Embedded BI Gives Business Users the Inside Track ... - Bitpipe

EDITOR’S NOTE EMBEDDED ANALYTICS PUTS BI DATA IN BUSINESS USERS’ HANDS

EMBEDDED BI A USEFUL TOOL FOR THE RIGHT USERS

DATA SERVICES EXECS PROVIDE TIPS ON MONETIZING DATA

Embedded BI Gives Business Users the Inside Track on AnalyticsData-driven users can get easier access to reports and more control over the analytics process with business intelligence tools embedded in operational applications.

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EDITOR’S NOTE

EMBEDDED ANALYTICS

PUTS BI DATA IN

BUSINESS USERS’

HANDS

EMBEDDED BI

A USEFUL TOOL FOR

THE RIGHT USERS

DATA SERVICES EXECS

PROVIDE TIPS ON

MONETIZING DATA

EMBEDDED BI GIVES BUSINESS USERS THE INSIDE TRACK ON ANALYTICS2

EDITOR’SNOTE

Interior Design, BI-Style

The case for embedding business intel-ligence tools in business applications is pretty clear: Doing so gives executives and other end users access to BI and reporting functional-ity without them necessarily knowing they’re even using it. And enabling users to easily view reports or analyze data can be central to an application’s success. For example, MasterCon-trol Inc. sells enterprise quality management software with an embedded BI tool, and execu-tive vice president Matt Lowe said the analytics component is key to making the information the application generates useful. “As an execu-tive,” he said, “I want to know why the data is important to me.”

Of course, there are other ways to provide BI capabilities without embedding them. And in a report on embedded BI published in Octo-ber 2015, consulting and research firm Dresner Advisory Services said BI vendors are far more likely than IT professionals to view the

technology as critically important. Still, Gart-ner included embedded BI as one of the five primary use cases that vendors have to support to meet its revised definition of a modern BI system—one that’s oriented toward user self-service and software ease of use, as outlined in its 2016 Magic Quadrant report on BI.

This guide explores the potential benefits of embedded BI, reporting and analytics soft-ware as well as its proper place in enterprise architectures. First, we look at embedded BI deployments at MasterControl and two other companies. Next, Howard Dresner, head of the firm that bears his name, discusses suitable uses for embedded BI tools. To close, panelists at an MIT event offer tips on creating products and services that monetize data—a process in which embedded BI can play a significant role. n

Craig StedmanExecutive Editor, SearchBusinessAnalytics

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EDITOR’S NOTE

EMBEDDED ANALYTICS

PUTS BI DATA IN

BUSINESS USERS’

HANDS

EMBEDDED BI

A USEFUL TOOL FOR

THE RIGHT USERS

DATA SERVICES EXECS

PROVIDE TIPS ON

MONETIZING DATA

EMBEDDED BI GIVES BUSINESS USERS THE INSIDE TRACK ON ANALYTICS3

TAKING CONTROL

Embedded Analytics Puts BI Data in Business Users’ Hands

Until mid-2015, Urban Airship Inc. was sitting on a ton of data that wasn’t always being put to good use. Then Neel Banerjee, a product manager at the vendor of mobile app engage-ment software, decided it was time to change that.

Urban Airship’s platform helps application developers and other businesses send notifica-tions and messages to app users to try to keep them engaged. The Portland, Ore., company collects data on user interactions with apps and stores it in a cloud-based Amazon Redshift data warehouse for use in analyzing and rating the performance of different notifications. But Banerjee realized that more could be done with the data. So he worked on developing an embedded reporting tool that gives Urban Air-ship’s customers access to the information.

Marketers at Urban Airship’s customers use a web application to schedule notifications and manage other user-engagement tasks. Now

they can also view reports about the use of their apps and the performance of their mar-keting campaigns in dashboards embedded in the web application. In addition, they can drill down into the interaction data and browse through it on their own to assess what’s per-forming well and why.

Banerjee said his clients have increasingly come to expect those kinds of data analyt-ics capabilities. “These marketing teams are becoming more data-driven, and they’re becoming more sophisticated,” he explained. “What becomes important [to them] is hav-ing user-level data. There was a market need of people who are asking these really specific questions.”

