I'm a surfer.
I discovered this hobby more than two years ago. The life of a surfer in Israel isn't easy; the Mediterranean Sea isn't abundant with high waves, and every "rise" of the sea triggers an immediate response.
So how does it work?
I used to check the weather forecast every day and draw conclusions from it. I was often wrong.
Slowly, I discovered additional information sources. Each one on its own isn't the most reliable. Today, I combine and cross-reference. This makes the difference:
Every morning, I visit one of the various websites of the many surf clubs spread along our long coastline. These sites show live broadcasts of the water (in low quality). I go through them one by one. If I identify a certain movement on the water surface, I move from there to the US Navy site, which tries to predict sea behavior over time. From there, I move to one of the weather sites that display a forecast that usually isn't very accurate.
Then comes the cross-referencing: The news says waves. The cameras show there aren't any, but it seems there's the beginning of something. The Navy forecast says maybe. I need to decide and plan the rest of the day accordingly! Possibilities such as the sea rising and me not being there, or arriving early to a completely flat sea, lead to a real sense of disappointment.
And so it is in organizations: Most organizations start business intelligence activities as specific solutions focused on business processes in small units. Applications such as product sales reports are the domain of a limited number of users with defined access to a specific information source.
Today, organizations are beginning to understand the real need for business intelligence and are looking to establish a single, cross-organizational architecture with analytical capabilities and report-generation abilities that will provide all employees in the organization with the tools to access the right and refined knowledge and information for effective decision-making.
As the "architects" continue their path to design and develop these organizational BI applications, they discover that core information is sometimes stored in hundreds of databases, flat files, cubes, and other storage means.
To reach the right business decision in real-time, employees need an integrated view of these different storage sources to get as broad a perspective as possible on the organization's performance.
There is a real need for decision-makers to see high-level dashboards that will show them drill-down details where needed, give them alerts when necessary - and all this without worrying about the source of the information. Organizations need to carefully examine how BI applications can support an environment with multiple heterogeneous information sources before making the technological choice.
An enterprise BI platform will not be complete without the ability to access and perform queries, cross-references, and slicing from multiple different data sources and present the results in a single interface.
This interface should have the ability to navigate and enable the five "types" of business intelligence:
Performance reports and results
Organizational reports
OLAP analyses
Future forecast analyses
Real-time notifications and alerts
This navigation capability allows employees to focus on solving real business problems and spend less time "cracking" and understanding the many information sources.
Dashboards are the ideal way to monitor cross-organizational performance in a multi-source environment. Their visual and interactive features appeal to businesspeople who can use them to identify problems, and their sources, and through them access additional, more distant information.
Dashboards must be interactive and have a clear visual interface to translate organizational performance to users. Interfaces that draw information from many different sources are usually divided into two types:
A dashboard that draws information from multiple sources without the ability to connect or cross-reference them
A dashboard that draws information from multiple sources with the ability to cross-reference, connect, and perform queries necessary for business analyses
Let's take as an example two reports that exist in almost every organization: sales reports and sales forecast reports. Sometimes, these two reports are found in different databases. To identify any trend, and from it make a concrete business decision, our BI system will have to cross-reference information from both sources. Of course, this system, to perform queries and slicing, must have common fields in the reports so that they can "communicate".
In conclusion, for performance-based organizational dashboards to become a real tool that helps in real-time decision-making, architects and developers need to ensure the integration of data and information from multiple different sources.
Good luck!
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