Coy Yonce's Blog

When it comes to making decisions with business information it is important to remember that there is never a single person making those decisions.  There are divisions, teams, and groups that are formed to tackle specific projects or that collaborate within their day-to-day jobs in order to make decisions that affect the business as a whole.  This can be something as grand as which employees to layoff or something seemingly as small as which support incidents to route to which support engineers.  In either case, there are business rules and processes that are followed and there are multiple individuals that contribute to the overall outcome.

The idea of collaboration within Business Intelligence is not a new one.  SAP BusinessObjects has the ability to enable discussions within the InfoView portal interface so that users can discuss the information presented within reports or documents.

There is also the Business Intelligence offering from Good Data, which allows for the hosting of Business Intelligence content within the cloud and the collaboration of that content directly within their analysis space.  Good Data allows for comments to be made against entire reports or for annotations to be made directly within each data element (e.g., cell in a table).

Antivia has also built their Antivia Desktop product which combines Business Intelligence with popular social network sites and the collaborative technologies introduced by Web 2.0.  Their product allows for the rating of content, discussions, and the creation of communities with an organization geared towards discussing the effectiveness Business Intelligence.

While all of the above mentioned examples are great in terms of the current marrying of collaborative technologies with Business Intelligence, I think that we need to take this further.  Not only do we need the ability to provide more collaborative functionality directly within Business Intelligence software, but we need to find a way to implement it so that users want to take advantage of it – to basically make it fun.  For examples of this, we only need to look as far as Amazon. A few of the key features that make using Amazon enjoyable and fruitful are the wide variety of products, the ability for users to review products, and the ability for users to create their own “lists” of products based on a theme.  All of these things have allowed Amazon to not only build a great retail site, but to also create a sense of community.  Jared Spool talks about these features (and others) in his talk hosted by User Interface Engineering.

How can we leverage the the success of Amazon’s community model and combine it with a new way to think about collaborative Business Intelligence?

In terms of collaborative aspects Business Intelligence software should include the ability to not only rate and discuss content, but to also collaboratively create content.  For example, let us say that I am an analyst within HR and I want to analyze the turnover situation from the current date compared to a year ago.  I fire up my BI product that my company has purchased, I find the data that I think is a good starting point, and I start analyzing.  At this time, I am exploring the data that exists and attempting to come up with some insights around how turnover has changed from last year to this year.  If I find something interesting then I am going to save that view and ask someone else to take a look at it.  Currently, I have to save the view as a report (or something similar) and then either ask my co-workers to view it, send it to their email, or distribute it via some other means.  Why not include the ability to contact my co-workers via the BI system and invite them into a workspace where we can look at my report and analyze it together in real time.  This analysis would include talking about the insights that are visible and also modifying the report to better tell my story of how turnover has changed.  Not only does this make the final story more complete (through multiple view points), but it also provides my co-workers with the same understanding that I have about the situation. (For more information on real-time editing, see this Wikipedia article.)

Let us take this further and add in the community functionality that we see on Amazon.  The turnover story would not only be interesting to HR and senior maangement, but also to the employees at large.  Obviously, there is some danger in sharing this type of information as it may make others leave as well; however, in the interest of fostering a community of users within an organization and being transparent, I want to provide all of the employees in the organization with access to this report.  So, I publish it on a company-wide portal.  The report by itself does not really provide the functionality for the employees to comment on the content or discuss how the information could be better presented – unless of course the portal where I have published the content includes this functionality.  What would be good is to have the ability for all employees to participate in discussion threads about the insights seen in the report, rate the report in terms of how effectively the information is presented, and provide feedback to the senior leaders about how they can improve the turnover situation.  By providing these features, the Business Intelligence deployment would be providing the mechanisms to foster a sense of community within the organization.  In addition, the creators of new BI content, administrators, and organizational leaders would better understand how information is being utilized.

The end goal of the suggestions presented here are to leverage the power of the individuals within an organization.  Those individuals are already collaborating on business decisions as they go through processes, perform they day-to-day duties, and work on special projects.  We should allow them to continue collaborating as they begin using Business Intelligence content to enhance their decision making abilities.  This is another way that we can ensure that BI becomes pervasive.

Addendum: Which other Amazon features would be useful in BI?

“Frequently Bought Together”

This type of functionality would be good to provide end users or analysts with suggetions on for other  BI content is typically viewed by users that view the content they are currently viewing.  For example, if I am looking at a visualization showing me the turnover in HR, then this feature would show me other content (reports, dashboards, visualizations, etc…) that also discuss HR turnover.

“Customers who Bought this Item also Bought”

This type of functionality could come in handy for BI with a slight twist.  For example, it would be good to not only show other content that discuss HR Turnover (as stated above), but also other content that discusses HR or turnover in general.  This content could be corporate BI content, other corporate content, or even content from the Internet.

