The Most Widely Used Business Intelligence Paradigm Enabling Pervasive BI with Guided Ad Hoc Reporting A White Paper by Kevin Quinn Kevin Quinn Bringing more than 25 years of software marketing and implementation experience to his role as Vice President of Product Marketing for Information Builders, Kevin Quinn oversees the development of marketing for all product lines. Mr. Quinn has been credited with helping to define business intelligence end- user categories through his creation of guidelines for using and employing business intelligence tools. He has helped companies worldwide develop information deployment strategies that help accelerate decisions and improve corporate performance. His efforts in this position have helped propel Information Builders’WebFOCUS and iWay Software solutions to category leadership in their respective areas. Kevin is also the founder of Statswizard.Com, an interactive sports statistics Web site that leverages business intelligence functionality. Mr. Quinn holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science from Queens College in Flushing, New York. Table of Contents 1 Executive Summary 2 The Business Intelligence Challenge 3 The Evolution of Business Intelligence 3 In the Beginning, There Was Batch 3 Business Units Find a Way: Advanced Ad Hoc Reporting 3 Next Came OLAP and Cubes 5 Guided Ad Hoc: Putting the Power of Reporting in the Hands of End Users 7 WebFOCUS Report Templates: How They Work 7 Ranking 9 Trends 12 Guided Ad Hoc In Action: Real World Successess 13 In Their Own Words Executive Summary Organizations today face a great challenge. They must make timely business information readily available to a large base of various users, in a way that is highly relevant and useful to each. But, the traditional business intelligence (BI) tools at their disposal have forced them to rely on IT resources, or teach their non-technical professionals how to navigate the complex features and functions of ad hoc and OLAP software. In fact, a recent report by Heavy Reading Research shows that only 25 percent of businesses can claim that at least half of their professional and managerial employees are using BI on a regular basis. The same report cites that the deployment of BI will likely more than double when tools become easier to use and non-technical users can more easily embrace them. Information Builders’ Guided Ad Hoc solutions empower businesses to broaden the depth and reach of BI – making more reports with more information available to more people across – and beyond – the enterprise. With Guided Ad Hoc, IT professionals can quickly and cost-effectively create a single report template, and publish it via the Web. Users can then use an easy and familiar interface to run their own reports. They can select their measures, dimensions, sorts, filters, and more from simple drop-down boxes – resulting in the potential for thousands of different content combinations, to satisfy the widest range of business information requirements. Today, Guided Ad Hoc solutions are used in thousands of companies of all types and sizes. These businesses have been able to recognize the true impact that BI can have, by putting the power of reporting right in the hands of their end users. 1 Information Builders The Business Intelligence Challenge For decades, BI has been providing companies with a faster, more effective way to collect, summa- rize, display, format, and distribute the information contained within their enterprise data sources. This has allowed business professionals throughout and beyond the organization – including executives, managers, front line workers, customers, and business partners – to view and analyze timely, accurate data about core business activities, and use it to improve decision-making and strategic planning. But, the complexity of traditional BI tools has placed a tremendous burden on IT teams. Developers typically build reports using intricate programming languages or WYSIWYG design tools, then make those reports accessible to end users via hard copy, Web browsers, or e-mail. As emerging and changing business requirements result in a flood of new report requests from end users, developers often find themselves buried in report-related projects that can distract them from other crucial corporate technology initiatives. Throughout the years, numerous advancements in BI solutions have made them more intuitive and easy to use. Simple desktop reporting tools made business data readily and broadly available to end users, but delivered static, relatively superficial information that provided limited strategic value. Ad hoc and OLAP tools offered the kind of in-depth analytical detail required, but were not widely deployed due to the time and costs associated with training, installation, maintenance, and support. That left non-technical users in the same position – requiring the ability to access and interact with mission-critical business data, but without the time or skills needed to generate their own reports. Because of these problems, most organizations use only a fraction of their enterprise data – less than twenty percent on average. And, according to GIGA Group, companies further compound the problem by making that data available to less than five percent of their business users. By failing to leverage their most vital asset – their information – companies hinder their own productivity, and put their ability to truly optimize performance in jeopardy. To reverse this trend, they must ask themselves: How do we provide truly meaningful information to a large number of end users at all levels – while minimizing the reliance on IT staff – without forcing them to learn complex business intelligence software? 2 Guided Ad Hoc Reporting The Evolution of Business Intelligence In the Beginning, There Was Batch In the past, programmers wrote COBOL programs that ran in batch mode on mainframes, collecting and aggregating numbers from data sources. The result was a printed report – complete with summaries, totals, subtotals, headings, footings, calculations, and more – that would be copied and shared among employees. Because these reports provided vital information that end users were unable to access themselves, IT departments found themselves inundated with requests. These requests were often expressed in business terms that were not easily understood by developers, resulting in iteration after iteration of each report until the user got exactly what they needed. This created time lags – often as long as several months – that negatively impacted the activity or process that the information within the report was supposed to enhance. Business Units Find a Way: Advanced Ad Hoc Reporting When point-and-click ad hoc solutions were introduced, they gave non-programmers new hope – allowing them to build their own reports, without IT intervention. Several power users within each business unit, who possessed both business savvy and the ability to understand data relationships from a technical perspective, were given report creation capabilities. At the same time, IT teams were free to work on other initiatives. Yet, this approach still resulted in static output, and additional reports were required to answer the questions raised by the data in previous reports. As a result, the underlying business problem which prompted the report in the first place was rarely solved. Additionally, although these tools did not require in-depth programming expertise, they were still quite technical in nature, with hundreds of features that were confusing to even a technically-astute business user, often leading to errors and inconsistencies in report information. Industry expert Ralph Kimball agrees, claiming that, “ad hoc query tools, as powerful as they are, can only be under- stood and used effectively by a small percentage of the potential data warehouse user population.” And, although ad hoc reporting solutions freed IT teams from a large percentage of their report development burden, it forced them to oversee the cumbersome process of installing and maintaining the software on user desktops. Next Came OLAP and Cubes Online analytical processing (OLAP) solutions were the next class of tools that aimed to further simplify reporting for end users. Data was pre-aggregated and loaded into multidimensional cubes, allowing users to quickly and easily drill down to more detailed information. Because OLAP is interactive in nature, users could participate in an investigative session directly from their desktop computers – drilling down to more detail, or sorting or pivoting, when information presented a problem that required further examination from a different perspective. No existing 3 Information Builders knowledge of complex data sources was needed; all information navigation and investigation could be performed instantaneously and was kept within the context of the cube. But, OLAP had plenty of problems of its own. First, IT staff found themselves burdened with requests for reports that included information outside the cube – resulting in the need to create new cubes or models. Additionally, data contained in cubes was often dated, and did not present a real-time view. And, like the ad hoc reporting solutions that came before it, IT staff were forced to install and maintain OLAP software on user PCs. End users have also been quite vocal about the limitations of OLAP. Nigel Pendse, an independent industry analyst who specializes in OLAP, conducted a survey of OLAP users. Among the key problems noted were slow query