Are We There Yet? Zero Wait BI for Everyone We... · 2013-01-22 · Social and collaborative 2 abc3 def 4 ghi *+ shift 7 pqrs 5 jkl 8 tuv 0 next # space 9 wxyz 6 mno where Zero wait,

Are We There Yet?Zero Wait BI for Everyone

JANUARY 2011

Sponsored by QlikView

CITO ResearchResearch to solve your problems

Contents

Executive Summary 1

A Plan of Attack on Wasted Time 3

How Business Discovery Platforms Support Zero Wait 5

1 Are We There Yet? Zero Wait BI for Everyone


Executive Summary“Time is money,” the saying goes, but left unsaid is the price we’re willing to pay for it and how it seems to suffer from hyperinflation. “The laziest among us have acquired a heightened awareness of time—by necessity,” James Gleick wrote in Faster. “The mod-ern economy lives and dies by precision in time’s measurement and efficiency in its employment.” Put another way: Speed wins.

The most successful technology companies know this and make speed the appeal of their products. Apple’s latest notebook launches in a flash, while Google has surmised that even a fraction of a second is too slow for search results. The aptly named Google Instant brings results before you’ve even finished typing.

We’ve been trained to be impatient—not that we have much choice. If time itself seems to be speeding up, the pace of business is accelerating even faster. If customers won’t wait, neither can you. And if you don’t have the information you need to make decisions, you’re just going to have to make decisions without it.

The problem is that most traditional systems and processes can’t keep up. If you have a question—what’s the true cost of this process? Is there an opportunity here?—the typical response has been to hurry up and wait. New databases must be built, cubes spun, and then re-spun as extra dimensions are added, until six months have passed and you’ve either forgotten your question or answered it as best you could. If time is money, then what is the cost of wasted time? How do you measure the missed oppor-tunities and squandered decisions, and what would you pay to recoup them?

Not that throwing money at it will solve the problem. Traditional Business Intelligence (BI) solutions are fundamentally flawed when it comes to answering new questions in a timely manner. They are products of an era in which computing resources were scarce and time was abundant, and the opposite is true today. Compounding the problem is the centralized architecture of traditional BI, a handicap that makes it all but impossible to eliminate the wait by putting information in people’s hands to make their own decisions. Traditional BI’s bottleneck is the enemy of speed, and we know it. Google, Apple, and other apps have taught us that software doesn’t have to be slow—in fact, it can be instant—so why are we still waiting?

What if you had zero wait at work? Zero wait to ask questions, get answers, ask more questions, and get all the information you need? Zero wait to change parameters, add data sources, take some away, compare and contrast. And zero wait to collaborate in



context, sharing your discoveries as easily as you’d chat someone a link. What if you could do all this without requiring intervention from IT or power users? What would that mean for your business? Faster decisions, for one thing. And more decisions, a faster corporate metabolism, and ultimately increased competitiveness.

Achieving a zero wait workplace requires augmenting traditional BI with Business Discovery—new tools and a new architecture enabling users to solve problems with-out having to bother IT. Business Discovery platforms enable business decision mak-ers to make better informed decisions based on data using tools similar to the apps they’re already familiar with. Business Discovery ultimately changes the economics of BI by driving down the costs of users asking and answering questions themselves, freeing IT to stop generating reports and focus on adding strategic value.

The pillars of Business Discovery include:• Works with what you have

• Remixability, reusability

• App-driven

• Insight everywhere

• Consolidate, search, visualize

• Social and collaborative

• Mobility

• Zero wait

This paper is devoted to an understanding and analysis of zero wait and what it will mean to your business.



A Plan of Attack on Wasted Time The concept of “zero wait” encompasses multiple meanings, as shown in Figure 1, in-cluding zero wait for response, to explore, to adapt, and to share insights.

Figure 1. The Meaning of Zero Wait

Each of these facets reflects an attack on wasted time that should produce a victory in the quality of decision-making. Business Discovery differs from traditional BI in one critical respect: you never walk away waiting for a query to finish. The inevitable end

Works with what you have

Remixability, reusability

App-driven

Insighteverywhere

MobilityConsolidate, search, visualize

Zero wait, real-time analysis

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Zero wait for responseAsk a question, press a button, and receive an answer almost instantly

Zero wait to exploreFollow the data any way that your curiosity leads you, looking at related data with no waiting

Zero wait to adaptRecon�gure both queries and the systems on the �y

Zero wait to share and compare insightsShare an analysis and allow more people to enhance understanding and problem solving



point of that, as anyone who’s ever used traditional BI will tell you, is quitting in dis-gust. The cognitive process of analysis and discovery doesn’t work if it’s disjointed. Hunches typically form and dissipate within seconds, not minutes (which isn’t helped by our shrinking attention spans). Any system in which you can’t chain one idea to another and follow it along to the next is effectively useless. But in Business Discovery, the stream of analysis isn’t interrupted. You’re free to explore and ask questions as fast as you can think of them.

