Panorama Business Intelligence

Lately it feels as if everybody in the BI world started blogging and writing about BI 2.0…. out of all the articles and blogs I read there is one that I liked in particular by Neil Raden – Business Intelligence 2.0: Simpler, More Accessible, Inevitable … I admit it might be the case because I felt for the first time someone was thinking about it the same way we do here at Panorama.

I know we promised this blog would not be about us and how we are better but the alignment is so nice that I wanted to open the floor for some discussion with the community and get some feedback about how we are thinking and building software around the concepts of BI 2.0.

Our next versions of BI products are branded as Proactive BI. When we speak about Proactive BI we think about 3 major initiatives: provide increased capabilities for end users to Focus on the relevant, enable information workers to go beyond generating insight and take structured action and finally, use BI and integrate it with processes and workflows to automate the routine.

Now, if look at how Neil talks about it I find it really interesting how PBI is so aligned with BI 2.0. Neil writes:

To become pervasive and grow out of its reporting niche, BI has to provide simple, personal analytical tools on an as-needed basis with a minimal footprint and cost.

In our labs we are working on what we believe will become a major innovation in the BI space – The Personal Dashboard. That new innovation essentially is about doing what Neil is referring to – BI with no BI tools. 

Think about the windows Vista side bar, outlook task pane or a basic RSS reader… these are the BI tools of the future, this is where users will be able to monitor and add the most important metrics they care about and not have to open complex BI tools for that…. 

In essence it won’t matter if you use Business Objects or Microsoft Excel, the goal is to provide users the ability to constantly track the key metrics and KPIs they care about where it makes most sense – Outlook, Windows and RSS readers.    

This is one of those new capabilities that we tag under “focus on the relevant” as we believe that having the ability to extract key metrics and put them in front of every user will make the big difference in achieving 2 things; a true pervasive BI world and provide users the ability to see only what matters.

Neil also mentions the following:

Today, analytics is a singular process. An individual views a report in some form or creates a query to understand something. No matter how sophisticated or nave, the result is always the same (assuming it works); the analyst has informed his or her opinion or hypothesis, but the analytical tool stops there. It isn’t possible to replay the steps and show others how the question was resolved. Nor is it possible, without a custom-made application, to transfer this new knowledge to a system or service that can act on it immediately. Nor is it possible — again, without building an application — to track the results of the decision explicitly (as in, “Orville, the action you took on pricing based on the new parameters that entered the system on Tuesday are showing a marked improvement in on-time arrivals at the terminal.”). Delivering such capabilities would bring a Nirvana of decision support, something we have all been envisioning for a decade or more, but BI in its current state is not designed to close the loop. That’s the promise of BI 2.0, and, in fact, it’s the single driving reason for this new era to emerge. 

ACTIONABLE! Taking structured actions is one of the biggest pains in todays’ BI world. People cannot repeat steps done previously to get to the bottom of a problem nor can they actually take action to resolve an issue from within the BI tools.

While Actionable BI is the term most BI vendors use, none has provided the tools to take actions and integrate with true business processes. While we have not launched our next version yet, I believe this will be the biggest differentiator…. Track how people resolve issues and recommend those actions to other users…. Integrate “out of the box” with workflows and processes that enable users to take action from within the BI Application and make actions a true part of BI.

Would love to hear comments on this…..