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volume 19 number 1
THE LEADING PUBLICATION FOR BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE AND DATA WAREHOUSING PROFESSIONALS
How bI makes Food for the Poor
more effcient and effective 4
Hugh J. Watson
Five Guiding Principles for
realizing the Promise of big Data 8
Bhargav Mantha
bI best Practices: Thoroughly Think It Through 12
Max T. Russell
Agile business Intelligence:
A Practical Approach 15
Justin Lovell
Watson and Siri: The rise of
the bI Smart machine 23
Troy Hiltbrand
Data Governance Gamifcation 30
Justin Hay
bI Case Study: Stanford Graduate School
of business builds operational bI for Data
in the Cloud 36
Linda L. Briggs
Q&A: beyond Analytics and big Data in bI 39
responsive Design: The Key to
responsive mobile bI Applications 42
Markus Guertler
bI experts Perspective: mobile bI 50
Jake Freivald, Suzanne Hoffman, Cindi Howson,
and Nic Smith
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1 BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE Journal vol. 19, no. 1
volume 19 number 1
3 From the editor
4 How bI makes Food for the Poor more effcient and effective
Hugh J. Watson
8 Five Guiding Principles for realizing the Promise of big Data
Bhargav Mantha
12 bI best Practices: Thoroughly Think It Through
Max T. Russell
15 Agile business Intelligence: A Practical Approach
Justin Lovell
22 Instructions for Authors
23 Watson and Siri: The rise of the bI Smart machine
Troy Hiltbrand
30 Data Governance Gamifcation
Justin Hay
36 bI Case Study: Stanford Graduate School of business builds operational
bI for Data in the Cloud
Linda L. Briggs
39 Q&A: beyond Analytics and big Data in bI
42 responsive Design: The Key to responsive mobile bI Applications
Markus Guertler
50 bI experts Perspective: mobile bI
Jake Freivald, Suzanne Hoffman, Cindi Howson, and Nic Smith
56 bI StatShots
As Close as Your
Conference Room
tdwi.org/onsite
volume 19 number 1
eDITorIAl boArD
editorial Director
James E. Powell, TDWI
managing editor
Jennifer Agee, TDWI
Senior editor
Hugh J. Watson, TDWI Fellow, University of Georgia
Director, TDWI research
Philip Russom, TDWI
David Stodder, TDWI
Fern Halper, TDWI
Associate editors
Barry Devlin, 9sight Consulting
Mark Frolick, Xavier University
Troy Hiltbrand, Idaho National Laboratory
Claudia Imhoff, TDWI Fellow, Intelligent Solutions, Inc.
Barbara Haley Wixom, TDWI Fellow, University of Virginia
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Go big or go home. In this issue of the Business Intelligence Journal, we look at big
and small from a variety of perspectives.
Big data is getting big buzz, and Bhargav Mantha looks at fve guiding principles
to help your enterprise make the smartest investment in, and realize the promises
of, big data. Mantha stresses the importance of using the right tools and looking at
current technologies, such as social media.
Senior Editor Hugh J. Watson looks at fve lessons learned from a BI project at a
nonproft and the benefts, including big reductions in delivery time for critical
information.
Troy Hiltbrand foresees big changes ahead in how business intelligence is executed
and deployed as smart machines and automation invade areas traditionally unique
to human interaction.
Justin Lovell looks at the big backlog of BI projects most enterprises have and
explains how teams can implement the agile mindset when building data output
applications. Lovell explores several agile concepts and how they specifcally relate
to business intelligence projects.
Justin Hay writes about the big gamegamifcation, that is. He proposes an
alternative to the traditional data-governance-by-committee approach by applying
principles of the gamifcation movement.
We also look at why small is just as important as big. Max T. Russell looks at how
your attention to the smallest detail can prevent big problems. Markus Guertler
discusses the importance of using responsive design for building mobile BI applica-
tions on small form factors. Our Experts Perspective feature discusses best practices
for moving to mobile BI.
Finally, this issues case study describes how the Stanford Graduate School of Busi-
ness realized signifcant performance improvements to some core operations and
how that success is paving the way for pushing deeper into the cloud. In our Q&A,
we examine Barry Devlins idea of business unintelligence.
As always, we welcome your comments, both big and small. Please send them to
jpowell@tdwi.org.
From the Editor
How BI Makes
Food for the Poor
More Efcient and
Efective
Hugh J. Watson
Introduction
Tese are challenging times for nonproft organizations.
Te troubled economy has increased the need to deliver
services efciently while also making fundraising more
difcult. Its the classic need to do more with less. Tis
climate has also contributed to the expectation that
nonprofts be highly transparent about how their funds
are spent and the benefts realized.
In judging TDWIs Best Practices Awards in the govern-
ment and nonproft category last year, I was impressed
with the work that Food for the Poor, an international
relief and development organization, is doing, and how
it is using business intelligence (BI) to help the entire
organization work more efectively and efciently.
BI enables direct marketers to maximize the efciency

of their appeals and outreach to donors
It gives managers visibility into key operational and

fnancial information
It provides real-time access to information about

history, goals, achievements, and targets to track
performance
It uses automatic scheduling and alerting technology

to keep the staf apprised of daily donations
By reducing the time it takes to access and deliver critical
information, BI makes the staf more efcient, reduces
the total operating budget, and frees up more time for the
organizations mission. Every minute wasted on manual
FooD For THe Poor
Hugh J. Watson is a Professor of MIS
and holds a C. Herman and Mary Virginia
Terry Chair of Business Administration
in the Terry College of Business at the
University of Georgia. He is senior editor
of the Business Intelligence Journal.
hwatson@uga.edu
FooD For THe Poor
reporting is time lost in meeting the needs of the people
Food for the Poor serves.
I invited two of the major contributors, Vickie
Torregrossa (IT director) and Jamil Idun-Ogde (data
analyst/project manager), to describe BI at Food for the
Poor and share what they have learned that might be
helpful for other organizations.
About Food for the Poor
Food for the Poor is the largest international relief and
development organization in the U.S. according to the
Chronicle of Philanthropy. Founded in 1982, its inter-
denominational Christian ministry serves the poorest of
the poor in 17 countries throughout the Caribbean and
Latin America. Its programs provide housing, healthcare,
education, fresh water, emergency relief, and microen-
terprise assistance in addition to feeding hundreds of
thousands of people each day. Since its inception, Food
for the Poor has provided more than $10 billion in aid
and is one of the most efcient nonproft organizations
in the U.S., with more than 95 percent of all donations
going directly to programs that help the poor.
bI at Food for the Poor
Food for the Poor has implemented a BI environment
that empowers business users throughout the enterprise
to gather information and gain insight through user-
friendly dashboards and parameterized reports that
allow users to better focus on their missions. Having
real-time access to information on fnances, history, goals,
achievements, and appeals has allowed Food for the Poor
to reduce its total operating budget and respond more
efectively to catastrophic events such as the earthquake
that rocked Haiti in 2010 and Hurricane Sandy in
2012. Te BI environment has also had a positive impact
on direct mail, donor relations, and other fundraising
activities that help the organization respond quickly to
humanitarian emergencies.
BI Environment
Food for the Poors nine-person IT department is
responsible for operational systems and BI. Te director,
a data analyst/project manager, and a programmer each
spend part of their time on BI reports, dashboards, and
special analyses.
Te nonproft does not have a data mart or warehouse.
Instead, it uses Information Builders WebFOCUS BI to
access, analyze, and display live data from operational
systems. Data sources include the donor, supply chain,
and departmental systems on a variety of platforms
(e.g., IBM Power Systems), databases (e.g., FoxPro), and
systems and applications (e.g., Microsoft Dynamics NAV
and Excel).
BI Applications
Since acquiring WebFOCUS, the IT department has
rolled out reports and analytic tools throughout the
organization. For example, direct marketing personnel
can track donations and send real-time reports to key
individuals managing the operation and spearheading
campaigns. Comparisons are made between the efective-
ness of this and previous years campaigns. According to
Carlton Lewis, director of direct mail, Te reports make
it easier to compare daily income from diferent appeals
and to monitor the efectiveness of various campaigns,
including the response to diferent acquisition pieces and
lists. During busy periods, the BI tools help supervisors
balance the caseload and track donations, exporting data
to Microsoft Excel for analysis as necessary.
Food for the Poors marketing department uses the BI
environment to manage its new TV monthly giving
campaign. Te reports are making it easier to track the
efectiveness of the campaign over time.
About three years ago, Food for the Poor implemented a
new ERP system, Microsoft Dynamics NAV. Trough
a combination of the BI tools and the new system, users
are able to greatly enhance the tracking of goods received,
who donated them, and where they are being distributed.
One report shows the contributions of diferent vendors
over time and may reveal, for example, a vendor who
has not donated recently and should be contacted. Tey
can see if there are countries that have received more or
less help compared to previous years. What used to be a
tedious, manual process is now automated, freeing staf
to acquire more goods to help the poor.
It is now possible to track the fow of donations from
specifc vendors to specifc countries and specifc people.
For example, if there is a need to recall a product, the
organization can identify who received the container and
quickly issue the appropriate recall.
Te accounting department uses the BI environment
to track daily deposit information, forecast cash-fow
requirements, and create a variety of fnancial reports.
Formerly I had to write queries to answer questions, and
it was very cumbersome, says Jef Alexander, Food for
the Poors controller. I now have several parameterized
reports that I can run to quickly produce results.
Alexander has also created parameterized reports for his
staf, making the entire department more efcient. Tey
can run the reports on their own and output the results
directly to Excel spreadsheets, he adds. WebFOCUS
helps them get daily deposit information more quickly
and it speeds up the monthly closing process.
BI reports and dashboards also boost efciency for the
projects department, which works with each country to
oversee specifc types of relief projects. Tese employees
must continually monitor income by category such
as animal husbandry, housing, food, and medical. A
projects dashboard reveals the type and quantity of goods
received by displaying information about the number,
amount, and types of gifts from each donor. It tracks
progress toward goals for each category.
Te donor relations department depends on the BI
environment to maximize the efciency of essential
fundraising activities. Te BI implementation literally
gave me back about seven days of my life each month,
says Michael Chin Quee, director of donor relations.
Tat was the time it would take to glean the information
from the necessary reports to manage my stafs produc-
tivity. Compiling the data was done manually, which was
time-consuming and stressful. I can now accomplish in
one day what took several daysand with the assurance
of accuracy.
Every day the donor relations department receives e-mail
messages about gifts that came in the previous day.
FooD For THe Poor
Especially in the case of large donations, the department
contacts the person or organization and thanks them for
their gift. Te ability to make calls quickly after dona-
tions are made has increased subsequent donations.
business Impact
Food for the Poor has achieved tremendous operational
efciency, with more than 95 percent of all donations
going directly to programs to help the poor. Senior
ofcers endeavor to maintain this outstanding efciency
rating while increasing the level of funds collected from
donors. Achieving this objective means leveraging one
of the highest cost centers in their organizationdirect
marketingcost efectively. Tis was one of the chal-
lenges that catalyzed the organization to acquire BI
technology. Tey wanted to permit instant visibility
into their marketing database while enabling the staf to
quickly evaluate such activities as direct mail, radio, and
advertising campaigns.
lessons learned
Food for the Poors experiences provide insights that may
help other organizations. Some insights are especially
appropriate for nonprofts.
Lesson #1: The Right Software Purchase Can Save Money
in the Long Term
Like any nonproft organization, Food for the Poor has
to be particularly careful about how it spends its money.
Tat said, the organization is a relatively large nonproft
and wants to invest wisely in business best practices.
Tere was a clear business need for the information
that could be provided by BI, and senior management
approved BI investments after the potential benefts were
communicated, which included productivity gains and
increased efciency.
Lesson #2: Deploy Quickly
It is always good to be able to realize the benefts from
IT investments quickly. Because Information Builders
allowed Food for the Poor to start using its software
during the proof of concept and there was no data mart
or warehouse to build, it was possible to implement
reports and dashboards quickly and to begin reaping the
benefts of BI.
Lesson #3: Users Love Live Data
Because the dashboards display live data, users can access
information as it happens. For example, it is possible to
see what items are going to be shipped from suppliers
and Food for the Poors warehouses and track the items
movement to the fnal recipients. Not all data is live.
Historical data for reporting purposes is sourced from
IBM Power Series and Microsoft Dynamics NAV.
Lesson #4: Dont Wait for Requests
Determine the business needs and start building the
system. It can always be modifed later. By showing
people whats available, you can increase interest and
excitement, which can ultimately lead to additional
requests.
Lesson #5: There Is a High Level of Satisfaction in
Working for a Nonproft
When you work for a nonproft organization, you
constantly see the need and urgency to provide assistance.
Tere is a good feeling associated with going to work.
Food for the Poor has a monthly staf meeting where
employees are informed about the good being done in
the countries served. People know that their eforts are
helping people in need and believe in the work that they
are doing.
Conclusion
Many nonproft organizations undertake advanced
humanitarian eforts but lack the IT systems needed to
sustain the eforts in a signifcant way. As an established
nonproft corporation, Food for the Poor is concerned
with efciently tracking and reporting the results of its
campaigns and appeals for voluntary donations.
Using BI dashboards and reports, Food for the Poor
is improving operational efciency in nearly every
department, with a positive impact on direct mail, donor
relations, fundraising, accounting, logistics, and project
management. Te BI tools help the organization keep its
overhead down and respond more quickly to humanitar-
ian emergencies. Reports that used to take hours to
produce are now run in minutes. Te systems ease of use
allows managers to obtain critical operational informa-
tion with little or no assistance.
FooD For THe Poor
Food for the Poors BI environment is helping the
organization to operate more efciently and improve
fundraising eforts in the wake of catastrophic events. For
example, in the six days following the earthquake that
virtually destroyed Port-au-Prince, Haiti, the organiza-
tion began feeding hot meals to about 20,000 people per
day and distributing thousands of tons of relief items
such as food, clothing, and medical supplies. Te efort
continues to this day, in Haiti and elsewhere, guided by
the current information and insight delivered from Food
for the Poors information systems.
reAlIzInG THe PromISe oF bIG DATA
bhargav mantha is a manager at
ZS Associates and a leader of the frms
global business intelligence practice.
bhargav.mantha@zsassociates.com
Five Guiding
Principles for
Realizing the Promise
of Big Data
bhargav mantha
Abstract
most organizations characterize big data in terms of volume,
velocity, and variety, but it is more useful to consider big
data in the same way we look at information management,
analytics, and how they impact business decisions. After all,
big data is a sweeping term that includes a variety of enter-
prise concerns, from managing and securing data sets to
technologies that can analyze the data more quickly and thus
enhance business value.
In this article, we outline fve guiding principles to help
companies make prudent investments and realize the promise
of big data. businesses should use these guidelines to help
them think hard about when, where, and how to best realize
big datas value within their organizations.
Introduction
Hardly a day goes by without some mention of big data
in our lives. Te hype-versus-hope debate of big data will
continue for some time as organizations across industries
grapple with the questions of why big data is important,
what to do with it, and how to get started.
Although big data is most easily characterized in terms
of high volume, velocity, and variety, it is more practical
to defne big data by the way we think about information
management and analytics and how they impact business
decisions.
One of the biggest obstacles organizations face is think-
ing big data is an initiative when, in fact, big data is an
umbrella term that covers many problem spaces, data
sets, technologies, and opportunities for enhancing
business value.
Here are fve guiding principles to help your enterprise
avoid becoming overwhelmed by the hype and focus
instead on making prudent investments that will help you
realize the promise of big data.
Principle #1: Determine the business case frst.
A critical step for key executives to ensure big data
adoption is to identify the business initiative and quantify
tangible business value. Tis involves pinpointing which
parts of the business would beneft from expanding
available data to provide more complete answers. For
example, a brand manager investigating a decline in
sales may want to augment the analysis by integrating
insight from call center records, Web logs, and consumer
sentiment through social media commentary on quality,
functionality, or price.
Key executives may also determine if big data analytics
can help monetize a portion of their business. For
example, they may use analytics to immediately make a
relevant ofer after a credit card is used to initiate another
transaction instead of storing the transaction for later
reporting.
Te business cases for investing in big data vary. Tey
can be business-process-specifc, such as improving the
customer experience, optimizing R&D, or managing
IT. Tey can be industry-specifc, such as optimizing
price or channels for technology frms, detecting fraud
for the fnancial services industry, managing intellectual
property for media companies, or improving treatment
outcomes for healthcare providers.
Organizations often take a misstep by thinking that big
data is just another source for business intelligence (BI).
For example, one organization confessed to using their
big data pilot to build Facebook and Twitter interfaces to
gather social media data, but said the efort was unsuc-
cessful because executives failed to consider what to do
with that data. Tey didnt determine at the outset how
to process the data, what questions it could answer, and
what analytics were required to make sense of it (senti-
ment analysis, monitoring evolving topics, or uncovering
networks and relationships).
Finding a business-driven initiative with measurable out-
comeswhether improved customer retention, increased
revenue from improved sales/channel productivity, or
even cost reductionwill improve your organizations
success rate with big data initiatives.
A critical step for key executives
to ensure big data adoption is to
identify the business initiative and
quantify tangible business value.
Principle #2: use the right tools and technologies.
Organizations should consider four main capabilities
to expand their existing BI and analytics initiatives to
support big data analytics.
Te most important capability is advanced analytics to
uncover previously hidden patterns. With new types of
data comes the need to apply new types of algorithms,
such as entity analytics, network analytics, text analytics,
and real-time scoring. Scalability is important because
improved accuracy and trust in your data means your
users are more likely to want to integrate additional data
sources or increase data volumes. Analytics must be
able to push these algorithm processes to interpret text,
images, and video streams.
Visualization and exploration can help your enterprise
fnd more complete answers to business questions. New
types of data (and greater volume) increases the need for
new forms of visualization (such as heat maps) to present
the data to users and highlight important patterns. Tools
such as Tableau Software and Datameer enable interac-
tive, iterative, search-like, visual data discovery.
Te third capability is to turn insight into action
to drive a decisioneither with a manual step or an
automated process. Applying analytics to streaming big
data requires technology that uses predictive models and
business rules to automate decisions and identify outliers
where business judgment is needed.
Finally, analytics tools must assemble the right mix of
information in a way that makes sense to the business.
Tis may include:
Tooling to compose fast-performing queries on very

