Architecture in the Business Context

Business needs and technical resources determine what BI technology and functionality your organization should deploy. To establish the best BI implementation, you need to consider all the components that make up a BI solution and how those components interact with the other elements of your IT infrastructure. Importantly, you also need to examine the level of business and technical capability that your organization can support. The Platform Vision model represents the components of a BI implementation as a solution pattern. The BI solution pattern comprises 3 stages of evolution that correspond to business needs in order of maturity. The BI solution patterns 3 stages are data, information, and knowledge. Each stage builds on the previous stage, in terms of both business requirements and technical complexity. The model progresses from efficient, to intelligent, to automated BI infrastructure, adding increased business value along the way.

Business Intelligence
The complete end-to-end, integrated, and fully scalable Business Intelligence (BI) solution pattern represents the components needed to create and manage large-scale data integration solutions and consolidate data from across the organization for delivery as a single view of information. This pattern enables real-time, process-based creation, management, and distribution of contextual and rich reports that are supported on a variety of devices; data mining; predictive and closed-loop analysis; and effective and efficient performance monitoring against organizational goals in real time. Integrating the BI solution pattern with other solution patterns illustrates how to present a single view of information to familiar applications and interfaces to facilitate collaboration and decision making. Centralized management provides one place for IT to set up, deploy, administer, and manage reporting, analysis, and performance management solutions. Tight integration with security, authorized access, collaboration, and business management features ensures compliance and control over information. Architectural prerequisites: Infrastructure and Management, Security and Management, SOA and BPM, Data and Management, IT Process Architectural recommendations: Integrated Communications, ECM and Collaboration, SaaS Solution patterns it enables: Web and Social Computing

The diagrams on this poster illustrate how the BI solution pattern integrates with other solution patterns through 3 stages. These views show architectural prerequisites for BI at each stage. In addition, you can see architectural recommendations for a mature BI implementation, as well as the solution patterns that BI enables.

Users

To deliver e-mail alerts to stakeholders based on threshold KPI values.

STAGE 1 STAGE 2 STAGE 3

To enable the design and development of intuitive charts, graphs, and other displays helping users to easily visualize reports and other information. Interactive user experience for providing users with rich BI information to improve decision making. For designing interactive dashboards and scorecards enabling ease of use and improved decision making. User Experience Stage 1:

To design user-friendly, easy-to-use wizards and advanced data visualization tools for analysis. For designing context-sensitive dashboards displaying only role-specific and relevant information to the user.

Personal

User Experience Stage 2:

Comprehensive

User Experience Stage 3:

Contextual

User Experience

Familiar and Intuitive

To deliver real-time alerts based on monitoring and analysis of KPIs to react quickly to changes needed.

For providing services as a layer of abstraction between LOB systems and the BI applications that consume them. For integrating the business data from various applications.

To facilitate better sharing of metadata across BI and non-BI applications for improved compliance monitoring. For orchestrating business processes enabling creation of BAM reports presented in dashboards. To enable integration of information with historic data and trends information from various sources for generating real-time integrated dashboards.

SOA & BPM Stage 3:

Integrated Communications Stage 1: Enable

SOA & BPM Stage 2:

Service Bus

Composite Applications

Integrated Communications

SOA & BPM

Web and Social Computing

ECM and Collaboration Stage 1: Capture

and Manage

Business Intelligence Stage 1: Data

ECM and Collaboration Stage 2: Automate

and Extend

Business Intelligence Stage 2: Information

Business Intelligence Stage 3: Knowledge

ECM and Collaboration

Business Intelligence

To provide portals to publish KPIs and scorecards for easier information visualization.

To enable workflows to manage report approval/review process. To provide workspaces and portals integrated with LOB applications for reporting and analysis. To facilitate collaborative report authoring. To enable anywhere, anytime access to reports, scorecards, and dashboards embedded in workspace or portal. To ensure data consistency in data marts with company-wide consolidated data dictionaries.

LOB Systems

LOB Systems
To define and implement policies for explicit and automated administration of data entities across multiple servers. To implement parallelism into the data warehouse to reduce the time required for ETL, maintenance, and end-user access. To increase data availability within performance applications with distribution of data across multiple database servers.

LOB Systems

For enabling data replication for distributed or mobile data processing applications, high systems availability. For enabling integration with heterogeneous systems and delivering scalable concurrency with secondary data stores for enterprise reporting solutions. To integrate a data mining model with third-party custom algorithms for identifying trends and patterns. To enable external BI applications to communicate directly with the database platform by exposing the database as an interconnected set of highly available web services.

LOB Systems

For authenticating users to enable secure access to data and BI applications.

Data and Management Stage 1:

Optimize

For enabling secure remote and universal access across all channels to BI infrastructure. To enable easy and secure access to data and BI applications by providing a centralized identity store that manages access across heterogeneous operating environments and LOB applications.

Data and Management Stage 2:

Consolidate

For providing multi-factor, role-based authentication and authorization mechanisms across different business processes and applications. For applying integrated and persistent protection policies on outbound and internal application and data access. For enabling secure remote access to reports and other BI applications from a variety of devices.

Data and Management Stage 3:

Proactive

Data and Management

Security and Management Stage 1:

Identify

To offer a virtual server operating system environment for BI applications compatibility testing. (Virtualization)

Security and Management Stage 2:

Protect

To implement data mirroring and backup procedures, ensuring data safety and application availability.

