Navigable Reference Indicators for Business Intelligence & Data Analytics

Nowadays, with rapidly changing industry trends and fierce competition, it becomes important for organizations to establish and maintain their position in the industry. In order to withstand the immense competition in the industry, it is important to stay abreast with the status of the industry and various industry norms. In the present context, a field known as business intelligence, also referred to as “BI”, has gained widespread popularity. Various organizations rely on business intelligence to understand and effectively manage the factors that drive an enterprise. Business intelligence generally refers to a category of systems and applications used to facilitate a business enterprise in decision making and governance.

From a consumer's perspective, the competitive industrial environment is beneficial as it ensures continuous developments in an industry and subsequently, quality products to the consumers. On the other hand, it becomes important for organizations from different fields to take cognizance of the growing challenges in establishing and retaining their position in the industry. Therefore, it is pertinent for the organizations to understand and adapt to the dynamics of rapidly changing industry.

To survive the continuously changing industry standards, most of the organizations invest considerable amounts of capital in market analysis. Analysis of the market ensures that the organization is updated and equipped with latest technologies and trends pertinent to their industry. For market analysis, business intelligence techniques are generally employed. Such techniques represent the tools and systems that play a substantial role in strategic planning of the organization. Using business intelligence techniques, information which may be considered relevant for growth and development of an organization is extracted and analyzed.

Based on the requirements of an organization, a report (hereinafter referred to as BI report) may be generated providing information relevant for the growth and development of the organization. The BI reports may include a number of measures or values in different sections of the report. For example, if the report is in a spreadsheet, and it may include hundreds of values in different columns and rows.

Generally, notes may be provided in BI reports to provide additional information about different aspects, say measures or values in the report. The additional information may include details or calculations which lead to the deduction of the marked value.

Furthermore, the notes may be provided at different places in a BI report. In certain cases, the notes can be provided as footnotes. But, in case of footnotes, layout of the main text gets affected as the footnotes may cover a significant portion of each sheet or page of the BI report. Therefore, in certain other cases, the notes can be provided under a separate heading at the end of a document, i.e., in the form of endnotes. 

However, in case of endnotes, it may be inconvenient for a reader to refer to endnotes corresponding to different values of the report as the reader has to continuously move back and forth between the main text and the endnotes. Therefore, continuously moving up and down the BI report may disrupt the continuity of the reader. This problem becomes more prominent in case of large BI reports, for example, BI reports including more of pages.

In addition, after referring to the notes provided at the end of the BI report, it becomes difficult for the reader to trace back the value from where the reader referred to the note. In some cases, different values may have a common note.

The common notes make it more difficult for the reader to trace back the value from where the reader referred to the corresponding common note, as it becomes inconvenient to identify the actual value out of the values referring to the common note. Therefore, the conventional Business Intelligence techniques lack BI reports in which notes can be referred by a reader conveniently.

Further, based on a change in the requirements of an organization, the information available in the data warehouse may also get changed. Subsequently, notes defined for the BI report may not remain applicable for the updated BI report values. Therefore, the user may have to redefine the notes as may be appropriate for the BI report values. This causes inconvenience to the user as the user may have to redefine the notes from the beginning to correspond to changes in the BI report.

The patent “Business Intelligence Reports With Navigable Reference Indicators”, describes an innovative method for a business intelligence (BI) system to generate BI reports with navigable reference indicators.  The navigable reference indicators may be provided as a forward and backward link between two or more sections of the BI report. The forward link can be provided at one or more values in the main text of a BI report to refer a reader to a corresponding note. Further, a backward link or a return link provided with a plurality of notes may refer the reader to the corresponding value in the BI report from where the reader initially referred the corresponding note. 

In this method the notes and reference indicators may be defined on the basis of a grain of a BI report. Therefore, the navigable reference indicators may automatically get updated and repositioned based on any change in data available in a fact table. The BI reports can be generated in different formats, such as graphs, curves, spreadsheets , slide shows, and text documents. Further, with the plurality of navigable reference indicators for different notes may be provided in the BI report based on a notes dimension for different columns. 

In this method, the navigable reference indicators can be provided as a forward link and a backward link between two or more sections of the BI report. This may guide or refer a reader to a corresponding note in the notes section, say the footnotes section or the endnotes section. Further, at least one backward link or return link may also be provided with each note in the notes section. The return links provided with the notes may refer the reader to the corresponding value in the BI report from where the reader initially referred the corresponding note.

Therefore, by providing navigable reference indicators with different values in the BI report, and with the notes in the notes section for referring back to the value from where the reader referred to the corresponding note, time spent in referring to the note may be minimized. Further, the inconvenience caused in tracing back the corresponding value may also be avoided.

As mentioned previously, notes and navigable reference indicators are defined on the basis of the grain of a BI report. Therefore, notes can be predefined in the BI system. Subsequently, in case of any change in the data contained in the fact table, e.g., the grain of a BI report is changed; navigable reference indicators provided in the existing BI report may automatically get updated and repositioned. This results in minimization of the time spent by a report developer in redefining notes for a BI report based on the changes in the fact table, thereby ensuring better convenience to the business user.