large data sets or to access high-performance analytic
databases such as Aster Data, EMC Greenplum, or
IBM Netezza
Analytic processing capabilities to ingest data in

motion, apply flters, and surface relevant real-
time data
Query and process returned data from unstructured

data (for example, in HDFS, the Hadoop Distributed
File System)
Big data requires more than just Hadoop. Although that
open source software framework has the greatest name
recognition, big data is too varied and complex for a
one-size-fts-all solution. Other classes of technologies
are equally well suited to managing big data, such as
NoSQL (not only SQL) and MPP (massively parallel
processing) stores.
Again, what matters is which of the three Vs poses the
greatest challenge for you and which of these technologies
supports the business case. In fact, there is no require-
ment for you to invest in your own infrastructure.
Instead, you might explore options for a cloud-based
service, such as Google BigQuery, and save on infrastruc-
ture costs.
Principle #3: People, people, people.
After youve developed the business case for big data,
begin a thorough skills assessment, because newer
analysis techniques and technologies may require difer-
ent skills or talent. Tere are three particular roles (and
associated competency models) that you can defne for a
big data initiative:
Te data scientist, who applies his or her statistical,

mathematical, and computer science skills to work on
large, complex data sets to fnd, interpret, and distrib-
ute statistically signifcant information. He or she will
also ensure that signifcance is easily understood and
acted upon by others.
Te business analyst, who blends business

understanding with data acumen to determine what
information is important for the business and how to
bridge the IT or data science gap.
Te technologist, who has the skills needed to

identify and assemble the best set of big data technolo-
gies and developers (for example, Hadoop and Hive)
to deliver on the business initiative.
Notice that the skills required dont all need to be about
Hadoop and advanced algorithms. One of our clients
admitted to feeling overwhelmed by the hype, leading
them to think of big data initiatives as beyond the
companys technology skills. In fact, all the client was
looking to do was gain insights from clickstream data,
which did not require Hadoop or the skills of a data
scientist. Mapping the business case, determining the
technology needed, and obtaining the appropriate skill
sets helped the client overcome their fear and make the
right investments toward big data analytics.
Principle #4: Start thinking social.
Big data could be an important component of your social
media strategy, especially when it comes to understanding
customers, prospects, and key infuencers. Social media
allows for ongoing engagement that can provide near-
real-time insight into customer attitudes and behavior.
Analysis of social media data can help you rapidly
identify trends: who uses your solutions, what customers
and prospects think about your and your competitors
brands and solutions, and what emerging markets are
developing.
Recognizing the value of and leveraging social media
data sources are relatively new challenges for many
organizations. A social intelligence efort will require
rethinking and redesigning existing information manage-
ment ecosystems. New analytical platforms, techniques,
tools, and governance processes are needed to unlock
customer insights.
Te implementation of a socially enabled business
through big data includes three main steps:
1. Listening to consumer dialogue on social networks,
sites, and communities and collecting the data
2. Analyzing the gathered information (mostly opinions)
and applying natural language processing algorithms
to extract actionable meaning and the most recurrent
themes
3. Engaging with customers by closing the loop and
taking quick, decisive, and appropriate actions based
on gathered insights
Principle #5: Dont treat big data as mission critical
right away.
Although big data quality will become increasingly
important, dont treat social media data or wiki data
like mission-critical fnancial data right away. Apply the
appropriate level of control to its use and exposure.
Your initiative may well be stifed from day one if you
apply the rigor of initiating and managing traditional
data warehouse projects. Instead, help the process be
iterative and collaborative: let the business and IT explore
interesting sources of data, refne what is important, and
apply the appropriate algorithms. Better outcomes are
possible when an organization conscientiously allows
big data initiatives to be iterative, exploratory, and even
transient in some cases.
The big Data opportunity
Big data presents a growing opportunity to understand
and change interactions with customers. It allows
companies to improve existing business processes, to
launch new lines of business, and to reevaluate how and
why data can improve decision-making processes. Using
these guidelines, think hard about when, where, and how
to best realize big datas value within your organization.
THInKInG IT THrouGH
max T. russell is the owner of Max and
Max Communications. He works behind
the scenes to promote individuals and
projects in a variety of industries.
maxt@maxtrussell.com
BI Best Practices:
Toroughly Tink
It Trough
max T. russell
Avoid an ambush of your bI project by thinking through every
imaginableand unimaginabledetail.
BI expert Alexis was hired by a nationwide adoption
agency to build a dashboard for user management. Te
IT director told her during the interview that if this frst
project went well, the CIO would approve a cautious BI
expansion throughout the organizationunder Alexis
leadership.
Te IT director listened to Alexis BI philosophy,
approved her methodical approach to the dashboard
design, and then wished her well. Several days into the
job, Alexis hit a brick wall. Te CIO, who knew just
enough about data architecture to make himself danger-
ous, stubbornly disagreed with her approach.
Te project was destined to be a headache to the end
because Alexis had failed to anticipate one variablethat
someone might disagree with her architecture.
A successful BI plan depends on doing many things
right, but certain unanticipated details can cause painful
interruptions or even kill a project. Its worth your teams
time to develop a vivid imagination to discover surprises
that could ambush your plan.
navigate in Your mind
You dont want executives or users to see you foundering
because of a detail you didnt expect or know about.
Tats why you and your team must imagine your way
through every conceivable and inconceivable detail of
show-stopping signifcance.
THInKInG IT THrouGH
Consider this non-BI example of an environment in
which various details could make or break your eforts
the crawl space under my house. Its very difcult to
navigate. More than once I have crawled through the
fog of spiderwebs while squeezing past one tight, muddy
space after another. A building contractor said its the
worst crawl space hes ever worked in.
Tats why I do each repair in my mind before I go under
the house. I do not want to have to start over.
Fixing a leaking water pipe may require:
Pliers, a drill and drill bits, a hammer, a pry bar, a
fashlight and trouble light, screwdrivers, nails and
screws, a sled for carrying equipment, wire to sup-
port the pipe, wire cutters, a hat to keep spiderwebs
of my head, extension cords to allow me to crawl
as far as possible without getting lost, a face mask,
a cloth to clean my hands, a foam pad to lie on, a
plastic bottle to support my head while lying on my
back, gloves, and safety glasses to keep particles out
of my eyes.
If I fail to anticipate even one procedure or forget a tool,
I might have to make the miserable journey back to the
crawl space opening, pull myself out, fnd the right tool,
return to the opening, and crawl back to the trouble spot.
I dont always have the heart to go back.
Its worth your teams time to
develop a vivid imagination to
discover surprises that could
ambush your plan.
Anticipating Persons of Infuence
Now lets return to the problem Alexis faced with the
dashboard. Neither she nor the IT director had involved
the adoption agencys CIO in discussions about their
approach to the dashboards design. Alexis fnally decided
to do it the CIOs way rather than wear herself out in
repeated arguments with him. By then, she had lost
trust with the IT director, who felt he had no choice but
to deliver what the CIO would eventually demanda
dashboard that would never do what the adoption agency
needed. Te blame would fall on the consultant, Alexis.
One question would have spared Alexis months of
anguish: Who else will be involved in deciding how
this project will be done? Te result of not asking the
question was, in her words, a BI failure.
Tat question would have changed everything by giving
her a chance to schedule a meeting with the CIO (and
any other decision makers) to set realistic expectations. If
the CIO still insisted on a faulty dashboard, Alexis could
bow out of the job. She had no interest in doing things
the wrong way!
Furthermore, straight talk prior to being hired might
have been more persuasive, building the CIOs confdence
in Alexiss skill as a true expert who would not stand
silently by and let the agency waste money.
Anticipating the router
Sometimes details go unseen because they seem too tiny
to worry about. Ive found myself in uncomfortable situa-
tions when I incorrectly assumed that an electrical outlet
was within reach of the power cord on my presentation
equipment, or that a projection screen would be available.
Tese are easy mistakes to make. Tey are also easy to
avoid if you are willing to think through the details of
your plan.
Imagine that youre at a BI meeting when the entire
team agrees that the frst step of the planning phase is to
connect three department leaders computers so they can
monitor and discuss the same set of planning data.
You ask, Who is in charge of providing the router to
make that happen?
It sounds like a petty question to your teammatesuntil
you explain why youre asking. A certain employee in the
central ofce moves as slowly as she possibly can when-
THInKInG IT THrouGH
ever anything of importance depends on her approval.
Pulling a router out of the locked cabinet and assigning it
to the BI team is simple enough, but her modus operandi
is to control others by moving at a pace thats just slow
enough to frustrate them and remind them that they
need her.
Because you asked the right question and anticipated
a problem, a BI team member can notify the central
ofce manager that a router is needed ASAP, preventing
a miniscule variable from delaying your initiative for
a ridiculous 72 hours, as has happened to others. Your
leadership has preserved the projects momentum and the
teams enthusiasm.
Project success means paying attention toand imagin-
ingall conceivable and inconceivable details ahead of
time, no matter how trivial they may seem. Expect the
unexpected and prepare accordingly.
Anticipating a breach in Protocol
You cant think of every signifcant stumbling stone by
yourself, of course. A good reporter has a contact list of
anonymous sources to draw on. A good detective has
developed a set of confdential informants. You must
assemble the same support for your project.
A nurse supervisor on the orthopedic foor at a hospital
blew the whistle on a BI tool when she noticed that IT
had given too much access to patient information. Te
radiology department read and misunderstood sensitive
doctors notes about a patient, concluded that he would
be nothing but trouble for the hospital, and then declined
services to him.
Not only were the notes supposed to be unavailable to
the radiology department, but orthopedic personnel were
the only ones who could properly interpret them. Te BI
tool that was supposed to be a business solution became
a potential loss of revenue, to say nothing of a privacy
violation.
Imagine if that BI tool had been your responsibility.
Imagine if you had developed contacts you could consult
with, so that you were able to bounce ideas of the nurse
supervisor ahead of time. You would have been able to
present her with what-if scenarios and ask what impact
your project would have on the foors operation. You very
possibly could have avoided the breach in protocol. At the
very least, you would have built rapport with the supervi-
sor and others whom you could add to your list of trusted
informantspeople who can help keep an eye on the
efectiveness of your business solutions.
nothing beats a Great Start
Te beginning moments of a BI plan are where so much
goes wrong or right. Use your imagination to navigate the
plan before presenting or implementing it.
Perform cooperative detective work to discover every
possible obstruction of importance, what other people
know that you need to know, and how to enlist their
support before you begin a clumsy invasion. Nothing
beats a great start.
AGIle bI
Agile Business
Intelligence: A
Practical Approach
Justin lovell
Abstract
Plenty of vendors promise to solve all our business users
problems or our technical teams problems with their tool sets
and methodologies. With the mounting pressure on business
intelligence (bI) teams (whether embedded in organizations or
those of consultancies) to deliver on time and meet expecta-
tions, it is no wonder that the allure of agile bI has cast its net
on unsuspecting teams desperate for success.
It is possible to learn from an execution and delivery meth-
odology crafted around the concept of team rather than
individual. This article looks at how teams can implement
the agile mindset in building data output applications. It
explains the concepts and how they relate to bI projects, rather
than the typical data input applications managed through the
software delivery life cycles commonly associated with the
term agile.
Introduction
Te agile methodology was designed to help enterprises
break free from the confnes of the data input application
development mindset. Te agile methodology assisted
developers by providing a general project execution
and delivery methodology. Te reason for adopting
an agile approach was not solely centered around its
much-purported iterative quality, but rather on team
dynamics.
One online source (http://agilemethodology.org) marks
the beginning of agile in 1970, when Dr. Winston
Royce presented a paper entitled Managing the Devel-
opment of Large Software Systems, which criticized
sequential development. Royce argued that software
development should not follow the model of the auto
assembly line, where one task must be completed before
the next is begun:
Justin lovell lives in South Africa and leads the
business intelligence team at Etana Insurance.
He has over 16 years experience in the felds of
business intelligence and data warehousing.
jnlovell@gmail.com
AGIle bI
Dr. Royce recommended against the phase based
approach in which developers frst gather all of
a projects requirements, then complete all of
its architecture and design, then write all of the
code, and so on. Royce specifcally objected to
this approach due to the lack of communication
between the specialized groups that complete each
phase of work.
Te agile methodology and the assembly line do share
one characteristic: they are based on small units of work.
I remember that when I started my career as a Delphi
developer I came across a term that intimidated me
primarily because of its spelling and seeming complexity:
polymorphism
1
, which is the ability of objects belonging
to diferent types to respond to method, feld, or property
calls of the same name, each one according to an appro-
priate type-specifc behaviour. After resisting the urge
to rush into coding my phase of a project, I had to take
a step back, break down the requirements into smaller
components, and (after understanding the relationships)
write my code in such a way that it only did one thing.
However, when integrated together with other code, it
met the overall requirements.
In addition to getting us into the object-oriented mindset
of code reuse, this approach dramatically improves the
quality and velocity of subsequent tasks simply because
the less code we write, the fewer bugs we can expect.
Herein lies the secret of the agile approach: breaking
down requirements into small, inter-related tasks that
can be executed quickly, with a high degree of quality,
and completed by diferent people, regardless of the type
of application were buildingwhether a data entry
application or an output application (one that generates
an analytical report, for example).
In the terminology of the agile methodology, breaking
down requirements into smaller tasks is called creating
stories. To illustrate, consider J.R.R. Tolkiens Te Lord
of the Rings. Tis epic consists of many stories connected
by various characters and situations that are all woven in
and around the overall plot. All of these stories merge to
create an imaginary world that was years in the making.
In a similar sense, the stories we support in our various BI
functions are tied to overall epics within the business that
need to be delivered to achieve success.
breaking requirements into Stories
When a business user comes to the BI team with a
requirement, it is the teams responsibility to do two
things: (1) validate the requirement and (2) break the
requirement down into stories.
If we as BI teams are to add intelligence to a business,
then we must validate user requirements up front. It is
not necessary to provide an extensive explanation of how
to conduct business analysis. Instead, simply ask the
requestor to complete the following three statements:
As a ... (role) ...
I want ... (thing) ...
In order to ... (purpose) ...

