White Paper Library: Enterprise Business Intelligence and Web Reporting

Please select one or more papers from the list below by checking the box to the left of each paper and clicking on the "submit" button at the bottom of the page.

Analytics

Advanced Data Visualization and Analysis Learn how turning raw enterprise data into intuitive and visually perceptive illustrations can make it easier to measure and compare information while spotting critical trends, patterns, and relationships.

Leveraging Real-Time Information to Enhance Financial Planning, Management and Control Learn how comprehensive financial analysis can help you obtain a complete, consolidated view of corporate performance and deliver timely, accurate financial information.

A Snapshot of Integration in Upstream Oil and Gas Operations In the upstream oil and gas industry, integration of business and production systems is becoming a critical part of doing business and remaining competitive. This report produced by Advertas and Upstream CIO Newsletter interviews producers of various sizes and an industry-standards group to form a picture of the challenges as well as potential solutions for successful systems integration in the oil and gas sector.

Data Visualization: Gaining Perspective Explore the benefits of using a data visualization tool to identify business problems that are hidden in large volumes of data. WebFOCUS Visual Discovery uses color, isolation, and chart interactions to reveal masked conditions. Data visualization tools like WebFOCUS Visual Discovery make relevant information pop out, using unique chart types like paraboxes, cone charts, and scatter plots. Once abnormal conditions are exposed by data visualization, traditional BI tools can then be deployed to investigate and monitor situations on a regular basis.

Enhancing Decision-Making, Cost-Efficiency, and Profitability With Predictive Analytics This paper discusses the incorporation of predictive modeling capabilities into the WebFOCUS BI platform and highlights how this advanced functionality can dramatically improve decision-making, thus reducing risk and costs while increasing revenues and profits.

Architecture

Scalability: Ensuring Long-Term Value for Business Intelligence and Reporting Investments This paper examines the connection between scalability to enterprise BI and reporting value, and recommends strategies for ensuring BI scalability.

Scaling Business Intelligence to Leverage Server Consolidations Server consolidation delivers the dual benefits of reducing costs and improving performance. And once servers are consolidated, they can dramatically improve the company's access to -- and use of -- its business intelligence systems.

The Foundation of High-Value Business Intelligence: A Description of the WebFOCUS 7.1 Architecture This paper, written by Information Builders CEO Gerald Cohen, discusses the benefits of a modular architecture for BI: applications can be scaled with less hardware; server environments can be managed with fewer human resources; and analytical business intelligence, end-user information delivery, electronic publishing, and operational business intelligence applications can be implemented with a single system. This leads to easier installations, lower maintenance costs, and shared re-use of common components.

Business Strategies

The Cost of a Question - Examining Total Cost of Ownership for Business Intelligence Solutions Reduce the purchase, maintenance, and implementation costs of business intelligence by standardizing on a single solution that meets all of your reporting and information delivery needs. Compares the TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) of BI solutions from Cognos, Business Objects, and Information Builders.

Information Now - by Gerald D. Cohen Information Builders' CEO Gerry Cohen describes how successfully mastering the three dimensions of business intelligence scalability will provide universal access to real-time information and improve decision-making across your organization.

Integrated Business Intelligence Suites Positioning Paper Read about the emergence of enterprise business intelligence suites and how they satisfy the information requirements of users across the enterprise and beyond

Establishing a Culture of Measurement - A Practical Guide to Business Intelligence This paper serves as a synopsis of Information Builders' philosophy of business intelligence. By using this paper as a model, you'll learn how to establish a culture of measurement and begin a powerful cycle of continued improvement within your organization.

Architecture of the WebFOCUS 7 Server for Autonomic Operation The autonomic server is Information Builders' next-generation WebFOCUS architecture.

Strategic Delivery and Management of Enterprise Information Discusses how WebFOCUS information delivery and management solutions help organizations dynamically deliver vital business information to the right people at the right time, and effectively store and manage it for future use.

Achieving Compliance -- Meeting Today's Reporting Requirements With Business Intelligence Technology Learn about the challenges and solutions for meeting the reporting requirements of government legislation, industry-specific standards, or corporate governance.