VALUE-ADDED POTENTIAL

Embedded business intelligence (BI) and reporting is a popular option for companies

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EDITOR’S NOTE

EMBEDDED ANALYTICS

PUTS BI DATA IN

BUSINESS USERS’

HANDS

EMBEDDED BI

A USEFUL TOOL FOR

THE RIGHT USERS

DATA SERVICES EXECS

PROVIDE TIPS ON

MONETIZING DATA

EMBEDDED BI GIVES BUSINESS USERS THE INSIDE TRACK ON ANALYTICS4

TAKING CONTROL

like Urban Airship that are looking to increase the value of existing applications by deepen-ing their functionality or make money off of their data by creating new products and ser-vices built around analytics capabilities. Nearly 70% of the 1,524 respondents to a 2016 survey conducted by research firm Dresner Advisory Services said embedded BI was important, very important or critical to their business. That response ranked embedded BI 12th in strategic importance out of 30 analytics technologies that the respondents were asked about, accord-ing to Dresner’s “2016 Wisdom of Crowds Business Intelligence Market Study.”

Banerjee and his team built the customer dashboards using an embedded BI tool from Looker Data Sciences. The dashboards are tailored to specific industries, he said. For example, a dashboard for online retailers shows marketers stats on products that shoppers are browsing, adding to their cart and buying via a mobile app. Another for media organizations shows what type of content is being browsed, read and shared.

For Banerjee, the embedded reporting tool is also a way of staying ahead of the competition

by offering a value-added service to customers. “It was driven by the fact that we thought this was a unique thing,” he said.

MasterControl Inc. is another technology vendor that’s big on embedded BI. For more than a decade, the Salt Lake City company has embedded a homegrown analytics tool into its enterprise quality management software, which automates document management and other processes as part of regulatory compliance and manufacturing quality assurance initiatives. Now it’s working to replace the custom analyt-ics technology with JReport, an embedded BI tool from Jinfonet Software.

Matt Lowe, MasterControl’s executive vice president, said that virtually all of the compa-ny’s 1,000-plus customers use the homegrown tool to analyze corporate-quality trends both internally and at their supply-chain business partners. When MasterControl first developed the analytics tool, commercial BI software “was either super heavy and difficult to use or too lightweight to do what we needed,” Lowe said.

But that’s no longer the case, and he said it’ll be easier for MasterControl’s customers to link JReport to their corporate BI systems

HOME

EDITOR’S NOTE

EMBEDDED ANALYTICS

PUTS BI DATA IN

BUSINESS USERS’

HANDS

EMBEDDED BI

A USEFUL TOOL FOR

THE RIGHT USERS

DATA SERVICES EXECS

PROVIDE TIPS ON

MONETIZING DATA

EMBEDDED BI GIVES BUSINESS USERS THE INSIDE TRACK ON ANALYTICS5

TAKING CONTROL

to support higher-level analytics applications that combine the quality data with information from ERP and customer relationship manage-ment systems. Only about 10% of the custom-ers have such linkages now, according to Lowe, who said the switch to JReport is due to be completed in late 2016 or early 2017.

INSIDE JOB FOR EMBEDDED BI

Embedded analytics applications don’t have to serve external users only. Businesses can also use them to improve internal operations by giving employees access to information when and where they need it.

For example, Clover Health, an insurance company offering Medicare Advantage plans initially in New Jersey, has developed a web application that gives its visiting nurse practi-tioners access to reports on how likely patients

are to develop health complications. That helps them make instant decisions about how to care for patients during home visits, said Otis Anderson, director of analytics at the insurer, which is based in San Francisco.

Clover’s team of data scientists analyzes information from insurance claims, lab results, electronic health records and nurses’ notes using a tool from Mode Analytics, then exports the analytics results to the web application, which the nurse practitioners can access while in the field.

Anderson said the embedded reports take data analysis out of Clover’s boardroom and push it to the operational front lines. The potential business impact of analytics “is not just on high-level, strategic things,” he said. “On the day-to-day things, that’s really where a good data tool can help your organization.”