If the requestor cannot provide clarifying details to these
simple statements, then the development team needs to
push back and decline the request until these statements
can be completed. If clarity is provided, then the team
can determine if the request has already been completed,
and if not, determine the value it ofers to the business
(which in turn afects its priority).
Herein lies the secret of the
agile approach: breaking down
requirements into small, inter-
related tasks that can be executed
quickly, with a high degree of
quality, and completed by different
people, regardless of the type of
application were building.
1
See http://www.princeton.edu/~achaney/tmve/wiki100k/docs/
Polymorphism_in_object-oriented_programming.html
AGIle bI
When the request rises to the top of the priority list, then
together the team breaks the requirement down into epics
and their stories. In an efort to put epics and stories into
context, think of an epic as a package of work and a story
as an individual use case (see http://en.wikipedia.org/
wiki/Use_case). A story can be further broken down into
tasks and subtasks that can be taken on by one or many
team members. Tis leads us to another property of the
agile methodology: the entire team commits to complet-
ing these defned stories within a defned amount of time,
typically one to two weeks, called a sprint.
Te team defnes its capacity by assigning points to the
selected stories. For example, a complex story might
take 20 points, while a simple story might take just 1
or 2 points. Over time, a team will be able to fne-tune
its delivery capacity by refecting on how many points
to assign to diferent stories. In my experience, a well-
functioning scrum team of about four people can manage
about 140 points in a two-week sprint.
When it comes to requirements
gathering, breaking requirements
down into stories, and designing
tasks, the entire team is involved.
Following this approach, agile BI teams can deliveron
weekly or biweekly cyclesstories to the business that
may be part of a larger epic but can still be deployed into
production and shown to the business as having been
completed. Later in this article we will review a BI project
scenario to see how this all works.
The Team
You will have noticed that throughout our discussion we
have referred to the team. When it comes to require-
ments gathering, breaking requirements down into
stories, and designing tasks, the entire team is involved.
Enterprises are often conficted; they want to add more
human resources to a development project to solve the
development backlog but worry that larger teams are
less efcient. We might assume a project will take longer
when we must explain its scope and requirements to
more people, but I have found that when team members
understand the requirements and contribute to the design
and planning, actual development, testing, and resulting
quality prove the value of the agile methodology.
Picking up on some key phrases from Dr. Winston
Royces defnition, we can unpack the underlying message
regarding how an agile approach can beneft a team.
Sequential development, or in todays project manage-
ment terminology, a waterfall approach, provides a
mechanism for clearly outlining the dependencies in
completing a product but endangers the fnal delivery
of the solution by fostering silos of specialties within the
project team. Te end result is that individual specialties
determine the velocity and quality of the solution, and
the entire team does not share the responsibility of the
overall delivery, but instead members are concerned only
with the work assigned to them.
At its core, the agile methodology seeks to unite the
project team (developers, users, and sponsors) in under-
standing requirements and to reduce dependency on
specialized skills by lifting up the overall team skills and
by fostering communication with a sense of community
responsibility.
How this works in practice is that (ideally) any team
member would be able to tackle a task. Tis is possible
because the entire team has committed to the delivery
of stories within a sprint. A natural spreading of the
workload occurs; if one team member fnishes a task, he
or she can either take the next task on the list or assist
fellow team members to complete their tasks.
Can this work in a BI environment? To a large extent,
yes, because if someone is defned as a BI developer, that
implies they understand the data warehouse life cycle and
have been exposed to the organizations BI tool set. Even
AGIle bI
todays business analysts tend to be far more technical
than were traditional business analysts, which enables
them to provide valuable support in the design, testing,
and user acceptance sign-of phases.
Most important, this approach includes the original busi-
ness user who requested the deliverable as a member of
the team. All too often business users are happy to make
demands but less inclined to get their hands dirty in the
delivery. Using diferent feedback mechanisms (explained
later in this article) will assist the team in regularly
keeping in touch with and showing business users what
work is active and what is complete.
An agile approach can foster team spirit. A team
committed to working in a sprint will have a sense of
accomplishment in seeing work completed and imple-
mented. Tis can be a motivating force in and of itself.
The execution
A word of caution is in order. Do not get lost in lists
of agile best practices. Agile methodology is full of
processes, procedures, and consultants insisting on strict
adherence. My advice to any BI team looking to adopt
an agile approach is to understand the methodology
frst and then relate it back to what will work best for
your environment in practical terms. Never lose sight of
the objective for adopting agile in the frst place, which
should be to manage a happy, lean but mean team whose
members deliver projects efectively, on time, and within
budget. Te suggestions that follow have come out of
practical, real-world experience delivering projects using
an agile methodology in a BI environment. Tey are not
the suggestions of a die-hard agile guru.
One of the exciting things about using an agile approach
is the teams ability to time box deliverables into a
sprinta short period of work, typically one to two
weeks. As has been mentioned, moving toward an agile
approach is not all about an iterative approach but rather
about managing execution via team dynamics. Te
iterative-ness of the agile approach comes into play
because to efectively execute with agile, the following
concepts must be adopted and repeated.
Ive never had good experiences
with so-called project managers,
who typically are really just project
administrators who take down the
minutes and set up meetings.
Here is an overview of how agile teams Ive worked with
have been organized as well as a description of the roles of
key players and the essential meetings held.
Product owner. In our BI environment, we must have a
team leader. In the software development world, the
product owner is a business user or manager. However,
when it comes to BI, there should be only one product
delivered to the business and that is intelligencethat
is, a decision support system.
Scrum master. Ive never had good experiences with
so-called project managers, who typically are really
just project administrators who take down the minutes
and set up meetings. Te great thing about agile is that
because the team is heavily involved in so many diferent
steps of the project life cycle, the project in some ways
manages itself. We will, however, need to coordinate
the sessions and someone should chair these and keep
discussions focused. Enter the scrum master. Tis
person can be someone from within the team or it can
be a role performed on a rotational basis, but it is not
always practical to load a team member with additional
responsibilities when they need to focus on development.
Tis can be even more overwhelming when there are
multiple scrums working on multiple sprints. What works
best in our environment is that the BI team leader fulfll
this role.
Daily stand-ups
2
. Tese 15-minute, early-morning sessions
set up and chaired by the scrum master are essential for
keeping track of progress and impediments. Te daily
scrum meeting is not used to solve problems or resolve
2
For more information on daily stand-ups, grooming and planning sessions, and
review and retro sessions, see http://www.mountaingoatsoftware.com/agile/scrum/.
AGIle bI
issues. Issues are taken ofine and usually dealt with by
the relevant subgroup immediately after the meeting.
During the daily scrum, each team member answers the
following three questions:
1. What did you do yesterday?
2. What will you do today?
3. Are there any impediments in your way?
Grooming and planning sessions. During this 90-minute
session scheduled every two weeks (depending on the
sprint duration), the product owner meets with the team
to discuss stories in the product backlog. Te product
owner shares the current known priorities and may ask
the scrum core development team for help in determining
the relative cost and risk associated with any new items or
items for which new information has come in. Te scrum
team is also asked to give input on the sequence of the
work and is encouraged to suggest ways to optimize the
order in which work is done.
Review and retro sessions. A 90-minute session is scheduled
every two weeks (depending on the sprint duration).
Each sprint is required to deliver a potentially shippable
product increment, so at the end of each sprint, a sprint
review meeting is held. During this meeting the scrum
team shows what they accomplished, typically in the
form of a demo of the new features. No matter how
good a scrum team is, there is always an opportunity to
improve. Although a good scrum team will be constantly
looking for such opportunities, the team should set
aside a brief, dedicated period at the end of each sprint
to deliberately refect on how they are doing and to fnd
ways to improve. Tis occurs during the sprint retrospec-
tive. Each team member is asked to identify specifc
things the team should:
Start doing
Stop doing
Continue doing
During a brainstorming session, the team develops an
initial list of ideas and typically votes on specifc items to
focus on during the next sprint. At the end of the sprint,
the next retrospective is often begun by reviewing the
list of things selected for attention in the prior sprint
retrospective.
Finally, if there is anything that you should remember
from this article, it is the fnal yet most important
concept in achieving successful story delivery:
Story swapping. Te danger in every project is scope
creepchanges in scope midway through a project.
Breaking down user requirements into relevant stories
and committing to the associated story points during a
sprint provides the team a powerful mechanism of control
over the scope. If and when (it is inevitable in every
project) the scope must change, the team need not panic
because it has committed to delivering a certain number
of story points during a sprint. When the requirements
change and new stories need to be defned and allocated,
the product owner enters into negotiation with the
business.
Te negotiation will go something like this: Te
following new story of eight points has been requested
to be delivered during the current sprint. Te capacity of
the current sprint is full and therefore it is not possible
to add more work during this phase, except on one
condition. Te current sprint contains two other stories,
also of eight-point value, that have not been started. If the
business would like to prioritize and select which of these
two stories is to be swapped out with the new story, the
team will still be able to meet the delivery deadline.
In this scenario, the team is not saying that the members
will not do the work. Te team is merely saying that its
members cannot do more work and is letting the business
decide which work must be done. At the end of the sprint,
all the work the business selected will be delivered.
The Project Scenario
Well summarize the key points of this article by using a
practical example: a request that came in to our BI team
from within an insurance organization where I function
as BI team lead (product owner).
AGIle bI
Te following user statement represents the request:
As the head of the Motor Insurance Division
I want to have a report that provides the average cost

of claims per branch for payments made to towing
service partners for the past three years
In order to set the benchmark target and to track

progress against it in the future, with the potential of
saving the company millions of dollars for handling
service partner payment agreements.
Let us follow the agile steps.
First, the entire BI team meets at their sprint groom-
ing session where the new request is presented. After
reviewing the captured user statement (use case), the team
agrees that although this seems on the surface to be a
simple BI application (report) request, it is not. Te main
issue is that the current data warehouse does not contain
a transactional claim payment fact table, which would
need to be referenced in order to determine who the
vendor was on the payment record.
Using the vendor categorization attribute from the
dimension table, it would be possible to determine the
reason for the payment (e.g., towing service).
Because this request cannot be contained within a single
story, a new epic is created called motor cost of claims.
Te following stories with agreed points are created from
this single request:
1. Source system analysis and profling to determine
where to get the claim payments data from = 20 points
2. Report design specifcation with explained calcula-
tions = 1 point
3. ETL source to staging load package = 13 points
4. ETL staging to ODS (operational data store) load
package = 13 points
5. Dimensional model design = 3 points
6. ETL ODS to data mart load package = 13 points
7. OLAP cube to load of data mart = 5 points
8. ETL full historic load = 8 points
9. ETL testing, reconciliation, and balancing to source
system = 8 points
10. BI application motor cost of claims = 5 points
11. User acceptance and sign-of = 5 points
Total Points: 94
Because there are only two BI developers and a single
BI analyst available to form the scrum team required for
this epic, the team decides that the full-time efort until
completion would be two sprints (each two weeks in
duration).
Sprint 1 will consist of stories 14 and Sprint 2 will
consist of stories 511.
Te scrum team meets for their planning session, where
designs and solutions are proposed. Some stories are
broken into tasks so more than one person can work on
completing the story.
Sprint 1 is started, and for the next two weeks, daily
stand-ups are held frst thing in the morning, giving the
team a sense of progress and helping them highlight their
impediments and request assistance where needed. Te
scrum master diligently follows up with items raised by
the team.
Sprint 1 is completed on time (of course) and a review
session is set up for the scrum team, including an
invitation to the business user. Te product owner then
demonstrates stories 1 through 4 in the session, even
showing the user how they are now able to query the
required data. An initial analysis is produced to highlight
a possible cost of motor claims to the user, who states
AGIle bI
that the numbers look fne but seem a bit higher than
expected. Tis is noted for Sprint 2.
A retro session is set up for the scrum team. Tey share
the good, the bad, and the ugly aspects of Sprint 1 and
note lessons learned to apply during Sprint 2.
Sprint 2 is started, and for the next two weeks, daily
stand-ups are held frst thing in the morning, giving the
team a sense of progress and helping them highlight their
impediments and request assistance. Te scrum master
diligently follows up with items raised by the team.
Sprint 2 is not completed on time because the users did
not make themselves available during the fnal Story 11
user acceptance and sign-of. Unfortunately, by this time,
more requests have been received by the BI team and
additional epics and stories have been allocated to scrum
teams and sprints. Te product owner, however, raises
with the motor cost of claim epic business owner that
Story 11 consisted of 5 points. Tere is a story in the next
sprint (although it is for the fnancial analysis depart-
ment) that consists of 5 points.
My advice to any BI team looking
to adopt an agile approach is to
understand the methodology first
and then relate it back to what will
work best for your environment in
practical terms.
Te product owner requests that the head of the motor
division set up a meeting with the fnancial account
owner of the fnancial analysis epic. In this meeting, it
is agreed by the business that Sprint 1 for the fnancial
analysis epic will swap out its story of 5 points to enable
the scrum team to complete the user acceptance and
sign-of story of 5 points for the motor cost of claims epic.
The Question of Support and maintenance
As with everything great engineers build, there must be a
system to manage support and maintenance. Is it possible
to use an agile approach for this purpose, even though
support and maintenance are not typical projects?
Te answer is yes. Te key is to create a shadow sprint
called support that runs in parallel with each project
sprint. As each project sprint is fnished, the support
sprint must also be closed and a new one created. Tis
coexistence of project and support sprints will enable
team members who fnish their tasks sooner to move
directly into work in the support sprint; the product
owner with the team doesnt have to add more stories and
increase the scope of the current project sprint.
Using this approach will enable reporting of statistics
such as project burn-down and story velocity. For the
support sprints project, burn-down is irrelevant because
the scope of the sprint is not protected by the product
owner. However, because the support sprint is closed at
the same time as the project sprint, reporting on story
velocity will provide keen insight into support-response
times. Because none of us lives in an ideal world in which
everyone only does a set and assigned task, the BI team
leader/manager needs to perform a careful juggling act to
ensure projects are given priority and regular, day-to-day
operational support is not left out.
The Delivery
As with most tasks, there are many ways to produce
the desired result, yet the reasons for adopting an agile
approach in the BI environment are compelling. Some
reasons include the team dynamics of trust, skill,
cooperation, and motivation. Te business is in control of
what work gets done and when, and the BI teams reputa-
tion for successful delivery on time and within budget is
preserved or enhanced.
Editorial Calendar and
Instructions for Authors
InSTruCTIonS For AuTHorS
Te Business Intelligence Journal is a quarterly journal that
focuses on all aspects of data warehousing and business
intelligence. It serves the needs of researchers and prac-
titioners in this important feld by publishing surveys of
current practices, opinion pieces, conceptual frameworks,
case studies that describe innovative practices or provide
important insights, tutorials, technology discussions, and
annotated bibliographies. Te Journal publishes educa-
tional articles that do not market, advertise, or promote
one particular product or company.
editorial Topics
Journal authors are encouraged to submit articles of
interest to business intelligence and data warehousing
professionals, including the following timely topics:
Agile BI
Architecture and deployment (including cloud com-

puting, software-as-a-service, Hadoop, MapReduce)
BI adoption and use
BI and big data
Data analysis and delivery
Data design and integration
Data management: MDM, data quality, and

data governance
Data warehouse and database technologies
Mobile BI
Project management and planning
Selling and justifying the data warehouse

editorial Acceptance
All articles are reviewed by the Journals editors before

they are accepted for publication.
Te publisher will copyedit the fnal manuscript to

conform to its standards of grammar, style, format,
and length.
Articles must not have been published previously

either online or in printed form. Submission of a
manuscript implies the authors assurance that the
same work has not been submitted elsewhere, nor
will be submitted elsewhere during the Journals
evaluation.
Authors will be required to sign a release form before

the article is published; this agreement is available
upon request (contact journal@tdwi.org).
Te Journal will not publish articles that market,

