Data Connectivity and Self-Serve BI

The business case for SAP BusinessObjects BI 4 is fairly simple: embrace SAP's vision of the future of business intelligence, including mobile BI and self-service BI, while lowering your total cost of ownership.

Self-service BI has its upside and its downside. The upside is that anyone in your organization that has access to SAP BusinessObjects can query enterprise data via universes, often with a Web Intelligence report, which allows them to make well informed decisions based on the most current and trusted enterprise information. This benefit justifies the adoption of self-service BI fully.

The downside of self-service BI falls on the platform management and administration side of the story, and it is two-fold. Firstly, self-service BI may lead to a proliferation of content -- more users creating more new reports, report iterations or exploration views, many of which may be for very limited use. If you've already migrated from XI 3 to BI 4, think back to the process you went through to rationalize content prior to migration. Think of self-service BI as a multiplier factor on that process, and you start to see the need for a proactive approach to BI content management. (Look at APOS Storage Center for such an approach.)

Secondly, and more importantly for the day-to-day operations of your BI platform, self-service BI takes some control of the volume and quality of the BI system's data connectivity away from platform managers and administrators and places it squarely in the hands of information consumers. This exchange is necessary for self-service BI to be of any benefit, but administrators are averse to giving up their control over data connectivity, as it impacts their ability to manage effectively and minimize bottlenecks.

If yours is one of those organizations that plan to take greater advantage of self-service BI across the enterprise, then BI data connectivity will become a bigger issue. In an ideal world, your universes would all be so well designed that there would be no issues with query performance, and end users would know better than to test the limits. But we don't live in that world. So your alternative is to monitor BI data connectivity proactively and act decisively to protect the integrity and dependability of your BI platform.

The APOS Intelligent Data Access Controller (IDAC)can help you become proactive with your data connectivity issues. Use it to monitor, manage and audit BI data connectivity. With IDAC, you can:

• Track queries in real time
• Receive automatic alerts when established thresholds are exceeded
• Intervene manually in queries
• Cancel runaway queries automatically
• Audit BI data connectivity

Self-Service BI - The Business Case for Upgrading to SAPBusinessObjects BI 4

Traditional BI answers known questions. Self-Service BI answers unknown questions.

So say Saskia Battersby and Pierre Leroux in a presentation they delivered at the ASUG SAP BusinessObjects User Conference 2012 (Extending Self-Service Capabilities of SAP BusinessObjects BI (PDF)).

Saskia and her colleague Deepa Sankar will be joining us for a webinar on Thursday, July 11, 2013, to discuss The Business Case for Upgrading to SAP BusinessObjects BI 4. Part of that business case is the new self-service capabilities of BI 4, and the growing importance of self-service BI for competitive advantage.

What are unknown questions? As Donald Rumsfeld once said:

There are known knowns; there are things we know that we know.
There are known unknowns; that is to say, there are things that we now know we don't know.
But there are also unknown unknowns – there are things we do not know we don't know.

While Rumsfeld's statement was widely ridiculed, it is actually quite accurate and succinct. If you don't know how to formulate the questions that challenge your assumptions or fill the gaps in your knowledge, then that information will elude you.

Or, as Mark Twainsaid, "It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so."

Standard reports answer a set of standard questions on a periodic basis. They provide information on the known knowns and known unknowns -- the information you use to manage your daily operations. But what about those unknown unknowns? How do you find answers when you can't yet formulate the questions? More and more, your competitive advantage depends on learning those unknowns through proactive analytics. Your performance will depend not just on how you react to markets, but also how you predict events and act to take advantage of them. You will be judged not just on what you know, but on what you should have known.

That's where the self-serve aspects of BI have their impact. That's why it's important to take advantage of the new capabilities in SAP BusinessObjects BI 4. Join us for this informative webinar to learn more.

View the recorded webinar.