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The BI Bed of Nails?

by: Troy Gottfried, Sr. BI Consultant, BECP, CRCP

What has become an ‘old adage’ in our vernacular, often attributed to Bernard Baruch, “When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”  This sentiment rings true for many Business Intelligence solutions I have seen over the last several years.  Whether you are trying to twist Crystal Reports into building applications, contort Dashboards into providing detail information, or just plain tired of trying to pound a square peg into a round hole, this may be the article for you.

A true Business Intelligence solution is comprised of several key elements.  Usually, we define these as:

1. Operational Reporting
2. Ad-hoc Reporting
3. Exploratory Analysis and Trending
4. Dashboard and Performance Management
5. Data Integration
6. Platform (Content Management and Distribution)

Business Objects provides a toolbox filled with various tools for precisely this reason.  In order to deliver the appropriate content to your users, you may have to employ a number of these tools.  Fortunately, Business Objects also allows a way to tie these different content types together by utilizing the Platform, or Enterprise.  Below is a brief description of each content creation tool along with which element of a BI solution it fulfills well.  For simplicity, I have not addressed the ‘overlap’ that can occur in some reporting and analytical needs between the different tools, and while this is by no means an exhaustive explanation of each tool, it may provide some guidance in helping you select the appropriate tool for the job.

1.  Crystal Reports

Crystal Reports has traditionally excelled as an operational reporting tool.  For the skilled report designer, almost any formatting variation is fully within their grasp:  From form letters, to aging reports, to inventory reports, to advertisements.  Crystal Reports is not, however, an ad-hoc reporting tool for the masses.  There are a few skilled report designers who can treat the tool that way for their own use, but to roll out a full installation of Crystal Reports to each user needing some sort of BI (i.e., pretty much everyone) would require a skill set for every user that is both expensive and difficult to achieve.

2.  Web Intelligence

While WebI is sometimes used as an operational reporting tool, its true strength lies in the simplicity of building ad-hoc queries and reports.  As a web-based reporting tool, it is much more easily distributed to a wide number of users and requires a very different skill set in order to fulfill its purpose.  Creating highly formatted reports can be tedious and difficult since it is web based, as is performing high-level trending and analysis over decades of data, which is why we have…

3.  OLAP Intelligence and Voyager

These tools are built to source multi-dimensional data structures.  In these structures (commonly referred to as data cubes) data is pre-aggregated at various levels, allowing for fast and efficient analysis over large volumes of data.  However, accessing detail-oriented data with these tools can be time-consuming and overwhelming for an analyst.  Additionally, creating presentation-level reporting from this tool can be difficult, as it is meant to be an analytical tool, not a reporting tool.  Which takes us to…

4.  Dashboard Manager, Performance Manager, and Xcelsius

The ‘Dashboarding Suite’ is designed for presentation purposes.  Contrary to popular belief, dashboards are not one-stop shopping outlets for data.  What these tools do very well is tell you whether or not you need to care about a given set of data, and suggest where you may explore to find out why you need to care.  This is managing by exception.  The other content types explained above can be linked to these dashboards to provide supplemental detail information once one finds that they do need to ‘care’ about that metric.

5.  Data Integrator

For those of you who own and use this tool, it is apparent that it is an Extracting, Transforming, and Loading (ETL) tool used to move data around.  The main purpose of a tool such as this is to get data into a format and structure that lends itself to the particular type of reporting or analysis which is necessary (see the tools listed above).  I mention this one because many folks beat their heads against the wall either trying to create reports from data sources that are not built for that type of reporting, or may even try to use something like Crystal Reports or WebI to export data to external tools for further analysis.  The best way to solve those problems is to put data into the necessary format and structure before sourcing it, rather than the alternative.

There are various other tools within the Business Objects toolbox, though those discussed above are the most common.  Further, many of them can be referenced from one another by utilizing the tools provided by the platform (Enterprise, the SDK, etc…).  Not every organization may be at a stage of needing each one of these different reporting and analytical tools at this point in time, but when that time comes, consider that there may be something within your BI stack which can fulfill that role better than the tool you have been using.  If you don’t, you may find that trying to use a tool for a use it was not intended does indeed feel like lying on a bed of nails.

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