By: Michael Morrison is President and Chief Executive Officer at Datawatch Corporation
In an effort to make more informed decisions, many departments and individual line-of-business users have turned to Business Intelligence (BI) solutions as a way to mine data for both reporting and forecasting purposes and to address increasing, business issues. Unfortunately, with failure rates hovering between 50% and 70% according to some studies, and business users continually looking for new tools to help them easily get at the data they need, BI alone is not always the answer.
The underlying issue is that business users often have all the information they need – but that information resides in existing reports and business documents scattered throughout the organization. Since they have no easy way to dynamically organize, integrate and analyze the intelligence trapped in these static documents, they are often left with less than ideal options. According to a recent Computing poll of more than 250 people who use or rely on data derived from BI reporting software, BI complexity is an ongoing problem. Cost was cited as the most important factor in the BI software selection process (29%) followed closely by ease of use (25%). The fact that cost and ease of use are the most important drivers of software selection underscores the challenges that complex BI solutions present to the people who consume the intelligence for making data-based decisions. These challenges are driving the emergence of a new category of solutions within the BI market that industry analysts refer to as Report Analytics.
From ERP-generated reports to even mainframe reports, organizations generate thousands monthly. But those reports are largely unusable without investing time and money into burdensome processes. Report Analytics software leverages an organization’s existing reports and reporting processes – and provides consumers with a self-service environment. This allows them to extract the relevant intelligence from any combination of these existing documents themselves and transform that information into dynamic, interactive reports for easy analysis and visualization. Whether the reports or business documents originate inside an enterprise or from external sources like customers or suppliers, Report Analytics allows business users to create, distribute and publish these reports without time delays or involving IT. And let’s face it, with increasing cost pressures and decreasing revenues, anything that bolsters productivity is critical in today’s real-time business environment.
Achieving Insight into Data Assets
Today, the enormous amount of data has made it difficult to parse and analyze it, which means that the resulting reports are sub-optimal at best. The format of the report also comes with its own set of unique problems. ERP, HR and CRM systems deliver static reports, oftentimes in text or PDF format, which are inflexible and cannot be integrated with data from other reports. This does little to foster understanding, analysis, or decision making and often does not include the unstructured, semi-structured, or externally sourced data that is required to make information meaningful. As a result, most organizations spend a great deal of money and time consolidating and mapping this data into a data warehouse, data mart or other operational data store. Or worse, an organization simply abandons the idea of leveraging that data and operates by intuition rather than hard data.
Report Analytics began to take root as a way to address this longstanding business challenge. Report Analytics tools model, aggregate and transform information from any number of existing reports and business documents throughout the organization, making it easy for users to access, extract and analyze data without having to invest in new reporting solutions. Functioning as the “missing link” in the broader BI reporting arena, Report Analytics captures structured and semi‐structured data from virtually any existing document. It also enables faster and deeper visibility into the business and better, more informed business decisions.
Complementing BI with Report Analytics
For many, Report Analytics sounds like it overlaps with Business Analytics or Business Intelligence. In all actuality they are complementary, yet key differences do exist. For instance, in BI deployments a few staff members, largely from IT, are charged with managing the data and creating both content and reports for business users. So while BI systems are an invaluable asset for many--allowing them to discern patterns in customer behavior and align the business behind a common goal--it may not always be the best, or only, tool for generating reports. Of the IT staff questioned in the Computing study, 31 percent said their department was required to produce up to 100 reports a month while 16 percent generated up to 500. Even worse, four percent estimated that they were required to produce more than 1,000 reports every month. The time that IT staff spent on producing these reports varied, with half taking a day or more and 10 percent estimating an average time of weeks or months.
And, often, while IT is off programming the custom reports, the business requirements change—meaning the data consumers receive in their custom report is once again incapable of helping them solve their particular business problem. This leads data consumers to the ever-popular BI “workaround” – Excel. All too often, business users dump the data they need into Excel; import additional information from transactional systems or other sources that are not in the data warehouse; and then perform analytics from there. This cumbersome manual process, while painful, is necessary as there is often little analytic value otherwise because of the missing and incomplete data. And while it solves the business user’s immediate need – getting the data they need to answer specific questions – it is fraught with peril. On a tactical level, moving data from a trusted system to the unsecure environment of Excel also introduces the possibility of compromising data accuracy due to simple human error. On a much more strategic level, this process completely undermines the integrity of the data. Once data is put into Excel, the business user is violating most data governance policies. The data is no longer trusted.
The Computing study demonstrated just how pervasive this problem can be. According to the financial decision makers questioned, 52 percent felt that less than half of the information needed to run the business effectively could be pulled from existing documents and in the correct format without having to rely on IT. The fact that users struggle to get a grip with BI software is perhaps reinforced by the fact that for two out of three of those polled, it is not the more tech savvy members of the IT department who are using it.
As organizations continue to be overwhelmed with huge volumes of data, the challenge lies not in amassing more, but rather in integrating and using the meaningful data that already exists. In today’s information overload environment, professionals can’t afford to spend valuable time aggregating information from various sources. Report Analytics enables business users to get the data they need from existing reports, transaction systems, data stores, and other formats themselves –enabling them to make better and more timely decisions without draining resources from their already over-taxed technical team.
About the Author
Michael Morrison is President and Chief Executive Officer at Datawatch Corporation, a provider of report analytics products and services. For more information contact Michael at Michael_Morrison@Datawatch.com or visit www.datawatch.com.