BI Scorecard Blog

Who Needs BI When There's Active PDF?

Information Builders kicked off its annual user conference in Nashville, TN, this week on an upbeat note to the tunes of marching band, a furry mascot, and a comedian. Yep, comedian Greg Schwem (very funny!) preceded the official keynote by President and Founder Gerry Cohen. It was a novel start to a BI conference, but with the economy struggling and some attendees having to travel here on their own dime, it was an upbeat start to a smaller than usual conference.

The most intriguing part of Cohen’s keynote was VP Daniel Ortolani’s demo of a new feature of Active Reports called Active PDF. With Active PDF, the entire range of Active Reports capabilities (sort, filter, chart) are now available from within a PDF document (see here for an example but make sure you have the latest Adobe Reader). While Information Builders’ positions Active Reports for a mobile work force, I see the value as much broader to any information consumer, including customers, suppliers and regulators who receive currently static reports and documents. For example, as a residential electricity consumer, I would love for JCP&L to send me an Active PDF e-bill so I can figure out which months our consumption flags us as a high consumption electric user. (Heck, I leave our thermostat at 78 in summer, and we even have a portion allocated to wind power! But let’s not digress). 

By a show of hands, less than 5% of Information Builders customers at the conference are using Active Reports. Whether that’s due to the product positioning or that it is an optional server-add on, I don’t know. (Customers: care to comment?) However, the vendor is offering customers a free trial license as part of its latest 7.6.9 release of WebFOCUS. The reports are water marked until the product is actually licensed, a smart way to entice customers to try the product. Enhancements to InfoAssist (see here for an in-depth product review) also made the key note. InfoAssist, released last November, is the vendor’s solution for business users, and as Cohen conceded, is an area the vendor had not previously put much emphasis on. The most noteworthy change in 7.6.9 is support for OLAP cube-browsing, including SAP BW, Oracle Hyperion Essbase, and Microsoft Analysis Services.

The customer presentations and discussions are what make going to these conferences most worth the trip. In particular, Ford Motor Company, who recently decided to standardize on WebFOCUS as part of their BI tool strategy, reflected an interesting theme I’ve encountered with several Information Builders’ customers. While business users have demanded business query tools to avoid the IT report backlog,  report chaos has sometimes ensued. This is as much a BI tool issue as an organizational challenge.  When a business query tool is deployed, IT still has an active role to play in managing shared and re-usable reports, but such changing roles is rarely considered on the road to self-service BI. Meanwhile, historically, Information Builders was criticized for being too developer- and application-centric. And yet, the ability to build a reporting application (versus a single report) is in fact a differentiator, but one the vendor seems not to emphasize. To be fair, perhaps it’s because that capability doesn’t fit neatly into an existing tool category. And of course, the value of this ability is more appealing to companies who have a centralized approach to BI and in which there is a strong IT-business relationship, minorities on both counts.  But the ability to build one reporting “application” with parameters for which data to display, how to filter the data, and the desired output, clearly is a lower cost proposition than hundreds of users developing hundreds of variations of similar reports.

Lastly, insurer Nationwide shared insights on a community service project they’ve done with the Columbus, OH school district that gives principals and teachers access to information on student data with a vision of improving graduation rates. In the two years since the reporting project started, high school graduation rates have improved from 50% to 75%.

Their story is one more example that shows BI is not only about improving business performance, but also, in making the world a better place!

Regards,

Cindi Howson, BI Scorecard

On Self-service BI and European Soccer

  You know that I am a big football fan, Packers in particular, because of my son, but everything I know about soccer (aka European football), I have learned from my English husband.

What does this have to do with BI? Information Builders just launched this cool new soccer dashboard of the 2009 Champions League. As I wrote about rich reportlets in this Cool BI article, such an interactive report is what most users envision for self service BI. Users don’t want “ad hoc” as in staring at a blank screen with 1000 possible data elements to choose from.  No. Most information consumers want to interact with an existing report or dashboard as a starting point.  Self-service  BI means users don’t  have to go to IT for a relatively simple enhancement request to get a sort, filter, chart, new calculation added to the report.

The soccer dashboard uses Information Builder’s Active Reports, an optional module first launched in 2006.  Based on a combination of Java Script and XML (AJAX), users can save this file locally and still have a high degree of interactivity while disconnected. To launch, click the link “launch the full report.”    So to sort the data, you click the down arrow on each column. Want to know who has the most fouls? It’s Atletico Madrid. This sort option is not something a programmer had to explicitly add to a report definition or user interface. Instead, it’s automatically available when the report is saved or rendered as AJAX output in the   same way you would save as PDF.

A bigger question of course is whether or not these fouls are worth it. Does aggression on the field result in more goals? With Active Reports, you can readily create a scatter plot (Fig3) by right-clicking on the Foul column. The chart shows there is a “slight” relationship between higher number of fouls and goals-scored. Unfortunately, the hover over only shows the coordinates of 5 goals to 21 fouls. It would be better if the hover displayed that this is from the German team of Bayern.  I think you would agree, though, that this level of interactivity is a big improvement over some web-based BI tools that seem to only automate former paper-based reports or that would require users to go into a sophisticated design environment. For the record, while Information Builders was one of the first to provide such robust interactivity using AJAX, some other  vendors now have varying degrees of rich reportlets via Flash. Information Builders supports both AJAX and Flash output.

Sadly, so far the Brits are not looking too good in this. But we are only a few weeks into the tournament, and as our favorite Leeds United never makes it to this level anyway, I guess I should focus only on the BI aspects of this app! So for a more in-depth review of Information Builders’ BI capabilities, check out the BIScorecard Information Builder's Overvew report.

Regards,

Cindi Howson, BIScorecard