monitor- tify strengths or weaknesses. The university ing acceptance rates based on offers. The sends the results to the government to comply MicroStrategy tool allows for clear insight into with federal mandates, but it also uses this
WHAT WORKS in enterprise business intelligence Volume 28 11 enterprise business intelligence
lesson from the experts
The cornerstone Fostering of any enterprise BI blueprint Departmental BI While should be the incremental Working Toward an gathering of data and development Integrated Enterprise of BI metadata and applica- BI Environment tions across the organization. As By Dan Paladino Analyst, Industry and Solution Marketing, the amount of MicroStrategy collected data increases, that data should be The Enterprise BI Vision increasingly lev- A successful enterprise BI environment eraged through seamlessly encompasses a wide variety of BI applications. applications across an organization’s depart- This leads to Enterprise BI environments provide a single version of the truth across the enterprise, as ments and workgroups. A key feature of more business well as high performance, scalability, and access to a wide variety of cross-departmental enterprise BI environments is that they are users having the applications from a single interface. based on a common set of building blocks opportunity to (i.e., metadata) with which users can develop benefit from BI reports, dashboards, and other BI compo- insight. Perhaps most importantly, however, To eventually reach the goal of enterprise BI, nents. This promotes internal self consistency is that the incremental costs of enterprise organizations should work to incrementally and a single version of the truth across the BI become justified as the number of consolidate their departmental islands of BI enterprise at the lowest cost of ownership. users grows and the return on investment into the enterprise environment. This process In addition, the high performance and scal- becomes clearer. must be transparent to business users as ability of enterprise BI supports the needs of their applications are migrated into a more the entire organization, regardless of how or Promoting the Growth of Departmental efficient, cost-saving, and scalable enterprise where business users access their BI. BI Applications and Merging Them into BI framework. Any BI tool used to conduct this the Enterprise evolution must ensure this gradual, transparent Enterprise BI also enables business users More specifically, the key to incrementally consolidation of departmental islands of BI. to address their immediate requirements by building an enterprise BI environment is to leveraging all five styles of BI, including dash- foster the growth of departmental BI applica- Summary boards and scorecards, enterprise reporting, tions across the organization. Departmental Enterprise BI environments provide organiza- OLAP analysis, advanced and predictive BI is inevitable. Its smaller scale, flexibility, tions with high performance, optimal data analysis, and alerts and notifications. With and convenience enables individual depart- and user scalability, and access to multiple these capabilities, business users can build ments and workgroups to satisfy their cross-departmental applications. Although a wide variety of applications for both depart- immediate business imperatives in a timely successfully developing an enterprise BI mental and interdepartmental use. fashion. As a result, more and more depart- environment can take several years, it is a mental “islands” of BI surface throughout the worthwhile investment because it promotes Developing an Enterprise BI Blueprint to enterprise over time. a single version of the truth and low total Achieve Enterprise BI cost of ownership. To achieve enterprise BI, It can take several years to successfully It is important to promote the use of these organizations should develop an enterprise BI establish a fully integrated, cohesive enter- systems across the entire organization. This blueprint. This development strategy should prise BI environment. To achieve enterprise creates, in effect, an information culture with be focused on fostering departmental islands BI, organizations must first develop and an understanding of the value of BI invest- of BI and finding a way to eventually merge evolve an enterprise BI “blueprint” or strat- ment. Fostering departmental BI is essential them within an enterprise BI environment. egy. Such an overarching strategy takes time to increase user adoption and lay the neces- to implement and will be revised over time, sary groundwork for an integrated enterprise For a free white paper on this topic, click here but is essential to the direction of an organi- BI environment that encompasses all of and choose the title “Evolving from Departmental Islands of BI to a Cohesive zation’s enterprise BI development. these departmental islands. Enterprise BI Environment.” For more information about MicroStrategy, click here.
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Qualcomm Speeds Time to Business Answers
Commentary by Steve Rimar Senior Programmer Analyst, Qualcomm
Qualcomm Incorporated (Nasdaq: QCOM) is Reduced Reporting Time and Optimized a leader in developing and delivering innova- Staffing Accelerate Time to Market “With QlikView’s ability to enable tive digital wireless communication products Although QlikView was originally intended IT groups to rapidly deploy and services based on CDMA and other for reporting within Qualcomm’s product advanced technologies. development services organization, use grew applications, we are able to put organically as employees recognized the the power of data analysis into Understanding the usage of internal applica- potential of QlikView analysis for functions tions is vital. With Qualcomm’s numerous outside of IT. More than 100 dashboards and the hands of our engineers faster business intelligence (BI) systems, obtaining reporting applications have been deployed than ever before.” application usage information sounds easy. across 15 business units. These applications Steve Rimar However, employees from the product devel- have given employees one-click access to Senior Programmer Analyst, Qualcomm opment services team could not easily utilize information that had previously taken them these tools to obtain this information. They hours or days to track down. did not lack the skills to do so; they simply four hours each week preparing reports lacked the time and resources. For example, a QlikView application for the for eight different Qualcomm product fami- ASIC System Test (AST) group has enabled lies—an exhausting five-step process that Steve Rimar, Qualcomm senior programmer Qualcomm to increase efficiencies in the included querying data from the company’s analyst, discovered QlikView while looking chip testing lifecycle and ultimately improve Manufacturing Execution System (MES) for a solution to some of the department’s throughput time. Previously, each group had using Qualcomm’s former BI software prod- key reporting and analysis challenges. to compile and distribute individual Excel uct, exporting to Microsoft Excel, creating a Rimar was intrigued by the appealing visual spreadsheets, since the AST group includes pivot table, refreshing the existing chart, and analysis and ability to rapidly develop new nine different subdivisions and employees in manually calculating yield and defects per applications. After downloading the fully both the United States and India. Today, the hundred units (DPHU) to complete the chart. functional free trial of QlikView, he built department’s 40 users share a single view Today, the weekly reporting process has an application for analysis of Qualcomm’s of how each chip feature is testing against been completely eliminated, saving the qual- Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) each phone, with powerful trending analysis ity technician 16–20 hours each month. system—within a few days. of coverage percentage, automation complete, and other key testing metrics. Qualcomm has Putting Business Intelligence in the The QlikView solution he developed accesses been able to save one day each month previ- Hands of End Users a large data set within the PLM application, ously spent generating reports. The same AST Qualcomm recognizes the additional value providing analysis on the number and pro- application also enables Qualcomm to opti- QlikView brings to its end users. “Since files of employees using the system, along mize staffing to meet timing commitments to QlikView is an all-encompassing tool and we with specifics on peak usage time, system the company’s manufacturing suppliers. don’t need to spend a lot of time gathering performance and speed, average product and modifying requirements, it only takes turnaround time, and bottlenecks in the pro- “Qliking” for Quality: Efficiency and a few days to get new applications up and cess. With Qualcomm’s existing BI solutions, Transparency in Quality Control running, allowing us to quickly expand to development time for the same application In addition to increased reporting and staff- additional users,” said Rimar. could have taken weeks or even months. ing efficiencies and the associated cost After experiencing QlikView’s ease of use and savings, QlikView has enabled Qualcomm For a free white paper on this topic, click here the minimized amount of predefined analysis to provide its engineers with the intelligence and choose the title “QlikView 9 for Business Answers: Making Organizations Smarter required for development, the team made to improve quality control processes. Before and More Productive than Ever.” For more the decision to purchase QlikView. QlikView, a quality technician spent at least information about QlikView, click here.
WHAT WORKS in enterprise business intelligence Volume 28 13 enterprise business intelligence
lesson from the experts
Mobile BI Gets Interactive
By Anthony Deighton Senior VP of Products, QlikView
Most people have already formed their opin- The mobile device in that salesperson’s hand ions of mobile business intelligence—and can pinpoint their location via GPS services Simply put, what people really unfortunately, the majority of these opinions enabled on the mobile platform. Why not need from mobile BI are answers are unfavorable. However, there’s good leverage that capability to automatically reason for this: Early attempts at transform- deliver relevant information on customers in to questions. ing useful business applications into mobile the salesperson’s current vicinity? versions have failed. Some were quick to gain that first-mover advantage to the small Let’s then consider the way we interact with Like any maturing application with a useful screen by simply shrinking their application the mobile device. Assume the salesperson experience, the applications will proliferate to accommodate the reduced real estate of has eight records he or she wants to look until people don’t remember how they ever the screen. Other attempts pushed out static through. Each record should have its own survived without them. That’s miles away for reports, which may have been marginally screen for the best readability, and the user the “fun” applications that have never been helpful, but typically created a frustrating should be able to thumb through the records taken very seriously in the market. But with user experience with no opportunity to inter- in “cover flow” mode—like flipping through the recent introduction of true mobile interac- act with the data. These approaches may music selections. With the inevitable need tivity for gaining business answers, that time have given access to some information, but to answer more questions from the delivered is now. certainly didn’t provide a positive experience. data, the user can pinch and swipe the screen to highlight a specific selection and For a free white paper on this topic, click here Two things have happened since BI appli- drill down for more information. To move to and choose the title “QlikView 9 for Business Answers: Making Organizations Smarter cations were first introduced to mobile the next answer, the user can simply shake and More Productive than Ever.” For more devices. First, the connectivity of 3G wireless the device to erase. information about QlikView, click here. networks has improved to the point where mobile devices have become a reliable busi- This is the new world of mobile BI. By ness tool. Second, the iPhone has set the engaging in this new experience, people’s standard for multi-touch interactivity with opinions of the mobile enterprise applica- mobile devices that consumers—who are tion will change dramatically. Beyond static also business users—have quickly become views, the ability to interact with data makes accustomed to. a significant difference in the usability and adoption of these applications. We’ve found As the worlds of serious business applications that beyond sales and service road war- and personal mobile devices merge, people riors (and executives who need to check in want and expect their BI to be within arm’s on the business), interactive BI on a mobile reach. When thinking about BI for mobile device is especially useful in the healthcare users, consider what people will expect from industry, where doctors can drill down to the the application in this environment as well as records of their patients without the need for the capabilities of the mobile platform. a laptop.
