Panorama Business Intelligence

In many companies today accountability and decisions made about the business no longer fall just on the shoulders of executives or senior management. Decisions are made at all levels throughout an organization and each decision impacts the business.

With that said, I find it very interesting to see that most companies still focus on empowering the power users and executives and tend to neglect the casual end users that are left with basic static data which they are supposed to use to make daily business deicisions. My big belief is that even these end users should have the ability to find new trends, make new observations and contribute to the growth of the business.

I read today about Nestle that are purchasing and deploying BI solutions, to extend their SAP BW deployment (http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/070820/20070820005061.html?.v=1).
When we sell to SAP customers the main goal we share with our customers is the ability to empower end users. Allow them use the valuable data in their SAP systems. By empoerment, I am speaking to the abiity to provide these users the ability to perform self-service analytics as opposed to just self-service reporting. The difference between self service analytics and reporting is that with analysis you generate new insights. All decision makers should have ability to interact with their data, look at it in different ways, ask new and different questions and uncover the answers to those questions.

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Mark Smith from Intelligent Enterprise published today a post about  Microsoft’s BI strategy that I found very interesting and relevant (http://www.intelligententerprise.com/blog/archives/2007/08/can_microsoft_p.html ) .
 
In his post, Mark talks about two big challenges with the Microsoft BI strategy.  First, Microsoft BI is a set of many dependant applications that need to be “glued” together and then customized by developers to really become a complete enterprise BI solution.  

Mark wrote,

“while good, there are challenges in the required dependencies of SQL Server and Microsoft Office to make the product deliver its full capabilities. This complexity inevitably adds to the cost of ownership of the Microsoft approach to BI and performance management.”

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Enabling SSO in the Panorama Dashboards site is quite easy, but you have to be careful.

Here’s a story that happened to me last month: We wanted to establish SSO in our dashboards site. In a matter of fact, the responsibility for this was under the skilled hands of our system team. After a short time they succeeded and SSO was established in our site. We saw it when we entered the site: Instead of login page we directly entered the dashboard page we wanted.

After a few days, when I entered into the settings section of the dashboard site, I saw this:

Yes, that’s right. No security at all. This is why we entered directly to the dashboard page instead of the login page…

The system team claims that they never said that the SSO succeeded and we say they did. No one will prove he’s right, so there’s no one to blame. But blaming is not everything. The important thing here is to learn for the next time: When you think you got a feature – check it. Things not always as they seems to be.

This week we finalized the patent application of our new product, NovaView Spotlight, and are ready to show this new innovation to the world.

NovaView Spotlight is the manifestation of our goal to truly simplify the use of BI, to make it more like Google or iPod.

You’re probably thinking to yourself (like I would) – “this is the 100th time I’ve read about a BI vendor claiming to make BI easy”….. and you are probably right.

So while you might be skeptical, I think this NovaView Spotlight will surprise you just as it surprised our early Beta customers.  We’ve been getting some great feedback from them that makes us believe we have something big.

I read this morning this note from Doug Henschen (http://www.intelligententerprise.com/blog/archives/2007/08/its_hard_to_avo.html) where he talks about this subject. Can BI really become easy and pervasive?

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One of the beautiful features of Panorama NovaView is the ability to manually edit the MDX which expressing the view. In the NovaView desktop application, click on Tools -> Direct MDX. The only problem is that you have to learn MDX yourself…

Here are some useful tips when learning MDX. Even experienced MDX programmers may find interest in these:

• If you were a code programmer in your past, you can relax: MDX don’t care about capitalization.
• Don’t even try to skip an axis: It’s impossible and it is meaningless. Use the predefined names for the axis, such as: columns, rows, pages, etc.
• You’re new to MDX and the whole OLAP gives you a headache? Try to imagine this as a hypercube. It can help you a lot.
• When writing large queries, pay attention to the “readability” of your MDX. Use the Monospace fonts whenever possible.
• Do NOT think of SQL when learning or working with MDX. Although the syntaxes may look alike, these languages are totally different when you get to know them.
• .Members will give you all regular members. .AllMembers will also include calculated members.
• An expression like [Time].Members won’t work if the Time dimension has multiple hierarchies.
• The asterisk (*) can replace the CrossJoin function. It may improve readability of the code.
• When using Order() function, you can specify a sorting criteria which is not shown in the result grid.