Welcome to Business Intelligence 101
Hi There! Before choosing a (BI) partner, you ll want to understand the essentials about BI including the various categories of analytics, what sort of insight is possible, which types of solutions are available, and key terminology. No problem; this handy introduction to BI will bring you up to speed on the concepts and definitions you ll want to know before you spend any of your valuable time evaluating vendors to choose the provider and route to business insight that s best for your group. 1. Types of Analytics... 6 2. Types of BI Solutions... 7 3. BI Terminology... 8
introduction Ever know you need something, but not how to get it? With a partner who is expert in advanced analytics and BI technologies, methodologies and best practices you can quickly learn. Why do you need to get up to speed on BI? A recent Nucleus Group study showed that organizations that implement business intelligence see up to a 13:1 ROI, making BI one of the best investments you can make.
The good news is that GoodData starts with insight, so you can end with results. We begin with insight so you can see results faster like this BI 101 guide. We want to help bring you up to speed quickly about what s possible with BI today, what sort of solutions are available, and clue you into some key terms you re going to run across. Afterwards, we ll hook you up with a Vendor Comparison Guide that shows you how to best compare possible BI solutions, and select a vendor and plan that s right for you. Ready to see how you can capture a 13:1 ROI on BI?
WHAT KINDS OF INSIGHT ARE POSSIBLE? By understanding the range of analytics capable through business intelligence, you can quickly zero in on the type of insight you desire, and which type of analytics will deliver what you most urgently need. Note that the types of analytics follow an evolutionary hierarchy, so plan to build intelligence as insight is unearthed and shared. For example: Before you can predict business performance, your organization will wish to first clearly understand the underlying patterns and root causes. So, you d begin with Diagnostic and build your BI up to Predictive. Descriptive Describes your business situation as it currently exists. See what has happened, when it happened, and drill down to greater detail. Automatic alerts can be set to let you know when a particular issue occurs again. Diagnostic Discovers why something has happened. Drill deeply into data to see the context of a problem and discover its root case. Explore the data, draw inferences, and make conclusions about why a problem may have occurred. For example: If call center hold times were greater than expected, drill down to discover a new group of call-handlers started the day prior who were perhaps not yet fully trained. Predictive Answers the question What If? What if we add three people to our help desk Will call times drop and by how much? If we reduce our sales cycle by two days, to what degree will quarterly revenue be impacted? Prescriptive Find out what to do next By detecting which actions have worked well in the past, your Insights Engine recommends the most effective course of action, given specific patterns or issues found in your data. Collective Suggest the most relevant & effective KPIs for your business needs. Through Collective Intelligence, which only GoodData offers, we take best practices culled from millions of our users interactions over 5 years and proactively recommend the most relevant and effective KPIs to help you reach results faster.
WHAT KINDS OF SOLUTIONS ARE AVAILABLE? Not all BI solutions are equal. Be sure to know your apples from oranges. GoodData provides Insights as a Service via a complete cloud-based business intelligence platform that gives you the advantage of a single vendor for all your insights needs. Only GoodData includes cutting edge Collective Intelligence, which takes best practices culled from millions of our users interactions and empowers us to proactively recommend the most relevant and effective tools to help you reach results faster. Full-Stack Solution One vendor enables all BI insight via one unified platform Provides all the tools and functionality you will need to extract your data, cleanse it, transform it, display it, and perform analysis. All support of the platform come from a single vendor you can call if an issue arises. Point Solution Platforms that excel at only a single BI function Customers choose point solutions only when and if they are comfortable finding, selecting, pricing, implementing, and maintaining multiple technologies and tools. A different analytical tool may be required for each stage of the BI process, which can require troubleshooting across platforms and supporting disparate technologies. On-Premise Solution Software/hardware system that resides within your firewall The business intelligence platform the hardware and software used to extract your data from its primary home, transform it into useful metrics, then display the analytics to the end-users all resides within your organization s firewall. It is completely under your control but it s also your responsibility to support and maintain. Cloud-based Solution Platform-as-a-Service you purchase on a subscription basis This solution is maintained and supported by your BI vendor per your service agreement. You can t physically see or touch the servers, but you don t have to worry about scalability, intrusion security, performing patches and updates, or re-booting should a problem occur.