—Ed Burns and Craig Stedman

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EDITOR’S NOTE

EMBEDDED ANALYTICS

PUTS BI DATA IN

BUSINESS USERS’

HANDS

EMBEDDED BI

A USEFUL TOOL FOR

THE RIGHT USERS

DATA SERVICES EXECS

PROVIDE TIPS ON

MONETIZING DATA

EMBEDDED BI GIVES BUSINESS USERS THE INSIDE TRACK ON ANALYTICS6

FINDING A HOME

Embedded BI a Useful Tool for the Right Users

Embedded business intelligence soft-ware lets companies build BI functionality into other types of applications so end users can access reports and analyze data without hav-ing to open up a separate tool. In a Q&A with SearchBusinessAnalytics, Howard Dresner, founder and chief research officer at Dresner Advisory Services, discussed the current sta-tus and future potential of embedded BI tools, based partly on the results of his company’s “2016 Wisdom of Crowds Business Intelligence Market Study,” which canvassed more than 1,500 IT, BI and business professionals on their BI and analytics priorities. Excerpts from the interview follow.

In your 2016 survey, embedded BI was in the middle of the pack on strategic BI and analytics technologies. Where do you think it stands as a technology among users?It’s definitely in the top half of priorities

[among the survey respondents], but it isn’t a barn burner. We aren’t talking about dash-boards or predictive analytics or reporting. I know some vendors are really pushing it, and for certain use cases it makes sense. If you want to serve up [BI data] externally—to part-ners or suppliers or the public at large—it’s a safe way of doing it because you can control access to the data and sync it up with an appli-cation. That’s a valuable thing to be able to do.

Is it primarily a technology for independent software vendors (ISVs), or is there potential value for user organizations, too?It’s predominantly ISV-focused, but sure, there’s interest within enterprise IT. Any orga-nization could benefit if, say, they have a cus-tomer portal or a supplier portal and want to serve up data [through it].

There’s a lot of talk about data monetization

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BUSINESS USERS’

HANDS

EMBEDDED BI

A USEFUL TOOL FOR

THE RIGHT USERS

DATA SERVICES EXECS

PROVIDE TIPS ON

MONETIZING DATA

EMBEDDED BI GIVES BUSINESS USERS THE INSIDE TRACK ON ANALYTICS7

FINDING A HOME

and data products—for example, making money off of your data by packaging it into analytics services. Do you see that as a real trend? And if so, could it give a boost to adoption and use of embedded BI tools?A lot of vendors are talking about everyone using embedded BI to monetize their data, and some companies will, some won’t. You can’t paint everything with a broad brush—not everyone’s data fits the model. And even if you rewind 20 or 30 years, the syndicated data business has always existed. Arguably, there are many more of those companies today, and there are a lot of reasons to use embedded BI to surface the [data]. But it’s not mandatory. You could do that with a mobile application, too. Embedded BI is just one [option], and it really depends on the targeted audience.

In user organizations, are IT or BI teams typically involved in buying decisions on embedded BI technology? Or are those decisions usually business-driven?In many cases, it’s driven by the front office and delivered by the back office. For other types of BI applications—data discovery

deployments, for example—it may not be as necessary for business units to involve IT. But with embedded BI, they usually don’t have the wherewithal to do the required integration work themselves. That can be a good thing for IT—it gives them a hand in the game.

But does it create potential conflicts inside organizations if IT or BI managers do need to get involved in deploying and managing soft-ware that they weren’t involved in selecting?Will there be complexities? Yeah. There’s always conflict there because of differing pri-orities. It’s one of those things where you really have to build the relationships—sitting down and negotiating, and helping the users to understand some of the challenges of what they’re trying to accomplish. Driving that kind of alignment is very hard, but it’s necessary.

