Business Intelligence Modernization

Business Intelligence has evolved through the years. Enterprises have been leveraging BI capabilities to derive insights and make business decisions using a variety of tools. At this point some business users are not getting all the data they need for their analysis or what they are trying to analyze is difficult to work with. The need is to convert data into actionable insights as fast as possible. The opportunity then is to find a way to modernize the BI solution with new concepts, tools and best practices to ensure they are not left behind.

BI modernization efforts might include:

• Incorporating self-service analytic tools
• Incorporating data science capabilities
• Including a sandbox data source
• Using data virtualization
• Leveraging a cloud platform

There may always be a need for those large operational reports but the new era of decision making requires the business user to be enabled to curate content. Users need to be able to identify key drivers and identify patterns in the data. Using state of the art analysis tools can enable a richer self-service environment.

With the field of Data Science exploding the need for easy access to simple data science capabilities is becoming high in demand. Analytic tools that can expose some statistical analysis on data would provide a starting point which could then be enriched by the data science experts.

Data challenges are a persistent problem. Tools that can process data in real-time will facilitate effective decision-making. Some enterprises have a data warehouse strategy in place but if the data is too complex to access then the value or trust in the data is diminished. Having a sandbox environment with a focused DataMart can alleviate some of the data access constraints. Quality of data needs to be a focal point as well in order to build trust. When data is scattered throughout the enterprise leveraging data virtualization can enable at least some initial analysis without a formal data processing initiative.

Why consider a cloud platform? The easy answer is that the environment can be maintained by experts and the environment will be elastic. Elastic in simple terms implies that the system is able to adapt to workload changes by provisioning resources automatically.