Simply put, what people really need from mobile BI are answers to questions. Shrink- ing down a top 10 customer report for a salesperson on the go is an answer to one question. But what if the salesperson has more questions? Enter the age of interactive business intelligence.
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Delivering Value of Half a Billion Dollars Annually
Auto giant builds comprehensive customer view, resulting in increased auto sales, improved customer experience, and reduced costs By Bob Hartline CDI Marketing, Acxiom Corporation
The Opportunity in an inaccurate and incomplete view of cus- The Solution One of the world’s largest automakers manu- tomers and prospects. Also, its data hygiene The automotive manufacturer chose Acxiom factures cars and trucks in 34 countries, efforts were not coordinated throughout the to create a data quality and customer recog- employs more than 240,000 people, and company, causing duplicated efforts and nition management solution to manage the sells and services vehicles in some 140 slow response times. data that moves in and out of its data ware- countries. This company sold approximately house. The solution had to meet the current 8.35 million cars and trucks in 2008. Sometimes the company would even forgo pressing need, be able to grow with its entire marketing campaigns. Executing a marketing capabilities, and support its future Building upon those numbers, the com- campaign to all new car buyers subscribed hub applications to confidently recognize pany’s goal was to sell even more vehicles to the in-vehicle communications system customer data company wide. and service in the years to come by influenc- without knowing who they are and what ing buying behavior. There are many factors other relationships they have with the auto Acxiom’s arsenal in the area of data quality that go into a car purchase decision, making manufacturer could negatively affect cus- and customer recognition management was it a challenge to effectively market to the tomer satisfaction. perfect for the challenge. Acxiom Data Qual- consumer. Factors include unpredictable gas ity delivers the highest level of accuracy in prices; finding a car company that’s innova- The company needed a solution that would the industry, thanks to the Acxiom knowledge tive and in tune with the customer’s needs; enable it to clean, integrate, and manage base and AbiliTec. Acxiom is able to clean and finding a reliable, safe, and quality product at customer and prospect information across enrich data to a level exceeding the USPS. an affordable price; and whether to go with a multiple divisions in a central repository. The foreign or domestic brand. solution must also marry that information This lift translated into additional revenue and with product and service relationship data to: cost savings for the automotive company’s If that wasn’t daunting enough, the company marketing organization. Combining the clean also realized that when a consumer buys a 1. Improve automotive consumer intel- data with AbiliTec—Acxiom’s patented linking vehicle, that information goes into one data- ligence and customer lifecycle contact technology—provided an accurate and per- base. That’s what should be expected, right? optimization to increase the company’s sistent link for the recognition of individuals But if that same consumer also signs up for ability to sell more vehicles within and across the client’s comprehen- the in-vehicle communications and diag- sive data infrastructure. Unlike traditional nostics system, his or her information goes 2. Improve marketing effectiveness and tar- software-based matching that sorts and into another database. What if the consumer geting through dynamic messaging and groups similar records within a geography finances the purchase through the auto personalization and attempts to match prospective records manufacturer’s financial arm? You guessed together, AbiliTec uses exclusive matching it—that consumer’s information goes into yet 3. Respond faster and more accurately algorithms to apply consistent consumer and another database. to changing market conditions through address links, regardless of name changes, improved consumer targeting moves, nicknames, or name variations. It’s no wonder with a footprint so large that the auto giant was having a hard time keep- 4. Reduce costs related to duplicate data, The power and performance of Acxiom Data ing up with its customers. Its data was not poor customer interactions, and ineffi- Quality and AbiliTec is made possible by integrated across divisions, which resulted cient marketing efforts the Acxiom knowledge base of consumer
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information that has been compiled more different divisions based on company-specific The Benefits than 35 years. The Acxiom knowledge base data, business record–matching rules, and Acxiom helped breathe new life into the auto includes more than two billion historical AbiliTec. On top of the linking and grouping, a company’s marketing campaigns, cultivating occupancies, hundreds of sources, up to consolidated view of each consumer and his its most current prospects. Measurable busi- 20 years of history on an individual, reliable or her relationship to the company needed to ness benefits include: and time-tested matching algorithms based be maintained over time. AbiliTec was able on more than 40 years of experience, con- to ensure the company stayed relevant to • Increase in sales of more than 90,000 tact data (name, address), associative data customers, which is key to success in today’s vehicles and $36 million in seasonal (date of birth, gender, phone number), and customer-centric marketing environment. car-care programs internal metadata. To get the auto manufacturer the solution it • An $18.6 million reduction in operational The final piece of the puzzle was a robust wanted, Acxiom first needed a handle on its costs and savings customer recognition management capability disparate data sources. Data was previously that could link and group customer and pros- consolidated from multiple automotive divi- • A savings of $1.2 million annually in pect information from disparate records to sions, but was not as usable as it should be. returned and “spoiled” mail through recognize the individual across many Its affiliate partners and financing company address hygiene provided data, and data was also captured from its service and parts organization. The • Efficient and strategic marketing efforts company could now track the lifecycle of a targeted at distinct types of customers at Solution Snapshot customer across its massive database, even specific points in the customer’s lifecycle, Customer: Automotive giant down to the granular dealership level. To pre- achieving a 99.9 percent campaign quality serve its prior investments, Acxiom carefully and on-time performance The Opportunity: Data was not inte- grated across divisions, resulting in an leveraged the company’s existing customer inaccurate and incomplete view of cus- data repositories, creating a smooth transi- • An expanding outreach program to tomers and prospects. Data hygiene tion and minimizing potential disruption to customers who were lost due to over- efforts were not coordinated through- the infrastructure that was already in place. suppression of customer files out the company, causing duplicated efforts. In addition to tracking customers and compil- Acxiom built a strategic, long-standing rela- The Solution: Acxiom’s arsenal of data ing collective information into one database, tionship with the automotive manufacturer. quality and customer recognition man- the auto giant also needed to be aware of Throughout the years, Acxiom has helped agement tools was used to create a actual vehicle owner data. When vehicles the auto giant clean, integrate, and maintain data quality and customer recognition are sold from one person to another or pur- its customer data, which in turn has allowed management solution to manage the chased at an auction, it’s easy to lose sight the company to recognize its customers and data that moves in and out of its data of the vehicle owner. Acxiom and R.L. Polk improve overall customer service. The results warehouse. & Co., a provider of automotive information, speak for themselves: 8.35 million vehicles The Results: worked together to accurately track the vehi- sold globally in 2008 with $506 million in • Increase in sales of more than cle ownership of all vehicles after they leave sales profit attainment and $18.6 million in 90,000 vehicles and $36 million in the lot. This provided the automotive com- cost reductions and savings. seasonal car-care programs pany the ability to correctly estimate its car • An $18.6 million reduction in park and precisely target its marketing efforts For a free white paper on this topic, click here and choose the title “’Excuse Me, Have We operational costs and savings for extended warranty and maintenance pro- Met Before?’ How Knowledge-Based Customer • Efficient and strategic marketing grams, as well as new purchase offers. With Recognition Helps You Really Know Your Acxiom’s data hygiene and postal services, Customers.” For more information about efforts targeted at distinct types of Acxiom Corporation, click here. customers at specific points in the this auto manufacturer quickly reestablished customer’s lifecycle contact with key customers, reduced print and postage costs, and improved overall deliverability of campaigns.
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NetworkIP Dials Up a 90-day date range, the system will provide a response within a minute or so. This clearly The Solution at a Glance Blazingly Fast Call wasn’t good enough.” The Customer: NetworkIP (www.networkip.net) Detail Analysis Customer demands were outpacing the The Industry: Telecommunications application. Broquie and his team needed Commentary by Stephan Broquie The Application: Data warehouse to provide a solution that would let custom- Director of Business Application Development, and Web-based BI application for NetworkIP ers query the raw CDRs for any period of analyzing CDRs time. It would have to store at least two years’ worth of CDRs—about 1.2 billion records, The Benefits: Founded in 1998, NetworkIP is the innovator each containing approximately 200 pieces • Queries up to 1,000 times faster and leader in providing prepaid services to of information—and deliver responses in 10 • Eliminates the need for aggregate the telecommunications industry. NetworkIP seconds or fewer for 90 percent of queries. data and enables faster, more provides a carrier-grade platform, as well as granular analysis products and services that enable its cus- NetworkIP selected the Vertica Analytic Data- • Allows the company to cost-effec- tomers to offer telephone calling cards, audio base, a high-performance, column-oriented tively store and query two years’ conferencing, and other prepaid services on RDBMS that runs on industry-standard, worth of CDRs a turn-key basis. The company’s customers Linux-based hardware. Because of its speed, • Provides near-real-time analysis include major carriers, telecom service pro- the Vertica database lets NetworkIP avoid • Reduces network cost analysis viders, distributors, resellers, CLECs, ILECs, working with summary or aggregate data, query time from 12 hours to 10 ISPs, and publishers. which improves accuracy, reduces DBA time, seconds; enables daily cost adjust- and allows NetworkIP and its customers to ments versus monthly Customers rely heavily on access to the data do more granular analysis. • Provides the ability to create new in NetworkIP’s call detail records (CDRs) reports in days instead of weeks to make business decisions such as calling “Vertica gives us near-real-time access to program rate changes. NetworkIP answers data,” said Broquie. “ICS Reports include this need with its award-winning Integrated data that may be only 30 minutes old— Connection Solution (ICS) platform. Using instead of a day old. Formerly, I couldn’t create new reports very quickly,” Broquie the ICS application, customers can mine provide our customers any information for explained. “What I didn’t have until now was the CDRs to analyze their traffic patterns, today until tomorrow, because our summa- a database engine that could support this monitor and forecast their profitability, and rization process took place at night in batch. type of flexible reporting.” perform other analyses. Vertica’s trickle loading capability enables data to flow into the system on a 24/7 basis Vertica will also save money for NetworkIP in Customers loved the application. But as so customers can quickly evaluate the hardware and administration over the long NetworkIP’s business evolved, its custom- effects of calling plan changes and readjust term. NetworkIP is running on a four-node ers became savvier and more data-hungry. them accordingly—cycles which can now cluster of Dell 2950 servers. Each server has They started requesting reports that Stephan happen several times per day.” two quad-core CPUs with 16 GB of RAM and Broquie, director of business application 1.2 TB of storage across four hard drives. To development, couldn’t easily support with the The company is also seeing big performance scale database performance and storage, summary tables he and his team had built. advantages with internal use. For example, it Broquie and his team can just add inexpen- In short, the ICS had become a victim of its has cut the time to perform a critical monthly sive, off-the-shelf servers. own success. cost analysis of toll-free traffic from 12 hours (using MySQL and summary tables) to 10 “The bottom line is that Vertica is solving Broquie explained: “Our customers’ focus seconds (using Vertica). NetworkIP also problems. It is solving our current problems used to be mostly on what happened last analyzes call data in near real time, making and it will allow us to launch a new genera- week and last month. Today, customers want routing decisions based on complex trade- tion of applications that will help our business to know things over a long period of time. offs to deliver the best customer experience grow,” concluded Broquie. They want to look at trends and at things that at the lowest cost. happened over the last 12 months, and to be For a free white paper on this topic, click here able to compare this year with last year. Most “We spent most of last year creating a and choose the title “Optimizing DBMS Architectures for Next-Generation Data of our queries have only been able to accom- new data mining center with a reporting Warehousing.” For more information about modate a date range of 90 days. And, within engine that is very flexible and allows us to Vertica Systems, Inc., click here.