The Real-Time Enterprise: IT Becomes Strategic Again Learn how companies are quickly moving to build flexible systems architecture so they can accommodate more dynamic business processes and accelerate information velocity throughout the enterprise.

Managing Total Cost of Ownership for Business Intelligence Learn how you can reduce the total cost of business intelligence and reporting for your organization.

Delivering on the Enterprise Business Intelligence Mandate – Success Factors for a Standardized Solution This white paper explains the specific business and architectural success factors to consider when selecting one enterprise business intelligence suite to serve as the enterprise standard.

Fostering the Culture of Accountability: Three Approaches to Creating a Performance Management System Using technology, companies create a culture of accountability by involving everyone, at all levels. Read comparisons among the three current technical approaches to managing performance.

Process-Driven BI: Building Smarter Business Processes Improving operational efficiency involves more than simply automating labor-intensive activities. It requires organizations to continually seek out new methods of managing increasingly complex business processes. By injecting business intelligence technology directly into critical business operations, you can ensure that the right people get involved at the right time to make decisions that impact your bottom line.

Implement a Best-of-Breed Fusion Center Knowledge is power, and today's law enforcement professional must be a knowledge-based worker. From the police chief to the patrol officer, everyone needs the latest information to rapidly gain awareness and understanding of the events in their jurisdiction. A well-designed Fusion Center can make this possible, but accessing, consolidating, and then distributing the myriad information sources required by a Fusion Center is no mean feat. This paper discusses the critical components and success factors required to design and implement a best-of-breed Fusion Center in order to effectively fight, and even prevent, crime.

Worst Practices in Business Intelligence: Why BI Applications Succeed Where BI Tools Fail This paper provides insight into the top four worst practices for business intelligence. It also provides guidance on how to avoid or overcome worst practices in order to tap into the true power of BI. By reading this paper, you will have a solid understanding of how to avoid BI failure and achieve success with your BI initiatives.

Business Intelligence: The Strategic Imperative for CIOs The CIO's role becomes more strategic as organizations use information to create a competitive advantage. This paper – using evidence from benchmarks created with IBM to test WebFOCUS' performance on System z running z/OS and Linux – helps CIOs to balance demands for information accessibility and processing power.

Optimizing Performance Across Your Supply Chain A firm's supply chain is the essence of how it delivers value to its customers. Deploying a supply chain performance management solution is a challenging process. This paper outlines critical steps and key factors in optimizing performance management for your entire supply chain.

How Business Intelligence Should Work – The Connection Between Strategic, Analytical, and Operational Initiatives In this paper, we'll investigate the various levels of business intelligence, discuss the challenges organizations face with today's typical BI deployments, and highlight how to make strategic, analytical, and operational initiatives work seamlessly together to enhance performance and boost competitive advantage across an entire organization.

The Most Widely Used Business Intelligence Paradigm - Enabling Pervasive BI with Guided Ad Hoc Reporting 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.

Business Intelligence on the Mainframe: Mission-Critical Applications Require a Mission-Critical Platform WebFOCUS, Information Builder's fully-integrated enterprise BI platform, leverages the advantages of IBM's System z to deliver a highly reliable, scalable, mainframe-based operational reporting environment that maximizes performance and minimizes risk.

Comply With XBRL: Automate Compliance With U.S. and European Financial-Reporting Standards The XBRL standardization initiative requires that all terms in financial reports be submitted in an approved taxonomy so comparable terms are used across different companies. This paper discusses the pitfalls of using manual steps that are currently common for transposing financial documents into compatible XBRL files, looks at the advantages of substituting an automatic process using WebFOCUS, and illustrates that process.

Successful Mergers and Acquisitions: Ensure Your M&As Through Strategic Use of Integration Technology The risks associated with mergers and acquisitions (M&A) are high. Various obstacles exist that, without proactive planning, can set the stage for failure. At the top of the list is the need to bring together disparate IT infrastructures to support the new, combined entity. In this white paper we will examine the importance of integration as part of any M&A strategy, and discuss those factors that need to be carefully considered when defining and implementing an integration plan.

The World's Best Business Intelligence Applications: Customer-Facing, Revenue-Generating BI Providing self-service access to information leads to customer loyalty, improved performance, reduced costs, increased revenue, and greater competitive advantage. When it comes to leveraging enterprise data for use in self-service applications, Information Builders' WebFOCUS has a proven track record of success.