“Inside this Book”

This type of feature has been implemented by some BI vendors already as a means to expose the metadata for BI content.  The use of BI content metadata extends into the areas of not only presenting “one version of the truth” and allowing users to see where the information is coming from, but also allows for the linking of content and enhancing search capabilities.  For example, in the screenshot from Amazon one can see that they have listed the first sentence, key phrases, and new phrases that exist in the book. This would translate nicely to presenting the description of a report, key phrases used in the report (as they relate to the business), new phrases that appear, the person that created the report, the date it was last modified, and even the last person that viewed the report.

“Listen to Samples”

This would be an interesting way to link BI content to visual and auditory media that is related to the report, visualization, or dashboard being viewed.  For example, if I were looking at the HR Turnover report then I would see links for the latest earnings call, a recorded meeting that discussed turnover in the organization, or maybe even a link to a video of a recording traning session on how to motivate employees.

Every employee within an organization requires information to do their job effectively.   So, when considering the types of users for a Business Intelligence deployment, everyone must be considered.  This includes the business analysts, power users, casual users, management, and the executive suite.  This wide span of users also covers all departments within an organization (e.g., Human Resources, Operations, Marketing, Legal, IT).  It should also be considered that the role for each of your users can fluctuate as they perform their day-to-day jobs – especially within smaller or more flexible organizations.  John Brookmyre presents this very well in his post from December of 2008. The key point from John’s post that really interested me was this:  “…BI interfaces could be improved if we designed them with the aim to empower users to move freely and use all of the functionality available”.  This is one of the critical issues regarding how Business Intelligence vendors can make our products more pervasive.  Our users are intelligent.  They understand the data of their business and most of them are naturally curious to follow an insight to its conclusion.  In order for BI vendors to help organizations make BI more ubiquitous, which would allow insights to be made and stories to be told by all users, our products and workflows need to be simpler and we need to provide interoperability.  In addition, we should expose functionality only when it is necessary.  This means presenting the novice user with basic functionality and gradually exposing more functionality.

Simplicity

Simple, but functional is key to any software interface.  When thinking about the design of Business Intelligence software, it is important to consider the business scenarios in which the software will be used.  Ultimately, BI software will be used in an effort to ease decision making.  As such, if we can make the interface simpler for the end user and content creator, then we can make the decision making process faster.  For example, SAP BusinessObjects Explorer allows end users and analysts to perform Google-like keyword searches for data.  This data is then returned in an iTunes-like interface.  Users can then take the data that they find interesting and analyze it within the Explorer interface.  This is a simple tool that does not get in the way of the business process.  QlikView takes a great step towards simplicity by allowing a user to download a full copy of their product within minutes.  This, combined with the ability to quickly create content within QlikView via immediately available demos, makes it easier for BI software to proliferate. Tableau takes this one step further by allowing a user to download their professional edition without even registering.  How does this make the decision making process easier?  The software is easier to install, easier to learn, and provides a quicker means to analyzing information.

Interoperability

Allowing the products within our suite to interoperate is also important to the proliferation of BI.  Currently the more established BI vendors have products that fit specific purposes: report writers for corporate reporting, dashboard builders for consolidating information views, analysis tools for slicing and drilling into information, and the list goes on…  Allowing content to be transferred throughout these tools not only makes it easier for the user to take advantage of the features of the entire product suite, but also allows more users to put together a story from the information they are viewing.  For example, if I were to build a document within SAP BusinessObjects Web Intelligence, I am pretty much stuck in that format – unless I want to rewrite the report again in a different product.  I should be able to perform my query and analysis in Web Intelligence, push part of the information out to Crystal Reports as static content, and then push other parts of the document out to Xcelsius to start building a consolidated visualization to tell a story.  The content created within each product in a BI suite should be portable and easy to push into other products.

QlikView has taken an interesting approach to this problem by creating a single content type.  For a new vendor in the BI market, this is a great step towards presenting themselves as easy to adopt and easy to use.  There is no struggle to determine which content type is best for a particular need and no need to give users access to multiple tools.  It is all the same tool.

Gradual Release of Functionality

Also important to the pervasiveness of BI is how we expose functionality within the product.  Imagine if you were to open up a product that you had never used before and were presented with all of these cryptic menu items and buttons.  How quickly would you move on to find another product that looks easier to use?  A BI product that is meant to be used by all within an organization should present its basic functionality within the immediate user interface and allow more advanced functionality to be discovered.  For example, when you open Excel, you can immediately see the purpose of the menus related to specific high-level functionality: insert, page layout, formulas, data, review, and view.  It is clear from these labels what I will find as sub-menu items.

