Independent Experts Perspectives On Operational BI & importance of Excel integration in BI
**** Operational BI Needs
Here is an expert perspective on Operational BI Needs dating 10th Dec 2007 . This article stresses the need for native application integration in BI . Here are some snippets .
Developers don't need all the fancy BI tool features either. They need a simple interface that lets them specify attributes, metrics and selection criteria, and that gives them the data in a usable form. This is not possible today. BI tools don't offer a stripped-down report definition interfaces, catalogs of available reports or queries, or the ability to make these available in on-demand fashion in different formats via different APIs.
A monolithic BI tool (as we have today with all the BI vendors) is not well-suited to adding BI services to an application.
One problem BI vendors face in addressing operational approaches is that they are largely driven by the economics of per-seat pricing, plus the big server engine charge.
Most BI tools are very poor as embedded tools within an application framework
**** King of BI :-
Here is an article Microsoft Excel: The king of BI (artical written in 2005 much before Excel 2007 ) which underlines the importance of MS Excel in Enterprise Analytics . Some Extracts of article :
" The current king of business intelligence (BI) tools is Microsoft Excel. Microsoft states that there are over 150 million Excel users, with many of them using Excel for BI -- reporting and analysis of corporate data.
For many years BI vendors have been building front-end tools to try to replace Excel spreadsheets for querying, reporting and analyzing data results. But despite the fact that tens of thousands of BI tool licenses have been sold, spreadsheets are still the most pervasive and dominant tool.
What makes Microsoft Excel so dominant for BI? It's on practically everyone's PC; there are no extra costs; it's easy to learn; it does the data manipulation and data graphics companies need for most reports and analysis; and many business people have become spreadsheet "jocks." Even if "real" BI tools were free, Excel already has enough momentum that people would still use spreadsheets for much of their reporting and analysis tasks."
At the end author give a word of caution : A final word of caution is that no single BI tool, not even the mighty spreadsheet, is sufficient for a company's BI
If you wish you can Read more about this article : http://searchdatamanagement.techtarget.com/tip/0,289483,sid91_gci1144734,00.html
**** Loving and hating Excel
Here is another article on loving and hating Excel dating 2006 much before release of MS Excel 2007 . This article also stresses the importance of Excel and co-operation with Excel in Enterprise analytics . Here are some important snippets:
" Set ground rules about when it's OK to use Excel -- and when it's not. Companies can implement technology tools and frameworks to manage enterprise spreadsheets -- and if business users want to use Excel personally, essentially as scratch paper, they can do that too.
I am planning on leveraging the BI platform to serve data to spreadsheets, but only after pitching the feature rich BI tools to the users first. Better BI reporting (flexibility, reliability, analytics) reduces the reliance on Excel. Failing that, making Excel the front end to BI services provides better quality data and some control over Excel targets."
*** Spreedsheet Integration features to consider when evaluating BI suites:-
"Microsoft Excel is unofficially the leading BI tool...........
Excel is all about rows and columns. Often in this conversion process, a lot of extraneous cells may appear.
In many cases, users may want to access the data, but they don’t
want all that formatting: they want tabular sets that can be further analyzed via embedded Excel functionality.
If your BI report contains a cross-tab, it’s ideal when this is presented as an Excel Pivot Table."
Source : (The document ‘Spreadsheet Evaluation’ is available free of cost to anybody by registering on http://www.biscorecard.com/evaluations.asp.)
Though this document elaborates on Excel Integration with a BI tool, it’s more relevant in an OLTP ERP environment like Baan.
All these links emphasis the latest trend of application integration in BI and mandatory excel strategy for best enterprise solutions for a company . Excessive, reckless and unbridled reliance on 'one version of truth theory' is detrimental to operational freedom and thereby excellence of the company. One need not buy any limitations on one's freedom on account of such redundant not-so-in-practice theories at the time of one's BI purchases. And after release of Excel 2007 and in view of latest trends, it has become more pronounced and evident .
This definitely will give good reasons for Company having BAAN implementation to have our Excel based reporting tool – ERPJewels which gives very good native data dictionary advantages.
FastTrack to ERPJEWELS :
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