A report on embedded BI that you released in late 2015 said BI vendors are far more likely to consider embedded BI to be a critical technology than users are. Do vendors think there’s more of a market for the technology than there really is?Many of those guys are focused on ISVs, so

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EDITOR’S NOTE

EMBEDDED ANALYTICS

PUTS BI DATA IN

BUSINESS USERS’

HANDS

EMBEDDED BI

A USEFUL TOOL FOR

THE RIGHT USERS

DATA SERVICES EXECS

PROVIDE TIPS ON

MONETIZING DATA

EMBEDDED BI GIVES BUSINESS USERS THE INSIDE TRACK ON ANALYTICS8

FINDING A HOME

embedded BI is a natural market for them. And if we only surveyed ISVs [as users], it would be a higher priority. The vendors are perfectly aligned with what ISVs are looking for. For user organizations, it’s a more nascent thing, and in many cases they have bigger BI fish to fry. But if you can put BI data in front of more people, that’s a good thing. And if you can have more people consuming BI data without knowing

they’re consuming BI data, that’s a good thing.Will embedded BI achieve the heights that

some of the vendor community would like to convince us we’ll see? Probably not. But I think it still has some legs. My advice is to make sure you think about the use case first, though. Oth-erwise, you might get a different reaction [from end users] than what you expect.

—Craig Stedman

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EDITOR’S NOTE

EMBEDDED ANALYTICS

PUTS BI DATA IN

BUSINESS USERS’

HANDS

EMBEDDED BI

A USEFUL TOOL FOR

THE RIGHT USERS

DATA SERVICES EXECS

PROVIDE TIPS ON

MONETIZING DATA

EMBEDDED BI GIVES BUSINESS USERS THE INSIDE TRACK ON ANALYTICS9

PLANTING SEEDS

Data Services Execs Provide Tips on Monetizing Data

Growing interest in the value of data is leading more organizations to consider going into the data business. But they will have to make special preparations for the new under-taking, according to panelists who discussed the matter at the 2016 MIT Sloan CIO Sympo-sium in Cambridge, Mass.

Those about to make the jump into so-called data wrapping—which, in this sense, is a phe-nomenon that sees companies reselling data and analytics that enrich their core products and services—should first look at the practices of veteran data services companies, according to Barbara Wixom, an MIT researcher who led the panel discussion.

“Things are changing in this digital world. We’re starting to look at data as a part of our products,” said Wixom, a principal research scientist at the MIT Sloan School of Man-agement’s Center for Information Systems Research. As that happens more broadly and

businesses increasingly adopt data monetiza-tion strategies, it’s worthwhile, she added, to “learn from the companies that are really good at doing what we need to do.”

New players may find that wrapping data around existing products for delivery to cus-tomers is no easy task. Panelists representing the world of data services said that going the product route requires top in-house data man-agement skills. New types of sales skills often are needed, too. Also necessary is an under-standing of the various levels at which custom-ers will want to work with data.

START WITH A DATA MODEL

“The first thing is to model your data to make it consistent. At the same time, you have to think about the abstraction level at which you will deliver the data,” said James Powell, a panel participant and CTO at ratings agency and

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EDITOR’S NOTE

EMBEDDED ANALYTICS

PUTS BI DATA IN

BUSINESS USERS’

HANDS

EMBEDDED BI

A USEFUL TOOL FOR

THE RIGHT USERS

DATA SERVICES EXECS

PROVIDE TIPS ON

MONETIZING DATA

EMBEDDED BI GIVES BUSINESS USERS THE INSIDE TRACK ON ANALYTICS10

PLANTING SEEDS

marketing research firm Nielsen Company in New York.

For some, he noted, modeling data for use by people outside the organization may require a different mindset. What might have been clear enough to use internally needs to be made even more clear when others start to use it, he said. For Powell, creating an adequate struc-ture around unstructured data is part of that process.

“We do a lot of careful modeling because we have a lot of specific needs,” he explained. “If you don’t structure the data, it becomes too hard to analyze effectively.”

Powell suggested that would-be data wrappers will find their new data offerings becoming embedded in the structure of the businesses to which they sell. That can be a problem if the data service isn’t flexibly designed with APIs that can reflect the dif-ferent levels at which customers want to work with the data as well as the changes that have to be made as tools are updated.

It’s possible to design data products “for the lowest common denominator” to cover a broad set of uses, Powell said, but that can diminish

the value of the product for niche data busi-nesses. “How you design that API can radically change the ease of use of the data,” Powell said after the panel discussion concluded.