WHAT WORKS in enterprise business intelligence Volume 28 17 enterprise business intelligence
lesson from the experts
Six Ways to Transform the Economics of Data Warehousing
By David Menninger Vice President of Product Management and Marketing, Vertica Systems, Inc.
For more than a decade, IT organiza- 1. Blazing speed on commodity hardware. tions have been plagued by high data You don’t need costly “big iron” or spe- warehousing costs, with millions of dollars cialized data warehouse hardware to spent annually on specialized, high-end get great performance. Columnar data hardware and DBA personnel overhead for storage provides answers to queries 50 performance tuning. The root cause: data to 200 times faster than traditional data- warehouse database management software bases while running on “green” grids of that was designed 20 or 30 years ago to inexpensive, off-the-shelf servers. handle write-intensive OLTP workloads, not query-intensive analytic workloads. 2. Compression lowers storage costs. Most 5. Eliminate “rip and replace” upgrades. data warehouses are 5 to 20 times larger As data volumes and BI users rise, data Although state of the art for so many years, than the amount of data loaded into warehouses often outgrow the hardware those OLTP DBMSs were always the wrong them, due to indexes and other auxiliary on which they were deployed, resulting in tool for the job of data warehousing. This has structures designed to improve perfor- expensive “rip and replace” upgrades. A become more apparent—and more costly— mance. With columnar data structures, shared-nothing MPP architecture enables as the amount of data that companies need storage is often 4 to 15 times smaller a data warehouse to scale “out” by to analyze and the number of people who than the amount of data loaded, due to adding inexpensive servers to the cluster need to analyze it have skyrocketed. Over aggressive compression. This dramati- to handle the additional load. time, these costs and missed opportunities cally lowers storage costs and further to serve the business upset the economics of improves performance. 6. Lower maintenance costs. You should the data warehousing and greatly diminished not need a legion of DBAs to tune perfor- its return on investment (ROI). 3. No DBMS “tax.” Licensing should be mance. Configuration, database design, based on the amount of data stored, optimization, failover, and recovery should Verizon, Mozilla, Comcast, JP Morgan Chase, not on the type or amount of hardware be automated, lowering DBA costs and and dozens of other companies have imple- on which the database runs. Deploy on speeding up delivery of solutions to the mented a new generation of data warehouses 1 server or 100, and unless the data business. that are more economical, make data centers volume rises above the license limit, you “greener,” and most important, enable the can change your data warehouse hard- For a free white paper on this topic, click here business to make data-driven decisions at ware without having to change and choose the title “Optimizing DBMS Architectures for Next-Generation Data more levels and on more fronts so they can your license. Warehousing.” For more information about out-innovate and out-execute competitors. Vertica Systems, Inc., click here. 4. Free replication and high availability. How to Achieve Speed, Simplicity, and When you are managing terabytes of Dramatic Savings, Too data, licensing should allow you to repli- Use a DBMS built from the ground up to cate data without limit (or added fees) to handle large-scale data analysis workloads ensure high performance and high avail- for many concurrent users. The following ability. In addition, there should be no innovations have enabled customers to extra costs for development, testing, or manage terabytes of data faster, more staging copies of the database. reliably, and more economically:
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Monolith Serves SaaS BI to the Quick-Serve Restaurant Industry
Commentary by Bruce Belvin CEO, Monolith
Monolith Software Services, headquartered of demographics,” said Belvin. “So the in Charleston, SC, provides software and technology had to let people access things “Staying open source throughout services to the Quick-Serve Restaurant (QSR) according to their current need.” the stack has let us keep our cost industry. The company brings powerful and cost-effective solutions to restaurant owners A Preference for Open Source model where we want.” and operators by combining state-of-the- To create a competitive, robust, and highly Bruce Belvin industry open source technologies with a appealing SaaS solution, the Monolith team CEO, Monolith product philosophy that lets customers lever- decided to continue its reliance on open age existing investments in hardware and source software components. The QSR other technology infrastructure. industry’s low margins require that operators ad hoc queries, and flexible analytics—the seek cost-effective solutions. Licensing and combination was a perfect fit and saved us Monolith’s suite of proven tools enables com- other costs for some BI and ETL solutions countless developer hours.” panies—typically those operating multiple can be prohibitive, and Monolith eliminated restaurants under multiple brands—to more some candidates for this reason alone. The fully implemented SaaS solution now effectively track and manage restaurant per- serves more than 3,500 end users in more formance at a cost significantly below that of The proposed solution stack was founded than 60 ownership organizations. Data is its competitors. on Linux and, for the data warehouse, the polled daily from more than 2,000 individual MySQL database platform. The warehouse restaurants. Maintaining the Growth Curve would be fed using specialized restaurant Monolith’s early success and reputation data polling software developed in-house, The solution has proved a good fit with for extensive restaurant industry expertise as well as Talend’s open source enterprise- Monolith’s go-to-market strategy. “Staying enabled rapid growth in an industry filled grade ETL, Talend Integration Suite. The open source throughout the stack has let with tough competition. As its Above-Store analysis and reporting solution selected by us keep our cost model where we want,” Monitoring offering was adopted by larger Monolith is the Jaspersoft Business Intel- said Belvin. “Our potential buyers are small companies, Monolith needed to upgrade the ligence Suite. business owners who might be choosing solution. Above-Store Monitoring is a BI tool between our solution and fuel for their boat offered online in the software-as-a-service “We chose Jaspersoft and Talend for a couple or motor home for the next year. Because (SaaS) model. of key reasons,” said Belvin. “They could do we have to compete on this emotional level, everything we needed them to do. The teams being able to go fast and price aggressively Among Monolith’s requirements for a viable were a good fit. The pricing model was ideal. gives us a real competitive advantage.” solution, support for multi-tenancy, in which And they gave us the best assurance we heard a single instance of software serves multiple anywhere that they would help us implement For a free white paper on this topic, click here client organizations, was critical. “The nature the multi-tenancy features we need.” and choose the title “Open Sesame: Why Open Source BI, Data Integration, and of SaaS dictates that you have one imple- Data Warehousing Solutions are Gaining in mentation serving many different companies,” “The combination of Talend’s code generator Acceptance.” For more information about said Bruce Belvin, CEO of Monolith. That and of the use of industry standards makes Talend, click here. meant every application or infrastructure Talend incredibly portable and versatile. We software component in the solution stack were able to convert all our in-house code as had to accommodate this need. well as incorporate some new data sources (fairly complex processing) into Talend “Our solution lets owners consolidate, sepa- integration processes in just a few months,” rate, and analyze their store performance Belvin clarified. “Coupled with Jaspersoft’s along a lot of dimensions—geography, prod- full range of BI functionality—its modern uct type, product grouping, and a range user interface, self-service dashboarding,
WHAT WORKS in enterprise business intelligence Volume 28 19 open source business intelligence
lesson from the experts
BI in the Cloud: Getting Started
By Andrew Lampitt Director of Business Development, Jaspersoft
For data warehouse and business intelligence Look for a full range of BI functionality: ana- architects seeking to deploy more effective lytics, reporting and report serving, ad hoc Consider BI projects shelved due BI solutions at less cost, cloud-based BI can query, and in-memory as well as disk-based to resource constraints—you may help—especially for temporary, unpredict- analytic power. Your BI solution should be able, prototype, and proof of concept projects. easy to administer and use, with a rich but identify that gem of a project Implemented correctly, cloud-based BI easy-to-learn browser interface. It must be with the potential to make a big eliminates the need to fund or find new infra- based on a modern architecture that clusters structure or consume scarce data warehouse easily for high scalability and works seam- business impact. resources. For successful BI in the cloud, a lessly in virtualized environments. number of preferred practices are emerging: Stay with open source for ETL. To minimize private cloud environments, as well as your First, stack the deck. Every BI solution, the need for busy administrators, use an ETL on-premises environment. cloud based or not, requires a number of solution offering a full graphical environment components: reporting and/or analytics, ETL, for handling data transformation and integra- Make it easy on yourself. Try to find all four database, and the tools to manage these tion tasks; scripting is too much trouble for components of your cloud-based BI stack components as well as the underlying com- do-it-quickly projects. Your ETL technology preloaded and ready to use on one of the puting infrastructure. Carefully choose each should scale well, leverage commodity hard- mainstream public clouds. This way, you of these elements. ware, play well in virtual environments, and can skip most of the administrative work and offer a no-cost trial version. quickly get on with your proof of concept, Pick your projects. To get started in the prototype, or one-off analysis effort. cloud, choose an application that requires Choose your database carefully. Depending a data footprint of less than 1 TB (you can upon your database size and query complex- To see how these practices can be leveraged scale out later if your application catches on). ity, a traditional RDBMS may be