Business Intelligence: IBM and Tableau - Research Paper Example

Business Intelligence al Affiliation Introduction Business intelligence (BI) refers to the organizational competence to blend in data from the across the business and transform it into knowledge. This accumulated knowledge is then used to develop fresh opportunities towards the attainment of a competitive advantage. The implementation of BI platforms enables enterprises to develop BI applications through the provision of capabilities categorized as online analytical processing (OLAP); platform integration such as BI metadata development and management environment; and information delivery. This paper compares and contrasts IBM and Tableau business intelligence software while evaluating how large companies handle BI implementation; the role of BI in competitive advantage and organizational strategy; organizational management of change during new information system implementation; and a summary of a case study of a company that implemented BI Solution. Implementations Of Business Intelligence Within Large Organizations Large enterprises using Cognos gain from using elements such as reports, analysis, scorecards, and dashboards for monitoring the performance of their businesses, analyzing trends, and measuring results. This way, businesses have the capability and information needed to make better decisions and approach their services with a service-oriented architecture that has both ease of management and deployment. Other benefits of Cognos business intelligence are mobile BI, collaborative BI, and real time monitoring. In terms of trend analysis and results measurement using Cognos BI, large businesses benefit from the software’s capability to be used with relational and multidimensional data sources from different vendors. For instance, Cognos BI products can integrate with NCR Teradata, Oracle, Microsoft, and SAP, to present web-based service oriented architecture (SOA). Though IBM Cognos is designed for large companies, Cognos Express is meant for mid-sized companies to allow companies to take advantage of features such as budgeting, forecasting, and planning functions. Furthermore, Cognos 10, integrates with Lotus Connect and SPSS predictive analysis, and mobile capability that allows users to access to full version of Cognos from their smartphones and tablets (Lodestar, 2013). However, IBM Cognos is known for very slow performance in preparing active reports with large datasets and one is required to only use small data sets, and apply query filters to return only the values of interest. Secondly, Cognos BI does not drill through functionality when applied in active reports viewed off line. Thirdly, active reports do not open in web browser and one must check the internet security settings to add the website as one of the trusted sites. For large organizations using Tableau Server the major benefit is a broad range of interactive visualization tools that assist businesses to analyze huge quantities of data quickly, intuitively, and in a user friendly way. In addition, Tableau is known for its mobile capability through mobile business intelligence that is portable in Android, Mobile website, and iOS. These features make Tableau that is applicable in education, nonprofit, manufacturing and engineering, information technology, internet and communications and banking and financial fields (Software Insider, 2015). Tableau business intelligence software is more flexible compared to other old-school solutions, since Tableau Desktop permits the creation of interactive dashboards and reports that are then published in the Tableau server for secure access on one’s desktop with the iPad or on the web. Furthermore, Tableau has the capability to recognize a data blend, thus appealing to the users in the conceptual sense. However, Tableau advises its clients against using custom SQL given associated performance reasons (Godkov, 2012). For instance, some SQL functions are not translated correctly into Tableau’s Native SQL especially when connecting to Teradata. Role Of Business Intelligence In Competitive Advantage And Organizational Strategy In any business environment, there are winners and losers. The winners are those who are market-responsive and remain focused in both tough and good times given that they operate under a few key strategic objectives and executions. For such businesses, financial, customer, and operational and risk management initiatives are all aligned with the business strategy and value creation. For large organizations, utilizing balanced scorecards and business intelligence tools creates performance measures that offer historical perspective. The benefits of aligning business strategy and value creation revolve around improving the understanding of customer perspectives and preferences; the profitability of relationship, customer, and product; and ultimate implication on firm performance and strategy. Furthermore, BI permits modelling the effect of changes in the market, regulatory needs, and competitor responses. IBM Cognos BI provides busies decision makers with detailed and accurate information for efficient decision making, and appropriate tools for effective data analysis. Through this capacity to make informed decisions, organizations manage to remain ahead of competition for basing their decisions on up-to-date and accurate information (Consentino, 2012). BI is also considered an extension of organizational strategy activities since it is dictated by the information from which it is derived. Conversely, Tableau is known for its stunning ability to produce interactive data visualizations obtained from processing big data effortlessly. As a result, Tableau facilitates timely and informed decision making given its speed to market. Like IBM, Cognos, Tableau offers visually appealing dashboards. Handling Change Management In businesses, the constantly changing market prompts organizations to change to remain competitive and to uniquely satisfy the needs and preferences of their customers. As companies seek to adapt to their changing environment, individuals, teams, and organizations are transitioned into desired future states. Again, the introduction of projects to adapt to the changing business market cause organizations to transition and take up innovation as a differentiation and competitive strategy. One characteristic of change is that it is inevitable no matter the type of organization or industry and it is a crucial characteristic that a company has the ability to win the consent of their employees on the change. The best way to manage change is recognizing its scope within the organization, establishing necessary adjustments for company needs, employees’ training, and attaining the employees’ support. Furthermore, change management is more successful upon the inclusion of effective communication informing stakeholders of the reasons behind the change; managing change resistance; effective training, education, and skills advancement; delivery of individual counseling; and monitoring implementation and fine-tuning. While using Tableau BI, organizations gain from self-service analytics while agile deployment model allows real-time iterations that prefer people over tools and processes, collaboration over requirements collection, and real time work. While managing change, IBM Cognos facilitates domain experts and technical business users to collaborate, maintain, and govern the definition of dimensions and hierarchies that are used and reused for managing performance and BI. IBM Cognos also empowers Summary Case Study: Scandavian Airlines Today, scandavian Airline uses a Business Intelligence solution for application modernization using Micro Focus Studio and Micro Focus Server. Using BI at SAS improves customer satisfaction, time to market, increases profits per customer, and contributes to cost reduction. These benefits are caused by the presence of data warehousing, higher speeds of customizing reports, and the fact that the solution offers low risk approaches to modernization of applications. With the new solution, SAS enjoys the benefits of data warehouse implementation on Windows within SQL Server and improved accessibility, effectiveness, and relevance of data for analysts, internal users, management and partners as well as customers (Scandavian Airlines, 2014). Data warehousing with SQL server reduces time and annual costs as batches that took six hours to complete now only require two. Additionally, the company re-used its existing data warehousing applications in a windows platform to come up with a much faster new system compared to where the data warehousing would have been re-written (Scandavian Airlines, 2014). Today, SAS prides itself in getting the right information to the right users and teams at the required time. This involves implementing easy self-service BI capabilities, and deployment of real-time analytics straight to Microsoft applications and mobile devices. References Consentino, T. (2012). Tableau Thrives in Providing Visual Discovery for Business Analytics. Retrieved March 2nd, 2015, from http://www.ventanaresearch.com/blog/commentblog.aspx?id=3521 Godkov, D. (2012). Impressions from Tableau in comparison with QlikView . Retrieved March 1, 2015, from http://bi-review.blogspot.com/2012/11/impressions-from-tableau-in-comparison.html Lodestar. (2013). IBM Cognos Active Reports Known Issues. Retrieved March 1, 2015, from http://lodestarsolutions.com/lodestar/?p=737 Scandavian Airlines. (2014). Business Intelligence & Analytics. Retrieved March 2, 2015, from http://www.sas.com/en_us/home.html Software Insider. (2015). View all photos. Retrieved March 1, 2015, from http://business-intelligence.softwareinsider.com/l/190/Tableau Read More