The Convergence of Enterprise Search and Business Intelligence Combined, business intelligence and enterprise search can serve as a key enabler of optimized operational performance, providing decision-makers with a single, simplified point of access to the broadest range of data and content that offers insight into data and information that had not previously been possible.

Five Things You Need to Know About Your Users Before You Deploy Business Intelligence This paper lists 5 things you need to know before you begin planning your BI application, so you can better understand the blend of capabilities needed to address end user requirements.

Leverage Information Builders for Successful Health Information Exchange Information Builders, specialists in the field of health integration, offers a health information exchange solution that creates a portal where hospitals, physicians, and other providers can engage in the meaningful use of electronic health records.

Complementary Technologies

Geographic Information Systems and Business Intelligence: Perfect Together Laden with examples, this paper presents a vision of the synergistic power of integrating geographic information with business intelligence applications.

Tackling the Data Management Challenge Through Server Consolidation Obtaining the best data for specific applications requires more than simply the ability to connect to like sources using similar semantics. It means making decisions about how fresh the data must be, where it must ultimately reside, and in what forms users need it. Navigate the challenges of data and server consolidation with help from Unisys and Information Builders.

Controlling Excel Chaos With Business Intelligence Providing direct, secure access from Microsoft Excel to corporate data presents a significant challenge. This paper first outlines the vulnerabilities of Excel, and explores strategies to counteract these shortfalls. It then describes push solutions that serve up corporate data from centralized Excel sourcebooks and add-in desktop functionality that lets expert Excel users pull data directly from corporate data sources. And finally, it proposes structured ad hoc applications that are flexible and agile in answering the impromptu questions of non-expert Excel users. This paper was updated in August 2007 to include information about WebFOCUS Quick Data, our add-in feature for Excel.

iWay Software Secure Messaging Option iWay Service Manager's Secure Messaging Option allows buisness users, and their partners, to enhance the security and harden the integration infrastructure used to exchange messages between organizations.

Everyone Sells: The Value of Business intelligence in Retail Business Intelligence can help retail executives, warehouse staff, customer services agents, and everyone in your retail organization realize new retailing innovations, improve margins, and propel profits to new heights.

Monitoring Trading Partner Agreements – Using Business Intelligence to Enhance BAM Activities iWay Activity Monitor integrates BAM and BI technology to capture end-to-end transaction and workflow data across multiple applications and business units, summarizing and displaying trading partner metrics to help managers make informed decisions.

Structuring the Haystack - Business Intelligence and Enterprise Search Solutions Make enterprise search solutions work for you by planning, collecting content, managing index processing, creating interfaces and navigation, providing analytics, and ensuring secure information.

A Prescription for Healthcare: Optimize Performance and Quality Now Data quality, streamlining business processes, providing information access, and making electronic health information interoperable between health enterprises via standards like HL7 are essential to the healthcare industry. Performance and quality are critical and in some cases key to the very survival of healthcare organizations. In this white paper we will explain how business intelligence and performance management, enabled by comprehensive integration are the keys to achieving success.

Maximize Opportunity and ROI With Business Intelligence and Integration Information Builders iWay Software offers integration solutions designed to reduce customer costs and improve operational efficiency by linking together disparate information sources and enhancing mission-critical business activities.

Increase Enrollment, Retention, and Student Success: Best Practices for Information Delivery and Strategic Alignment in Higher Education With a clear strategic focus, enterprise-wide business intelligence, and a formal best practices process for executing strategy, colleges and universities can navigate the operational challenges of data access and performance management to increase enrollment, retention, and student success. This white paper shows you how.

Take an Intelligence-Led, Proactive, Predictive Approach to Law Enforcement This paper illustrates how various police departments implemented successful crime center solutions via Information Builders' Law Enforcement Analytics (LEA), using BI, analytics, and GIS mapping to improve critical decision-making, increase efficiency, and make their cities safer.

Performance Management Without Biases Today's organizations require a best-of-breed performance management platform. Information Builders' Performance Management Framework is a powerful, comprehensive solution that facilitates the effective, efficient management of both financial and operational performance across an entire enterprise.