suitable—or today, explore the Amazon EC2-based BI solu- Consider BI projects shelved due to resource you may prefer a high-performance analytic tion created by Jaspersoft, Talend, Vertica, constraints—you may identify that gem of a engine that can ensure the query speed and Rightscale at www.rightscale.com/bi. project with the potential to make a big busi- users require. Choose a column-oriented ness impact. Making a business case may solution so you’re not wasting overhead For a free white paper on this topic, click here become a nonissue, as your potential cost retrieving entire rows; a massive parallel and choose the title “Open Source in the Business Intelligence Market: Crossing the may not hit the bureaucracy threshold. In any processing (MPP) architecture is a must for Threshold to Mainstream Adoption.” For more case, you can accurately predict and control scalability and performance. Efficient, high- information about Jaspersoft, click here. costs, which will be low, and your project can compression technology is also essential; be retired as easily and affordably as it can ideally your choice will perform data opera- be started. tions on compressed data. Administration should be browser based with a modern Insist on open source BI. Aside from archi- architecture that can scale linearly. tectural concerns and high costs, proprietary solutions can also lock you in—just when Keep management options open. Use a cloud you’re trying to become more flexible. Pre- management solution to provide for automatic mium, “commercial open source” versions scaling, monitoring, and notifications. Ide- will give you the support, stability, and extra ally, the solution will include preconfigured features you may need while remaining templates for push-button provisioning and highly affordable. You can also use a free trial launching the database, BI, and ETL com- version to build a complete solution before ponents of your solution. Also, it should help you ever spend a penny on BI. you manage in and across multiple public and
20 WHAT WORKS in enterprise business intelligence Volume 28 open source business intelligence
c a s e s t u dy
The Swiss Colony Harnesses Web Data for BI
Commentary by Mark Douma Director of Internet Marketing and Operations, The Swiss Colony
Founded in 1926 by Ray Kubly, The Swiss The Swiss Colony initially turned to Pentaho “Pentaho’s BI suite and top-notch Colony is one of the world’s largest and Reporting because the company didn’t want most successful multi-title catalog compa- to invest in a traditional reporting product professional support enabled us to nies. Today, customers can purchase almost for a proof of concept project. However, as deliver a successful, high-value BI anything from The Swiss Colony’s line of the team got more involved in the develop- catalogs, including jewelry, furniture, cook- ment process, it decided to use the Pentaho solution at a much lower cost than ware, small appliances, bedding, electronics, Data Integration module as well. “As we got would have been possible with the and decorative items. more into the reporting, we realized that we wanted to tweak some of the data. We could expensive, proprietary alternatives.” As could be expected, the company has have rewritten the ETL process in Perl, but it Mark Douma developed a strong infrastructure to capture made more sense to use Pentaho,” Douma Director of Internet Marketing and Operations, and report information generated by its cata- said. For the project, The Swiss Colony part- The Swiss Colony log business. However, when e-commerce nered with OpenBI, a business intelligence grew as a channel, a new series of analytical consulting company and Pentaho partner requirements emerged. “We were doing a lot of that specializes in open source technology. requests and feature enhancements is faster our own analysis and building a lot of reports than I have experienced with commercial using SQL statements and then dumping data Douma felt very comfortable opting for a vendors,” Douma said. In the final analysis, to Excel,” said Mark Douma, director of Inter- commercial open source solution. “Our goals the Pentaho implementation has allowed The net marketing and operations. Moreover, the aligned very well,” he said. ”They sell sup- Swiss Colony to move to the next level in its company was not fully satisfied with the data port. They have a lot of incentive to provide business intelligence and analytics capacity. produced by its Web analytics applications. great support, and they do.” “With OpenBI and Pentaho, we have ramped “The Web analytics data was intriguing, but it up faster than we ever could have by our- stopped short of being truly actionable, unless The company has integrated nearly 400 GB selves,” Douma said. you can really integrate it with your customer of data from its 12 e-commerce Web sites data warehouse,” Douma said. That kind of with the 1+ TB corporate data warehouse, For a free white paper on this topic, click here integration was not a core competency for and the application is in the process of being and choose the title “Deploying Business Intelligence on Sun Fire X4275 Servers.” For most Web analytics vendors, he added. rolled out. The flexibility of the reporting and more information about Pentaho Corporation, ability for users to generate their own reports click here. About two years ago, the team explored is critical. “With the Web, there is a big dif- how to better integrate its Web data with ference between what is trackable and what other customer data. As the first step, one is measurable,” Douma said. “You have to of the technical analysts in Douma’s group determine what problem you are trying to developed an extraction, transformation, solve and then solve it. For example, we can and load application using Perl to parse now look into our search data in ways that Web logs. That effort assured the team it were not possible with any other tool. Our could integrate data from its different chan- use of Pentaho has opened up new areas of nels. For reporting in the proof of concept analytics for us.” effort, The Swiss Colony decided to use the reporting module from Pentaho Corporation. As the project matures, The Swiss Colony Pentaho BI Suite Enterprise Edition provides anticipates using additional Pentaho mod- comprehensive reporting, OLAP analysis, ules. “With OpenBI and Pentaho, we can dashboards, data integration, data mining, use exactly what we need and they provide and a BI platform. support. And the turnaround time for support
WHAT WORKS in enterprise business intelligence Volume 28 21 open source business intelligence
lesson from the experts
Streamlining Selection and Budgeting for BI Success
By Jared Cornelius Manager of Product Marketing, Pentaho Corporation
Good news for prospective business intel- Speaking of RFPs, their role and importance Picking the right tool is a hollow ligence buyers: The BI market has evolved in the selection process is changing as well. significantly over the last few years, providing Tight IT budgets over the last 18 months are victory if you can’t effectively customers more ways to try before they buy. driving organizations to focus on their most deploy it, drive usage, and achieve This streamlines the selection process and important functional requirements rather than reduces the risk of making a bad technology laundry listing features, from the imperative the business benefits that drove decision. However, technology selection is to the inconsequential, and seeing which your BI project in the first place. just one ingredient in BI success. Beyond vendors check the most boxes. It’s critical traditional rules about collaboration between to understand your users’ functional require- business and IT, executive sponsorship, and ments, and it will save you a lot of time in the The other unfortunate implication of dis- other best practices, the structure of project selection process if you separate the must- count-driven overspending on BI software budgets can play a key role in driving short- haves from the nice-to-haves. Do not allow a licenses is that it leaves you with a budget and long-term BI success. BI vendor to try to dictate your requirements that’s not structured for success. Experi- based on their feature list. enced BI practitioners know how important Prove It! non-technology factors are in BI success. To try out a given vendor’s BI software in Pay As You Go, and Budget for If you’ve spent your entire project budget your environment, you previously had to BI Success on software, you won’t have the appropriate work through an arduous series of calls with Another thing that’s changing in BI—also funding for technology services, business a sales person, disclose lots of information accelerated by recent economic softness—is domain consulting, or end-user training. about your project, and sign confidential- a shift away from traditional software licens- Picking the right tool is a hollow victory if you ity agreements. Customers are tired of this ing processes in which you prepay a large can’t effectively deploy it, drive usage, and model, and it’s becoming easier than ever to licensing fee to cover all foreseeable users achieve the business benefits that drove your get your hands on BI software for evaluation and phases of your BI project. Vendors have BI project in the first place. with little or no friction from some vendors. driven this behavior with inflexible per-user pricing models and steep per-seat fees that Learn more about how to drastically change Commercial open source vendors, such as force customers to buy BI capacity they the economics of BI at Pentaho, frequently provide direct access won’t need for 2 years—just to get a good www.pentaho.com/low_cost_bi. to product downloads, documentation, and discount and bring the price down. other technical resources. Some software- For a free white paper on this topic, click here as-a-service (SaaS) BI vendors also provide BI vendors like Pentaho are now offering and choose the title “Deploying Business Intelligence on Sun Fire X4275 Servers.” For “sandboxes” for product evaluation. Even the models that provide more flexibility with more information about Pentaho Corporation, BI megavendors are beginning to recognize options such as per-CPU or per-server pric- click here. the need to provide greater access to poten- ing, concurrent user licensing, and others. tial buyers. These options are offered on a low-cost subscription basis that includes support Now, instead of making a critical BI technol- and maintenance, so you don’t need to pay ogy decision based on some PowerPoint huge up-front fees to use the products. You slides, a scripted demo, and a long request can also expand your deployment to more for proposal (RFP), you can find out yourself users as your success grows without having whether a given BI tool can meet your needs to purchase user licenses every time your in your environment. usage expands.