WHAT DO THESE BI TERMS MEAN? Become familiar with the language of business intelligence by brushing up on terminology here. We know the world of BI can be a bit overwhelming if you haven t been exposed to its vernacular. Before selecting your analytics platform, come along with us as we review a few of the more common terms you will encounter. A Z
Ad Hoc Analytics: Ad hoc analytics are charts, tables, and metrics that are constructed to answer specific questions as they arise. They are often used only as needed and not used as a standard part of a dashboard. For example, when your manager says, I can only see the total sales in our current dashboard; can you show me sales for the western region but only for new product lines? Here, you might construct an ad hoc report that uses filters to show exactly what she has requested.
API: An Application Programming Interface is a set of functions exposed by a platform that allow a user to interact with the platform via a program. An API lets your application talk to the GoodData platform and set up new users, metrics, models, etc. through code vs. performing this manually.
CONNECTOR: A connector is simply a pre defined set of instructions that tells the BI system how to extract data from an outside system. Example: the GoodData to Salesforce.com Connector allows easy connectivity without having to perform a lengthy integration effort.
dashboards: Dashboards are groupings of analytics that are generally organized around a role, theme or workflow step. Three examples: a dashboard for a sales representative role, one for displaying regional results, and a third for the customers to be contacted step of a process.
5 0 1 0 1 0 0 0 1 1 1 data warehouse: A data warehouse is a database that contains data used for reporting purposes. Rather than connecting directly to a transactional system to get data (which can slow down the system for users), business intelligence systems often extract data to a data warehouse on a periodic basis and then perform all the calculations on this subset of the data. Data warehouses reduce the risk of corrupting critical transaction data and ensure that users don t see slowdowns to the operational application while analytics are running.
dimensions: Dimensions are the various ways of slicing a metric, such as by region, by user, by week, month or year. Metrics and dimensions should be considered inseparable partners always consider the dimensions you need when building a new metric, as they make metrics more valuable, enabling users to examine data in the way that makes the most sense for particular situations.
1 7 4 1 4 7 1 4 1 4 1 7 4 1 4 7 1 Extract Transform Load (ETL): The ETL process is what gets the data from the data source into your business intelligence system in the correct format. This usually isn t a simple file transfer rather the ETL process is a complex routine that extracts data from each source, performs cleansing & the modifications (e.g. combine individual data points into daily averages), and then places the data into the correct location in the BI system. The complexity of the ETL process depends on the number of data sources, the number of metrics, and the amount of transformation required.
Filters: Filters are used to determine which data you want to see in an analytic or dashboard. For example, when interested in only the eastern region, you could set a dashboard filter to exclude all regions but the east.
metrics: Metrics are simply measurements that become the building blocks for charts and other analytics, such as number of customers or average wait time. Metrics can be taken directly from production systems (e.g. the number of customer records) or calculated from other metrics (e.g. the average number of orders per customer account).
About GoodData The industry s first Insights as a Service provider, GoodData helps organizations of all kinds tackle their data challenges, delivering business-changing insights in a fraction of the time. Our Open Analytics Platform is the only solution that puts the power of Collective Intelligence at your fingertips leveraging best practices developed from millions of user interactions to recommend better ways to explore your data. GoodData. We start with insights, so you can end with results.
Insight from GoodData analysis helps everyone: 1 Make more informed, strategic, and quick decisions 2 Respond quickly to what s happening 3 Change what s gone wrong 4 Predict what might happen if 5 Discover what to do next Our end-to-end solution, 100% cloud based model, and deep expertise in business intelligence starts with insight, so you can end with results that continually improve your business.
WANT TO KNOW MORE ABOUT GOODDATA? For more information about how to choose an Analytics Ally to help you implement BI across your organization, download the complimentary copy of our latest how-to resource: An Intelligent Journey: Buyer s Guide to BI. Get in touch. team@gooddata.com 415-200-0186 @gooddata gooddata.com