advertise, or promote one particular product
or company.
Submissions
For more information and complete submissions
guidelines, please visit tdwi.org/journalsubmissions.
Materials should be submitted to:
Jennifer Agee, Managing Editor
E-mail: journal@tdwi.org
upcoming Submissions Deadlines
Volume 19, Number 3
Submission deadline: May 16, 2014
Distribution: September 2014
Volume 19, Number 4
Submission deadline: August 8, 2014
Distribution: December 2014
THe bI SmArT mACHIne
Troy Hiltbrand is a technology strategist
for Idaho National Laboratory.
troy.hiltbrand@inl.gov
Watson and Siri:
Te Rise of the BI
Smart Machine
Troy Hiltbrand
Abstract
The past few years have seen a signifcant evolution in
human-computer interaction. The era of smart machines is
upon us, with automation taking on a more advanced role than
ever before and permeating areas that have traditionally been
unique to human interaction. This movement has the potential
to fundamentally alter the way business intelligence (bI) is
executed and deployed across industries as well as the role bI
may play in all aspects of decision making.
Watson: Human versus machine in a battle for
logical Supremacy
In 2011, at the commencement of a special episode of
Jeopardy pitting man against machine, host Alex Trebek
indicated that you are about to witness what may prove
to be an historic competition. He was right.
In this competition, IBM Research charged forward
to take the next step in the evolution of computational
leadership. Tis was the follow-up to a groundbreaking
1997 chess match in which IBMs supercomputer Deep
Blue faced of with Garry Kasparov, chess grandmaster.
Tat contest proved that a supercomputer could apply
programmatic logic to outperform a human master, in
this case at the game of chess.
With this new competition, IBMs team was faced with
profound and new levels of challenges. With chess, there
are predefned rules of movement. Deep Blue focused on
analyzing all of the possible outcomes and probabilisti-
cally determining the most optimal next move to counter
its challenger. It took into consideration patterns associ-
ated with Kasparovs past play along with the patterns of
many other great chess players.
Te Jeopardy challenge was inherently diferent. It
required that the machine think like a human and
interpret language like a human. To up the ante, IBM
didnt take on just any Jeopardy competitors in their
demonstration of computing excellence; they took on
Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings, the two most successful
champions who had ever played the game. Te bar was
set high; the team needed to develop a system that would
interpret, solve, and respond to clues that spanned many
topics presented in various formats.
To accomplish this, researchers developed Watson using
natural language processing and text analytics to develop
the basis for the human-computer interaction layer as well
as a probabilistic approach to identify the best answer
for each specifc clue. Te result displayed not only the
answer but also a graphical representation showing the
top three potential answers and the probability of being
correct. Unlike the chess match, which allowed Deep
Blue the traditional chess timing rules to do its analysis
and return a result, Watson was under a time crunch to
perform all of its computational processing more quickly
than its two all-star competitors.
With the complexity of fnding the right answer for
the given clue paired with the relative messiness of
human language inherent within the clues themselves,
Watson proved that even with high-power systems and
engineering genius on the back-end, it was still a complex
challenge. Watsons performance was not without quirks,
resulting in a tie at the end of the frst day of play.
By the end of the three-day exhibition, Watson came
out on top, earning more than $77,147 compared to the
$24,000 and $21,600 of its competitors. Ken Jennings,
ever a good sport, bowed to the new Jeopardy champ. I
for one welcome our new computer overlords, he wrote
on his video screen, quoting an episode of Te Simpsons.
Siri: bringing Artifcial Intelligence to the Consumer
On October 4, 2011, Apple raised the stakes in the
battle for mobile supremacy with its launch of Siri on
the iPhone 4s. Tis innovative feature distinguished the
iPhone 4s from its competitors and laid the groundwork
to become the digital personal assistant of the future. Siri
provided a mechanism for end users to push a button and
ask a question, which would then be processed against
a multitude of applications on the device (including
reminders, calendars, messaging, e-mail, notes, music,
clocks, maps, and Web browsers) to either perform a
function or return related content. Tis elevated the
mobile phone from a portable computer to a personal
digital assistant, freeing the user from needing to know
which application should perform the requested function.
Now users could speak a simple command and have the
phone perform the majority of the processing needed to
respond accordingly.
Te base technology supporting Siri was important
because it went beyond simply doing speech recognition
to execute a command. It married recognition with
natural language understanding to determine what type
of action the end user intended, identify the relevant
functionality, execute the command, and return a
response within the context of the request. Tis was
signifcant because it was built into a mobile phone
intended to be carried around and provide on-demand
access wherever and whenever the end user needed
itthe embodiment of computational mobility. Watson,
although much more capable in terms of its processing
potential and its sub-second response time, required a
cluster of 750 computers with 2,880 processor cores on
10 server racks to function, which signifcantly limited its
portability.
Smart machines for bI
Watson and Siri have demonstrated that natural language
understanding has the potential to fundamentally change
how end users interact with computational processing.
Tese same trends also have the potential to fundamen-
tally alter how users engage business intelligence systems
in the decision-making process.
Traditionally, business intelligence suites have focused on
search and navigation as the mechanism for providing
content to end users within a business systems repository.
Both of these focus on metadata attached to predefned
reports and dashboards. Tis metadata includes report
titles and descriptions, but it is limited in providing a way
to fnd specifc answers to questions. Tis is where natural
language understanding bridges the information gap to
support business intelligence. Instead of end users typing
sales into a search bar and needing to know whether
they want the report sales by date or the report sales by
market segment, users would prefer to type exactly what
theyre looking forWho has sales growth of 10 percent
or more? or List sales growth at least 10 percentand
have the engine display a dashboard of sales fltered to
show only those segments of the business that have sales
of 10 percent or greater. Taking it one step further, users
would like to dictate their search requests, no keyboard
required.
Complicating the engines job is that the users engage-
ment is context sensitive. Unlike the search engine, which
can index report metadata in the same fashion for every
company, a natural language engagement requires much
more context about the content to be efective. For Siri to
be efective at answering questions, it must interact with
multiple distinct content stores such as maps, calendars,
the Web, and so on. Te engine has to determine the
most probable purpose of the engagement and invoke the
mechanism to call that functionality.
Business intelligence tools of
the future can learn from Siris
simplicity as they strip away the
complexity associated with knowing
how and where to find information
and provide a simple and universal
interface for users.
To succeed in applying natural language understanding
and advancing human computer interaction for business
intelligence, engines must address three aspects of the
problem: consumption, understanding, and response.
Tese three represent the input, processing, and output
stages of system design.
Consumption
As organizations move into this new paradigm, the frst
area to address is request consumption.
Te traditional method of end users interaction with a BI
suite is to type one or more terms related to the request
or to navigate to a predefned location where known
information is located. Tis usually requires multiple
steps and in some cases requires end user training to
ensure that users understand how to move through the
business systems.
To simplify this interface on the iPhone, Apple intro-
duced an advanced voice-to-text system that takes a
request in the form of human speech and translates it
into a string of text that characterizes the request. Apple
removed the barriers of training and complex system
interaction by boiling down the interface to the single
push of a button. In response to this simple action, Siri
is ready to accept any command that the user desires.
Tis opens a conversation stream between human and
machine.
Business intelligence tools of the future can learn from
this simplicity as they strip away the complexity associ-
ated with knowing how and where to fnd information
and provide a simple and universal interface for users. Te
BI tool must facilitate a request in the language of choice
and have the system perform the heavy liftingconvert-
ing the request into a set of systematic processes that will
supply the users desired objectives.
Watson didnt use voice-to-text processing, but instead
had the clues fed to it at the same time that Alex Trebek
read them to the other competitors. Tis is similar to the
way end users naturally inquire with respect to questions
about business analytics. It is much more familiar for
an end user to ask, What is happening to the sales in a
certain region since we started our marketing campaign?
than to formulate a complex SQL (structured query lan-
guage) statement, a MDX (multidimensional expressions)
statement, or visit a series of screens that will dynamically
create the back-end SQL or MDX statement(s).
It is not optimal for an executive with a question to
navigate to a portal and navigate to the right report
to answer questions. Many organizations have created
business intelligence competency centers where executives
can send a request and have a team of BI analysts extract
and return an answer.
As technology advances in natural language understand-
ing, the process of engaging an analyst to research the
question and provide an answer could become a thing of
the past. Te executive could e-mail or send a text mes-
sage to a virtual assistant directly and the system would
interpret the objective, perform the analysis, and return
an answer without the delay of human intervention.
With more public-facing business intelligence solutions
enabling customers to perform self-service information
gathering, this concept can be extended to social media
venues. As questions or requests are made through
Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or a myriad of other social
media or communication platforms, these requests can be
parsed and their context identifed; the request can then
be answered without needing a human customer service
representative.
Tis evolution in how requests are consumed and
fulflled will fundamentally change how businesses will
work in the future and will have a dramatic impact on
the economy as a whole. In the fall of 2013, Gartner
predicted that the rise of smart machines will have a deep
and widespread impact on businesses through 2020. Tis
prediction includes the potential widespread elimination
of millions of middle-class jobs; those employees focused
on providing this middleman service may be replaced
by smart machines (Gartner, 2013). Although this has
serious implications for the state of the economy as a
whole, it also means that companies that can get in front
of the wave and power the coming evolution will win in
the end.
understanding
Te greatest technical challenge comes after a user makes
a request. Tis includes bringing a level of context and
understanding through elements of natural language
processing. Language is messy; the same fundamental
request can be conveyed in multiple ways, using diferent
words and phrases and through various communication
channels. Add the global connectedness of business
transactions and the need to support multiple languages
and dialects, and the challenge increases dramatically.
To overcome this, natural language processing doesnt try
to develop a prescriptive set of rules to follow under every
circumstance, but instead uses machine learning and
statistical probability to fnd patterns of speech and likely
meanings.
Te frst step in natural language understanding is
taking a string of characters and determining how to
break it into parts that can be used to drive processing.
Tese pieces, whether words or phrases, are the basis for
interpreting the request.
Parsing a sentence can be as simple as identifying where
the spaces are in a sentence and breaking the sentence
at these spaces. As punctuation is factored in, the
process becomes more challenging. When evaluating a
period, the parser needs to distinguish between multiple
instances of usage. When a period falls at the end of a
sentence, it is not attached to a word but to a sentence and
has no relevance to the adjacent word. If it is attached to
a word inside a sentence (e.g., Mr. or Dr.), it is associated
with the word and not the sentence; it might or might
not be able to be stripped away without changing the
meaning of the word. If the period falls inside the word,
stripping it out might have a more signifcant impact.
For example, U.S. (with periods) represents a country,
whereas without periods it is a pronoun representing the
speaker and others.
Tese complexities apply to other punctuation characters
as well. Capitalization can be used to help defne sentence
boundaries but brings similar challenges in the form of
acronyms, mixed case names, and other use of capital
letters that are not the norm.
Te next step in natural language processing involves
identifying the parts of speech of the identifed words.
Diferent parts of speech distinctly afect the meaning
of the sentence. Nouns represent the entities of concern,
adjectives are used to provide additional context to the
nouns, verbs are often associated with the action, and
prepositional phrases provide context to the sentence as
a whole.
Parsers often rely on predefned corpuses of text that have
been hand annotated by experts and help defne statistical
models for determining the part of speech of specifc
words in specifc positions. Tese corpuses are used to
train models that can be applied to an unknown set of
text to determine the most probable part of speech for
each word in the sentence.
Words are often based on the same root and
multiple forms have closely related meanings. Plurals
(e.g., tree/trees, ox/oxen, sheep/sheep), gerunds (e.g.,
water-ski/water-skiing, write/writing, fnd/fnding), and
other grammatical vehicles take a word with very similar
meaning and mask it so that it fts into a sentence in a
diferent way. Comparing these words in their raw format
could miss the fact that the words are meant to achieve
the same request. Natural language processing can
identify the common root among the diferent variations
of a word, thus identifying the words as related.
Once words are split, parts of speech are identifed, and
words are stemmed to identify commonalities, it is
often important to group these words from the sentence
back together so that phrases take on their intended
purpose. Tis is because the meaning exists only with the
phrase and not with each of the individual words. For
example, the phrase the United States of America has
a specifc meaning that the words united, america, states,
the, and and dont have independently.
With words and phrases broken into parts, the next
step is to attach meaning to the words. With many
words, there are multiple meanings and the instance in
question relies on the context of the words surrounding
it. For example, the word bank could mean a fnancial
institution or the bank of a river. If other words in the
sentence indicate money or a physical building, the
meaning is likely the fnancial institution. If the words
in the sentence relate to foliage and water, it is probably
the bank of a river. Tese clusters of similarity allow for
probabilistic determination of the best meaning of a word
or phrase. Processing has to be able to disambiguate the
words and phrases based on probabilistic modeling to
identify the context.
Words that can be identifed as named entities can have
even greater importance for meaning. Tese named
entities can include the actual names of people, places,
and organizations. A named entity associates a wealth of
additional context to the term, expanding the meaning of
the phrase. With an organization, this additional context
includes attributes such as leadership hierarchy, revenues,
stock market information, or a public reputation. With a
place, this includes attributes such as population informa-
tion, information about major exports and imports,
geographic location, and a wealth of history. With people,
there exist inherent relationships with other individuals,
talents, skills, and educational background.
Tis additional context can be as important to the request
as the words in the request. If an end user is looking to
see sales for the north region, the phrase north region is
a geographic designation that is composed of multiple
areas. To process this request, the system has to be
knowledgeable about this relationship and be able to
associate sales for each of the areas and group them into a
higher level representing the region.
With a fundamental understanding of the words and
phrases associated with the request, the next step is to
associate the related task in the system. Te system will
match multiple facets of the request with the metadata
associated with the data to successfully respond to the
end users request. Tis includes the facets of the fve Ws:
who, what, when, where, and why.
Who
From a security perspective, the system must be able to
interpret who is making a request and whether that user
has permission to view the information. If an executive
sends an e-mail message or sends a request in a text
message, the system has to associate an identity with the
credentials, perform authorization, and determine the
accessibility of the information requested.
It must also be able to determine whether the entire
breadth of information requested falls within the domain
of the users privileges. If a manager requests information
for the entire company, but only has access to regional
data, this restriction needs to be considered.
With new forms of interaction
at the input stage, new forms of
interaction need to be in place at
the output stage as well.
If the system is open to the public, the system has to
ensure that the information is segmented such that sensi-
tive business information will not be provided in response
to a malicious request. If the information is sensitive to
one individual, the system must ensure that the informa-
tion will be provided to that individual but not to others.
What
Data sources must be tagged with metadata so they can
be systematically matched to the what of the request.
Tis entails mature metadata management and master
data management programs within the organization. As
the technology matures, information management will
become paramount and organizations that bypass this
step will be forced to return and look closely at how to
bring it up to par.
Where
If the information is located across multiple data sources
or in multiple data marts, the system must associate the
end users request with the correct data source. Tis forms
a logical mapping that acts as an information trafc
director, sending the request in the right direction based
on its content and context.
When
Time frames within requests are often stated in relative
terms, not absolutes. Te system has to be time aware and
must be able to translate the terms yesterday or last
week into instructions that will retrieve the correct data.
Why
Tis facet is the most difcult but can also provide
the greatest value for users. If the system can apply
natural language processing to understand what the
user is requesting as well as understand why the user is
requesting it, then the additional context can increase the
breadth of the response and the business value.
If a user sends an e-mail that says, I am trying to fnd
the sales by region over the last year to determine where
to invest marketing dollars, a system that can return
sales by region over the past year is valuable. However,
a system that can interpret the request as an evaluation
of historical marketing campaign investmentsand can
evaluate the marketing returns by regionwould be
remarkable.
With a business intelligence competency center, analysts
can often read between the lines and understand the why
associated with the question, allowing them to go beyond
providing the simple answer to the question asked. Tis is
where the concept of the smart machine surpasses simply
enhancing current BI search using natural language
processing. It is here that organizations will fnd the
greatest efciency in automating knowledge-based work.
respond
Finally, once consumption and understanding are in
place, the system must respond. With new forms of
interaction at the input stage, new forms of interaction
need to be in place at the output stage as well.
If a request arrives in an e-mail or text message, return-
ing a traditional graph or chart might not be possible.
Te information might need to be synthesized into a
statement that is as compact as the request. If an execu-
tive is using a mobile device in a remote location and
sends a request in a text message, that request contains
context as to the limitations of the medium for the
response. It might be ideal to text back a simple answer
while simultaneously sending a heavier, richer set of
information via e-mail so the executive can review the
information further when a device with a richer interface
or larger display is available.
Privacy must be considered when working with a public
that is making requests via social media. If an end user
uses Twitter to request personal information, there might
be risk associated with responding through the same
media channel. Te mechanism might need to change
from a public tweet to a private message, still on the
Twitter platform but with diferent settings for visibility
by other users.
An organization needs to clearly understand the risk
profle associated with diferent forms of communication
and the level of sensitivity and security of the transmitted
information to be able to communicate the right message
through the right medium.
Business intelligence organizations
and competency centers need to
prepare now for the impact theyll
experience as smart machines
permeate industry.
Just as Apple used speech-to-text as a mechanism for
inquiry retrieval, the company also used text-to-speech as
a delivery mechanism. Tis increased the efcacy of the
user engagement and increased the perceived value of the
response.
Final Thoughts
Because language is not exact and user intentions are not
always clearly articulated, the user engagement might
require a multi-step process where the system responds
not with an answer but with clarifying questions to
provide the necessary context needed to generate the most
relevant response.
Watson and Siri whet the appetite of end users for the
type of interaction they may have in the future. With
recent technological innovation in natural language
understanding and human computer interaction,
organizations are preparing for fundamental shifts in the
way they do business. Business intelligence organizations
and competency centers need to prepare now for the
impact theyll experience as smart machines permeate
industry and drive the economy forward. BI practitioners
must determine what solutions they need to put in place
to be ready for that coming wave and the state of business
interaction it will enable.
reference
Gartner [2013]. Gartner Says Smart Machines Will
Have Widespread and Deep Business Impact Trough
2020, press release, October 10.
http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/2605015
DATA GovernAnCe GAmIFICATIon
Justin Hay is vice president of solutions
with Stream Integration. He is also
the author of the blog EDW Strategic
Positions (justinhay.wordpress.com).
justin.hay@streamintegration.com
Data Governance
Gamifcation
Justin Hay
Abstract
This article discusses the application of gamifcation mechan-
ics to data governance implementations. It outlines the
goals of data governance, particularly in the context of data
warehousing, and introduces the concept of gamifcation. It
then explores fve key motivators and shows how each would
be addressed by a gamifed governance program.
Ten gamifcation mechanics are discussed with notes on how
each relates to data governance. A hypothetical gamifed gov-
ernance program is described in story form, including notes on
its practical application. The article concludes by advocating
a gamifcation approach as part of a cultural trend to engage a
younger generation of business users who have been raised on
games as an integral part of their lives.
Introduction
When governments, businesses, and organizations
of all sizes and types embrace game thinking and
mechanics, they are better able to engage their
audiences, cut through the noise, drive innovation,
and ultimately increase their revenue.
Te Gamifcation Revolution
Building a data warehouse is a large and challenging
undertaking for any organization. One of the biggest
challenges involves ensuring the accuracy of the informa-
tion that is presented to end users. Tis requires data
governance, including:
Governance of the business metadata, including the