For these reasons, achieving zero wait requires more than just traditional BI: it requires Business Discovery. The freedom to explore as many or as few data sources as you like—with zero wait to select more or subtract a few—requires loading them all into memory. So does moving from one level of aggregation to another without refresh-ing a data warehouse or recompiling cubes. Zero wait to adapt means bringing all of that data together and having it at your fingertips, which traditional BI and its reports are ill-equipped to do.

It also means reengineering BI to think like people rather than the other way around. In the typical drill-down path of BI, looking for answers requires starting to look at a cosmic level, then drilling down to a planetary one, then Europe, France, Île-de-France, Paris and so on until you reach the ground. No one thinks this way. Drastically reducing the time it takes to make discoveries requires starting where you believe the answer to be rather than where the software would like to look.

The last front in the war on wasted time is collaboration. Zero wait to put another pair of eyes on your analysis could mean the difference between breakthrough and failure. Enterprise software vendors have finally begun to incorporate social networking tools in their products (consider Salesforce Chatter and Jive), but they are not focused on creating a real-time, zero wait window into BI. For now, it’s enough to simply have people in the same room.

One company armed its business analysts with tools of the variety described above and on Fridays charged them with connecting data sources that had never been con-nected before, curious to see what patterns and correlations would emerge. It didn’t matter if they went weeks without finding anything, an attitude that turned BI on its head. But this exercise wasn’t BI at all, not in any traditional sense. It was something else: Business Discovery.



How Business Discovery Platforms Support Zero Wait Business Discovery emerged as a response to mounting frustration with traditional BI and the necessity for a new software architecture if zero wait was to become a reality. Business Discovery platforms, the architecture of which is shown in Figure 2, bridge the gap between traditional BI and standalone applications like Excel, placing us in control of exploring and exploiting our own data and without having to burden IT.

Figure 2. How Business Discovery Platforms Create Value

Business Discovery Platforms allow end users to more deeply explore and understand the information available to them

As a result, a new paradigm of user driven analysis takes hold. Data starts to create value. A culture of sharing and reuse appears

The best dashboards and applications are captured and propagated throughout the company

The result is that the entire company has more information to make decisions

Works with what you have

Remixability, reusability

App-driven

Insighteverywhere

MobilityConsolidate, search, visualize


Drivers:

Explore and Discover

Share and Reuse Package andPropagate

Make InformedDecisions

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Using intuitive tools that marry database connectors with fluid interfaces reminiscent of apps you can get for your iPad or Android device, Business Discovery platforms drive down the cost and complexity of aggregating disparate data sources, which are combined in-memory to make zero wait exploration a reality.

Business Discovery replaces monolithic systems with intuitive apps—much like those in Apple’s App Store—that anyone can use to analyze a business problem with zero wait. Like Apple’s, these apps are simple, single-purpose, and more intuitive than a spreadsheet. But they’re also easy to create, modify, mash up, and share, demonstrat-ing the possibility of zero wait adaptation.

Business Discovery platforms make it easy for business users to modify, mash up, col-laborate, and share Business Discovery apps on their own. Users can remix and reas-semble data in new views and visualizations for deeper understanding. With Business Discovery, users have the information they need to generate fresh insights.

The greatest strength of Business Discovery is that it leverages the entire organiza-tion. It takes a bottom-up, enlightened approach to IT, allowing every employee to contribute, with zero wait on collaboration. Business Discovery unlocks the value of data by letting users explore freely.

This paper was sponsored by QlikView and created by CITO Research

CITO ResearchCITO Research is a source of news, analysis, research, and knowledge for CIOs, CTOs, and other IT and business professionals. CITO Research engages in a dialogue with its audience to capture technology trends that are harvested, analyzed and communicated in a sophisticated way to help practitioners solve difficult business problems.

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Are We There Yet? Zero Wait BI for Everyone We... · 2013-01-22 · Social and collaborative 2 abc3 def 4 ghi *+ shift 7 pqrs 5 jkl 8 tuv 0 next # space 9 wxyz 6 mno where Zero wait,