Panorama Business Intelligence

Using Advanced Insight to Drive Business Results

The business world is full of data and information.  Companies keep collecting it so they can better cater to customers, compete in markets and appease regulators.  Many companies are trying to adapt their business models and practices to integrate management by exception as a core principle.

The foundation of this management model focuses on the concept that a company has two types of products or processes – the ones that behave as expected and the ones that behave exceptionally.  Managing by exception is based on the premise that business information workers should be focusing their attention on the exceptional because that is where they can have the most impact on the overall business.  Business Intelligence supports and facilitates this management philosophy.  

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Standardizing BI – Application vs. Platform 

If you ask the “industry” about the optimal way of standardizing BI, the consensus definitely leans toward the platform.  Choose a single platform to standardize on and use it to access data dispersed across the organization.  Then use one set of reporting tools to gain insight about business trends and opportunities.

It sounds great.  But it’s also an ideal that is difficult to achieve.  The industry is moving in that direction, but the progress is deliberate.  Currently, there are two main platform standardization approaches being advocated in the marketplace.  But they do not always help organizations achieve the best reporting, analysis and performance management from data across the organization. In addition, standardizing on one platform requires an organization to sacrifice functionality from existing investments, allot significant budget and demand effort from already overburdened resources.

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While the world of BI is trying to make non analyst users start using BI, I am starting to believe that the only way information workers and business users will use BI is if we make it possible to use the data without the BI Tools.

One of the ways you think about innovation is by actually ‘killing’ the most important feature of your product – so for me it is killing the existing front ends leaving me with data and a user. Starting here I believe new and innovative BI Concepts come together. Let me give you an example of some things we have going on:

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The next generation BI – BI 2.0 or how we like to call it – Proactive Business Intelligence really takes a big dependency on integrating BI with workflow engines and business process management solutions making BI And the process together bigger than the sum of the parts.

So what is a workflow?

A workflow is a model of a human or system process which is defined as a map of activities. An activity is a step in a workflow and is the unit of execution, re-use and composition for a workflow.

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Panorama software has been in the driving seat of MDX since it’s invention around the OLAP technology we sold to Microsoft back in 1996.
Since then we’ve taken MDX to the extreme. As such I wanted to share some of the reasons why MDX has revolutionized the world of BI…. I hope you enjoy this entry and please provide your comments.

So the invention of MDX (Multi Dimensional Expressions) is really the key cornerstones in the world of BI especially since its establishment  as a standard query language for OLAP servers. MDX has three powerful concepts embedded in it. These concepts together are what make MDX unique and allow users to ask complex multi dimensions questions.

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