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OLAP-Driven Collaborative Portals: Everyone in the
Pool!
By Nathan
Rudyk
You know the story. The adult stands around the swimming
pool, telling the big kids they can use the high diving board,
the middle-sized kids they can swim out of the shallow end if
they promise to be careful and all the little kids to just
stay behind the rope.
With central IT playing the role of the adult, BI and, in
particular, the deep data diving involved with OLAP
technologies is for big kids. The standard wisdom is that
“information analysts” are the only ones smart and willing
enough to crack open an interactive data tool, “information
explorers” can venture outside the rope with water wings
puffed up with “guided analytics,” and those kiddie- class
“information consumer” masses will be satisfied with reams of
static reports – provided they wear lots of sunscreen.
It’s as if our industry has institutionally given up on
trying to serve most of the people most of the time – at least
with the same degree of freedom afforded the deep-diving
analyst elites. Information consumers have to settle for
static reports or, at best, the snakes and ladders of
spreadsheets. Meanwhile, the Internet marches on into our
living rooms, where children of all ages are involved in
multithreaded, spontaneously collaborative interactions inside
game portals, music portals, sports portals, search portals,
dating portals and much more.
To be fair, there are distinct challenges to allowing
everyone in today’s extended enterprise to swim out of data’s
shallow end, if only because of traditional approaches. As
pointed out by Claudia Imhoff and Mike Biensen1,
“Today, reports remain the most tangible evidence of the data
that business users need to make critical decisions. However
depending solely on reports rather than on the data, often
results in some inherent problems.”
Some of those problems include having to run back to the
“adult” in IT every time a new report is required; the
inability to ask spontaneous questions of the data (OLAP’s
primary function); or a way to share the fruits of ad hoc
analysis within your peer group. Even with supremely indulgent
adults, relying on reporting alone to serve the needs of all
the information consumers in the organization results in a big
maintenance burden that eventually requires a reckoning of
whether there’s a better way.
Collaborative Web reporting and analysis portals provide
that better way. With customized interfaces offering
increasing degrees of freedom on both functionality and data
complexity, such portals allow everyone the ability to dip
into the data pool at their own speed and according to their
own ability. Because reports are the starting point, or first
degree of freedom toward further exploration and OLAP
analysis, spontaneous data dives are encouraged along with
ability to view, create and collaborate on self-serve
OLAP-driven reports. This makes for a more leisurely and
productive pool-side life for the adults in IT.
According to Mark Smith of Ventana Research, there is an
evolution from information delivery – the unidirectional path
for information flow (usually reports) to users – to
information collaboration, which provides a bidirectional path
for users to exchange views, comments and input to
information, often via portals.
Says Smith2, “Integrating collaborative
technologies will provide business intelligence deployments
the ability to access, analyze and deliver information that
can optimize business activities ... This evolution of
technology and functional capabilities represents the next
level beyond the current unidirectional 'push and pull'
approaches of business intelligence technology vendors. The
current approaches provide individuals the ability to optimize
functional areas but do not provide the opportunity for groups
of individuals to collaborate for the best possible outcome.”
In many smaller enterprises, the IT adult is not often
present, or very busy, and the data used to collaborate on
decisions is captured and tracked not in the context of a BI
suite but in individual Excel spreadsheets. This is a very
low- cost mechanism, but the extraction of relevant
information and the ability to juxtapose different pieces of
data becomes a challenge unless all the kids are very good at
pivot tables or programming in Visual Basic.
Even large organizations may use “spreadsheet farms” as a
form of reporting to capture and track relevant information.
This is often done where there are too many diverse systems,
each of which has a piece of relevant data, or where the
existing BI system is too training-intensive or expensive in
terms of seat licensing to offer anything approaching
universal access to everyone who needs to go for the
occasional swim.
This results in a contradictory confluence – where there is
a greater need for more people to access reports and conduct
data analysis and a smaller capability for the IT department
to generate the reports that meet those greater needs.