Data Management & ETL

Resource Governance and Analysis for Enterprise Business Intelligence Demonstrates the benefits of enhancing your business intelligence system with in-depth resource analysis and preemptive governing capabilities.

Leveraging Your Data Architecture for Enterprise Business Intelligence Find out how to leverage your data architecture in order to shorten business cycles, increase responsiveness to changing business conditions, and gain a competitive edge.

Fixing Enterprise Search Web-centric search technologies cover only a small portion of the requirements of enterprise search. An enterprise search solution must reflect the needs of the environment and its users – the diverse multiplatform, multi-tiered, multi-application, and multi-user environment that runs the businesses of today.

Leverage Information Builders for Successful Health Information Exchange Information Builders, specialists in the field of health integration, offers a health information exchange solution that creates a portal where hospitals, physicians, and other providers can engage in the meaningful use of electronic health records.

Development & Deployment

Enabling Rapid ROI: With Java Based Business Intelligence Applications Learn how to leverage the processing efficiencies of Java-based application servers to deploy business intelligence applications to more people at a lower per user cost.

Rapid Business Intelligence: Application Development for the Web Shows how to rapidly develop applications for all users and broadly deploy them via the web.

Mobile Business Intelligence Reporting: A Roadmap for Success How an organization approaches mobile BI will inevitably impact the health of the entire enterprise. With more and more employees traveling and working remotely, organizations that meet the demand for mobile BI will benefit from maximized productivity by enabling users to get the information they need wherever they are. This paper helps to identify key issues, highlight paramount considerations, and map the necessary steps to successfully implementing a mobile BI reporting solution.

For Partners

Maximize Opportunity and ROI With Business Intelligence and Integration Information Builders iWay Software offers integration solutions designed to reduce customer costs and improve operational efficiency by linking together disparate information sources and enhancing mission-critical business activities.

Enhance Your SaaS Application With Advanced Business Intelligence As the demand for SaaS grows, providers can leverage advanced business intelligence to provide significant and measurable impact to the enterprise.

Legacy Extension

FOCUS Web Integration Using WebFOCUS Directed to owners of FOCUS reporting environments, illustrates how leading organizations have minimized cost and time for moving legacy systems to the Web.

Mainframe FOCUS Release 7.6: CPU Performance Improvement The 7.6 release of mainframe FOCUS employs the new IBM/C compiler to achieve CPU performance improvements of 10 and 20 percent and more compared to the previous release. In many cases, it restores performance levels to those of 7.0.8R from 1999. This paper details the benchmark process and results for various mini-applications from which you can extrapolate the gains you might achieve on your own applications by upgrading to 7.6.

Doing More With What You Have: Save Money on Your BI Applications by Using Your IBM Mainframe This white paper looks at ways that you can save money by doing more with your current investment in IBM's z/OS mainframe.

The IBM zIIP Specialty Engine for Mainframe FOCUS As of Release 7.6.10, FOCUS is enabled to run on the system z Integrated Information Processor (zIIP) engine. This white paper demonstrates the types and approximate amounts of FOCUS workload transferred to the zIIP under various conditions, and the resulting cost reductions.

Management & Administration

Deploying and Managing Enterprise Wide End-User Reporting Environments Learn how to deploy secure, wide scale business intelligence applications that provide the ability to personalize and specialize views of the information.

Leverage Information Builders for Successful Health Information Exchange Information Builders, specialists in the field of health integration, offers a health information exchange solution that creates a portal where hospitals, physicians, and other providers can engage in the meaningful use of electronic health records.

Learning Circle: Data-Driven, Decision-Making Tools for Educators Learning Circle improves educators' capacity to make data-driven decisions, set goals based on academic achievement results and intervention strategies, and then achieve those goals.

Partner

Enhance Your SaaS Application With Advanced Business Intelligence As the demand for SaaS grows, providers can leverage advanced business intelligence to provide significant and measurable impact to the enterprise.

Scalability

Enhance Your SaaS Application With Advanced Business Intelligence As the demand for SaaS grows, providers can leverage advanced business intelligence to provide significant and measurable impact to the enterprise.

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