| Benefits of Using Meta5 |
| Smart or Proactive Applications |
| Everyone in the data business understands that
data is growing exponentially. In fact, it is quite understandable
that everyone in your organization will be required to monitor increasing
amounts of information with the responsibility to act on that information.
However, we are seeing a shift in the way businesses are addressing
this problem. Instead of building applications that require human
interaction drill down OLAP or ROLAP answers, "smart" applications
are emerging as the norm. Smart applications are applications that
will query, test and probe your data automatically based on business
rule metadata that you define. These business rules might be as simple
as "If any of my products' volume falls by more than 10% from
the prior period, I want the business manager to be paged and a more
detailed report waiting in his e-mail for his review." Being
able to create, define and implement applications of this nature will
give businesses like yours a distinct advantage and the ability to
react to business issues before you even come to work the next day!
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| Integration of Data and Applications |
Companies are investing tremendous amounts of dollars
towards integrating their data and applications to be shared on common
platforms. We have found and in fact we agree that this is a very
worthwhile effort and should continue to be pursued. However, in the
11 years of consulting to Fortune 500 companies, we have yet to see
a completely integrated system or data warehouse. Why? The answer
is change. Your business will continue to grow and change. It is imperative
that companies have development tools that can react to business questions
before the data is integrated into your systems. Businesses will continue
to add new data sources that won't quite be ready for systems integration.
What will you do if someone asks an important business question that
needs to be answered today? How will you integrate, transform and
report your data for these requests? Successful companies recognize
the need to react quickly to ever-changing business problems. Accomplishing
this integration of data and applications "on the fly" before
it is incorporated into your systems is crucial to achieve the quickest
"Time to Answer" and give you the competitive advantage
you need. An important aspect of your business intelligence solution
must include the ability to react quickly to these very important
requests. These questions can't wait until the data is in a format
that is acceptable. If you wait too long, the business environment
will have already changed. Your BI solution must have the ability
to integrate your data and applications "on the fly". It
is important that business intelligence tools reduce the "Time
to Answer" on some of their most complicated data. It seems clear
as businesses grows that it will become more and more important to
integrate new data sources and their applications from departments
all over your organization and on the Web and to be able to so today!
"The currency of the digital marketplace is intelligence, but
it's hard to leverage the cumulative knowledge collected by disparate
systems… A real-time, panoramic, single customer view (of data)
is the Holy Grail … everyone is searching for it." - The
Meta Group |
| Web Enabled Analytical Applications |
| After the completion of analytical applications,
importance should be given as to how you disseminate or distribute
those applications or finished reports. Remember that your users have
clients, too. Many of these data consumers do not have the desire
or need to interface with a sophisticated analytical application in
order to see their results. Instead, they prefer to have some simple
point and click interface to get to the data of importance to them.
The Web seems to be the most common and accepted interface portal.
Therefore, publishing finished applications and reports to the Web
is a necessary and valuable component of your business intelligence
system. It is also important to create a relationship between your
business intelligence tool and the delivery mechanism of the Web.
Without this relationship, reports will be duplicated in multiple
delivery systems to address the needs of data consumers at varying
degrees of sophistication. |
| Ability to Create Local Joins at the Application
Level |
The ability to create
local joins at the application level allows you to combine data from
disparate sources or separate queries from within your database. It
is a common need to join data at the application level to:
1) Build business rule comparisons
2) Enhance query performance
3) Join locally created data i.e. local spreadsheet with your
database
4) Join data from multiple databases or data sources
5) Calculate aggregates on the fly based on a realignment of
data due to new business rules that are in place before the actual
data warehouse changes can be implemented. We have found that these
tasks are now commonly attempted by manually sorting data and creating
joins using spreadsheet macros or writing complex C or Visual Basic
code which can be very time consuming and requires an extra level
of computer expertise. |
| Automated Cutting and Pasting of Data |
| Many "canned" reports are created for
reuse when new data is posted. This process can be automated to reduce
the time necessary to perform these tasks over and over during each
data refresh period. With the use of spreadsheet templates and the
ability to automate cutting and pasting, a very complicated analysis
that is performed on a repetitive basis can be reduced to a single
push of a button. Without this functionality, repetitive tasks can
introduce errors and can become quite time consuming to the point
where full-time employee positions are required just to maintain standardized
reports. |
| Metadata to Define User Friendly Representation
of Databases and Their Relationship with Each Other |
Metadata eliminates the need for users to guess
what their database tables mean. Tables can be named, as the business
needs to see them, through a logical representation called metadata.
This shields users from unfriendly database naming conventions without
effecting underlying systems. Insignificant columns that are confusing
to users can also be removed from the users' representation without
the need to alter underlying physical tables.
Logical groupings of tables may also be defined in metadata. These
grouping can assist the user in determining which tables actually
have meaningful relationships with each another. These groupings can
also contain the proper joins necessary to create a correct query.
Without the use of metadata it is common to see frustrated users unwilling
to use the database because too much technical know-how is required.
Default joins provided in the metadata also improve the quality of
database usage by eliminating "bad" or "runaway"
queries, and thereby increasing database credibility and confidence.
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| Sending data directly to Excel |
| Seamless integration with Excel is a base requirement
of business intelligence tools. Integration with Excel does not mean,
"we create Excel outputs". It truly means that the functionality
that exists in Excel must be leveraged in your business intelligence
application development environment. Leveraging Excel will help mitigate
the learning curve your users have when trying to create complicated
analysis. A typical benefit observed is the ability to have applications
simply drop data into Excel templates and produce complicated reports
with little technical effort. This leverages the base knowledge that
already exists with a tool that your users are comfortable with. |