22 WHAT WORKS in enterprise business intelligence Volume 28 S oftware-as-a- S e r v i c e
c a s e s t u dy
Metro Atlanta YMCA for us to deliver the experience, and what people wanted and felt they were willing Better Aligns Its to pay. It was a complicated, time- and KEY SELECTION CRITERIA resource-consuming process. Our volunteers • Easy to evaluate, purchase, Mission, Member told us we needed better BI tools. We agreed and implement and started searching.” Programs, and • Affordable More than Pretty Pie Charts Marketing Activities After comparing a variety of BI solutions, • Requires minimal IT involvement including those provided by Cognos and • Advanced analysis for identifying Oracle, Lenahan and her marketing team with On-Demand key trends selected an on-demand business intelligence Business Intelligence solution called Birst. “Cognos is still sitting in • Ability to export to other the package in the back,” said Lenahan. “We applications By Barbara Lewis Director of Marketing, Birst felt the time and expense of the data map- ping would slow us down and cost too much.
Founded in 1858, the Metro Atlanta YMCA “I wasn’t looking for pretty pie charts showing member support and engagement market- helps children learn and grow, brings families what we already knew in spreadsheet form,” ing program is based on the demographics, closer, and encourages individual health and Lenahan said. “I wanted to see trends that tenure, and frequency of involvement of well-being. As part of this broader mission, would help me take immediate action—and I YMCA members. the YMCA has become the largest child care got just that. provider in Atlanta, enriching the lives of “We’re now able to focus on solving needs more than 10,500 children every day. “I also needed something that would require within member households,” continued minimum IT involvement because their Lenahan. “I can think more strategically Wanted: Better BI Solutions to Better agenda is so full already. I don’t have a BI about clustering and reaching out to custom- Serve YMCA Members background, but with Birst’s on-demand ers in a way that’s meaningful for them. For The Metro Atlanta YMCA constantly strives solution I was able to get up and running example, we now know we have over 10,000 to support its local communities. To create with a trial in just a few hours. Since our first kids in elementary school and we’re finding high impact programs and increase member conversation, Birst has been focused on pro- new ways to enrich and support their lives. enrollment and participation, the YMCA’s viding what we needed quickly and at a very We have thousands of households with kids marketing team needed a better way to fair price.” under 4, so we’re looking at what we can do understand member needs. to help parents raise preschoolers. I believe “I wasn’t looking for pretty pie that what gets measured gets done. With Past attempts to promote its programs were Birst, we’re deepening our engagement with overly time consuming and not as effective charts showing what we already our members.” as the team wanted. The YMCA tried com- knew in spreadsheet form. I wanted bining income statements and budgets with For a free white paper on this topic, click here the member database to summarize trends, to see trends that would help me and choose the title “Why On-Demand BI?” For more information about Birst, click here. create marketing strategies, and predict take immediate action—and I outcomes. Employees and volunteers spent valuable time pulling pivot tables from got just that.” Excel spreadsheets. Betsy Lenahan Chief Marketing Officer, Metro Atlanta YMCA “Before Birst, we spent more time compiling accurate data than interpreting data,” said What Gets Measured, Gets Done Betsy Lenahan, chief marketing officer for Metro Atlanta YMCA purchased Birst Groups Metro Atlanta YMCA. “We created a seasonal and it was implemented within 30 days. menu like a restaurant and showed our Deployed across 28 branches, Birst helps whole list to as many people as we could to the YMCA better align member programs see where there was a good match between and marketing activities with the organiza- what we were good at, what it would cost tion’s goals. The YMCA’s new, multilevel
WHAT WORKS in enterprise business intelligence Volume 28 23 software-as-a-ser v i c e
lesson from the experts
Why On-Demand BI?
How this full-feature, low-cost approach to BI is increasingly chosen by savvy IT managers
By Brad Peters CEO, Birst
In a difficult economy, smart businesses and architecture changes are handled by are pursuing every opportunity to maximize the vendor and automatically delivered to performance while minimizing costs. Busi- the customer. ness intelligence solutions are in demand as companies seek to optimize efficiency, effec- Lower Implementation and tiveness, and their competitive edge. While Ongoing Costs investments in conventional on-premise BI There are limited up-front costs and IT and analyses. With traditional BI, such solutions are impractical and unattractive resource requirements. On-demand BI pro- changes could take weeks or months, involv- right now, the allure of on-demand BI solu- viders manage all of the back-end systems ing significant IT resources. tions has never been stronger. for their service, so customers are spared the hardware and setup costs associated with Greater Visibility On-demand BI solutions, which are hosted traditional BI solution deployment. Up-front Easily share data and reports, even out- solutions accessed over the Internet, offer costs for implementation are significantly less side the firewall. On-demand applications the benefits of traditional BI while improving than traditional solutions. are deployed over the Internet so users can the economic bottom line. These solutions easily share data with others, both within the provide powerful and flexible business insight Ongoing costs are also lower: On-demand company and with outside partners. In addi- but are faster, easier, and less costly than BI vendors typically charge a subscription tion, users can integrate data from multiple traditional “behind-the-firewall” solutions. fee that provides a single price for use of the sources located anywhere, including other application, maintenance, and support. business units, or from suppliers and partners. The business benefits of on-demand BI are compelling and real: On-demand BI solutions, which Low Risk, High Reward Due to these significant benefits, on-demand Increased Access, Maximum Results are hosted solutions accessed over BI is likely to have a substantial impact on Lower cost and higher ease of use get BI the Internet, offer the benefits of your bottom line. BI is becoming much more into the hands of those who can make the accessible, flexible, and affordable for every- biggest impact. Conventional solutions tend to traditional BI while improving the one. On-demand technologies are making it be expensive and IT resource intensive, limit- economic bottom line. worthwhile for any size organization—from ing their availability to a handful of dedicated small and midsize businesses to large enter- analysts. On-demand solutions are easier, less prises—to implement a BI solution that will costly to deploy, and require little expertise to Scalability lead to new insights and greater effective- use. As a result, they are more accessible to Easily scale from small to enterprise ness throughout the business. business users throughout the organization. level. On-demand solutions are designed to support a large number of customers For a free white paper on this topic, click here Faster ROI simultaneously with capacity to spare. This and choose the title “Why On-Demand BI?” For more information about Birst, click here. A faster “time to value” allows for a quicker means any individual customer can quickly return on investment. On-demand BI expand his or her on-demand solution by solutions offer quick deployment and easy simply requesting a larger account size or customization. Unlike traditional BI imple- more users. mentations, which can take 12 to 18 months or longer, on-demand BI solutions can typi- Flexibility cally be up and running in just a few weeks. Quickly adapt to changing business needs. On-demand BI solutions can be updated Ongoing maintenance and customization is easily, so business users can quickly add also faster and easier. All software upgrades new reports and dashboards, data sources,
24 WHAT WORKS in enterprise business intelligence Volume 28 TDWI researchf e at u r e
TDWI research
Analytical Tools By wayne W. Eckerson for Business Analysts
Business analysts can benefit from three types of analytical 9 product (which embeds ROLAP in a BI platform) and tools: OLAP, visual discovery, and Excel-based tools. Visual Oracle with its Oracle BI Extended Edition product, which it discovery tools are the newest addition to the business inherited from Siebel Analytics. Although ROLAP tools can analyst toolbox. address much larger volumes of data than MOLAP products, their query response times are slower. To address this problem, 1. OLAP TOOLS. Other than spreadsheets and desktop ROLAP vendors are making creative use of caches, 64-bit databases, OLAP tools have been popular with business operating systems, and optimized and multi-pass SQL to analysts, especially financial analysts, who like being able provide consistently fast query performance. to slice/dice data dimensionally and navigate up and down organizational, product, and account hierarchies at the 2. VISUAL DISCOVERY TOOLS. One of the fastest-growing speed of thought (which most OLAP tools support). From toolsets for business analysts are visual discovery tools. a business perspective, OLAP tools make it easy to uncover Several sponsors of this report offer visual discovery tools, the root causes of problems, identify trends, and compare including ADVIZOR Solutions, TIBCO (which sells Spotfire performance across groups. Professional), SAS (which sells SAS JMP), and Tableau Software. The tools provide “speed of thought” analysis, OLAP tools store data in multidimensional databases or conforming to the way business analysts want to consume cubes, which are like spreadsheets on steroids—supporting and interact with data. Applications built with visual multiple dimensions instead of just two. One downside of this discovery tools are popular with casual users, who like the approach is that the cubes contain only summary information, point-and-click filtering and drill-down to detail. because it takes too long for OLAP databases to calculate data values at the intersection of every dimension in every Versus BI tools. Unlike reporting tools, visual discovery hierarchy. Vendors of multidimensional databases—which tools provide sub-second response times for any action taken include Oracle (Essbase), Microsoft (Analysis Services), and against the data (e.g., filtering, drilling, calculating, sorting, SAP (Business Warehouse)—have made great strides in ranking) because they store data in memory instead of remote expanding the amount of data that cubes can contain by databases (although some can query databases dynamically dynamically calculating data within cubes and joining data as well). They are faster to deploy than BI tools, because across cubes. Some of these vendors have also made it possible the IT department doesn’t need to create a semantic layer for users to input data values to perform planning, budgeting, or implement specific types of database schemas. Visual and “what-if” analyses. discovery tools also can be less expensive. A customer can purchase a few desktop licenses at $500 to $1,000 each to get Many vendors also provide graphical clients tools to access the started, then add a server extension later so power users can databases, although Excel is still the preferred OLAP client publish live, interactive views to others. in the finance department. SAP, for instance, is working on a new OLAP client code-named Pioneer that will blend the best Visual discovery tools link tables that may not perfectly match, of its Business Explorer (BEx), an Excel-based client for SAP either in granularity or table relationships (e.g., one-to-one, BW geared to data analysts, and BusinessObjects Voyager, a one-to-many, many-to-many), according to Doug Cogswell, graphical OLAP client designed for BI professionals, according CEO of ADVIZOR Solutions. The flexibility to associate to John MacGregor, product manager for Voyager. SAP has data across multiple tables makes it easy to use an attribute just introduced SAP BusinessObjects Explorer, which allows in one table to filter fields in multiple other tables on the fly, for data exploration on top of large volumes of data using the something that can be difficult to do in SQL. search paradigm and a highly visual user interface. For example, suppose a university wants to invite potential Some vendors have abandoned physical cubes and use SQL donors for a new football/lacrosse complex to a dinner in New to dynamically create virtual cubes from relational databases. York City. Without IT assistance, and in less than 20 minutes, The two dominant vendors of this relational OLAP (or an event planner can use a visual discovery tool to identify 34 ROLAP) approach are MicroStrategy with its MicroStrategy prospects from a list of 94,000 that played both football and
WHAT WORKS in enterprise business intelligence Volume 28 25 TDWI research
Visual Discovery Tools
Figure 16. Here, an event planner using a point-and-click visual discovery tool has identified 34 potential donors from a list of 94,000 and is now viewing the group’s characteristics, such as donor rating.