SKILLS ARE US—OR NEED TO BE

Overall company skills may need to be upgraded when making the leap to being a data business—and the pressure to gain such skills is on in many organizations, as seen by MIT’s Wixom. “Talent is the elephant in the room,” she said. “We all know there is a data-skills shortage out there.”

Panelist Mona Vernon concurred. Vernon, a vice president at the Thomson Reuters Labs unit of New York-based media and informa-tion services company Thomson Reuters, said the situation calls for ingenuity in hiring and organizing teams. “A lot of the time, data man-agement is the hardest part of analytics,” she said, “You don’t want to hire an experienced machine learning hand and have them spend six months trying to chase someone that can get a database. So you have to think about skills creatively.”

HOME

EDITOR’S NOTE

EMBEDDED ANALYTICS

PUTS BI DATA IN

BUSINESS USERS’

HANDS

EMBEDDED BI

A USEFUL TOOL FOR

THE RIGHT USERS

DATA SERVICES EXECS

PROVIDE TIPS ON

MONETIZING DATA

EMBEDDED BI GIVES BUSINESS USERS THE INSIDE TRACK ON ANALYTICS11

PLANTING SEEDS

When going beyond basic data wrapping to selling algorithmic analytics tools, additional attention is required, she said. That’s because the analytics algorithm being sold becomes a part of customer processes, and the buyer and seller need to know the associated business risks. “The competency you need is to be data-literate in the product marketing and manage-ment,” Vernon explained. “You have to know the implications, even legal implications, of the algorithm for users.”

DATA AT YOUR SERVICE

Newbies to the data business will find prepara-tion is generally required to succeed at selling new data and analytics packages, according to Ivan Matviak, an executive vice president at State Street Corp. The Boston-based banking company has expanded its original securities finance and investment management services to include a data-as-a-service platform, risk

and trading analytics services and other new offerings.

Matviak said some of the new data ser-vices had previously been offered in different forms as part of financial services bundles, so enhancing and unbundling them was challeng-ing, especially for the sales team. “We underes-timated how difficult it would be to sell these products,” Matviak said. “Costs were different. The salespeople we had didn’t have experience with that, so we had to make an honest effort to build that up.”

Clearly, many steps are required to turn the dream of new data revenue into reality. Com-panies that join the data-business fray may expect more competition, too. In late 2014, forecaster IDC estimated 70% of large orga-nizations had already purchased external data, and 100% will do so by 2019. In this light, IDC expects more organizations will begin to sell data or offer value-added content also aimed at monetizing data. —Jack Vaughan

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EDITOR’S NOTE

EMBEDDED ANALYTICS

PUTS BI DATA IN

BUSINESS USERS’

HANDS

EMBEDDED BI

A USEFUL TOOL FOR

THE RIGHT USERS

DATA SERVICES EXECS

PROVIDE TIPS ON

MONETIZING DATA

EMBEDDED BI GIVES BUSINESS USERS THE INSIDE TRACK ON ANALYTICS12

ABOUT THE

AUTHORS

ED BURNS covers business intelligence, analytics and data visualization technologies and topics for Search-BusinessAnalytics. Before joining the site, he wrote for SearchHealthIT, covering federal electronic health record policy, health information exchanges and emerg-ing health IT-related business practices. Email him at [email protected] and follow him on Twitter: @EdBurnsTT.

CRAIG STEDMAN is executive editor of SearchBusiness-Analytics and SearchDataManagement. He has been an IT journalist for 30 years and was an editor and reporter at Computerworld before joining TechTarget in 2009. Email him at [email protected] and follow him on Twitter: @craigstedman.

JACK VAUGHAN is senior news writer for SearchData-Management. Previously, he was editor in chief for SearchSOA. Before joining TechTarget in 2004, he was editor at large at Application Development Trends and ADTmag.com. Email him at [email protected] and follow him on Twitter: @JackVaughanatTT.

Embedded BI Gives Business Users the Inside Track on Analytics is a SearchBusinessAnalytics.com e-publication.

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