In addition, the buttons with which the user is immediately presented are pretty clear.  For example, the font, alignment, and number formatting controls are intuitive.   As another example, we can consider SAP BusinessObjects Web Intelligence Rich Client.  When you open this tool, the first thing you are presented with is a menu allowing you to choose to create a new document or open an existing document.

If I choose to create a new document, then I’m ready to start within two additional clicks.  If I chose to create a new document against an SAP BusinessObjects Universe, then I am presented with an interface that allows me to drag objects exposed within the Universe into my query in order to create my document.

This interface is fairly intuitive and the text helps the user figure out what to do next.  There are some elements that are unclear. The text at the bottom that states “Display by objects” really means nothing to a user that has no understanding of what an object is.  I like that the “Scope of Analysis” section of the interface is not displayed by default.  This should be considered an advanced type of functionality that the user can expose once they understand what it does.

QlikView also provides a fairly intuitive interface.  The first screen with which a user is presented is a highly intuitive set of  examples and demos.

Also, the high-level menus are easy to understand – with the exception of “Selections”, “Bookmarks”, and “Object”.   The buttons presented are similar enough to Microsoft Office that any user should be able to figure them out quickly.

QlikView does a great job of allowing their users to immediately build content by making the interface easy to follow and presenting embedded demos.

Tableau is another great example of gradually exposing functionality.  The first page within the Tableau interface presents with the options of opening existing data sources, connecting to a new data source, viewing samples, or viewing training videos.

After opening one of the sample data sources (Coffee Chain), the user is presented with a fairly intuitive interface for creating an information view (in this case, a report).    I can quickly create a report by dragging a dimension (e.g., Product Type) into the “Columns” section and a measure (e.g., Sales) into the “Rows” section.  While building the report I get an immediate visualization and the application even detects the best chart for displaying my information.

Not only is it simple to build a report for a novice user, it is also easy to add filters and change the properties of the report.  It is quite simple to change their suggested information view into another format by using the “Show Me!” button at the top and selecting a different visualization type.  This is made even easier by the fact that the application hides visualizations which are not relevant to the data being viewed (notice the greyed out visualizations).

As can be seen from the examples above, each of these products makes it simpler to get started with information viewing and analysis, but only exposing a basic level of functionality at within the immediate interface.  The more complex functionality is accessed within sub-menus or via right-clicks.  Over time users will become more experience with the products and will start to investigate other functionality via exploration or reading documentation.

So, what’s the point?

The objective of this post was to higlight specific examples of simplicity, interoperability, and a tiered exposure of functionality.  The end goal of building our BI interfaces with these ideas in mind is to allow more users to take advantage of the software without being overwhelmed and without having to ask for help.  In the end, this will allow BI to become more pervasive and will enable more stories to be told based on the data within an orgnization.  This will allow those organizations to really see what their data is telling them so that they can improve their processes and become more efficient at doing what they do best.

Being able to tell a story with Business Intelligence content is a must for any organization.  It is this story telling ability that allows the organization to realize new insights and then put the appropriate context around the information to improve processes or decision making abilities.  It is also an iterative process.  I may gain an insight from an analysis session and present this as a story to several departments within my organization.  Those departments will then take my story, do their own analysis on the information within their own contexts, and tell their own story.  The end result is that the organization is unifying around stories that attempt to understand what their data is telling them and then collaborating on improvements to achieve more efficient business processes.

I would argue that this level of collaboration can only be achieved if Business Intelligence is provided to everyone within the organization.  Only then will employees have the power to determine these insights on their own without waiting for the problem to get bigger or for someone else to realize the problem exists.  As Business Intelligence vendors we have been saying for years, we want to make our products ubiquitous…but how?

Cindi Howson posted an article in February of 2008 talking about how we should achieve ubiquitous, or pervasive, BI. She found that, at the time, only 25% of workers were using BI.  I would venture to say that this number is not much higher today.  I’m sure that there has been some increase due to the focus on government audits and a larger understanding of the importance of data, but overall, the number probably has not moved much.  The reasons are ultimately still the same as Cindi points out in her article: companies need to realize the value of the data they have, they need to deploy the tools to more than just analysts and power users, and they need to provide the rights tools to the right workers.  So, why haven’t companies made more progress towards these goals already?  Largely because the products they are using do not make it easy.  As BI vendors we need to do more in order to make BI easier to adopt for all users within an organization.

Within the next three posts, I will focus on the following ideas with regards to ubiquitous BI:

• Creating simpler, interoperable products that start with basic functionality and expose advanced functionality when needed
• Ensuring that our products are enjoyable to use by taking advantage of collaborative techniques and our community of users
• Focusing on making our products embeddable

The goal of these posts will be to explain how BI vendors can further enhance their existing features along these lines and learn from other software that utilize these ideas to create easy to use and easy to deploy products.