lacrosse (a cross-table, one-to-many relationship), live in New Tableau’s drag-and-drop interface provides multidimensional York, New Jersey, or Connecticut, and have given more than visualizations by dynamically querying relational databases, $10,000 in the past five years (another cross-table, one-to- OLAP cubes, and enterprise data warehouses, including many relationship). Months later, when the university receives Teradata. The result is live, interactive dashboards and reports the donations, an analyst might create a statistical profile that can be shared via browser, workbook, and embedding in of the biggest givers and run it against the entire alumni Web applications. population to identify other potential athletic facility donors. (See Figure 16.) Versus spreadsheets. Unlike spreadsheets, visual discovery tools provide analysts with unbounded access to sizable Visual discovery tools are quickly moving upstream, from volumes of raw data. A 32-bit desktop operating system with desktop to departmental and enterprise applications. Most 2 GB of RAM can comfortably hold six to eight million have beefed up their authoring and publishing capabilities so rows of data. A 64-bit Windows 2003 server machine with analysts can create highly interactive dashboard applications 16 GB of RAM can hold 20–50 million rows of data and 50 for casual users. For example, Spotfire Professional is a concurrent users without performance degradation. Some can server-based, enterprise analytics platform that supports hold more data by shuttling infrequently used data to disk. a range of functionality—from interactive reports and dashboards to statistics, data mining, data integration, and Visual discovery tools also provide more sophisticated, real-time data delivery. interactive charting and visualization than spreadsheets. Using a mouse to point and click and drag and drop, analysts The vendors also support innovative visualizations and can quickly identify patterns and outliers, explore causal data mining functions. For example, ADVIZOR Solutions relationships, compare performance among groups, and supports 15 chart types, including standards such as pie, generate target lists or segments. In fact, most speed-of- bar, and line charts, as well as more innovative types, such thought analysis is done visually, not with pivot tables or grids. as scatter plots, heat maps, time tables, data constellations, (See the sidebar, “Visual Analysis Techniques,” next page.) and paraboxes. SAS JMP integrates a vast array of analytics, including regressions, clustering, choice experiments, and Versus OLAP. Unlike most OLAP tools, visual discovery so on. Many vendors have also moved beyond nightly tools fit the structure of the question being asked rather than batch loads to support dynamic data delivery. For example, fitting the analysis to the structure of the data, according
26 WHAT WORKS in enterprise business intelligence Volume 28 TDWI research
Visual Analysis Techniques VISUAL DISCOVERY TOOLS
Visual discovery tools let users analyze data visually by clicking on charts and visualizations rather than manipulating tables and grids. See Figure 17. Common visual discovery operations include:
• Drag a group or data element onto a chart to display it
• Drag a slider or click on a chart to filter data
• hover over a data point in a chart to view its details
• Use the cursor to highlight data points in a chart to create a new group
• click to drill down or across or filter data
• work with one table or many linked tables in memory
Figure 17. Visual discovery tools often resemble dashboards but are much more interactive. In the top image, a dashboard is filtered using checkboxes; in the lower image, every view is filtered by directly clicking one mark in one view.
to William Smith, principal of Claraview, a division of model these constructs within the tool’s metadata (if allowed), Teradata. Visual discovery tools don’t need an IT person to and (6) performance will degrade if all the data can’t fit in design a dimensional data model based on rigid dimensions memory. and hierarchies. As a result, the tools aren’t restricted to predefined navigation paths and hierarchies. In addition, the Of course, most of these “deficits” don’t bother business tools use a “load-and-go” approach in which analysts load analysts. For example, most prefer to work with raw data— raw data from multiple sources and simply link tables along defects and all—rather than aggregated or precalculated common keys to get a unified view of the data set. The tools data filtered through a metadata layer. Most also don’t want typically load atomic-level data, not aggregated data via a the data to change underneath them and prefer to work lengthy calculation process. As a result, most visual discovery with snapshots rather than dynamically changing data. The tools can be deployed in a few hours or days, depending on tools can help analysts perform rudimentary quality control the complexity and cleanliness of source data. because they make it easy to spot outliers.
Downsides. A BI purist might be quick to point out some 3. EXCEL-BASED ANALYTICAL TOOLS. Another important of the downsides of visual discovery tools, especially when toolset for business analysts is Excel-based analytical tools. implemented independently of a BI platform and data Because business analysts primarily use Excel to perform the warehousing environment: (1) They don’t address data quality bulk of their analyses, some vendors believe that forcing them issues, (2) they don’t generate standard reports, (3) the data to adopt a new interface is ludicrous. “If you can’t beat them, sets are not persistent and must be refreshed from scratch join them” is a common refrain. each time there is a change (although some now support dynamic updates or direct query connections), (4) they Excel plug-ins. Of course, most of these vendors are well don’t join large tables; they simply link them in memory, (5) aware of the problems that Excel creates when used outside they don’t support dimensions, aggregations, hierarchies, or of a managed BI environment. That’s why most vendors offer predefined calculations, unless a designer spends time to BI tools in which Excel is the front-end to a BI server of some
WHAT WORKS in enterprise business intelligence Volume 28 27 TDWI research
sort. Even Microsoft has recognized this problem and has Other vendors have created Excel-based products that run gradually begun offering BI-friendly versions of Excel, such as on a desktop yet can be managed in a centralized fashion. Excel Services (a thin-client version of Excel that works with For instance, Lyzasoft shipped a desktop tool in 2008 SharePoint) and SQL Server Table Services (an Excel plug-in geared to business analysts that gives them an Excel-like for using data mining functions in Analysis Services). interface to gather, analyze, and present data from multiple sources using an intuitive visual design tool. The tool traces Most leading BI vendors, such as SAP, SAS, and the analyst’s steps, capturing the workflows in a central MicroStrategy, currently offer Microsoft Office plug-ins that repository for reuse and auditing/monitoring by analysts let users view and interact with predefined BI reports as MS and IT administrators, respectively. ModelSheet provides Office documents, such as an Excel spreadsheet. The plug-ins a Web-based modeling environment to create and maintain maintain “live” connections to the BI reports so users always spreadsheet models, deliver them using conventional view the most up-to-date information. Most visual discovery spreadsheets, and manage changes in a centralized fashion. tools flip that paradigm and source from Excel rather than publish to it. Tableau, for example, enables users to flip Wayne W. Eckerson is the director of TDWI Research at The Data back and forth between the spreadsheet data and Tableau’s Warehousing Institute. He is an industry analyst and the author of visualizations of it. Excel is one of the more popular sources Performance Dashboards: Measuring, Monitoring, and Managing of data for visual discovery tools. Your Business (John Wiley & Sons, 2005). He can be reached at [email protected]. Excel clients. Several vendors have gone a step further, making Excel a full-fledged client to their BI servers. This This article was excerpted from the full, 28-page report, Beyond lets business analysts create reports natively in Excel (or an Reporting: Delivering Insights with Next-Generation Analytics. Excel look-alike) instead of having to create the reports in the You can download this and other TDWI Research free of charge BI tool and then export them to a file or download them to at www.tdwi.org/research/reportseries. Excel via a smart plug-in. The report was sponsored by ADVIZOR Solutions, Inc., For example, several vendors use Excel as a client to access MicroStrategy, Oracle, SAP, SAS, Tableau Software, Teradata one or more OLAP servers. XL Cubed and Microsoft run Corporation, and TIBCO Spotfire. Excel natively against Microsoft Analysis Services; SAP’s BEx Analyzer runs against Business Warehouse; and Applix (now owned by IBM via Cognos) uses Excel to access TM1. Other vendors provide spreadsheet-based access to relational databases via an analytic server. Eivia provides thin-client access to an Excel-like spreadsheet that lets users perform what-if analyses against all dimensions and hierarchies in a data warehouse, which is not an easy task!
28 WHAT WORKS in enterprise business intelligence Volume 28 best practices awar d s
Best Practices Awards 2009 Predictive Analytics ARC ARC is an airline-owned company that provides financial settlement TDWI’s Best Practices Awards recognize organiza- solutions and data and analytical services to the travel industry. tions for developing and implementing world-class For years, travel agency fraud was identified at the physical travel agency location by performing an audit of paper coupons and business intelligence and data warehousing solutions. weekly reports. It typically took two days to review the volumes of Here are summaries of the winning solutions for 2009. paperwork and prepare a report on findings drawn from patterns and trends from 13 weeks of data.
For more information, visit www.tdwi.org/BPAwards. With the ARC industry data warehouse, along with the imple- mentation of predictive fraud models, ARC can now analyze 39 months of data in minutes to detect patterns and trends across an entire industry.
ARC’s advanced predictive models are flexible enough to meet changing business and industry needs. Curtailing fraud involves predictive modeling of real-time data; ticketing anomaly monitoring; scrubbing data for known fraud schemes; providing information for taking counter-measures; and creating and promoting best practices for the industry. ARC now responds, in near real time, to emerging scenarios and identified trends, rapidly adapting and adjusting its predictive models to meet and counter new challenges.