Security and Management Stage 3:

Predict

Infrastructure and Management Stage 1:

Efficient Infrastructure

Infrastructure and Management Stage 2:

Intelligent Infrastructure

For making applications that run on a central server accessible to a variety of clients. To improve availability scenarios through clustering technology, providing application redundancy and enhanced backup options. For implementing server virtualization to consolidate the branch infrastructure, application, and office server workloads. (Virtualization)

To monitor and manage policies to accelerate diagnosis and response of servers hosting data warehouses and other BI applications. To optimize application performance by spreading sessions among the available resources equally. (Virtualization) For streaming BI applications on-demand over the internet or via corporate networks. For implementing service-level monitoring of data and application servers.

Security and Management

Infrastructure and Management Stage 3:

Automated Infrastructure

Infrastructure and Management

IT Process Stage 1:

Define

IT Process Stage 2:

Report

IT Process Stage 3:

Correlate

IT Process
To base real-time decisions on performance and quality metrics. Allows analysis to proceed with confidence in the quality of the underlying data through regular audits. To follow a robust, enterprise-level strategy for data that includes data governance policies and well-defined processes to maintain and manage data.

Investigate
To provide services for tracking financial and organizational performance against corporate, departmental, and workgroup goals.

SaaS Stage 1:

SaaS Stage 2:

Embed

For reducing implementation cycles for BI solutions.

For establishing policies to ensure quality/standard of BI applications.

To automate the auditing and cleansing of data residing in data warehouse.

To identify and realize organizational risks and incorporate inferences in financial analysis, predictive analysis, trend visualization, and forecasting etc. To provide services to streamline real-time analysis while maintaining performance considerations.

SaaS

Stage 1: Data
The Data stage is the entry level for the BI solution pattern. Solutions aim to improve access to raw data from applications such as financial or customer relationship management (CRM) databases so managers and users can create operational reports. Integrated data supports day-to-day reports and lets managers and users create specialized reports. Search solutions are limited to individual applications and primarily let you retrieve and compile data within the application. If applications are directly related by platform or vendor, some search solutions encompass the extended environment. Platform alignment helps you ensure that line-of-business (LOB) databases are available for and structured to support reporting to applications through data marts. Database consolidation is essential to providing access to a comprehensive data set; therefore, make sure that your infrastructure can scale vertically and horizontally and that you can monitor and manage applications from a tool set that is integrated into all areas of the platform.

Stage 2: Information
Operational reporting at the Data stage helps you see the data you know you have. At the Information Stage, analytical reporting helps you see data you may not know about. Analytical reporting enables you to examine data based on known relationships in an application and correlations across LOB applications within a data warehouse or data marts. Analytical models and structures provide ways to represent data visually in formats such as heat maps and decision trees so you can surface complex data patterns. Data visualization capabilities let you deliver information scorecards, dashboards, and user-driven reports through a publish-andsubscribe model. Search solutions within your structured data depend on what you know to construct insightful views of complex data relationships inside and across LOB applications. As you identify frequently needed views of data, you can expose them as parameterized reports and tune their performance. Platform alignment helps you ensure that information is delivered securely and to authorized users only. Business process management (BPM) can support activity monitoring. As you interrogate data, aligning the platform to your business processes becomes more critical. IT Process solutions provide a direct link to the business, and you can standardize processes to generate reports, request changes, and manage the overall infrastructure. Users get a consistent, interactive user experience that is based on LOB applications and is available through multiple entry points, such as mobile devices and reporting interfaces.

Stage 3: Knowledge
Informed decision making is the ultimate expression of BI. At the Knowledge stage, executives evaluate underlying relationships and patterns in data to get a clear and comprehensive picture of their business and to inform decisions. To improve performance and enable knowledge-based decision making, you can restructure data-centric data warehouses to align with business strategy and support core business processes. A master data management solution can mean centralizing all BI initiatives to achieve a single, standardized, and enforced organizational data structure. BI embedded in data mining, predictive models, and transactional processes can produce actionable results that can be implemented at low levels within the organization, so change is implemented at the most appropriate point. Providing corporate knowledge that is persistent, available, and organized helps ensure that historical data mining produces valuable insights. Insight that is derived from business logic queriesand is enabled with enterprise-level search solutionshelps fill in detail that automated solutions do not or cannot provide sufficiently. Platform alignment at the Knowledge stage becomes apparent as BI adds business insight to process automation and workflows. BI helps identify ways to standardize and manage the flow of data within the platform. Enterprise Content Management (ECM) elements help to align the metadata taxonomy you enforce with your master data management solution. At this stage, infrastructure can support disaster recovery by using a hot backup site, which requires data marts and data warehouses to be replicated safely, efficiently, and continually.

The business value of any technology implementation surfaces when you consider the expense and effort of integrating that technology with your entire platform. The Advaiya Platform Vision model represents IT infrastructure as interconnected components, or solution patterns, that correspond to traditional IT service offerings. In addition to describing the requirements within each solution pattern, the Platform Vision model illustrates relationships and dependencies among the solution patterns. By examining how each element of your IT platform affects the other elements, you can determine the cost effectiveness and business value of any technology decision. Your IT infrastructures technical complexity and your organizations evolutionary stage shape how you approach a technology implementation. For each solution pattern, the Platform Vision model explains how that pattern is manifested in each of 3 stages of maturity within both the organization and technology. By using the Platform Vision model to assess your platform and your current capabilities, you can make informed business decisions that add long-term and short-term value.

Platform Vision is presented by Advaiya, Inc. www.advaiya.com | www.platformvision.com

2009 ADVAIYA, INC. REPRODUCTION IN WHOLE OR IN PART IS PROHIBITED. BI1.0.0A