names of terms being used, ensuring they are accepted
across the enterprise, and that they conform to a
naming standard (including work order, class words,
and standardized abbreviations)
Governance of the defnitions applied to those terms,

such that they are meaningful, unambiguous, and
well-formed
Governance of the data architecture, so that the

information integrity remains sound and users can
access it with relative ease and confdence
Governance of the data content, ensuring that the

information conforms to business rules and meets
standards of completeness and correctness
Data governance can be a dry and time-consuming afair,
frequently necessitating lengthy committee meetings and
careful maintenance of lines of communication between
business users and IT staf. Typically, the list of data
elements to be processed with names, defnitions, and
business rules is longer than a program can deal with in
advance of a data warehouse development efort. As a
result, governance may be conducted in parallel, creating
inevitable rework as late-arriving governance changes are
enacted.
Gamifying data governance is about
working to motivate employees to
actively engage in the process
and employing ideas from games
to do so.
Tis article proposes an alternative to the traditional
committee approach to data governance based on the
gamifcation movement as articulated in such books as
Te Gamifcation Revolution (Zichermann and Linder,
2013), Loyalty 3.0 (Paharia, 2013), and Nudge (Taler
and Sunstein, 2009). Gamifcation involves mechanics
that help motivate and incentivize participants to perform
a set of tasks. Tis article draws from the ideas of these
books with regard to gamifying business processes in
general, and applies them specifcally to the activities
involved in data governance.
Applying concepts from games to achieve business goals
is an ancient idea. Contests have been used extensively
as a marketing tool for decades, eliciting an outpouring
of creative public participation for everything from
breakfast cereal to the design of national monuments.
More recently, technology has opened up possibilities
for customer loyalty programs, where people gain points
for purchases and receive special ofers and perks when
certain levels are achieved. Educational applications are
also using gaming conventions to help motivate users. An
excellent example of this is Duolingo, which helps users
learn a language while encouraging them with points,
achievement levels, and rankings against friends.
Here is a breakdown of a potential gamifed data govern-
ance program:
Overall concept. Te responsibility for data governance

is taken on by the business user community as a
whole. Te process is gamifed to set group targets and
monitor the progress of the program through measur-
able sets of activities and milestones.
Goals. Te data governance initiative strives to improve

the quality of business data by establishing policies
and rules to be applied to the data and measured and
monitored on an ongoing basis. Te program will also
work to improve the collective knowledge and under-
standing of that information by business users across
the enterprise by involving the community in creating,
assessing, and utilizing the business metadata.
motivators
Gamifying data governance is not about making a game
out of the governance process for the entertainment of
employees. It is about working to motivate employees to
actively engage in the process and employing ideas from
games to do so. In Loyalty 3.0, Rajat Paharia identifes
fve key motivators:
Autonomy. For broad acceptance, it is essential that data
governance not be imposed upon the business user
community. As a gamifed process, the responsibilities are
shared across the user base, with individual responsibil-
ity to create content and the ability to give feedback
responses actively infuencing the outcomes.
Mastery. Tere is a certain degree of skill involved here,
particularly in the tasks related to lexicography, that is,
forming the defnitions of terms. Making these concise
and meaningful to a range of users can be difcult and
requires considerable communication skills. Similarly,
crafting policies and rules to ensure the integrity of data
also requires discipline and attention to detail. Getting it
right will involve the mastery of the processes involved.
Purpose. Te purpose is built in. Data governance is
already a necessity; gamifcation is a means of driving
the process forward. Te ultimate goal is to improve the
business, optimizing the data assets at hand to increase
return on investment. Gamifying the program also arms
management with levers to target specifc subject areas,
such as customer information and marketing-campaign-
related data. Te program can be tuned to meet both
strategic and tactical goals as required.
Data governance is already a
necessity; gamification is a means
of driving the process forward.
Progress. Gamifcation mechanics enable the programs
progress to be measured. Each participant can see the
extent of his or her individual contribution, as well as
the entire communitys progress toward the ultimate or
immediate goal. Progress can be seen in diferent terms
depending on management objectives such as short-term
sprints, specifc sets of terminology, alignment with data
warehouse releases, or targeted business units. Tis stands
in stark contrast to the never-ending list of business terms
that the governance council addresses on a weekly basis
in many programs, where the distance from the end goal
can be difcult to determine.
Social interaction. In the context of data governance, this
aspect relates to business users working together toward
a common goal within business units, across lines of
business, and between business and IT. Technical and
business understanding of the data is involved, and an
understanding of the data life cyclefrom data entry to
business intelligencewill need to be communicated.
Everyone must be engaged and participating for the
information to be entered correctly and trusted when it is
used. Te gamifed data governance program encourages
communication between users, employing both coopera-
tive and competitive gaming mechanics.
Gamifcation mechanics
Gamifcation mechanics are the methods by which
gameplay concepts are applied to other spheres of activity.
Loyalty 3.0 identifes 10 diferent mechanics, which
well discuss in relation to a gamifed data governance
program. Each of these mechanics combines a number of
the fve key motivators just listed.
Fast feedback. Users receive immediate response from
their actions. In our governance program, users gain
points by contributing data defnitions to the business
glossary, reviewing and/or correcting existing defnitions,
and stewarding accurate data with defned policies and
business rules to ensure data integrity and usability.
Conversely, users are penalized for poorly written
defnitions, non-standard names, and inaccuracies in data
for which they have stewardship responsibility. More than
just points, the process is interactive across the program;
names and defnitions are assessed and receive an active
response from other users.
Transparency. Transparency is about making the process
clear to everyone. Users can view graphs and reports to
see their level of achievement, which activities have had
the greatest impact, and how their contributions to the
program compare to the wider community.
Goals. With the motivator of purpose in mind, the goals
can be both immediate and long term. Users are invited
to set personal goals as well as respond to individual and
group challenges. Goals can include setting a certain
number of defnitions, mapping a set number of sources
to targets, completing business rules, or achieving metrics
on data quality.
Badges. Badges are essentially a public sign of achieve-
ment. Users are awarded them for reaching levels of
data quality, for their active participation in the data
governance program, and for specifc achievements. Tese
badges can be displayed on Intranet sites, posted on the
walls of cubicles or lunch rooms, and embedded in e-mail
signatures. Some of the badges are advertised and the
criteria to win them clearly articulated; for others, their
existence is made public, but the means to achieve them
remains hidden; still others are kept secret and awarded
as a surprise.
Users can view graphs and reports
to see their level of achievement,
which activities have had the
greatest impact, and how their
contributions to the program
compare to the wider community.
Leveling up. Both individually and as teams, users are
taken through levels of participation and achievement
based on scores and badges. Although climbing levels
should initially be quite simple (e.g., level 1 to 2 requires
the user to add fve new data defnitions), each subsequent
level will be increasingly difcult to achieve (e.g., level
2 to 3 might require 10 new defnitions). Management
defnes the objectives of the program, so the levels can
correspond to these goals. A level can be defned as being
a domain of information (for example, customer informa-
tion), the completion of a set of policies (business rules
have been applied to all vendor address information), or
achieving a level of data quality (99.9 percent of custom-
ers have an identifed representative).
Onboarding. Business users will join and leave the program
over time. New users must be able to join as easily as pos-
sible. Te onboarding process will introduce users to the
tools, conventions, and processes involved, as well as the
data governance program applications: enterprise business
glossary, data profling tools, and dashboards to monitor
data integrity. Users will need to become conversant with
naming and defnition conventions and how business
rules are applied to information. Tis is done in the
context of the gamifed program, incrementally showing
users how to gain points and win badges.
Competition. Users can see the leaderboard of the most
productive people in the company or by line of business
(or any other group) as well as their particular placement
in the ranking of the program and the ranking of all
other participants. Individual and group scores show
users their level of contribution to the program. In this
way, the program utilizes both competitive and coopera-
tive drivers.
Collaboration. Te whole data governance program
works toward the same collective goal. Te collaborative
nature of the work can be underlined by identifying
end-to-end data governance needs by project. Just as
testing of development work must be conducted by a
third party, the crafting of defnitions and rules must
be checked and confrmed through reviews and testing.
It will take a multi-disciplinary efort to ensure that the
program works.
Community. Te idea of community in this context is
about the visibility of everyones work. Too often, work is
pushed of from one group of business users to another or
from business users to the IT department. Here, everyone
sees the work that everyone else is doing. It becomes clear
to everyone, management and users alike, who is pulling
their weight and who is dragging the process down. If
someone needs help, the community can pitch in.
Points. Points are awarded and deducted; they show indi-
vidual and group status and can be redeemed for rewards.
Tis provides the fast feedback mentioned earlier and
supplies the measurable result that is key to determining
the progress and efectiveness of the program.
A Gamifed Data Governance Story
A story about a hypothetical gamifed data governance
program will best illustrate how this approach might be
put into action. (Note: Te concepts of ideators, collabo-
rators, and connectors were drawn from Te Gamifcation
Revolution.)
NE Corp. had a problem with their business users
understanding of business terminology. Over the past fve
years, NE had launched a number of initiatives to defne
business terms within an enterprise glossary, but there
had been little engagement from users, and the defni-
tions produced were either poorly written or not accepted
by the general community.
Mistakes and miscalculations were costing the
organization millions of dollars annually. Terms were
ambiguously defned, leading to the wrong data being
used for reporting. Policies regarding what constituted
complete and accurate information were absent, and rules
to measure and continually monitor the quality of data
were not in place.
Participants in the governance initiatives cited several
causes for their failure. Te cleanup task was daunting,
with thousands of terms to be defned, policies and data
quality rules to be established, and links to where terms
appeared in databases to be identifed. Te connections
between the data stewards who owned the domain of
information, the business users who produced and con-
sumed it on a daily basis, and the information technology
staf who managed it were weak or nonexistent.
Management knew they needed to try something
innovative to fully engage users in the process across the
spectrum of stakeholders. Enter Gamifed Data Gover-
nance (GDG): a gamifed approach to data governance.
With GDG, the governance of information was taken on
by a wide set of information producers and consumers.
Te program had three sets of participants:
Ideators. Tis group consisted of data stewards responsible
for drafting the defnitions, policies, and rules that
governed the data. Ideators could see lists of complete and
incomplete terms. Teir focus was on lexicography and
the data dictionary aspects of the business metadata.
Collaborators. Tese business users worked with the
metadata generated by the ideators. Teir role, within
the context of the program, was to review and score the
work the ideators produced. Tey also provided feedback
on the connectors work when mistakes were found.
Collaborators saw lists of reviewed and un-reviewed
terms based on terms with completed defnitions. Teir
role was to ensure that names and defnitions were
accurate and meaningful. Tey provided feedback on the
ideators work.
Connectors. Tese IT personnel were responsible for link-
ing data assets to the terms. Connectors saw lists of terms
with numbers of attached data assets by source system.
Te data assets were part of operational systems as well
as the data warehouse, MDM system, and data marts,
among other sources.
Te gamifcation mechanics of GDG involved partici-
pants earning points through one of the three sets of
activities. Ideators earned points by defning terms, poli-
cies, and rules; collaborators earned points by reviewing
and rating the terms defnitions; and connectors earned
points for each data asset mapped to a term.
Levels of achievement were awarded based on points
earned. For example, ideators received 1 point per defni-
tion. Level 1 was reached when a participant amassed 5
points, Level 2 required 15 points, Level 3 was set at 30
points, and Level 4 required 50 points.
Badges were awarded to individual participants based on
the completion of certain units of work. Tese units were
based on a subject area domain of terms (e.g., customer,
account, organization).
Trophies were awarded for cross-group achievements,
such as a set of customer information having a complete
set of reviewed term defnitions with source and target
data assets attached.
Individuals worked within defned team groupings.
Leaderboards were displayed at both the individual and
team level.
Te GDG program appeared as a Web page to partici-
pants, displaying personal and group scores as well as
achievement levels, badges, trophies, and leaderboards.
Te scores were drawn from calls to the business glossary
metadata. Each activity, such as the addition of a term,
the defnition of that term, or the inclusion of a business
rule, triggered the game engine to add a point to the
users running score. Te GDG program was customiz-
able and permitted a given participant to perform more
than one role.
Te program was run in six-week sprints, each of which
had a defned scope of terms to be included. Scopes
coincided initially with the releases of the MDM program
and later with iterations of the data warehouse, the GDG
program being integral to the quality of both products.
Te limited timelines helped to focus the energies of
participants and give a sense of closure to each sprint,
even though the overall work entailed a much longer
time period.
Te success of the GDG program was measurable.
Engagement from the participants was high, and with
peer review included, the quality of the ideators work
quickly achieved and maintained a high standard. Te
attention and collective engagement focused on the
work led to a higher than anticipated adoption of the
business glossary for all stakeholders, and there was
a marked improvement in data quality adherence to
policies and rules.
Summary
Te authors of Te Gamifcation Revolution point out
that the millennial generation demands this type of
gamifed engagement in the workplace and that business
will ignore the gamifcation of its processes at its peril.
Loyalty 3.0 calls out gamifcation as a trend spanning all
industries, including healthcare, banking, retail, telecom-
munications, education, and government, specifcally
relating to the loyalty of employees.
Tere is evidence of a widespread cultural shift toward
gamifcation. Look at the gamifed mechanics of elec-
tronic readers, the collection of likes conferring status
on Facebook, and the loyalty programs of cafs, cinemas,
and grocery stores. Tis shift is having an impact on
industries of all types and presenting new challenges to
harness the torrent of gamifed data.
Te cultural movement toward gamifcation also ofers
fresh opportunities to engage and motivate employees,
many of whom come from a generation raised on the
interactivity of new media.
Business must govern data. Information is piling up and
must be addressed with discipline and rigor. Traditional
methods and organizational structure may not garner the
level of participation required to be efective. Gamifca-
tion does not trivialize this work, nor will it necessarily
transform the sometimes tedious task of governing data
into entertainment. However, people perform better
when they are motivated, and gamifcation mechanics
can provide that motivation. Gamifcation ofers a way to
ensure that the business wins.
references and related reading
Burke, Marsha, and Troy Hiltbrand [2011]. How
Gamifcation Will Change Business Intelligence,
Business Intelligence Journal, Volume 16, Number 2.
Paharia, Rajat [2013]. Loyalty 3.0: How to Revolutionize
Customer and Employee Engagement with Big Data and
Gamifcation, McGraw-Hill.
Taler, Richard H., and Cass R. Sunstein [2009].
Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and
Happiness, Penguin Books.
Zichermann, Gabe, and Joselin Linder [2013]. Te
Gamifcation Revolution: How Leaders Leverage Game
Mechanics To Crush Te Competition, McGraw-Hill.
bI CASe STuDY
BI Case Study
Stanford Graduate School of Business Builds Operational BI
for Data in the Cloud
linda l. briggs
By using right-time business intelligence to access data in the cloud, Stanfords
Graduate School of Business (GSB) has realized signifcant performance
improvements to some of the graduate schools core operations. Te success of
the project is paving the way for further acceptance of cloud BI in other areas
at Stanford University.
Stanford is one of the worlds leading research universities, known for both its
entrepreneurial spirit and its relationship with nearby Silicon Valley. Areas of
excellence range from the humanities to social sciences to engineering and the
sciences, and research and teaching heavily stress interdisciplinary approaches
to problem solving. Te Stanford Graduate School of Business (GSB), in
turn, is one of the most exclusive and highly rated in the world. Last year it
accepted only seven percent of those who applied. By itself, the GSB has about
1,100 students and operating revenues of some $156 million a year.
Te graduate school needed to deliver information more quickly to users in
several areas critical to its core operations, according to Vivek Sinha, who
works in the software engineering department at the GSB. Sinha served as
engineering project manager on the right-time BI project, working with
the technical and business teams to make sure the project met the needs of
both groups.
The Challenge
When the right-time BI project was conceived, Stanford University itself
which relies heavily on Oracle software and has its own IT group apart
from the GSBwas beginning to roll out a BI platform, Oracle Business
Intelligence (OBIEE). Stanford also uses the Force.com platform developed
by Salesforce.com across the university. However, there was no way to easily
connect the systems. Early on, the GSB team realized that staying on the
same platform as the university would make analytic needs simpler. We
thought, OK, so we already have Salesforce, Sinha says, and across campus
there is going to be a rollout of this Oracle BI product. Could we stitch the
two together?
Te team quickly realized that the limited reporting capabilities in Salesforce
meant they would need to extract data from Salesforce and bring it into
Oracle in order to handle the reporting and analytics they needed. According
bI CASe STuDY
to analyst Asha Wahi, who worked
with Sinha on the project, Tere
would defnitely have been a gap in
client needs if we couldnt merge the
data that we produced on Salesforce
with other data sitting on the
Oracle database [as well as] other
databases.
Specifc applications that Sinhas
team decided to address included
student housing, class registration,
and faculty human resources. Te
implementation, which has been
in production since early 2012,
includes dashboards built from
real-time data accessed directly from
cloud applications. Te dashboards
ofer true real-time response
virtually as soon as an event
happens, it appears on the cor-
responding dashboard.
Building right-time BI for those
applications running in the cloud
is not an investment or competitive
advantage. Rather, it is absolutely
critical for the business school
to operate, according to Sinha.
Making decisions in areas such as
student housing assignments and
class registration required tight
integration with operations to
ensure timely responses during the
workfow. For example, the gradu-
ate housing application required
right-time BI in order to make
accurate assignments to students as
they applied for housing. Given the
limited supply of housing and the
high volume of student requests,
immediate response was needed.
Originally, the student housing
and class registration applications
were built on Microsoft and Java
technologies, and the faculty human
resources workfows were mostly
managed on paper. Te reporting
facilities included in those applica-
tions, however, were inadequate for
the graduate schools requirements.
Similarly, native reporting facilities
on the Force.com platform used by
Stanford were inadequate for the
GSBs requirements.
We had started using
Salesforce.com for traditional
CRM kinds of things, as well as to
implement custom applications and
for line-of-business needs, explains
Sinha. However, as the IT group
began to look at more sophisticated
needs, including both transactional
reporting and more detailed
analytics, we realized quickly that
Salesforce and its capabilities were
not going to get us far enough.
Research into external products
and systems that could supplement
what Salesforce.com ofered did not
produce a solution. Building a new
BI platform or hiring developers
to produce custom intelligence (or
both) would have been both expen-
sive and disruptive to operations,
the GSB team decided. In addition,
a signifcant investment had already
been made by Stanford Universitys
IT group on an existing BI and data
warehousing infrastructure, Oracles
OBIEE along with Informatica
PowerCenter.
Another challenge the GSBs IT
group faced was to develop a data
integration solution between the
on-premises PeopleSoft ERP and the
cloud. Force.com used SOAP Web
services API for data access, but data
in the ERP system needed to be
uploaded regularly to support rapid
transactional data processing, and
needed standards-based SQL access.
Facing those challenges, the GSB
IT team decided it couldnt use
Force.com directlymore robust
right-time BI was required to com-
plete the decision steps for housing
assignments, class registration, and
other core processes.
Finding a Solution
To bridge the two systems, the GSB
IT group researched options from
their existing systems for real-time
SQL connectivity into Force.com
from their business intelligence
platform. Based on that research,
they decided to implement the
Progress DataDirect Force.com
ODBC driver for use with both
Oracle Business Intelligence and
Informatica PowerCenter. Te
Progress DataDirect driver provides
direct real-time access to Force.com
for those platforms and was the only
solution that could provide direct
SQL access to the cloud platform.
Te ODBC integration enabled
GSB business usersin just three
monthsto build a metadata model
and access data in real time directly
from the transactional source. Data
is accessed without either staging or
physically moving it, ensuring the
data quality and integrity needed to
make the best decisions.
Te same fexible ODBC connector
was used for ETL. For example,
bI CASe STuDY
the student housing application
required right-time dashboards
to make accurate assignments.
In addition, student registration
decisions required up-to-the-second
data during open class registration
periods. Te dynamic nature of
cloud computing within the
Force.com platform enables new
right-time BI capabilities because
fetching live data via ODBC does
not impact the production applica-
tion performance.
Te GSB team tackled the graduate
student housing application frst,
and in the process simplifed the
original application signifcantly.
Te existing application had
complex reporting needs, Sinha
explains, and moving it to the
Salesforce platform ofered an
opportunity to pare back both the
application and its reporting func-
tions. We were looking for ways to
simplify the complexity of reporting
needs from the end users perspec-
tive, Wahi says, and to streamline
the analytics and the dashboards.
roI, Future Plans
Beyond the fact that right-time
business intelligence is critical to the
business schools core operations,
there is no specifc calculated return
on investment. However, potential
savings from even a small increase
in efciency are signifcant given
the graduate schools yearly opera-
tions budget (approximately $156
million). Also, the team avoided
building a custom data loader for
the ETL step, which it estimates
would have taken 12 development
months, not including investment in
a new BI platform.
Te remaining work for both
tactical and strategic BI includes
building a data warehouse between
the ERP and cloud applications,
which will use the infrastructure
that the team has already built. Tis
approach of incorporating cloud
applications with the existing BI
and data warehousing infrastructure
establishes a framework for modern-
izing applications university-wide.
Beyond the graduate school of
business, the project will almost
certainly prove relevant to the entire
universitys adoption of cloud-based
application platforms, according
to Sinha. Te GSB project paves
the way for Stanford overall to run
more applications in the cloud, he
says. Other departments, schools,
and organizations within Stanford
will encounter the same challenges
the GSB faced. Key systems such
as ERP, BI, and data warehousing
remain on-premises while trans-
actional applications move to the
cloud, where data may be stored in
silos with limited BI capabilities.
Clearly, a key requirement for
running mission-critical applications
of-premises is for right-time busi-
ness intelligence that is integrated
into core business processes. Te
GSBs project has allowed BI users
to easily and quickly access needed
data in real time, and demonstrated
to the university the potential of
cloud computing and right-time BI.
Linda Briggs writes about technology

