The focus shifts from all the available data to just the right data

Using business intelligence (BI) data to evaluate—and ultimately improve—corporate performance requires knowing exactly what data should be examined and what should be ignored.

Mark Smith, CEO of San Mateo, Calif.-based Ventana Research, says a growing realization of this fact is driving the continual shift toward BI platforms that filter and organize data for individual users. “You only need a certain amount of data to make the right decisions,” says Smith, who recommends keeping specific business needs in mind when developing BI strategies.

The key question, according to Smith, is what specific data is necessary to measure the effectiveness of each department? “What data do you need for finance, and what do you need in manufacturing?” he asks. “If you break things down in that fashion, it's easier to determine what data is needed to create the proper metrics and key performance indicators.”

Michael Corcoran, VP of strategy for Information Builders, a BI software vendor, contends BI tools should not just consider the roles of the users, but also their level of experience working with operational data. He says that's why Information Builders' WebFOCUS platform offers multiple levels of reporting capabilities.

One level of reporting offers easy, self-service data access to casual BI users ranging from employees to customers and business partners.

“If [users] can point and click on a Web page, they should be able to create their own information on demand just by pointing and clicking and checking off a couple of options,” says Corcoran.

For the more traditional BI users—the analysts, or power users, as Corcoran calls them—WebFOCUS has tools that support ad hoc queries and analytics.

Yet with all these different ways of slicing, dicing, and viewing data, one thing remains important: consistency.

“All of these pieces offer very specialized interfaces that appeal to certain types of users, but they all derive the information using the same engine in the same way,” Corcoran points out.

But using the same engine often isn't enough. To deliver a consistent view of data, companies also must ensure that all user groups agree on how they're going to measure and correlate the data.

The Hillman Group, a Cincinnati-based manufacturer and distributor of hardware products, learned that lesson when it implemented WebFOCUS in early 2005. Hillman employees use WebFOCUS to view data generated by ERP, order management, and sales systems.

According to Kirk Townsley, senior application developer/portal administrator, when Hillman rolled out a WebFOCUS application that gives users access to open order information, there were 14 open order reports. Each used a unique way to measure open orders, depending on the department that created the report.

“One of the challenges we faced was defining a corporate open order report,” says Townsley. “We consolidated all the reporting into one WebFOCUS application that had multiple views of the data. It gave everyone from different departments the information they needed, but the more important thing, it gave them one source for the data.”

This type of enterprisewide agreement on report definitions helped Hillman Group employees, who were initially overwhelmed by the amount of data WEBFOCUS made available to them.

“They just didn't realize they had this information available to them,” Townsley says. “And they've never had it available to them this quickly, and in such an organized manner.”