Panorama Business Intelligence

“We are making BI pervasive buy putting pivot tables on every desktop with our latest office suite” ; “We re-designed our product to use the latest Adobe technology to make BI tools more powerful”; “Every company needs BI”….

These are just a few quotes you will find in many press releases and interviews with BI vendors. What strikes me about these quotes is the fact that BI vendors are innovating the tool rather than focusing on solving the business problems for which BI was originally created; enabling information workers and managers to get insights into the business so every employee can make better and smarter decisions. Things have become so absurd where most BI tools are improving in directions that have very little to do with the solving the main business problems. 

As long as BI vendors just focus on making pivot table and report creation tools “better” BI won’t become any better in helping solve the real business problem… how many people will ever use a Pivot Table (weather it is in excel of in a web browser? 1%?)

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I never thought of it until one of my users said it. Sorting the KPI can be a very good idea. Instead of always having the same indicators (gauges, traffic lights, etc.) in the same position of the screen, sorting it can make the viewer expect that the most relevant indicator will be placed in the top-left corner of the screen, the second most-relevant will be placed after it, etc.

Sorting the KPI is a very easy thing. Every end user, even with no clue in MDX can do it by following this:

In the Define KPI wizard, go to the “Select Set” step. Copy the current set. For the example, let’s say that the current set is [Products].Members and you want to sort it according to the Sales measure in descending order. Click on the advanced button on the right of the set (The button with the “…” on it) and enter the following MDX statement:

Order([Products].Members, [Measures].[Sales], DESC)

If you want to order in ascending order you can replace the DESC with ASC or not to mention it at all.

I read this (http://www.intelligententerprise.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=202805814)  article today about the recent consolidation in the BI market.

Here is a quote form that article:

If vendors do the integration work they promise, it might also prove beneficial to purchase front-end BI from the same vendors who sell the apps that contain core business data: Oracle, Microsoft Dynamics and SAP enterprise-resource planning applications…

Does this mean that If I have SAP for ERP And Siebel for CRM the best thing for me would be to buy 2 front ends, one for each of my applications?

This very useful option in Panorama can prevent much pain. Often, you don’t want your CEO(s) to play with the views you created in Panorama. The beautiful dashboard page you created is what you want them to see and that’s it.
In the dashboards site, select the component holding the desired view and in its Toolbar options, check the “Disable Analysis” checkbox. This will prevent the user from slicing and dicing with your view.