Data Governance BMO Financial Group Established in 1817 as Bank of Montreal, BMO Financial Group is one of North America’s largest diversified financial services provid- ers. In 2004, the Bank’s Board of Directors approved a policy that declared information a strategic asset. The policy includes all infor- mation media: paper and electronic. Data warehouses, marts, and unstructured data repositories are all within scope.
The bank instituted a multi-year program to develop and institution- alize the roles, standards, and processes to support the policy. The governance program has focused on creating trust in the bank’s information through education and awareness; processes and sup- porting technology; monitoring and reporting; and emerging risk management. The program has evolved to become an ongoing department within the bank’s information management function with close ties to operational risk.
Defining great customer experience and meeting regulatory require- ments both demand accurate and timely information collected from around the bank. BMO has demonstrated increased information management maturity and is realizing the benefits of a taking a formal, holistic, and integrated approach to managing information.
WHAT WORKS in enterprise business intelligence Volume 28 29 best practices awar d s
Government and Non-Profit BI/DW on a Limited Budget Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools IMPAX Laboratories, Inc. Solution Sponsors: Mariner & Microsoft Corporation IMPAX Laboratories, Inc., a technology-based specialty phar- Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools is a consolidated city-county school maceutical company, applies its formulation expertise and drug district that has been nationally recognized for academic achieve- delivery technology to developing controlled-release and specialty ment and business innovation. The district, North Carolina’s second generics as well as branded products. largest, has more than 137,000 students in pre-kindergarten through 12th grade, 19,000 employees, and 180 schools. IMPAX’s enterprisewide single data warehouse platform (SQL), single report tool (IBM-Cognos) integrated data from source ERP, CMS decision making is guided by its Strategic Plan 2010: Edu- operational systems, spreadsheets, and third-party data. The proj- cating Students to Compete Locally, Nationally and Internationally. ect was created to deliver one centrally located “version of the truth” Among the plan goals was the creation of a Data Dashboard as and provide timely, accurate, and actionable information to all levels requested by the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education. The of the organization. It allows business users to modify existing Data Dashboard, built in collaboration with Mariner and Microsoft, reports and create new BI reports for themselves, saving an esti- was launched in the fall of 2008. It has provided an accessible mated 2,600 hours of labor monthly. visual interface that allows parents, school administrators, and citizens to monitor district progress on the plan’s goals. The Data Portals or dashboards were key. The BI team asked mid- and Dashboard has increased the district’s transparency and credibility upper-level managers for five key performance indicators; resulting by making available in-depth information about schools dashboards delivered data relevant to each manager’s functional and academic progress. business area.
The Data Dashboard helps administrators and the public proactively The implementation across an 800-employee company in four loca- monitor district performance on strategic plan goals, as well as a tions—from business requirements gathering and data modeling wide range of academic and operations indicators. to reporting and training—was successfully completed by a three- member BI team, with assistance from outside consultants.
Enterprise BI Freescale Semiconductor Radical BI Solution Sponsor: Teradata Corporation Ingersoll Rand, Industrial Freescale Semiconductor designs and manufactures embedded Technologies Sector semiconductors for the automotive, consumer, industrial, and net- Ingersoll Rand Industrial Technologies Sector provides products, working markets. Freescale launched an enterprisewide data and services, and solutions that enhance its customers’ energy effi- analytics platform to enable faster and more informed business ciency, productivity, and operations. Products include complete decision making. A first for the semiconductor industry, this joint compressed air systems, golf and utility vehicles, tools and pumps, business and IT enterprise business intelligence (EBI) program as well as material and fluid handling systems and environmentally combines factory, engineering, and business data into a single data friendly microturbines. warehouse, enabling cross-domain analytics. EBI-enabled new ana- lytic capabilities have cut business process cycle times from days ITS’s BI initiative began in response to impaired visibility and to hours or even minutes. timeliness of information across discrete systems. BI was expected to radically accelerate the access and transparency of Since going live in mid-2007, the EBI program has become the infor- information across the globe. By having the flexibility to source mation and analytics backbone of Freescale’s business application data from multiple disparate legacy and strategic data sets, staff programs. It has enabled the successful launch of reengineering could focus on performance improvements days earlier rather initiatives in supply chain, manufacturing, customer service, qual- than data collection. ity, and finance, and has improved yields, reduced customer quality incident-response times, improved sales and marketing’s pricing Today, IR ITS has an enterprise BI solution that spans four geo- process, and consolidated financial data and reporting. graphic regions, five market channels, eight disparate data sources, and 137 product categories. It includes analysis on pre-sales, order The EBI program has delivered significant business value by management, services, procurement, supply chain, and operations. observing many best practices, including use of an enterprise data The solution’s agility, breadth, and rapid implementation are proving model, a consistent focus on providing end-to-end analytical capa- invaluable given the volatility and turbidity in the current market. BI bilities, and effective leverage of ERP data for analytics. has reduced the time to benefit for both visibility and decisions.
30 WHAT WORKS in enterprise business intelligence Volume 28 best practices awar d s
Master Data Management Customer Intelligence National Instruments Spokane Teachers Credit Union Solution Sponsor: Initiate Systems, Inc. Established in 1934, STCU is the Inland Northwest’s largest and National Instruments (NI) transforms how engineers and scientists most successful credit union. With more than $1 billion in assets, design, prototype, and deploy systems for test, control, and embed- STCU is a full-service financial institution with more than 350 ded design applications. employees serving 80,000 members through 13 branch locations.
NI’s customer-centric master data management platform (CDI hub) An ambition of every progressive retail financial institution is to pro- project addressed duplicate and disparate customer data. With- vide employees with the tools to help optimize members’ financial out a single, trusted, and complete view of its customers, NI was lives. By leveraging its data warehouse as the analytical engine unable to deliver excellent technical support; NI employee produc- behind a simple front-end programmed in-house, STCU is achiev- tivity was decreased; and the company could not fully understand ing this objective with its “Conversation Engine” solution. its customers. The tool studies each member’s individual portfolio of services NI implemented Initiate Organization and Initiate Consumer from and transaction behaviors, and identifies specific opportunities for Initate Systems, Inc. Source system customer contact records are members to (1) improve their rates or lower their fees by adjusting loaded into the CDI hub in near real time utilizing SOA. Initiate’s their product mix, (2) save time by adding member services that comparison algorithm identifies and links together duplicate cus- deliver greater convenience, (3) improve the quality of member data tomer contacts. to bolster accuracy and security, or (4) recognize and celebrate the individual members. The tool’s radical simplicity was critical to its NI can now consistently deliver the correct level of service (techni- highly successful adoption in the company, and its rich source of cal support) to its customers. Users now have a 360-degree view of information has been paramount to a service revolution for STCU. each contact: leads, opportunities, quotes, orders, service requests, installed products, and notes, associated with all the duplicate contacts. The new internal search leverages Initiate’s probabilistic Enterprise DW search and match capabilities to find contacts on the first try with Telenor Pakistan 99 percent accuracy. Solution Sponsor: T-BIRD Telenor Pakistan is the world’s seventh largest mobile operator, with 164 million mobile subscriptions in 13 countries. In just four Dashboards and Scorecards years, the company has become the fastest-growing mobile RBC Wealth Management operator in Pakistan. Solution Sponsor: Birst RBC Wealth Management, a wholly owned subsidiary of Royal Bank The initial DW solution suffered from serious granularity and history of Canada, is one of the nation’s largest full-service securities firms restrictions. The BI team realized it was inadequate for Telenor Pak- with more than 2,300 financial consultants and 5,000 employees. istan’s long-term BI road map and market ambitions. Three months after launch, the team started to plan, design, and build a state-of- RBC WM had been delivering a reporting and sales development the-art, Teradata-based enterprisewide data warehouse. tool to their field advisors, but delivered information was stale; was Excel-based (labor intensive); and reports had to be run manually. The EDW is based on the Teradata Communication Logical Data Model; it integrates information from all major network and IT RBC WM implemented the RBC Dashboard to provide greater vis- sources (13 months of call detail records, customer data, billing ibility to its business, customers, and revenue-growth opportunities. and payment information, customer interactions, and more) to build After a brief implementation period, financial advisors saw immedi- a 360-degree view around the customer—a challenge for a com- ate value in the information and positive business impact from the pany with 20 million subscribers and huge traffic volumes. dashboard. Delivering the right information to the right people who can use it daily empowers its financial advisors and their clients. Multiple applications are running on the EDW (campaign manage- ment, revenue assurance, Google Earth, dashboards, customer RBC Dashboard has been live for over three years, exceeded portals, etc.) to fully capitalize on this rich information resource its targets, and is now used by hundreds of financial advisors. and 360-degree customer view. This fully integrated EDW will be RBC Dashboard has become a core operating platform that an one of the key differentiating factors that will help the company to ever-increasing user base considers essential to their success outperform and be a leading service provider in Pakistan’s dynamic and profitability. telecom market.