in corporate, education, and govern-
ment markets. She is based in San
Diego. lbriggs@lindabriggs.com
bI Q&A
Q&A
Beyond Analytics and Big Data in BI
In Dr. barry Devlins new book, Business unIntelligence: Insight and Innova-
tion Beyond Analytics and Big Data, the author explains that he believes the
term business intelligence to be something of an oxymoron. much of the
business behavior Ive encountered has been far from intelligent. Perhaps
Im a little cynical, but business dysfunction often seems the appropriate
term. We asked Dr. Devlin about several of the issues he raises in his book.
Business Intelligence Journal: Could you explain your cynicism?
Barry Devlin: One of the foundations of this book was my belief that
the raison dtre of BI is to support business users in making good
decisions. Good, depending on the context, can mean fact-based,
valuable, innovative, or a host of other things. However, in speaking
to clients and colleagues, Ive heard again and again about decisions
taken in the absence of information, of business analysts sent back
to the data to take another look, and of managers whose beliefs
drive decisions more than the data they receive. I wanted to explore
the actual relationship between information, the processes by which
decisions are made, and the internal motivation of the people who
make them. Despite the longevity of the term business intelligence and
its many successes, I came to the conclusion that the rationality it
implies may be too narrow a concept to cover the real complexity of
decision support.
You state that rationality is overrated. Why is that, and whats
taken its place as a leading theory in decision making?
Rational choice theory has long been the almost exclusive basis for
thinking about decision making in business. Of course, rationality
has, and should have, an important role. However, modern psycho-
logical and neurobiological research shows the importance of other
mental processesemotional, intentional, intuitive, and morein all
aspects of human thought. Given that business is essentially a human
and social enterprise, it makes sense to consider these aspects when we
want to support decision making. At present, there is no all-inclusive,
new theory that relates all these people aspects of decision making.
I hope my book can contribute to driving new thinking about whats
needed beyond the current focus on the data-driven business.
http://bit.ly/BunI-Technics
&
bI Q&A
You write that big data is neither
necessarily big nor data. What
do you mean by that? How does
it relate to the tri-domain logical
model, and why should enterprises
care about this model?
I see big data as one of the most
over-hyped terms in the IT industry
and one that has spilled wildly over
into the popular media. It is a poorly
defned and thus highly dangerous
term. First, I believe that we need
to place our focus on information
rather than data, which I defne
as a computer-optimized subset of
information. Second, the focus on
big obscures the reality that what
we are dealing with now is funda-
mentally diferent in nature from
what IT has created and managed
for business since the beginning of
commercial computing.
Te tri-domain model emphasizes
this by identifying two classes
human-sourced information and
machine-generated datathat pro-
vide access to a level of information
that we seldom, if ever, considered
before. Tese messages, events,
and measures precede and inform
the process-mediated data that is
created and managed in traditional
operational and informational
systems. Te current focus is on how
human-sourced information and
machine-generated data can predict
what will (or will not) eventually
become business transactions.
Hence, their business value.
More important from an informa-
tion management view is that this
information raises important issues
about quality and ethics of use that
are far beyond what we have ever
considered before. For example, the
extension from (process-mediated)
point-of-sale data in classical afnity
data mining to wholesale gathering
of pre-sales and non-sales-related
data for the prediction of personal
state and likely behavior creates
signifcant issues about data reli-
ability and serious privacy concerns
about inferences that may be drawn
from the information gathered.
Weve seen this, for example, in
the reaction to Targets predictive
pregnancy data mining and market-
ing in 2013.
You discuss the conundrum of
consistency versus timeliness.
Users want reports faster, yet in
the past, correctness and consis-
tency were highly valued. How
can enterprises weigh the trade-
ofs to these drivers, and where
does data quality come in?
Tis dilemma was actually the
original driver of my thinking when
I frst conceived of this book in
2009. Te business need for and
concepts of operational BI were
well understood by then, but it
was clear to me that the original
data warehouse architecture (as I
defned it in a 1988 IBM Systems
Journal article) and its subsequent
evolution are ill-suited to these
needs. Te primaryindeed, almost
soledriver of the original archi-
tecture was data consistency. Given
the state of operational systems of
the time and the business focus on
consistent period-end reporting and
analysis, this focus was valid. Te
layered operational-EDW-data-mart
architecture provided the best
solution for consistency and data
management needs.
Since then, however, the speed of
business has increased dramatically
to the extent that perhaps the most
commonly heard BI requirement
today is for real-time data access.
Technology has also advanced.
Operational systems data is better
managed than ever before, although
its still far from perfect. Databases
are far faster and more powerful
than they were in the 1980s and
1990s. More recently, we have
also seen the emergence of big
data, as I already discussed. Taken
together, my conclusion is that our
fundamental and long-standing
architectural principles were in need
of revision. Passing all data through
a centralized EDW and maintaining
multiple layers is simply no longer
needed nor even physically possible.
Te new architecture I propose,
therefore, moves our thinking from
layers to pillars. Tese pillars are
distinguished from the long-reviled
data silos by the provision of assimi-
lation function and context-setting
information (aka metadata), which
spans and links the pillars to ensure
consistency while permitting the
timeliest provision of information to
business users.
What best practices can you
recommend to help business users
and IT work together to create
a biz-tech ecosystem based
on this new architecture, given
bI Q&A
their long history of being at
loggerheads?
Better communication between
people and organizational entities
is my short answer. It may seem
simplistic, but in my experience,
a lack of communicationand,
in particular, active listeningis
at the core of most difculties
between business and IT people.
Changing this requires a deep shift
in thinking on both sides. IT people
must step back from their widely
held self-image of white-coated
technicians tending the computing
Beast, ensuring its performance and
quality, and begin to see themselves
as business people who simply better
understand the limits and possibili-
ties of technology.
Conversely, business people
Beauty in this metaphorhave
to recognize their own growing
technical skills and engage with IT
as equals rather than masters.
Tese shifts lead to a synergy
between business and IT people
that has long been lacking. Tey
also call into question the current,
widespread outsourcing of IT
functions. My frm belief, expressed
in the phrase biz-tech ecosystem,
is that technology is at the heart of
all business advance and innovation
for the foreseeable future.
A second thread involves the
recognition within IT that our
current disintegrated environment of
separate operational, informational,
and collaborative systems is not
sustainable. Driving consistency and
timeliness across the full process
scope of modern business demands
technical and organizational
integration at a level far beyond
anything we have seen. I believe that
such integration is best driven from
the parts of the IT organization
most familiar with these needs.
In information terms, this is the
team responsible for enterprise
data warehousing; for process,
it is the organization working
with service-oriented architecture
(SOA). Terefore, the creation of an
all-encompassing, well-integrated,
enterprisewide, logical information
resource starts from the existing
data warehouse and its supporting
team and extends outward to the
other data and information used by
the business.
Note that this information now
most defnitely includes that which
lies beyond the enterprise boundar-
ies. To maintain balance, the
EDW team will need to recognize
that decision making is a process
(however fexible and adaptive) and
cede to the SOA organization those
aspect of the BI environment that
demand process integration and
management.
Tird, and perhaps most demanding
for IT people, is the need to look to
decision making as a human mental
activity rather than something
that can be totally implemented in
software and hardware systems. I
am very aware that this fies in the
face of the current industry fascina-
tion with all things data-driven.
Although there are most certainly
opportunities in data-driven,
algorithmic solutions, a single-
minded focus on such mechanistic
approaches will serve only to drive
an even deeper wedge between
business and IT. To return to our
fairy-tale analogy, only when Beauty
kisses the Beast does she discover the
Prince within; so, too, must IT and
business kiss and make up so that
decision support (and I do increas-
ingly like that old term) can achieve
its full and true potential.
reSPonSIve DeSIGn
Responsive Design:
Te Key to
Responsive Mobile BI
Applications
markus Guertler
Abstract
mobile users want the same functionality they enjoy on their
desktop apps, including at-a-glance views of performance, but
formatted in a way that is optimized for each of their devices.
As such, developers need to create business intelligence (bI)
apps that take into account content, context, and usability as
never before.
responsive bI apps have become the standard for organiza-
tions that need the same applications deployed to devices with
different screen sizes while maintaining a consistent design
and requiring a minimum of maintenance effort. Founded on
the concepts of responsive design and HTml5, these apps
signifcantly reduce development and maintenance costs
compared to building distinct apps for every device an organi-
zation supports. responsive design for bI improves application
usability and lengthens shelf life.
Introduction
Afordable and high-performing mobile devices in the
hands of nearly 50 percent of the population have paved
the way for the bring your own device (BYOD) trend.
More than 80 percent of employees are already using
personal devices in the workplace, and half of the worlds
businesses are expected to embrace the BYOD trend
by 2017 (Kanaracus, 2013). Moreover, 38 percent of
companies expect to stop providing devices to workers
by 2016 according to a global survey of CIOs by Gartner
(InformationWeek India, 2013).
Te rapid adoption of smartphones and tablets combined
with the promise of Web-enabled wearable technologies
such as watches and eyeglasses has led to an ever-
increasing number of devices we may soon see in the
markus Guertler oversees product strategy
and requirements as the technical product
manager for BI software provider arcplan.
markus.guertler@arcplan.com
reSPonSIve DeSIGn
workplace. According to Juniper Research (2012), the
next-gen wearable devices market, including smart glasses
(i.e., Google Glass), will be worth more than $1.5 billion
by 2014, up from just $800 million in 2013. Although
the majority of these devices are sold in the context of
ftness and healthcare, there are several applications
within modern enterprises as well.
From employee self-service human resources to
collaborative document sharing, rolling out applica-
tions throughout the workforce presents several new
opportunities beyond traditional mobile e-mail and
communications. One of the greatest opportunities for
employee productivity and efciency comes via business
intelligence for all types of mobile devices, largely driven
by the need for real-time analytics.
Gartner has identifed real-time analytics as a trend,
explaining that with the vast amount of information
generated every minute and the shorter time-to-decision
necessary for modern business, real-time intelligence
is becoming a must have to maintain competitive
positioning in the market (Gartner, 2013). Especially in
business environments, any information available within
a defned time window provides a chance to take action,
adjust strategies, or capitalize on opportunities. For
example, detecting fraud in credit card activities requires
immediate attention.
By the same token, a call center manager monitoring the
wait time of incoming calls should be able to correlate
the current queue and key performance indicators (KPIs)
on internal call handling in conjunction with customer
expectations. Shifting resources swiftly can have a
signifcant impact on customer satisfaction, retention,
and loyalty, but only if the information is used within
a window of action. Tese scenarios can greatly beneft
from the real-time analytics made possible by mobile BI
applications.
Gartner predicted two years ago that by 2013, 33 percent
of BI functionality would be consumed on handheld
devices (Roe, 2011). With the number of mobile BI users
expected to increase, there is one design principle for
mobile app development that will continue to make this
possible.
responsive Design for Any Device Type
Te success of responsive design is often catalogued by
marketers and e-commerce vendors with regard to website
availability and optimization. Case studies have shown
increases of up to 63 percent in click rates and 18 percent
in transaction rates when responsive Web design is used
to create mobile websites and mobile e-mail marketing
campaigns (Contact Center Solutions Community, 2013).
For the same reasons marketers rely on responsive Web
design to better serve mobile customers, businesses are
beginning to rely on responsive app design to help mobile
employees do their jobs more efciently.
Figure 1: United Pixel Workers adopted responsive design early to serve
its tech-savvy user base on all devices. The website uses a simple grid that
scales well to ft on various screens.
Originally developed for Web design, responsive design is
a single-URL site framework in which the same HTML
code is delivered to each device. Tweaks to a cascading
style sheet (CSS), which determines the layout of a Web
page, allow it to adjust to the screens form factor.
Applications built on the principles of responsive design
respond to various parameters and self-adjust according
to the height, width, resolution, and orientation of a
device. Te layout responds to the device, asking for
the content so that the same content is presented regard-
less of device type (see Figure 1).
reSPonSIve DeSIGn
Information workers are using an average of 2.3 devices
for work purposes, and over half (52 percent) are using
three or more devices (Gillett, 2012). BI reports and
dashboards that are optimized for each device have
become necessities for busy employees who use a variety
of devices to view information and make swift decisions
throughout the workday.
Responsive design yields dividends for BI developers
as well. Tey can create just one application for all
devices, where the master app is designed one time and
reconfgured slightly for each device with little efort.
Tis amounts to potentially huge savings in terms of
development and maintenance costs for BI apps, with a
single content repository serving multiple devices.
Until now, the delays for mobile BI adoption have been
logistical, mainly related to the laborious process of
designing and maintaining applications for multiple end
user devices. Responsive design has made these challenges
obsolete by making it easier than ever to build and deploy
BI apps that are clean and modern, designed for quick
consumption of data and taking action, and can be used
on any device without the need for extra development. It
has become the standard development paradigm thanks
to faster implementation and maintenance cycles.
HTml5: The emerging App Dev mode of Choice
Responsive design goes hand in hand with HTML5,
which builds upon previous HTML versions to provide
greater Web design fexibility by allowing developers to
create graphical, interactive, and feature-rich Web-based
experiences. Because HTML5 makes multimedia and
graphics content easier to handle on any device, BI apps
have moved to an HTML5 client rather than continuing
to rely on Java, Silverlight, Flash, or other older Web
technologies.
Analyst groups have taken notice of the benefts of
HTML5 for mobile BI apps as well and have high
expectations for the rise of HTML5 in lieu of native
app development for Apple iOS or Google Android in
the enterprise. Forrester Research analysts claim that
developers of mobile apps in the enterprise will fock
to HTML5 as the application development mode of
choice (compared to native apps) because it is simpler and
cheaper (Messmer, 2013).
HTML5 allows applications to be accessed through
a browser to work seamlessly on any device, further
eradicating any arguments for native Web apps, which
require application or infrastructure customization
for every diferent device type or technology and are
cumbersome and costly to maintain over time for both
vendors and end users. Te functions of HTML5 allow
for cost-efcient mobile options that can reuse existing
desktop applications on mobile devices.
Responsive design is important to developers creating
business applications in HTML5 that require extensive
layout changes and user interface capabilities. Building
business applications that must perform functions (such
as manipulating multiple forms of data, conducting
queries, or controlling remote devices) goes far beyond
responsive Web design, which is focused solely on
websites that are predominantly read without a high level
of interaction (Alpha Software, 2013). Because BI relies
on data analysis and interaction, it is a pioneering use case
for HTML5-based business applications.
HTML5 browsers also access touch information,
enabling Web apps to behave just like native apps, and in
the near future, modern browsers will also access sensor
information and other device-specifc features to lessen
the diference even more. Tere is no need to use plug-ins
such as Flash to view multimedia content on desktops
(for example, animated BI charts) which is important
considering iPhones and iPads still do not support Flash.
Additionally, all major browsersChrome, Safari,
Firefox, Opera, and Internet Explorersupport HTML5
enhancements, so the possibilities for design and develop-
ment are limitless (see http://html5test.com/results/
desktop.html).
Ultimately, the users experience with websites and BI
apps is better and faster with HTML5 because of its
reduced reliance on plug-ins, which are handled difer-
ently in each browser. HTML5 ensures that all content is
served up the same way, regardless of browser or device.
reSPonSIve DeSIGn
The Screen Size Dilemma
It has been a common challenge for BI app designers
to optimize applications to ft varying sizes of desktop
PCs and laptops that range from 1324 inches, but this
challenge was further complicated when mobile devices
became ubiquitous in the workplace. Tablets will surpass
laptop and PC sales in 2013, and in light of recent BYOD
trends, it is expected that many of these tablets will end
up in the workplace (Hamblen, 2013).
Tere is no such thing as a standard tablet. Although the
iPad might have been considered standard at one time,
today there are devices from Apple, Samsung, Microsoft,
ASUS, Sony, Toshiba, Motorola, and Kindle used in the
workplace, all with diferent screen sizes and form factors.
Tese tablets also introduce several new screen sizes into
the marketplace. In addition to the iPads 9.7-inch screen
and the iPhones 4-inch screen, models such as Amazons
Kindle Fire and Googles Nexus 7 caused an explosion of
the sub-8-inch tablet market.
Size is only one point of contention. BI app designers
must also take into account other factors, such as
orientationwhich devices are optimized for portrait or
landscape displayand pixel density or pixels per inch
(PPI). Not only do you need to accommodate design
layouts for mobile devices, but you also need to take into
account high pixel density displays.
For example, the iPhone 5s Retina Display can display
more pixels on its 4-inch screen than most laptops. A BI
dashboard that is acceptable on an iPhone with 326 PPI
looks signifcantly diferent on a Microsoft Surface with
148 PPI.
Tere are many reasons why BI apps need to be designed
diferently for diferent devices. Phone screens of 45
inches are too small for advanced charting or for
dashboards that look great and work well on tablets. In
the same vein, analytical applications designed for larger
screens need to be divided into smaller columns that
smartphones can display properly.
For example, a dashboard with four or six charts can
be digested easily on a 19-inch monitor, but on a
smartphone, a user can view only one chart at a time with
readable numbers and labels. Responsive design enables
Figure 2: Example of a desktop dashboard reformatted for a smartphone.
the app to adjust the content display for mobile devices so
it is large enough to be understood on the smallest device
without signifcant zooming (see Figure 2).
With responsive design, app designers can slightly modify
the desktop app for smartphones by stacking charts on
top of each other, requiring the phone user to simply
scroll down to view the same content. Tis eliminates
the need to pinch or zoom for better views of data and
dashboards because the content is optimized for the
screen size (see Figure 3).
To better support the stacking of objects and object
groups, it is also important for developers to employ a
style guide with an approved layout paradigm of a grid
with tiles that can easily be stacked and multiplied for the
diferent layouts, making the use of each app a smooth
experience.
Te same intuition applies when a user fips between
portrait and landscape orientationthe app understands
and will self-adjust to present the correct variation of
the content. Desktop monitors and tablets in landscape
orientation can accommodate several charts arranged in
two rows, but smartphones and tablets in portrait mode
are better served by charts stacked on top of each other.
reSPonSIve DeSIGn
Designers are also increasingly looking to remove unnec-
essary elements and adjust visualizations to maximize the
amount of information per pixel. For example, gauges or
