Zoho Reports looks interesting. I’ll sign up and play around with it a bit. Thanks for letting me know.

Coy

Thanks for the comment and sorry for taking so long to reply.

I completely agree about pervasive BI being dependent upon on us helping making decisions easier instead of getting in the way. Ultimately, users do not care whether they are using BI or not so long as they are able to get to the information that they need to do their jobs and complete their projects. Users complete business processes by following a series of workflows. As BI vendors, we should create software that enhances those workflows instead of getting in the way of them. This is where I see us being embedded into the business procesess.

When it comes to a dynamic interface, I also agree that we need to stop guessing what a user may need based on their role. Many users flex to different roles as they perform their jobs. This will take them from being a casual user to an analyst and even to a storyteller about the information. As such, we need to design our software so that it is is not only portable, but also so that it information flows freely throughout our products and even into 3rd party products.

Great points David.

Coy

Thanks for the comment. That is interesting that you provide collaboration around the “objects” (i.e., attributes and metrics). Where do you see most of the collaboration occurring currently? Is it at the report level or the metadata level? I think that most deployments of BI are very young in terms of how they are thinking about introducing collaborative aspects to BI. So, I would expect to see people getting excited about the ability to discuss reports and comment on the effectiveness of an information delivery portal. I would see less of a demand currently for the collaboration around actual metrics and attributes.

I would agree that a big benefit of collaboration is to reduce the bloating effect. We see this constantly with the SAP BusinessObjects products as well. As our Web Intelligence product is designed to be an adhoc and analysis tool, you will see lots of users recreating reports that already exist rather than re-using existing reports. Though, I have seen customers handle this effectively by providing report “templates” – especially within extranet deployments.

I think that the other big benefit of introducing collaborative aspects to BI is the ability to enhance and/or mirror the communities within an organization. There are processes that individuals follow within business scenarios and there is collaboration that happens around those processes. BI is a decision support tool that should fit right into any business process so that any individual or group can make decisions easier by having access to the information that they need. By mirroring the collaborative aspects of an organization within BI we are ensuring that we are helping users make decisions rather than getting in the way of those decisions being made.

I would love to experiment with the collaborative aspects of Good Data. What did you have in mind? Can you create the project and make it a public project? We can then get people to contribute so that we can start seeing which collaborative functionalities become the most used and which ones are not. The results would very interesting.

Coy

Great post. Good Data enables collaboration around all of our metadata – not just reports as you show above, but also attributes and metrics, data loads, etc.

We built in a great deal of collaboration in Good Data, and we’ve been tracking behaviors since we launched our beta service in December – we are hosting over 2,000 BI projects to date and the findings have been surprising. Comments and annotations on the data are lower than we thought, but we’re seeing a high level of report reuse.

Unscientifically – the biggest impact of collaboration seems to be avoiding ‘report bloat’ by encouraging users to build on top of existing reports as opposed to starting from scratch. We have users who have over 1,000 saved reports in salesforce.com, so the bloat is real.

Let me know if you want to experiment with collaboration within a Good Data project – we can set up a project with data, invite people for the specific reason to see their collaboration habits. We can even make it a public project with no login/access control requirements.

-Sam

The next leap to get us there is the dynamic interface. We have to stop trying to guess what the user will need or not guessing at all and over presenting data as information. There is a distinct difference in the 2 items. Only when the gui becomes a conduit to turning the data to information in a dynamic way are we to the point in the evolution that we become pervaisve and meaniful to 100% of the community.

It is too often that I see BI content created for the visual effect rather than for the actual purpose of creating actionable information displays. Part of the blame goes to the information designers and part to the BI vendors.