Panorama Business Intelligence

Self-service has always been an important factor in the business intelligence community. But in today’s BI world, most companies limit their users to create their own self-service reports on top of pre-defined, pre-modeled data. The self-service capabilities are only feasible when working with such data. The real issue is that users are sometimes limited when required to work with pre-modeled data since so much data is not covered under the “Official BI data warehouse” – ultimately this leads to decisions based on incomplete research. That, coupled with the growing number of applications used by organizations today, is why it is important that your BI solution provides complete self-service capabilities that include also the ability to connect ad-hoc to any data source as well as build their own reports and navigate the data.

Self-service implies that your information workers become less reliant on the parameters the IT department sets out for your BI solution. A lot of solutions out there take a narrow view on self-service. What makes the most sense for today’s information worker is to utilize a comprehensive, end-to-end self-service approach with no IT-defined limitations.

In order to move beyond the limited perspective, your BI solution should also be able to retrieve and examine relational data from sources like RDBMS, Excel, CSV and a host of others. Panorama NovaView does this by using unique algorithms to model data instantly. Other BI solutions out there utilize other methods to model and create reports based on the wider range of data.

For example, if the IT team were to build a model on top of the SAP human resources module, then information workers get to build their reports on top of that data, but what if some information resides in a spreadsheet? In most cases this data will stay outside of the report.

Remember that critical information sometimes doesn’t make it to the data warehouse, and that can seriously limit your perspective and the perspective of your organization. The growing diversity in data sources requires that you leverage some form of universal data connectivity that can be initialized and used by end users and not be limited by the capacity and attention of ITor suffer the consequences. With a more comprehensive viewpoint, you’ll be able to make better business decisions.