speedometers are not common on mobile apps because
they take up too much room without providing much
information. Instead, apps today might display a simple
box that highlights the speedometer metric, which ofers
an improved pixel-to-information ratio.
Above all, mobile BI apps must prioritize content frst.
Because mobile devices have small screens, the most
important elements should be the main focus, with
an option to drill down for additional details. Often,
designers will start with the smallest device frst and build
modifcations for larger screen sizes and devices. Selecting
the most relevant BI content for the smallest mobile
device frst helps streamline the app from the beginning
so users can easily access their most important KPIs right
away without unnecessary scrolling.
usability that Transcends the Device
When it comes to a BI dashboard app, mobile users want
the same functionalities they can enjoy on their desktop
apps, including at-a-glance views of performance without
much analytical capability. However, mobile users of a
planning application may want something very diferent
from desktop users: the ability to review, update, and
comment on data. Input dialogs and screens for mobile
devices may need special attention in regard to font size
and limited keyboard capabilities to ensure the best user
interface.
One of the more difcult aspects of designing mobile
BI apps is the added layer of context. An app must be
designed with a full understanding of where users might
be accessing it. For example, will a user plan to check
something quickly on the way to an appointment or
while walking around a plant foor? Apps are often used
in bursts, which can require design modifcations such as
large flters for quick status checks and live tiles for highly
relevant updates (see Figure 4).
Figure 3: Example of stacking dashboard objects for optimal mobile utilization.
reSPonSIve DeSIGn
Figure 4: Example of live tiles on a dashboard, where numbers are simply
presented without unnecessary visualization.
Context also has signifcant implications for navigation.
A mouse and keyboard are used to navigate a PC-based
dashboard, but the experience on a mobile device difers
signifcantly; fnger gestures (such as pinching, swiping,
or tapping) and sometimes a stylus are used to navigate.
Mobile users have certain expectations about how to
navigate various mobile devices, so designers must create
a way for users to navigate their dashboards intuitively
using device-specifc controls without taking a class or
reading a manual about how to navigate the interface.
Although desktop apps typically feature navigation tabs
at the top of the display, mobile apps with navigation tabs
at the bottom are often more popular because navigation
at the top may get in the way of users primary tasks.
Once top navigation tabs become too wide for the screen
size, they should be reformatted to a dropdown menu.
Mobile BI apps should take into account which functions
are most important for a specifc device and optimize the
app for those use cases (see Figure 5).
Figure 5: Adjust application navigation and menus to the available space on the various devices.
reSPonSIve DeSIGn
Some mobile BI app users will simply want to view the
status of their metrics, but others will see the mobile
app as their primary means of accessing corporate
information, particularly executives, feld salespeople,
and foor managers who are constantly away from their
desks. Designers are building modifcations in BI apps
that account for how users will want to interact with
their data and make it as easy as possible to drill down,
add commentary, and share insights. For example, large
touch targets, as wide as 72 pixels to accommodate
thumb navigation, are imperative for users who need to
input data, switch flters, and drill down (T, 2012). Tere
must be enough space between actions so users will not
accidentally hit the wrong target.
Responsive design is an approach
that generates true business
value: time and effort savings for
developers, higher adoption rates
among users, and a longer shelf life
for BI apps.
Another key capability that encourages touch-based
utilization is a simple search box, which can eliminate
or reduce the need for a separate menu that occupies
valuable screen real estate. Search is especially important
when massive volumes of data are involved because it
helps users navigate through large information stores.
Because BI systems manage terabytes of data, it can be
challenging for an enterprise search engine to locate
specifc reports and their underlying data.
All of these capabilities combinedcontext, content,
and searchare made possible with the fexibility of
responsive design, which is why its the design method of
choice for BI app developers. Te large amounts of data
and myriad of reporting structures that are unique to BI
require an intuitive design method that empowers the
user through a seamless experience.
A new Industry Paradigm
Organizations that use BIas well as solution providers
themselvesare increasingly looking to future-proof
their dashboard and reporting apps, minimizing many
of the risks associated with continuous mobile device
innovations. When a device with a diferent screen size
becomes popular, a responsively designed app should
need only a few adjustments to provide users with
optimized mobile experiences.
For decades, BI applications have been designed for
desktop PCs or laptops. It has taken time to develop
mobile design standards, but now that the iPhone is six
years old and the Google Play store hosts one million
apps, BI providers are getting serious about addressing the
needs of mobile BI users.
For BI app designers, it is impossible to create separate
reports and dashboards for every device, especially where
BYOD is allowed. Responsive design is the new and intel-
ligent approach that allows designers to create one app
that dynamically adjusts its layout for all devices, from
desktops to smartphones. Its an approach that generates
true business value: time and efort savings for developers,
higher adoption rates among users, and a longer shelf life
for BI apps.
references
Alpha Software Corporation [2013]. Alpha Software
Takes Mobile Development to the Next Level with
New Alpha Anywhere Capabilities that Let Businesses
Rapidly Build Responsive Mobile Apps, press release,
November 12. http://fnance.yahoo.com/news/alpha-
software-takes-mobile-development-140000404.html
Bhas, Nitin [2012]. Te evolution of wearable devices:
are they the future?, JuniperResearch.com,
November 2. http://www.juniperresearch.com/
analyst-xpress-blog/2012/11/02/the-evolution-of-
wearable-devices-are-they-the-future/
reSPonSIve DeSIGn
Contact Center Solutions Community [2013].
Experian Marketing Services Updates on Mobile
Devices Email, Professional Services Close-Up,
September 15. http://callcenterinfo.tmcnet.com/
news/2013/09/15/7411426.htm
Gartner [2013]. Gartner Says Actionable Analytics Will
Be Driven by Mobile, Social and Big Data Forces
in 2013 and Beyond, Gartner.com press release,
February 11. http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/
id/2332515
Gillett, Frank [2012]. Employees use multiple gadgets
for workand choose much of the tech themselves,
Forrester.com, February 22. http://blogs.forrester.com/
frank_gillett/12-02-22-employees_use_multiple_
gadgets_for_work_and_choose_much_of_the_tech_
themselves
Hamblen, Matt [2013]. Tablet shipments to outpace
laptops in 2013, Computerworld, May 6.
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9238939/
Tablet_shipments_to_outpace_laptops_in_2013
HTML5 Test. http://html5test.com/results/desktop.html
InformationWeek India [2013]. By 2016, employees may
have to bring their own devices to work, says Gartner,
news item, May 2. http://www.informationweek.
in/informationweek/news-analysis/176979/2016-
employees-bring-devices-gartner
Kanaracus, Chris [2013]. Half of worlds companies to
embrace BYOD by 2017, Computerworld, May 20.
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9239333/
Half_of_world_s_companies_to_embrace_BYOD_
by_2017
Messmer, Ellen [2013]. Forrester Research calls
mobile-device management heavy-handed approach:
Research frm forecasts mobile virtualization
overtaking MDM, sees bright future for HTML5,
Network World, March 28. http://www.networkworld.
com/news/2013/032813-forrester-mobile-268206.html
Roe, David [2011]. Gartner Predicts Business
Intelligence Will Go Mobile and Social,
CMSWire.com, January 10.
http://www.cmswire.com/cms/information-
management/gartner-predicts-business-intelligence-
will-go-mobile-and-social-009765.php
T, Anthony [2012]. Finger-Friendly Design: Ideal Mobile
Touchscreen Target Sizes, Smashing Magazine,
February 21. http://uxdesign.smashingmagazine.
com/2012/02/21/fnger-friendly-design-ideal-mobile-
touchscreen-target-sizes/
Experts Perspective
Mobile BI
Jake Freivald, Suzanne Hoffman, Cindi Howson, and nic Smith
Kimberly rainer is the bI director at Patio Fashion, a designer,
manufacturer, and distributor of high-end outdoor patio
furniture. She has a fve-person bI team that maintains a data
warehouse, supports reporting and dashboard systems, and
creates ad hoc reports and analyses. The warehouse contains primarily
sales, marketing, fnancial, and supply chainrelated data that comes from
operational and erP systems. Corporate headquarters is located in Chicago
and design and manufacturing are in California. The sales staff is distributed
throughout the country and calls upon big-box, chain, and mom-and-pop
stores.
To date, Patio Fashion has done little with mobile bI, even though its bI
software for reporting and dashboards supports it and the vendor suggests
that moving to mobile bI is both straightforward and valuable. Kimberly is
also getting messages from senior management and sales that the time is
right to make the move. Senior management would like to have up-to-date
sales information and the sales team would like to have information to
support sales calls.
Kimberly is in favor of moving forward with mobile bI but has some
questions.
1. Is it likely that her team has the necessary skills or will they need
substantial training? Will she need consultants with specialized skills?
2. What features or functionality should she expect in her current bI
software to make the movement to mobile bI easy?
3. Are native applications the best approach to use?
4. Should she push for strongly controlling the variety of devices to support?
5. If management allows employees to use their own devices, what elements
should be part of Patio Fashions bring-your-own-device (bYoD) policy?
6. When it comes to mobile security software, what functionality is critical?
7. What are some best practices with mobile bI?
8. What are some of the gotchas to avoid?
Jake Freivald is vice president of corporate
marketing for Information Builders.
jake_freivald@ibi.com
Suzanne Hoffman is senior director,
analyst relations, for Tableau Software.
shoffman@tableausoftware.com
Cindi Howson is the founder of BI
Scorecard and author of Successful
Business Intelligence: Unlock
the Value of BI & Big Data.
cindihowson@biscorecard.com
nic Smith is senior director of
marketing for analytics at SAP.
nic.smith@sap.com
bI exPerTS PerSPeCTIve
JAKe FreIvAlD
Kimberlys situation
is a mixed bag: good,
because shes getting
business buy-in to work with cool
and valuable technology, but also
somewhat risky.
Lets identify some of the risks frst.
1. Expectations for mobile computing
are very high. If she doesnt deliver
something thats useful, easy to
use, and stable, the project will
likely be viewed as a failure.
2. Requirements for mobile computing
are different from typical BI require-
ments. BI deployments frequently
feature drag-and-drop interfaces
that let you start from scratch to
create dashboards. On mobile
devices, people expect simple,
interactive apps that give them
exactly what they want.
3. Mobile technology changes rapidly.
If Kimberly has to handle too
many diferent permutations of
mobile devices and platforms,
shell end up spending more time
on maintenance and migrations
than on delivering important
functionality.
4. Kimberly will probably still have
to keep supporting her existing
business intelligence requirements.
If her mobile infrastructure is
diferent from her other infra-
structure, shell need to expand
her team, which is expensive, or
support fewer capabilities.
Kimberlys team probably has
technical skills that will prove
useful, but her staf will need to
change their mentalities somewhat
to adjust to diferent expectations.
Teyre probably used to consider-
ing a project successful based on
how many diferent questions the
analysts can answer; with mobile
BI, a better measure would be the
number of users who compare their
BI apps favorably to their weather or
travel apps.
Her team should learn to create
small, self-contained, tightly focused
apps with which users can interact
with the data without surprises.
She should not consider moving
her drag-and-drop BI capabilities
to the mobile world. Simplicity is
keyin a perfect world, there would
be no training for these apps, and
end users wouldnt realize they were
using business intelligence. Teyd
just be getting information.
In other words, her team probably
needs training in app design more
than in anything specifcally
BI-related.
If Kimberlys team creates simple,
easy-to-use, interactive, business-
focused BI apps for mobile devices,
they will be perfectly usefulcon-
ceptually, at leaston the desktop
as well. Shell want to avoid support-
ing two completely diferent sets of
applications, so her BI infrastructure
should support browser-based access
for users who arent on mobile
devices.
If shes going to support both
browser-based access and mobile
access, HTML5 is the way to go
for the analytic components of
these apps. Native apps require
separate maintenance for each
mobile platform and are useless for
desktop browsers. HTML5 ensures
cross-device and cross-platform
compatibility, allowing Kimberly to
support more people with less efort.
Note that I said, HTML5 is the
way to go for the analytic compo-
nents of these apps. Teres a role
for native mobile device capabilities
in the other components of the
apps: fle management, security,
push and alert technology, and
so on. We recommend a hybrid
approach for mobile BI that includes
a native helper app that serves as a
container for HTML5-based
analytics. At worst, the mobile
device will only have support for
HTML5, which provides full BI
interactivity, but wont have a native
app; at best, the mobile device will
support full BI interactivity as well
as nice-to-have, non-analytic
features.
When looking for HTML5-based
analytics, its best to ensure that
the data and analytic engine can
be cached locally on the device so
that, say, sales reps can analyze
their data while disconnected on a
fight. Tat way, even a user with an
unsupported device can receive a BI
document in an e-mail and simply
open it to begin analyzing the data.
Using a hybrid native/HTML5
approach will allow Kimberly to
support desktop browsers and a wide
variety of mobile devices with the
same staf and the same tools. It will
also enable her to support customer-
facing analytics. She can take the
same customer information used by
salespeople and, where appropriate,
push that information out to the
big-box, chain, and mom-and-pop
stores she supports. Tat can help
Patio Fashion deepen its relation-
ships with those customers in ways
that would be more difcult for
native-only approaches.
Better still, she may be able to push
similar information to her suppliers,
making Patio Fashions supply
chain more efcient and providing
an additional return on the BI
investment that management hadnt
previously considered. Done right,
thats a hero-making step.
Kimberly has a lot of work ahead of
her, which shouldnt be understated.
Te good news is that the steps she
will take to make her mobile users
happy can also help her manage the
workload and ongoing maintenance
burden of BI in general.
SuzAnne HoFFmAn
Patio Fashion will certainly be able
to transform its business by adding
mobile to its collection of manage-
ment and sales efectiveness tools.
Moving to mobile will help drive
a culture of data-driven decision
making in a more collaborative and
real-time environment.
Mobile business intelligence can
be woven much more closely into
where work is getting done: hallway
conversations, stand-up meetings,
executive briefngs, and discussions
with customers and partners. To
assume that everyone is at their
desk or with their PC when they
need data is to limit the potential of
business intelligence.
The steps Kimberly
will take to make
her mobile users
happy can also help
her manage the
workload and ongoing
maintenance burden of
BI in general.
Kimberly is right to take the step
forward into mobile. Her questions,
although valid, represent some of the
latent fear that the market leaders
have already laid to rest.
One area that Kimberlys team will
need to wrestle with is the division
of labor. With todays self-service
platforms, her team will be looking
to change roles in the delivery of
business intelligence. Tey will move
away from the creation of ad hoc
reports and analyses and focus more
on data availability and architecture
to support users. Te goal should
be a truly self-service environment.
Empowering the sales and execu-
tive management with their own
data analysis will free Kimberlys
resources to prepare more data and
leverage her data assets more fully.
Her current vendor already has
a mobile delivery platform, so
she can expect them to deliver a
consistent experience on both a
desktop and mobile device. Te
hallmark of a top-tier vendor is the
ability to deliver mobile-optimized
dashboards and reports without
any special consideration for the
environment in which they are to
be deployed. Good design practices
will pervade all environments, not
just mobile, but the form factor of
mobile dictates that certain con-
siderations be given to an audience
on the go. Tese include a lack of
screen real estate and device-specifc
interaction capabilitiesdesign
considerations that Kimberlys team
will need to learn.
Rather than developing a technical
skill set to enable a mobile deploy-
ment, the team will learn about
aesthetics and varying data con-
sumption patterns that are nuanced
with a mobile user community.
Rich, interactive dashboards and
analyses with up-to-date data can
impact a customer site. Te ability
to swipe, pinch, and edit data on the
fy is also important in the hands of
salespeople and executives.
Te teams users will consume data
more quickly and ask for a broader
reach of data as they collaborate and
interact with customers, suppliers,
and internal systems. Savvy sales
professionals will want to pull in
data from their customers and local
sources to become more efective
partners to their distributors.
Although the process of adding
data and consuming data should
not change, the division of labor I
referenced earlier will place Kim-
berlys team frmly in the role of data
stewards with fewer worries about
which platforms they are support-
ing. Te good news is that her team
probably has the skill set it needs
today and just needs to refocus.
Kimberly should look to her vendor
to provide a seamless interface to
her new mobile deployments. As
mentioned, there will be a few
design considerations, but the users
level of interactivity and functional-
ity should not change for any new
mobile environment. Te mobile
deployment should be optimized by
default without requiring plug-ins
or additional modules. Whether
Kimberly chooses a native applica-
tion or data access through a portal
or live connection will depend on
the sophistication of her users.
Over time, mobile users will show
themselves to be adept at reaching
a comfortable level of interactive
capability. Many employees will
be frequent and creative users of
the data because it is now readily
accessible and interactive. Creating
a hybrid environment where there
is both a programmatic application
and a reporting environment as
well as a more interactive authoring
environment will cover the range of
users. If Kimberly chooses to deliver
just a portal or application and not a
more interactive experience, she will
be frustrating some employees by
limiting the data they can use.
Te situation will be similar if
Kimberly tries to limit the type
of devices or environments that
Patio Fashion is willing to support.
Most IT departments have taken
a bring-your-own-device (BYOD)
approach to let mobile users choose
their own platforms. Any mobile
user is far more likely to be happy
with an application if they can use it
on their device of choice.
Empowering the
sales and executive
management with their
own data analysis
will free Kimberlys
resources to prepare
more data and
leverage her data
assets more fully.
Regardless of the device, Kimberly
will need to ensure that the data is
secure and provides the fexibility for
users to access what they need. Patio
Fashion doesnt need to control the
devices, per se, but they do need to
govern the data access and set up
plans for data wiping in the event
a device is lost or stolen. As a best
practice, data should not be down-
loaded to the device. Tis eliminates
the need for device authentication
rights to the data. Data security
should happen at the data server and
application level. Better yet, deploy
the application external to the
frewall in a hosted BI application.
CInDI HoWSon
Kimberly is fortunate that her
management and users are asking
for mobile BI, because even though
its a highly rated BI technology,
mobile BI continues to require
evangelizing in most companies.
Patio Fashion is astute in picking its
highest value areasalesfor its
mobile BI deployment. Putting data
and BI in the hands of the sales force
at the point of customer contact will
arm them with timely information
to provide better customer service,
potentially boosting sales.
Plan for Pitfalls
Even though mobile BI has been
around for years and her vendor
claims to support it, not all support
is the same. Kimberly needs to plan
for volatility in this space and should
evaluate her current BI vendors
capabilities against the companys
requirements as well as capabilities
from third-party solutions. Cur-
rently, native device applications
give the best user experience, and for
sales people to embrace the mobile
dashboards, they must be easy to use
and appealing. Patio Fashion also
wants to make a positive impression
on its customers, so if the sales
person is showing possible products
or past orders on an iPad during a
customer discussion, the company
needs to ensure a stable and fast app.
Some BI vendors advocate a
browser-based or optimized Web
app approach. Tis certainly saves BI
development time as existing reports
or dashboards can be used, but these
apps may lack support for:
Location awareness
Ofine mode for when a Wi-Fi or

