Mashups can offer a way to better exploit existing technology investments, lower the cost of enterprise business intelligence, unclog the bottlenecks in BI, and put it into the hands of the masses, as FSN contributing editor Lesley Meall discovers.
You only find out who is swimming naked when the tide goes out, as Warren Buffet has famously observed, and recent economic conditions have repeatedly highlighted. So as the consequences of getting caught skinny-dipping become progressively more severe, governments are opting for austerity measures and businesses are looking for ways to do more with less, and technology is high on the list of both enablers and targets.
After years of information technology (IT) investment that promised to save money or increase revenue, and often did neither, organisations now need to extract the maximum advantage from their existing information systems, and the data at their disposal. They are looking for new routes to enhanced insights and improved decision-making, and they want to access them as quickly as possible, and with the fastest possible return on investment. For some, the answer is the enterprise business intelligence (BI) mashup.
“Tight budgets bring out the resourcefulness in us all,” commented James Kobielus, an analyst with Forrester Research. To shorten the lengthening queues of requests for help with reports, dashboards, cubes, and other analytic applications and data structures, decision-makers are being given self-service mashup tools. “They let workers handle some BI development tasks themselves, from within their browsers, Excel spreadsheets, and other client applications,” explained Kobielus in Mighty Mashups: Do-It-Yourself BI for the New Economy.
“The traditional approach to self-service BI requires users to collect and analyse data by running SQL queries and importing data onto spreadsheets on their desktop for manual manipulation and analysis,” said Kobielus, but this is no longer necessary. The US Defence Intelligence Agency used a BI mashup to provide real time analysis of disparate intelligence sources through an “asset dashboard”, and Pfizer, the pharmaceutical giant, has used one to meet the forecasting, planning, modelling and ad-hoc query needs of its decision-making pharmaceutical sciences product executives.
“Enterprises have begun to adopt self service BI to cut costs, unclog the analytics development backlog, and improve the velocity of practical insights,” said Kobelius, and as well as pulling data from internal sources, such as data warehouses and transactional applications, they are integrating external data sources. Mortgage brokers at Caixa Galicia have access to a data mashup that mixes customer mortgage records (internal) with regional housing prices and market conditions (external), and uses Google Maps to produce personalised presentations of available properties.
BI mashups can be part of what Forrester describes as “the information workers decision support Nirvana”, because they can offer solutions to many of the problems of traditional BI. As well as eliminating bottlenecks and minimising cost, their self-service approach can help to shorten the time required to answer business questions, and facilitate access to that all-important single version of the truth, as well as providing a unified access to a single view (of data and its presentation) from myriad structured and unstructured, internal and external sources, all of which you can read more about in the Forrester DIY BI report (which you can read for free courtesy of the data visualisation expert Corda).
Not that Forrester is the only analyst firm singing the praises of the mashup. In 2009 Gartner predicted that by 2012 one-third of analytic applications applied to business processes would be delivered through mashups. “Organisations who want to link analytics with business processes should use coarse-grained mashups of existing operational and analytical applications,” suggested Kurt Schlegel, Gartner VP, rather than use portals to view these side by side, because as he added: “Coarse-grained mashups overlay analytical insights, such as queries, scores, calculations, metrics and graphs, onto the graphical user interface of the operational application.”
But as is often the case with an emerging technology, for many organisations, the notion of any kind of enterprise mashup prompts more questions than answers. “There is a market awareness issue,” said Richard Absalom, a technology analyst with Business Insights. His research for the 2009 report The Future of Enterprise Mashups provided information on the evolving mashup marketplace and its most innovative players, and revealed a disparity (among CIOs) between those using and appreciating the possibilities of mashups, and those who didn’t use them and had very little idea what they were missing.
“The overall picture was of mashups as something experimental,” the analyst recently told FSN. So although many of us may be personally familiar with the results of mashups that use Google APIs (applications programming interfaces) and Salesforce APIs, even CIOs (who one might reasonably expect to be reasonably tech-savvy) seem unable, or unwilling, to make the leap of faith in an enterprise environment. “A lot of companies want to see how mashups will benefit the bottom line before they make any commitment”’ said Absalom.
Some of the CIOs involved in Business Insights’ research seemed to have very little idea what mashup is – let alone a BI mashup. “I think you can put this down to education,” suggested Absalom, and although his research found that those already using mashups intend to continue or increase their use, these organisations seemed to be self-selecting. “Most of the companies already using mashups are themselves technology companies,” he said, “and they tend to be large, or at least those with very large amounts of data to play with.”
But this lack of awareness could soon be a thing of the past; the use of mashups, and decision makers’ ability to gain ‘self-service’ access to them, could both be about to go through the roof – not least because of the influence of Microsoft. As FSN has already detailed, the May arrival of Microsoft’s data analysis add-in, PowerPivot for Excel 2010 (which will be free with MS Office 2010 and can be downloaded for trial), could potentially take BI out of the hands of IT and put (spreadsheet-based) mashups into the hands of anybody with the will to use them.
Excel 2010 will feature an in-memory engine that can handle up to a hundred million rows of data (as long as you’ve got the RAM); along with PowerPivot thiswill enable users to pull in vast amounts of data, from separate worksheets, and mash all of this together, without the need to re-define models or structures (and in many cases, without involving the IT department); and if required, the results can then be shared with others via MS SharePoint.
“This is going to change the way businesses make their business decisions,” said Donald Farmer, principal program manager for the Microsoft team actioned with “doing for BI analysis what Microsoft’s PowerPoint program did for presentations,” by making them a DIY business staple. Only time will tell, whether or not Microsoft has succeeded. But the ubiquity of MS Excel and the potential of PowerPivot could well carry both BI and enterprise mashups into the mainstream. As Absalom observed: “Everything changes when a big player gets involved.”
