Blog

One of the most common questions that business owners ask themselves is «How to be competitive and outperform competitors?» A couple of years back the main characteristics for getting a competitive position were price, design and advertising. Now they are not the only ones. Understanding the client, his needs, willingness and ability to pay are the main characteristics that determine a competitive advantage. Data and BI are too important here because they can help to reply to these questions. The 3^rd BI generation release gave a possibility to afford analytics tools to every business user and bring to the light the full data value. The current business intelligence scenario is driven by innovations.

Let’s consider some of them:

1. Technology shift

Let’s come back to 2000’s. The appearing of a big number of users promoted the appearing of a big data amount. Such situation led to the purchase of high-performance desktops with CPU servers that had bigger memory and direct attached storage. The first 2 generations had a data-oriented stack as a design point. Unlike its predecessors, the 3^rd generation is moving towards a network-oriented stack. The first important technology shifts began to emerge during of major vendors IBM and Oracle consolidation. Early BI solutions often were installed on desktops and it was difficult to deploy enterprise software products globally. Over time the Internet became the main design point. In consequence, web-based architecture was developed, and it offered easy installation process and faster deployment options.

2. Data about data

Realizing that analytics is an enterprise-wide function and not limited to desktop, vendors strived to develop well-managed and secure products seeing the enterprise involvement. Products were built around a metadata layer. A metadata repository stores and manages metadata.

Metadata types:

• descriptive – for recourse discovery and identification;
• structural – provides information about data container and describes types, versions and other digital material features;
• administrative – provides technical information (file type, how it was created, who can access it).

3. Storytelling with data

Earlier BI solutions made use tools focusing on reports and dashboards. However, architecture evolvement promoted the functional development of BI solutions. It will not be difficult for a qualified specialist to make evident insights looking at a specific data set. But it’s impossible to say the same about all business participants. Information only in the form of graphs or tables is not always fully understandable for users. For comprehensive understanding of the data meaning, solutions that allow to use the storytelling technique were developed.