Business Intelligence at Business Speed

We recently had another product planning meeting with our development team in Australia.  These sessions are extremely worthwhile as they ensure we are all aligned regarding where we are headed and why.  I personally find it humbling in these meetings as I’m surrounded by people who are much smarter than I am.  We explore many areas and ideas that come from a combination of our customers, advisory board, partners and internal thinking, and we always have a list of really cool, valuable things we could develop that outstrips our resource capacity – at least we know we won’t run out of things to do!  I find that we can group our plans into various themes and one theme that we’ve been pursuing for some time has been how to provide a business intelligence solution that operates at the same speed as business. 

There are different aspects to this theme:

1. Providing relevant information in a timely manner such that daily operational decisions can be made with current rather than lagging data;
2. Providing forward-looking or predictive information to enable the business to anticipate potential future outcomes and proactively make decisions to address these;
3. Being flexible enough to support the business structure as it evolves over time.  

We have developed some unique capabilities to support each of these already and have development plans to push the envelope further.  I’ve outlined a few examples below:

1. Timely information:

• When we founded myDIALS we wanted to provide multi-dimensional data analysis coupled with immediate data update.  We felt that to be most effective, operational decision making required near-real-time (or right-time) data update. The development team had experience in the real-time world of industrial automation, so it was natural to develop unique technology to allow real-time update of a multi-dimensional data store rather than using traditional OLAP cube technology.  This has given us a real advantages as businesses seek to reduce the latency from when an issue arises to when the cause is determined and an action initiated.
• Of course the update speed needs to be optimized such that decisions are made with granular enough data to support rapid action without flooding the people making decisions with “noise”.   Hence we provided the ability to flexibly tune the update frequency and granularity of information on a metric by metric basis.

2. Predictive information (aka predictive analytics):

• Already we provide forecast projections that can show people making decisions what is likely to happen in the future if no action is taken;
• In addition, we provide what-if scenario analysis which operates in real-time and can analyze historical, current and future scenarios by specifying changes in one or more metrics and then viewing the rolled-up effect of those changes;
• There is much more we plan to provide that will make it much easier to specify a desired outcome and then have the system determine alternative paths to achieving that outcome based on a combination of historical trends, targets, specified assumptions and learnt correlations – watch this space!

3. Flexibly supporting business structure changes:

• Businesses continuously change in small ways – adding new customers, introducing new products or sunsetting products, opening new locations etc. and the BI solution has to match these changes over time.   We’ve taken several steps to facilitate these changes by providing a quarantine that captures unrecognized data and enables the configuration to be easily and quickly manipulated to add new dimension members or aliases to support these types of changes.  Our query engine self-learns which dimensional intersections are valid for each metric (these can vary by time period) so that we display only relevant data onto the dashboards.  And when we tightly integrate with another solution (for example NetSuite), we auto-discover these types of changes and continuously synchronize our configuration to match the master.
• There are bigger business structure changes that happen periodically - the most common example being a restructure of the sales organization.  We are now developing the ability to automate these types of changes while maintaining the integrity of historical information.  This supports the business more flexibly and eliminates the manual effort (and time) required to make those changes in traditional systems.

For business intelligence to deliver maximum value to the business, particularly in the area of operational excellence and decision support, it must operate at the same speed as the business.  To be competitive, businesses are evolving and making operational decisions more quickly than ever.  Hence new innovative technologies and approaches are required for BI solutions to keep pace, and we have a lot more planned than the few examples provided above.

This is one of the major reasons why I find our planning sessions to be as much fun as they are – we are continually pushing forward with new Operational BI capabilities to support the needs of businesses today and into the future.