In modern computing terms, this is a classic entry for an
Internet portal – in this case a Web reporting and data
analysis portal. As with any Internet-driven application built
for mass adoption via the browser, the portal’s foundation
technologies must facilitate the ability to combine resources
from many systems, using Internet protocols that can not only
connect browsers to servers but data from different servers.
The benefit is that competing data resources trapped on
disparate networks and platforms can finally be united in a
useful and universally accessible system.
The functionality of a Web reporting and data analysis
portal built on such protocols can be defined by what is
important to users, not what is stored or run by any single
system. Drawing on shared resources and delivered through a
self-graduating, scalable, application program interface, this
truly Web-based approach offers many advantages over
Web-enabled client/server approaches that again attempt to
trap the data inside a single vendor’s proprietary system
architecture.
When you are operating in a true Web-based architecture,
you’re able to think about and create your reporting and
analysis portal more along the lines of
interactive-data-for-all versus
reports-for-most-interactive-data-for-some. The technology
architecture and IT adult-imposed barriers between different
parts of the data pool are eliminated. There are no such
things as information analysts, explorers and consumers – only
people working together to make the best decisions they can.
For these people, collaborating on a report or analysis
session becomes as simple as sending a link from your favorite
news portal – the only requirement for the collaboration is a
browser, connection to the Internet, and a need to know.
Another key requirement for this type of portal involves
licensing. Internet portals – whether they’re delivering news
content to millions or MP3s to thousands – are all about mass
adoption. The more kids in the pool the better. Unfortunately,
many vendors – either saddled with client/server technologies
recreated for the browser or existing business models
dependent on per-seat licensing, training and services
revenues – are misaligned for mass adoption models.
What’s needed is technology that is not only slick in a
controlled vendor demo, but slick when it’s quickly and
inexpensively deployed on a Web server with per server
unlimited user licensing. If it’s truly Web-based software
there should be no need for server farms to support a few
dozen concurrent users – one server should be able to serve
hundreds or thousands. There should also be no need for armies
of onsite integration consultants, just one or two data-
literate folks who know how to work with Web technologies.
To summarize the critical elements for Web reporting and
data analysis portals, what you need to look for are:
- Broad, universal access to the data no matter what the
source from spreadsheets to disparate databases on different
server platforms.
- Instant one-click gratification that offers useful
insight on first contact, like any good Internet portal.
- Simple and efficient Internet architecture that
implements quickly (weeks not months) without a large
services bill to make it happen.
- Reporting that morphs into OLAP-driven analysis at the
click of a mouse, so anyone can dive deep as needed.
- An application programing interface (API) layer that
allows you to customize a self-graduating user experience or
create multiple UIs for different types of users, so
everyone has a comfortable jumping in point despite
differing skills or knowledge.
- The ability to share and collaborate on self-created
reports and analysis, because the more people you engage,
the broader the benefits of the data and decisions made from
it.
- Personalized, secure access to the right data to protect
confidentiality or privacy of individual employees,
suppliers, partners or customers inside and outside the
firewall.
- Per server versus per user licensing, where the Web
server does the job for hundreds or thousands, not just
dozens .
Whether you’re the “IT adult” in your organization looking
for an easier way to supervise and enable people or just one
of the kids in the organization hot for an invitation to dive
into your data, rest assured that hearing “EVERYONE IN THE
POOL!” need not be a call to panic, but a call to action.
References:
1. Biensen, Mike. Imhoff, Claudia.
“Intelligent Solutions: The Devil You Know: Integrating Old
Reports into New BI Systems.” DM Review. June
2003.
2. Smith, Mark. “Relevance of Collaboration
to Performance Management.” http://www.ventanaresearch.com/. Article ID
v03-02. January 22, 2003.
Nathan Rudyk is the vice president of Marketing for
Databeacon Inc.
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