As Microsoft introduces intelligence tools for a wider
audience, established suppliers are looking to provide role-based
functionality across the business
As Microsoft prepares to drive business intelligence down the
business food chain with this month's release of Business Scorecard
Manager 2005, users are facing the issue of whether to abandon
established business intelligence tools and go the Microsoft
route.
Other business intelligence suppliers, such as Cognos, SAS and
Hyperion, are also focusing on making business tools available to
more employees through role-based tools and interfaces that are
easier to use. SAS, for example, has outlined a strategy called "BI
for the Masses".
Microsoft's Office Business Scorecard Manager 2005 is a
server-based business score-carding application that uses Office,
in particular Excel, and the SQL Server database platform. This
lets companies deploy personalised scorecards to staff so they can
track key performance indicators against goals.
Microsoft plans to make other business intelligence features
mainstream next year. These include portal and collaboration tools
via Sharepoint 12, data analysis through Excel 12, and integration,
analysis, reporting and datawarehousing with SQL Server 2005. The
Office 12 suite is expected in the second half of 2006.
In October, Hyperion also sought a broader audience of users
with the release of its System 9 product.
System 9 integrates financial management applications into a
business intelligence platform to broaden the reach of business
intelligence across an organisation, said John Kopcke, chief
technology officer at Hyperion. The software offers users a
role-based interface, where roles are defined by the company using
the system. It can then define the databases and reports each role
can access.
Hotel chain Hyatt International is one early adopter of System
9. It plans to use it to gain a unified approach to collecting data
from Oracle and other applications.
Clive Longbottom, service director at analyst firm Quocirca,
said making business intelligence available to the entire workforce
may come at a cost to businesses.
He believes that many business managers do not have the
expertise to use business intelligence systems effectively. "The
highly skilled will understand, but the marketing campaign manager
or sales director may come up with something that meets their
agenda and beat people over the head with the data. Unfettered use
of business intelligence may not help a company," he said.
Longbottom added that role-based business intelligence tools may
hold the answer to this problem because they can limit what data
employees can access. "By making it role-based, you can give best
practice templates to staff," he said.
Longbottom said that despite Microsoft's stated strategy,
pervasive business intelligence is not here yet. "We are a couple
of years away from IBM and Microsoft being able to say they have
got all the bits put together properly. Gaining acceptance from the
market will take another 12 to 18 months after that," he said.
Another issue is the abundance of portals and dashboards with
which to view a company's data. These are available from most
business intelligence suppliers, including Hyperion, Business
Objects, SAS, and now Microsoft.
"We are getting to the point where a large number of
organisations are realising they have too much heterogeneity in
their portal environment, with portals from Siebel, Oracle
Plumtree, and MySap, for example," said Longbottom.
Many companies are therefore selecting either IBM Websphere
Portal or Microsoft Sharepoint Portal as the front-end for their
reporting tool, he said.
Business Objects is releasing version two of its Business
Objects XI business intelligence suite this month, with new
features including intelligent question, said the supplier's chief
executive John Schwarz.
"This provides the ability for the end-user to ask natural
language questions and to structure their query in ways that do not
require programming. The entire interface is geared to writing
sentences," he said.
Schwarz added that Business Objects is developing Trusted
Business Intelligence, where the user can be sure that a data
element is linked to the source database, the linkage is never
broken, the data has not been tampered with, and they can drill
down to the source.
Business Objects is also working on Operational Business
Intelligence, where the data is constantly being updated, so it
stays "dynamically current". This will allow companies to use the
latest information from a real-time stream.
Schwarz said several trends have become apparent over the past
year:
- In organisations with more than 5,000 staff, 75% to 80% have
business intelligence installed - in some cases, 15 different tools
- but their usage is light
- In the mid-market, there is fairly light deployment, with an
average of two tools deployed
- IT departments tend to buy the business intelligence platform,
but business managers tend to choose the analytics.
At the root of the future product strategy of SAS is the notion
that businesses should be able to use their data as a resource to
be exploited, said Richard Kellett, strategy manager for
technology at SAS UK. "We have to make every part of the business
effective and help everyone make decisions," he said.
This will mean giving expert business intelligence users
powerful interfaces that are easier to use, and mainstream users
more automated but equally powerful processes with simple
interfaces, said Kellett.
Another element will be business activity monitoring coupled
with business modelling, so only significant events are tracked.
SAS currently provides this service for Honda's warranty analysis.
This has saved the car maker significant costs, said Kellett.
Hyperion recently released Hyperion System 9 Business
Intelligence+. Key to this version is the ability to carry out
business management, financial and production reporting, and the
use of multi-source dashboards and personal workspaces.
Hyperion said System 9 Business Intelligence+ is one of the
first business intelligence tools to use personalised workspaces
for business performance management, so end-users do not have to
switch between multiple systems and technologies to get the answers
to their business questions.
According to Quocirca, a lot of suppliers are jumping on the
business process wagon, and using business intelligence as a
business performance management tool. But it predicted further
industry consolidation as the more established providers attempt to
buy up the competition. Industry experts also believe Oracle and
SAP are likely to buy up specialised business intelligence
firms.
Lack of integration frustrates users, says
Forrester
Users have expressed frustration with early business activity
monitoring implementations, according to Henry Peyret, senior
analyst at Forrester Research.
"Products are too tightly linked to supplier technologies such
as business process management or business intelligence, and they
are not really open enough to support a service oriented
architecture [SOA] strategy yet," he said.
Users said the need to collect performance management data from
numerous places and aggregate this in dashboards was a fundamental
requirement. But suppliers will need to define standards and have
more integration capabilities before they can claim that business
activity monitoring is ready for SOA, said Peyret. "Customers have
found the first implementations to be immature," he said.
Energy company EDF was one organisation that expressed surprise
at how few suppliers were able to measure end-to-end process
performance.
"Most business activity monitoring tools can only collect key
performance indicators from business process management tools from
the same supplier. Only the same supplier's business process
management product can provide the performance management KPIs
represented in business activity monitoring dashboards," said
Peyret. "Additionally, these products are currently difficult to
integrate with each other."