Building an Intelligent Enterprise
The business intelligence (BI) industry has been evolving for decades, giving today's leading vendors a tremendous base of technology and expertise. But as customers extend BI technology into every corner of the enterprise, they not only need tools for reporting, query and analysis, but complete application development environments for building complex BI applications.
This is beyond what most of today's BI vendors can deliver.
The majority of these vendors grew up offering point solutions for reporting, data warehousing, or analysis, then gradually added additional point solutions as they cobbled together enterprise business intelligence suites (EBIS). Some of the these solutions were built in-house, others were acquired from third-party vendors. The result is a hodge-podge of tools without any true cohesion. They might look
the same on the front-end because they utilize a common user interface. But under the covers there is little architectural synergy among the various BI modules.
Information Builders, by contrast, has created its entire suite of business intelligence and reporting tools from the ground up. Each component has been carefully architected to complement the others, and all of them are based on a common development environment and complete set of infrastructure services. This gives Information Builders a leg up as we make the transition from offering a mature EBIS to a complete BI platform.
Wayne Eckerson of The Data Warehouse Institute says a BI platform is characterized by a cohesive architecture upon which you can layer BI functionality. For example, it includes a common application development environment, a common security layer, common meta data, a common repository, a single API, a single reporting engine, a single information delivery engine, and so forth. Each of these functions takes the form of services that you can access via a service-oriented architecture (see Eckerson Interview).
Emphasis on Integration
A BI platform is the foundation for developing production reports, parameterized reports, self-service reports, and financial reports. It also enables a wide range of analytical capabilities via performance dashboards, portal connections, spreadsheet connections, and online analytical processing (OLAP) tools. Andy Kellett, an analyst with the Butler Group, believes this type of tightly-integrated solution is essential to today's enterprise computing strategies. "If businesses are to gain real value from their BI assets, there is a genuine and growing need for solutions that can be fully integrated with the organization's other main infrastructure systems," he reports. "The strength of WebFOCUS comes from its ability to work with a wide range of enterprise data sources, coupled with its capability to rapidly develop custom built applications – applications that allow customers to address critical business problems" (Butler Tech Audit, April 2003).
According to Kellett, WebFOCUS includes everything from back-end Extract Transform and Load (ETL) services to front-end Web-enabled information flows. In between these two extremities, it provides function-rich, enterprise level BI applications that are aimed at supporting user communities wherever they reside. Such applications include the provision of ad-hoc query facilities, analysis tools, general reporting and financial reporting, OLAP, document and chart generation, portal delivery, the distribution and archiving of information, plus a range of security and administration features.
Leading the Way to SOA
In addition to accommodating many types of reporting and data visualization activities, the WebFOCUS platform works within a service oriented architecture (SOA) to enable real-time data analysis, event monitoring, and business activity monitoring. With access to real-time transactions, data warehouses, and business-to-business messages, it always delivers the information you need, when you need it.
"We see integration as one of the strengths of the Information Builders BI solution," says Kellett. "It is carried out within WebFOCUS on a number of levels. The component architecture provides documented APIs, making all features and functions of the product available to third-party processes. The product itself has been tightly integrated with all major portals and leading development environments. Also, WebFOCUS leverages the wealth of integration technology provided by its relationship with iWay Software."
WebFOCUS can create, consume, and publish Web services, making it an integral part of a service-oriented architecture. Within the WebFOCUS environment, Web services can be used in conjunction with iWay Software's Business Services to enable universal XML access to more than 280 proprietary information systems. This makes it easy to combine data from internal and external sources and drill down among many types of information.
Why is this important? Whether your business initiatives involve boosting revenue, bringing new products to market, or raising the productivity of your managerial staff, you need BI applications that can be created and modified quickly – without disrupting business operations. Basing your BI applications on a common platform helps you accelerate development cycles, lower costs and respond more quickly to changing market conditions.
Setting a Standard for Consistency
Today's organizations are not looking for niche BI products. They're looking for standards that allow them to reduce the cost of maintaining the entire IT infrastructure. From a personnel standpoint, having a standard software platform enables you to leverage investments in common tools and skill sets. From an architectural standpoint, standards help you reduce data redundancy, eliminate inconsistent metadata, and reuse business logic.
Companies that standardize on a cohesive BI platform can drastically reduce the total cost of business intelligence and reporting company-wide. In a recent Unisys study, 92 percent of all large organizations said they have or will soon standardize on a single BI platform (Business Intelligence Trends Study, Unisys Corporation, August 20, 2004). These organizations understand the savings that can be gained by eliminating redundant tools. They also save by freeing up money, resources, and systems previously dedicated to supporting disparate BI solutions.
This desire to centralize reporting functions and eliminate extraneous analysis tools is further driving the adoption of standard BI platforms. Many Information Builders customers have demonstrated substantial savings and productivity improvements by consolidating their BI investments and adopting a common, enterprise-wide standard.
Boosting Operational Insight
Information Builders' relentless focus on enforcing standards and automating common development tasks is paving the way for new types of operational dashboards and operational business intelligence systems. These sophisticated applications yield a high return for organizations such as Eastern Mountain Sports, Starwood Hotels, and Parker Hannifin – all of whom have production BI applications that are profiled in this issue. By finding faster and more effective ways to turn operational data into relevant, actionable information, these organizations are demonstrating how to shorten business cycles, increase responsiveness, and gain a competitive edge.
Of course, organizations can make the most of a standard BI platform if they also centralize BI strategy and execution practices. Some companies do this by establishing a business intelligence competency center (BICC) to make the most of their BI investments. A BICC sits between the business units and the IT department, overseeing everything from gathering requirements to managing data repositories to developing useful BI solutions.
Basing your BI applications on a common platform helps to accelerate development cycles, lower costs and respond more quickly to changing market conditions. With WebFOCUS, Information Builders has created a flexible BI platform that makes it easier to access, combine, deliver, and share knowledge and insight throughout the enterprise.
 
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