Vitally critical information can be literally "hidden in plain sight." This fact is cleverly illustrated in Edgar Allan Poe's classic detective story The Purloined Letter, in which a corrupt government official has hidden a stolen document in his apartment. The police can't find the letter despite tearing the place apart. Poe's detective Dupin shocks the police by easily finding the letter, hidden in plain sight on a desk alongside other innocuous papers. Dupin realized, just as the sly government official had, that the police would look for the letter only in places where they themselves might hide it and would overlook the letter sitting right under their noses!
The critical task of providing actionable enterprise data often falls victim to the same limited thinking displayed by the police in Poe's story, particularly when such mistaken logic is applied to laudable but misguided efforts to implement pervasive BI across an organization. Many IT professionals mistakenly believe the only way to get enterprise BI into the hands of those who need it is to implement BI tools, typically with still-complicated interfaces, as well as create and maintain the data management systems necessary to support BI.
Fortunately, there is a much more pragmatic approach to achieving the aim of pervasive BI: getting the right information to the right people at the right time. This article will introduce report mining, an enterprise solution that delivers on the promise of pervasive BI and is based on an understanding of how people really work, not how IT professionals think people should work.
Pitfalls of Conventional Pervasive BI Solutions
Some would argue that pervasive BI represents the wave of the future where high-level executives are fully supported in their business decision-making by all members in an organization. By connecting to the appropriate database with sophisticated data visualization tools, information is available to anyone looking to analyze it. But the question remains, does everyone need to analyze this information? In reality, pervasive BI can turn out to be more trouble and extra work with no incremental company benefit.
Giving all levels of users this type of universal access is an inefficient approach because of the multitude of challenges associated with using data warehouses or transactional databases as the source for pervasive BI. These challenges range from the scalability and security issues of potentially hundreds, if not thousands, of users banging against such data sources to the likely end-user missteps that may impact performance. Organizations also need to consider the extensive IT support necessary to train end users in the use of BI tools. Additionally, a database-centric approach may hamper a company’s ability to share analyzable information with people outside the immediate enterprise, such as employees in distributed offices, customers, vendors or partners.
While allowing end users to access information by their own accord is acceptable in some instances, there frequently are other situations where the need for BI does not warrant the time nor the effort required to extract information out of a transactional database or data warehouse.
Microsoft Excel: The True Pervasive BI Tool
There are, at best, a few million copies of BI tools licensed worldwide, yet more than a third of these seats are shelfware.1 In contrast, there are more than 200 million licensed copies of Microsoft Excel in active, constant use on a daily basis.
Excel is the epitome of pervasive BI, providing what virtually all knowledge workers really want: information in a format they can immediately understand and use with confidence. For years, BI vendors have been swimming against the current by offering BI tools that enterprises "should" use instead of Excel; solutions intended to be superior or sufficiently “Excel-like” to replace Excel in the organization. However, these efforts are often in vain. As Forrester Research recently observed, "spreadsheets are a permanent fixture in enterprises because no other analytical application outperforms them in flexibility, ease of use and ubiquity."2
