Most of the BI Landscapes in industry utilize a content driven BI Approach rather than a user focused BI approach. While the content centrist approach is great for IT or IS organization it posed challenges to Business as business have to juggle through a lot of content which can be dashboards , reports and explorer information spaces or any other BI contents to do the analysis. This can lead to a lot of frustration and confusion and in the process and also wastes a lot of time of business to get all the relevant information for a specific analysis. Also when a new business user wants to do the same analysis the path he might take can be time consuming as he might need to understand which BI contents available for an analysis and what type of information they have and then switch between those contents to reach to an answer.
To overcome this problem we came up with a novel way to build user focused BI utilizing custom websites with embedded BI contents. Now before going there you might argue why anyone would need one more website when we already have BI launchpad in BusinessObjects as the default portal. And the answer is quite simply BI Launchpad can have multiple type of content like reports (Webi/Crystal) , Dashboards , data exploration Information space and they are most of the time just sitting in different folder and sub folders and there is no logical way to tie them to a specific type of activity or users and the process can be very cumbersome. Also some times the contents are not linked together for example there could be a sales dashboard and sales detail report but user have to go to sales dashboard find out the scenario which he wants to analyze and then go to the reports and select all prompts and filters to get to the details for that scenario.
How this solution works from a bird’s eye view: The most critical feature to make the solution work is open document URL for specific BI contents and enabling single sign on for BusinessObjects. The solution leverage the Opendoc links of Business Objects contents and combining it with i-frames in a customer portal. The portal being rendered via an IIS website which has a user friendly DNS alias. Let’s say user can access all the relevant sales information tying http://salesvs. http://businessobjects-dev(followed by a bunch of clicks to get to your desired folder), which one makes more sense and easier to remember when you are looking for all BI Contents related to sales? We created the sites and named them as http://Sales, short, meaningful and easier to remember for users. The IIS websites make use of i-frames within which the open document links for dashboards, explorer information spaces and Webi reports are called. Also we make sure to make the website code in a way that it loads the dashboard contents while loading utilizing the parallel processing without wasting user time and once loaded the dashboard does not refreshed automatically.
Let take an Example:
Let’s take a fictitious scenario; assume you are a product manager in a large organization selling products to consumers across to globe and you are assigned to some product line in the company. Your job requires to ensure your have enough inventory for next week for your top selling products for last quarter for in North American region and ensure the plants which supplied the product is going to produce enough of them for the next quarter.
In a traditional content driven BI scenario you would have go to sales folder and find out which reports or dashboard gives you the top customer for last quarter by region. Then find out which is your top selling product for North America by filtering your product lines and regions. Then after you find the product, you would need to go to inventory folder and find out which report or dashboard shows the current inventory by product. Then find what is the current inventory levels for your top product which you have got from sales report. Then go to forecast report find out the forecast of the product for the next quarter and then then compare the number with the current inventory to understand how much of the product you would need to produce during next quarter.This whole process can take many hours to get a answer.
Now let’s take the scenario in this new approach where there is dedicated web link like http://PM-Analyticswhich has the sales dashboard with inventory dashboard and Forecasting report at the same Weblink as different tabs. The user just goes into the sales tab , finds the top selling product then gets to the next tab which inventory while still preserving his sales analysis.Then he finds the inventory numbers and goes to the next tab which is forecast report filtering the product and compare the additional inventory that will be needed based on forecast. Sounds simple!! This process will also save user a lot of headache to find the right content use the contents correctly as everything needed in one place and his sales analysis is not lost and he has just do the similar analysis for south America region quite easily as his old analysis does not automatically reset to default and the session should be still active. This process should be no more than few minutes.
How does it Look:
In a traditional content focused BI user have to go to Launch Pad , Public Folder and then find all the contents that are needed for an analysis.
In the new Process just need to Type a URL in a browser which can be as simple as http://saleswhichallows the user to directly view the landing dashboard without the hassles of finding it in a folder and all the additional BI contents to support an analysis. They do not see anything else except what they need.
The application can have reports which support analysis and also explorer information spaces to do data exploration.
When users wanted another set of related data they just click on another tab which takes him for additional analysis.
I am going to have another post to discuss on all the technical details and possibly some source code to achieve this in your environments.