Web 2.0

The advent of Web 2.0 has upset the Internet in some interesting ways, particularly with regard to user experience and participation, the creation, derivation, and relevance of metadata, and the ability to deliver new functionality by leveraging existing sites, thereby accelerating time-to-market. This article considers how these concepts can be applied to benefit the world of business intelligence (BI). We'll discuss how users can benefit and a number of issues and requirements of corporate IT to implement and benefit from such solutions.

BI solutions have long provided decision makers with access to corporate data, such as product profitability, customer profiles, and resource allocation. Access to such business intelligence is invaluable for strategic planning. However, using the tools that provide access to this invaluable information can frustrate users.

Web 2.0 and, specifically, rich Internet applications (RIA) solutions can provide features and qualities in Web-based applications that engage users in ways flat HTML solutions can't. In the Web 2.0 world, users can escape the mundane, unproductive paper or PDF report, and the mind-numbing exercise of manipulating Excel pivot tables. They'll no longer have to generate custom reports from an enterprise reporting package or wait weeks for IT to generate the report for them. Instead, users point, click, drag, and slide through data presented in familiar Web 2.0 widgets they use every day at sites such as Yahoo Mail Beta, Google Maps, and Outlook Web Access. In this type of environment, users can interact and collaborate with the data, decorating it with commentary and other metadata, and sharing it with a mouse click.

The Web 2.0 world enables users to access and compare a broader range of data, enables them to look more deeply at that data, and get the data they need sooner. Wasn't this the original promise of business intelligence as a tool that supports business managers and executives, helping them make more accurate and timely decisions?

This article considers how the following hallmarks of Web 2.0 can benefit BI and what corporate IT needs to do to implement such solutions.

The hallmarks of Web 2.0 and rich Internet applications are:

• User experience: Applications that feel like an installed fat client delivered over the Web (e.g., Google Finance and The Baby Name Voyager), particularly allowing immediate, interactive responses to user actions
• User participation: User feedback encouraged and integral to the application (e.g., del.icio.us)
• Creation and relevance of metadata: User-created metadata that improves the quality of the data presented in the tools (e.g., flickr)
• Composite applications and time-to-market: Applications created from services requiring only user interface (UI) development and minor business logic (e.g., most mash-ups, for examples see programmableweb.com)

It's important to note that the capabilities delivered by Web 2.0/RIA solutions aren't completely new. DHTML enabled many of the capabilities (if not all) that we see in Web 2.0 applications; so what's different now? AJAX and Flash provide a more robust environment to implement this type of functionality. Productivity on these ubiquitous, de facto standards is light years ahead of the DHTML world. This productivity and ubiquity have resulted in an explosive growth on public Internet sites and its emergence in corporate solutions.

Boosting User Adoption and Efficiency: Think "Interactivity"
In the corporate BI space, as with the public Internet, increased user adoption and engagement can be achieved by providing user interfaces that are visually appealing and task-oriented. However, to make an application (or site) truly come alive for a user, the application should also provide for manipulating data, incremental user feedback, and interactive components (e.g., finance.google.com). Such features aren't possible in HTML, while others are possible but not practical based on the number of roundtrips required to update and render the data.

User adoption and efficiency is also increased by task-oriented interfaces, since they let users be much more self-sufficient than traditional applications do while requiring a minimum of training or technical expertise. This is particularly compelling because current implementations of most off-the-shelf business intelligence tools aren't sufficiently usable for most users to be able to leverage their full abilities. However, the failing is primarily on usability (not on technical ability) as most out-of-the-box BI solutions do allow users to customize the data and the views of that data.

Increasing User Participation: More Heads Are Better Than One
Increased user involvement is also an interesting phenomenon of Web 2.0 that may have a significant impact on BI. Web 2.0 applications encourage users to submit metadata to applications. The data that users contribute to applications in the Web 2.0 space, while not verified as accurate, is, nonetheless, providing significant new information to the data spaces that they contribute to. In the BI world, we can leverage this same phenomenon to gather new "intelligence" about the data we're presenting to users. Specifically, we can gather metadata such as:

• Corrections to the information stored in the warehouse or the enterprise data space; generally this appears as explanations for the data. For example, letting a user correct the monthly revenue number to account for product returns.
• Comments on the perceived accuracy of the data.
• Amendments to the information stored by the system. For example, when a sales representative misses their sales quota they can explain why.
• Related links to the information presented. (This can be particularly interesting since it may lead to a Semantic Web environment.)

Users providing feedback to the system can also improve the searching capabilities of the enterprise. For example, when users (or administrators) can provide bibliographic-style information to a system about its sub-components (or the new components they create), future users can search based on these references. This minimizes the burden on the IT department to create these new "views" and increases the intelligence of the overall enterprise.

The storage of this information must be considered part of an overall user metadata solution. Currently, there aren't a lot of off-the-shelf solutions to support this problem (if any), but many of the semantic tools and BI metadata repositories that come with BI packages can be adapted as a solution. The primary goal is to offer a "metadata service" in the enterprise that allows application teams to submit information as well as search for it. The implementation of the metadata repository, while important, can generally be considered an implementation detail.

Faster Time-to-Market: New Rules of the Game
The Web 2.0 world carries as a key tenet the continuous improvement of applications (or the "perpetual beta"). In other words, applications get many incremental updates that have a minimal outage impact on users. BI solutions, in particular, benefit immensely from this kind of model where enhancements are released quickly because the business intelligence of an organization is always changing, either because users come to new conclusions or because the rules of the economic environment change. This is in stark contrast to traditional BI solutions, which are relatively slow to change, requiring IT involvement for even the simplest variations on reporting. Even when BI tools claim to support the users without involving IT, in practice that's rarely the case and new functionality for the BI application must be prioritized in the IT department's regular queue.

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