WHAT WORKS in enterprise business intelligence Volume 28 31 best practices awar d s
Operational BI TDWI THANKS THIS YEAR’S PANEL OF EXPERT JUDGES: GE Rail Services GE Rail Services (GERS), a North American transportation and • Sid Adelman, Principal, Sid Adelman & Associates leasing service provider, provides repair and maintenance services • John Bair, CTO, LaunchPoint for leased railcars. • Steve Dine, President, Datasource Consulting, LLC
GERS uses a variety of IT operational systems and interfaces with • Jill Dyché, CBIP, Partner, Baseline Consulting external partners and industry service providers. One of its most • Wayne Eckerson, Director, TDWI Research, TDWI powerful BI applications to date is Shoptimizer, a real-time opera- • Dan Evans, CBIP, Sr. Group Manager, tional analytics tool that finds the optimal shop to provide railcar BI Practice, Avanade, Inc. repairs subject to over 20 constraints and dynamic parameters. • Jonathan G. Geiger, CBIP, Executive Vice President, Intelligent Solutions, Inc. Prior to Shoptimizer, repair shop selections were made by customer service representatives without critical knowledge of shop capac- • Patty Haines, President, Chimney Rock Information Solutions ity, shop capability, railcar movement patterns, and overall railcar • Claudia Imhoff, President, Intelligent Solutions, Inc. condition. Railcars could wait weeks for repair or be transferred to • Krish Krishnan, President, Sixth Sense Advisors Inc. another shop. Now, Shoptimizer calculates shop capacity dynami- cally and allocates capacity based on railcar type and predicted • Mike Lampa, Sr. Manager, Enterprise BI, Dell, Inc. work requirements. It displays other recent repairs and predicts • Evan Levy, Partner, Baseline Consulting the full scope of likely required repairs based on just one defect • Tony Lopykinski, Managing Principal, Maven Advisors, LLC reported by the customer. It also predicts the probable destination • Justin Manes, Consultant for the railcar upon completion. In addition, constraints are applied for international moves and overall transit distance and route proba- • Joyce Norris-Montanari, CBIP, President, bilities. These features are critical in eliminating unnecessary GERS DBTech Solutions, Inc. shipping and leasing costs. • Mark Peco, CBIP, Partner, InQvis • Laura Reeves, Principal, StarSoft Solutions • Philip Russom, Senior Manager, TDWI Research, TDWI • Todd Saunders, EVP Customer Solutions, CONNECT: The Knowledge Network • Hugh Watson, Professor of MIS, University of Georgia • Nancy Williams, CBIP, Vice President, DecisionPath Consulting • Steve Williams, President, DecisionPath Consulting • Barb Wixom, Associate Professor, University of Virginia
32 WHAT WORKS in enterprise business intelligence Volume 28 solution pro v i d e r s
Solution Providers
The following solution provid- ers have shared their enterprise business intelligence stories and successes, technology insights, and the lessons they have learned for What Works in Enterprise Acxiom Corporation Birst
Business Intelligence. 611 East Third Street 153 Kearny Street, 3rd Floor Little Rock, AR 72201 San Francisco, CA 94108 1.888.3Acxiom 415.644.5400 Fax: 415.762.4115 [email protected] www.acxiom.com [email protected] www.birst.com
A global leader in interactive marketing Birst™ is the leading provider of on-demand services, Acxiom connects clients with their business intelligence solutions. Birst brings customers through deep consumer insight the benefits of fact-based decision making that enables effective and profitable market- to a broad audience by making it affordable, ing initiatives and business decisions. Our fast, and easy to use. Birst is designed to consultative approach spans multiple indus- support users of all sizes—from individuals tries and incorporates decades of experience to groups and entire companies—so that in consumer data and analytics, information everyone can benefit from greater insight technology, data integration, and consult- into their business. By easily integrating ing solutions for effective marketing across information from key systems, like CRM, digital, Internet, e-mail, mobile, and direct operational, and financial systems, execu- mail channels. Founded in 1969, Acxiom tives and individual contributors using Birst is headquartered in Little Rock, Arkansas, can have the information they need to do and serves clients around the world from their jobs more effectively. locations in the United States, Europe, and the Asia-Pacific. For more information about Acxiom, visit www.acxiom.com.
WHAT WORKS in enterprise business intelligence Volume 28 33 solution pro v i d e r s
ESRI Information Builders Jaspersoft
380 New York Street Two Penn Plaza 539 Bryant Street, Suite 100 Redlands, CA 92373 New York, NY 10121 San Francisco, CA 94107 909.793.2853, ext. 2366 Toll Free: 1.800.969.INFO 415.348.2300 Fax: 909.307.3046 International: 212.736.4433 Toll Free: 888.399.2199 Fax: 212.967.6406 Fax: 415.281.1987 [email protected] www.esri.com [email protected] www.jaspersoft.com www.informationbuilders.com
Since 1969, ESRI has been giving customers Information Builders’ award-winning combi- Jaspersoft’s open source business intel- around the world the power to think and nation of business intelligence and enterprise ligence suite is the world’s most widely plan geographically. The market leader in integration software has been providing used BI software, with nearly 9 million total geographic information systems (GIS), ESRI innovative solutions to more than 12,000 downloads worldwide and more than 10,000 software is used in more than 300,000 customers for over 30 years. WebFOCUS commercial customers in 96 countries. The organizations worldwide, including each of is the world’s most widely utilized business company’s Jaspersoft Business Intelligence the 200 largest cities in the United States, intelligence platform, providing the security, Suite provides a Web-based, open, and most national governments, more than two- scalability, and flexibility needed at every modular approach to the evolving business thirds of Fortune 500 companies, and more level of global extended enterprises. Its sim- intelligence needs of the enterprise. than 7,000 colleges and universities. plicity helps create executive, analytical, and Jaspersoft’s software is rapidly updated by a ESRI applications, running on more than operational applications that reach dozens community of more than 98,000 registered one million desktops and thousands of Web to millions of users. Our iWay Software suite members working on more than 350 proj- and enterprise servers, are the foundation provides state-of-the-art integration compo- ects, which represents the world’s largest for the world’s mapping and spatial analysis. nents that address all SOA, application, data, business intelligence community. More infor- To learn how to see your data in a new way, and information management requirements. mation is available at www.jaspersoft.com visit us at www.esri.com. Together, these products give Information and www.jasperforge.org. Builders’ customers the ability to grow and innovate according to their needs.
34 WHAT WORKS in enterprise business intelligence Volume 28 solution pro v i d e r s
MicroStrategy Pentaho Corporation QlikView
1861 International Drive 5950 Hazeltine National Drive, Suite 340 150 North Radnor Chester Road, Suite E220 McLean, VA 22102 Orlando, FL 32822 Radnor, PA 19063 703.848.8600 407.812.OPEN (6736) 484.685.0600 Fax: 703.848.8610 Fax: 646.573.2545 Fax: 610.975.5987 [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] www.microstrategy.com www.pentaho.com www.qlikview.com
MicroStrategy, a global leader in business Pentaho Corporation is the commercial open QlikTech is the world’s fastest-growing intelligence and performance management source alternative for business intelligence. business intelligence company. Its flagship technology, provides reporting, analysis, Pentaho BI Suite Enterprise Edition provides QlikView product delivers instant business and monitoring software that enables lead- comprehensive reporting, OLAP analysis, answers, enabling users to easily explore ing organizations to make better business dashboards, data integration/ETL, data their data without limits. Unlike traditional BI, decisions every day. Designed to support mining, and a BI platform, making it the QlikView delivers immediate value with pay- the most demanding business intelligence world’s leading and most widely deployed back measured in days or weeks rather than applications, MicroStrategy is ideal for commercial open source BI suite. Pentaho months, years, or not at all. It is the only enterprisewide BI standardization. Compa- provides support, services, and product BI offering that can be deployed on prem- nies choose MicroStrategy for its advanced enhancements via an annual subscription ise, in the cloud, or on a laptop or mobile technical capabilities, sophisticated analyt- that can lower total cost of ownership by 90 device—from a single user to the largest ics, and superior data and user scalability. percent compared to traditional, proprietary global enterprise. MicroStrategy is built from a single archi- BI offerings. Founded in 2004 as the pioneer tectural foundation, making it the most in open source BI, Pentaho’s products have Through QlikView’s disruptive, in-memory integrated and efficient BI architecture been downloaded more than five million associative approach, business users have available. With an intuitive Web interface, times, with production deployments ranging experienced unprecedented success and MicroStrategy enables business users from small organizations to The Global 2000. satisfaction, backed by its unique 30-day to seamlessly access enterprise data for Learn more at www.pentaho.com. money-back guarantee. QlikTech has more enhanced decision making. More information than 12,000 customers in 95 countries and about MicroStrategy is available at more than 800 partners worldwide. For more www.microstrategy.com. information, please visit www.qlikview.com.
WHAT WORKS in enterprise business intelligence Volume 28 35 solution pro v i d e r s
Talend Vertica Systems, Inc.
105 Fremont Avenue, Suite F 8 Federal Street Los Altos, CA 94022 Billerica, MA 01821 714.786.8140 978.600.1000 Fax: 714.786.8139 Fax: 978.600.1001 [email protected] [email protected] www.talend.com www.vertica.com
Talend is the recognized market leader in Vertica Systems is the market innovator open source data integration. After three for high-performance analytic database years of intense research and development management systems that run on industry- investment and with solid financial backing standard hardware. Vertica has developed from leading investment firms, Talend revo- column-oriented analytic database tech- lutionized the world of data integration when nology with an MPP architecture that lets it released the first version of Talend Open companies of any size store and query very Studio in 2006. large databases orders of magnitude faster and more affordably than other solutions. Talend’s solutions are used primarily for inte- The technology’s unmatched speed, scalabil- gration between operational systems, as well ity, flexibility and ease of use helps Vertica’s as for ETL (extract, transform, and load) for 100+ customers, including JP Morgan business intelligence and data warehousing, Chase, Verizon, Mozilla, Comcast, Level(3) migration, and data quality management. Communications, and Vonage, capitalize on business opportunities in real time. Vertica Unlike proprietary, closed solutions, which is headquartered in Billerica, MA. For more can only be afforded by the largest and information, visit the company’s Web site at wealthiest organizations, Talend makes data www.vertica.com. integration solutions available to organiza- tions of all sizes and for all integration needs.
36 WHAT WORKS in enterprise business intelligence Volume 28 BI Training Solutions: As Close as Your Conference Room
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38 WHAT WORKS in enterprise business intelligence Volume 28 TDWI Partner Members
These solution providers have joined TDWI as special Partner Members and share TDWI’s strong commitment to quality and content in education and knowledge transfer for business intelligence and data warehousing.