Analytical Software
Visualization is essential for rapid collaborative decision making as illustrated by the case of Sun National Bank, a regional bank, which needed to compete with much larger banks. It created a single data warehouse for all its branches and provided analytical software to monitor performance metrics such as the fastest growing products, regional variations in revenue, all visualized as charts and graphs, on dashboards for rapid decision making.
A larger number of business and operational users need analytical software tools that cater to their specific needs. Consequently, analytical software needs to be scalable and designed for role-based customization. A case where a customer switched from reporting tools to more scalable enterprise software is the Ministry of Tourism in Bahamas which had used an OLAP tool, within its offices, for its processing power and analytical capabilities. Later, the ministry needed to communicate with 400 local hotels and regional tourist boards and switched to an enterprise reporting tool with server-based computing environments. Lately, OLAP providers have upgraded their scalability.
As information is drawn from a growing number of functional departments, business intelligence software should be able to draw data from a variety of repositories. Information Builders product, WebFocus 7, for example, provides access to more than 200 data sources and data formats, including relational and legacy data.
An all-encompassing use of business intelligence is that companies find themselves looking at both structured and unstructured data. Regulatory compliance, as required by Sarbanes Oxley, requires detailed monitoring of controls which often means finding a record among million others. Similarly, fraud detection in the corporate sector often requires sifting through thousands of e-mails which would be impossible with manual methods. It would be hard for companies to uncover pain points in customer experience unless they are able to mine call center conversations. Similarly, companies invariably experience delays in understanding the causes of warranty claims while shipments of the same product continue and later add to the costs of refunds or product recalls. It is important to be able to correlate structured and unstructured information to complete the analysis. Attensity is one company which has products that can read as well as store structured and unstructured information in a relational form. Whirlpool uses its Relational Extraction Server to extract information and develop insight about warranty claims, customer feedback and service records.