cell signal is weakan important
consideration if sales people meet
in the back of warehouses and
remote locations
Rich graphics for charts
Multimedia for product images

and video
Touch gestures such as swipe,

pinch to zoom, tap to see details,
and fltering for dashboards
Workfow to view past orders,

then place new ones
Te app versus Web app debate is
just one sign of fux in the mobile
BI industry. Kim has to plan for
changing requirements, some report
redevelopment, and the evolution of
capabilities in this space.
bring Your own Device
At one point, Gartner was estimat-
ing that 50 percent of companies
would have a BYOD policy by
2015, but a poll conducted during
a summer 2013 TDWI Webinar
showed we are already there.
Te days when companies issued
company-purchased BlackBerries or
set standards about which mobile
devices can connect to the network
are fast becoming a distant memory,
particularly for small businesses
such as Patio Fashion.
In many cases, the
skills BI designers
use to create BI
content are the same
for mobile as for the
desktop or Web.
BYOD puts additional strain on
the IT team to support diferent
devices while ensuring security.
Apple devices currently have the
strongest native app approach
from BI vendors, but with Android
smartphone sales outpacing Apple,
BI vendors are gradually improving
Android support. Te BI team can
recommend devices and evaluate
which capabilities will be supported,
but they cannot issue strict edicts.
To ensure security, Patio Fashion
may want to consider a mobile
device management solution that
allows the company to authenticate
users based on the unique device ID
and perform a remote wipe if the
device is lost or stolen. A few mobile
BI solutions have these capabilities
baked directly into the product.
Start Small
As with any BI initiative, its
important to start small, learn the
lessons, and prove the value. So it
is with mobile BI. Kimberly should
start with some enthusiastic sales
people, identify the most valuable
data, reports, or dashboards, and
optimize the solution. As the early
adopters tweak the requirements
and solution, the app can be scaled
to more sales people, and eventually
Kimberlys team can expand the
program to include solutions for
executives and warehouse managers.
nIC SmITH
To begin a mobile BI strategy, Kim-
berlys organization should examine
how they can mobilize their existing
BI content by identifying reports,
dashboards, and visualizations
that can be extended to a mobile
landscape. In many cases, the skills
BI designers use to create BI content
are the same for mobile as for the
desktop or Web. End-user training
should be minimal to nonexistent
as well; the end-user strategy should
focus on adoption and on selecting
the right groups and the right BI
content.
Some important features for a
mobile BI deployment include:
Support for gestures. It is

important that the BI design
software supports the mobile user
interface and that dashboards
and visualizations can be created
to support mobile gestures.
Visualizations. A variety of visuals

that can ft the mobile form
factor and render in HTML5
are important for the support of
multiple mobile landscapes.
Geospatial integration. Te BI
software should support map and
location-based analytics.
Management and administration via

BI platform. It is critical that IT
has a way to manage, maintain,
and administer BI content to
mobile devices via a common
platform.
As for support for native
applications, this depends on the
organizations device landscape.
Some BI content may be supported
via a native application on one or
several mobile operating systems.
An organization with a varied device
landscape may want to look at a
hybrid approach to support users
with a combination of native app
experiences and fexible analytics
via Web or HTML5. In this case,
it is critical to consider the needs
and working environment of the
end users who will consume the
BI content.
Many organizations are allowing
employees to bring their own
devices and working to support
whatever their user community is
using. Depending on the sensitivity
of information, Kimberlys strategy
should include security and device
management across the complete
spectrum of devices.
A key element to a successful BYOD
strategy is to ensure employees
devices are set up with a device
management application that
will allow IT to remotely control,
confgure, and support the device
landscape. For example, this would
allow IT to remotely wipe a device if
it is lost or stolen. It could also help
with the provisioning of mobile BI
content to the employees devices,
and allows IT to keep track of
mobile usage and engagement with
corporate systems.
Critical functionality for mobile
security includes encryption, device
management, device provisioning,
and support for all device operating
systems.
Kimberly should select specifc busi-
ness areas for her initial mobile BI
eforts, such as executive leadership
or sales executives. Tis will allow
the organization to gain traction
with mobile BI and garner support
from key leaders to help promote it
to other areas of the organization.
She should also keep the mobile BI
experience relevant, engaging, and
ensure the information is current.
Some common mistakes Kimberly
should avoid include:
Trying to force-ft a desktop BI

experience on a mobile device
Trying to give end users too

much data interaction/manip-
ulation
Overly complex BI content

design

bI STATSHoTS
StatShots
TDWI Technology Survey: Cloud bI
Te Boston Technology Survey asked attendees to answer
a few questions about cloud BI, which has been slow
to gain adoption. We were interested in understanding
where companies are in their adoption of cloud BI, the
stumbling blocks they are facing when trying to imple-
ment it, and how respondents viewed private and hybrid
cloud BI. A private cloud includes a set of computing
resources that generally sits within a company and is set
up and managed as a cloud resource. A hybrid comput-
ing environment includes the use of public and private
clouds, often with one or more touchpoints.
Ninety-two people responded to the survey, with varying
numbers answering diferent questions. Tis should
therefore be considered simply a quick pulse survey.
Companies are considering cloud BI. Although 24% of

respondents claimed they would never use the cloud
for BI, 44% responded that although they arent using
it now, they were thinking about using it (Figure 1).
Reporting, dashboards, and analytic sandboxes are options

for cloud BI. We asked those attendees who were using
or thinking about using cloud BI what kind of analyt-
ics they are currently or would consider putting into a
cloud environment (Figure 2). Reporting, dashboards,
and analytic sandboxes ranked the highest on the list.
Top cloud BI challenges still include security. For those

attendees who were using or thinking about using
cloud BI, Perceived security concerns was rated the
highest with a score of 4.5 (Figure 3). Tis has always
been a top concern, real or imagined. Te fact that
governance and integration issues ranked highly sug-
gests that respondents are becoming more informed
about cloud BI.
Fern Halper, Director for Advanced Analytics,
TDWI Research
Do you make use of the cloud for BI and analytics? Please select
the statement that best applies to your company.
We would never use the cloud for BI or analytics
24%
We dont use the cloud now but we are thinking of
using it for BI or analytics
44%
We make use of a private cloud for BI
9%
We use SaaS BI services, which act as our BI and
analytics toolkit
1%
We use a hybrid approach to BI and analytics.
We make use of some cloud BI services as well as
utilize our on-premises BI and analytics solutions
12%
Dont know
9%
Figure 1.
If you DO use the cloud (or plan to) what kind of BI and analytics
do you or will you perform there?
Basic reporting
31%
Dashboards
24%
Sandbox for experimenting with custom analytics apps
23%
Operational intelligence/analytics
15%
Real-time dashboards
13%
Visualization
13%
OLAP cubes
12%
Custom analytical apps
12%
More advanced analytics such as predictive analytics
11%
Geospatial analytics
10%
Figure 2. Not shown: types selected by 5% or less of respondents.
What is or was your biggest challenge with getting your
organization to move to the cloud for BI and analytics? Please
rate where 1 is not a challenge and 5 is a challenge.
Rating Average
Perceived security concerns 4.5
Internal politics
4.1
Extending governance issues
4.1
Data integration between public clouds
4.0
Data integration in a hybrid environment
3.9
Developing the business case for it
3.6
Education around benefts about the cloud
3.6
Cost for transporting data around the cloud
3.3
Data integration in a private cloud
3.3
Figure 3.
TDWI Partners
These solution providers have joined
TDWI as special Partners and
share TDWIs strong commitment
to quality and content in education
and knowledge transfer for business
intelligence and data warehousing.

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Linda Briggs writes about technology

Ofine mode for when a Wi-Fi or

Rich graphics for charts

Multimedia for product images

Touch gestures such as swipe,

Workfow to view past orders,

Support for gestures. It is

Visualizations. A variety of visuals

Management and administration via

Trying to force-ft a desktop BI

Trying to give end users too

Overly complex BI content

56 BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE Journal vol. 19, no. 1

Companies are considering cloud BI. Although 24% of

Reporting, dashboards, and analytic sandboxes are options

Top cloud BI challenges still include security. For those

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