The bigger and more complex an organization is, the higher priority it places on quality and timely reports to aid it’s decision makers.
Various factors have accelerated the growth of this sector in recent years, and these include tighter governance and reporting regulations, increased competitor awareness of the power of good business intelligence, and a volatile economic climate raising the need for higher quality information.
The pain felt by almost all businesses that build a BI solution is that, while the end goal is mandatory, the journey to achieve it is slow, expensive and inflexible. These three factors are felt so severely, that the majority of BI projects fail to deliver the intended benefits.
Slow progress is the norm because BI solutions are constructed manually and involve highly complex software components to be purposely built for each customer. Typical implementations in the real world take nine months to complete at best, and at worst, years.
Expensive BI projects occur because of their complexity and the sheer volume of work needed to extract data from the organization’s computer systems, integrate it and build a Data Warehouse from it, and finally direct that data towards various audiences and reporting tools.
Inflexible implementations are the result. Businesses change rapidly and so do their reporting requirements. By definition, a BI project is never finished as it must adapt with the business it serves. Once a highly complex and completely bespoke solution is in place, making changes means reworking every component and dependency within that solution. The business soon learns how brittle the system is. If the cost of building it was high in the first place, the cost of maintenance and growth is an even greater shock to budget holders.
Just as Henry Ford solved the manufacturing conundrum of his day, so BIReady solves these three pain factors described above using the same concept - automation. BIReady builds Data Warehouses automatically. It also maintains them, and changes them on the fly according to business need.
BIReady can achieve in a few minutes what a team of software programmers take weeks to do. We prove this regularly in our 30 minute personal demonstration. Our customers prove this repeatedly as they maintain and grow their BI solution according to their needs. To make this concept more ‘digestible’ for newcomers, we often express a conservative estimated 50% overall project saving in time and costs. For the technology aspect alone, this is close to 90% in most cases. BIReady continues to deliver savings of the same magnitude with every subsequent enhancement project the business undertakes.
The BIReady software product is unique and represents the embodiment of what the industry currently calls "Agile BI". The term Agile is used to denote the flexibility to changes inherent in their products. Yet those vendors who are currently describing their products as Agile are really only describing how their products affect one slice of the whole solution. These are not achieving true agility. In relation to the entire BI architecture, Figure 1 shows the partial agility offered by today's product vendors.
BIReady is not in competition with other BI vendors' tools and does not require that those tools be replaced. Instead BIReady truly delivers Agile BI across the entire life-cycle of the solution by automating its design,
generation and subsequent changes. With a few clicks of the mouse (instead of weeks of work), the underlying Data Warehouse is generated, data extracted from source systems, dimensional reporting layers are generated and loaded with data.
As figure 2 shows, this level of true agility is delivered to the whole solution. The end result is that the existing BI reporting tools that were advertised as agile by other vendors (due to their innovative and
flexible reporting capabilities) can still be used, and to a far better extent, since the full and proper Data Warehouse exists underneath them. BIReady therefore enhances the return on investment in other BI reporting tools.
Before BIReady, all of this had to be built by hand.
BIReady does not eliminate the sophistication of Data Warehouse best practices. Instead it automates them.
This results in consistent and repeatable results drawn from the best practices of recognized Data Warehousing pioneers such as Inmon1, Kimball2 and Linstedt3. Yet, BIReady is not a black box. While it manages the Data Warehouse gracefully, its processes are open, configurable, and can be easily integrated other technologies and platforms. For example, scheduling or other bespoke data interfaces can make use of preferred tools whenever required. BIReady works with any number of data sources and is compatible with a wide range of popular database platforms.
BIReady delivers BI solutions that can keep up with the business. It empowers businesses to direct report-ready data to users quickly, at a far lower cost than ever before. Rather than lagging behind by months, BIReady accelerates changes, adapting to new reporting requirements at the speed of the business.