Information that doesn’t fall into the right person’s hands at the
right time is money left on the table. We’ve written at length about integration
across the computing environment enterprise-wide, and how important it
is – indeed, how it constitutes one of the IT grails at present. At the
infrastructure level, integration supplies the free flow of data
enterprise-wide. This is only the beginning however: at the user level,
canny use of data is still required to turn it into information, and
perhaps even wisdom.
A situation arose at Dovetail just
the other day that illustrates how business runs on the ad hoc query,
or so it often is at the decision gate. A Dovetail Software customer
was debating whether to renew its annual maintenance contract with us.
Fortunately we use our own software here, Dovetail CRM.
We were able to run an ad hoc query from our support client that pulled
up a year’s worth of support tickets and cases opened for our customer.
With
a custom query on the fly, we were also able to retrieve ranking across
the customer base for custom and support work, which showed the
customer as one of the heavier users. Running the year’s data through
another ad hoc query (simply using pull-down menus and form fields by
the way), we totaled the equivalent one-off support call costs. Bottom
line to the customer was: on this activity, save a lot of money by
renewing the maintenance agreement. Top line to Dovetail was: add one
new contract because of information retrieved in the moment.
In
discussions that tend to happen between executives and principals, in
fact between agents and customers at all levels of the company, the
need for summary in real time is acute. Rather than plow through
reports and tabular data, you want one pinpoint question answered.
Because in any contest for business questions, the number one ad hoc
query is really: “is that money on the table?”
ITtoolbox,
one of our favorite forums, has a useful background piece on the way
that business data is structured in the database, and the way that the
business is modeled for reporting. One of the comments points out that
dimensional modeling dominates business reporting because it derived
from the inspiration of business reporting.
“All of the non-numeric information about a customer
can be found in one place, the customer dimension table [...] Fact
tables are records of business occurrences and transaction [...]
Between the two major types of tables, dimensions and facts, almost all
the relevant information for a business can be instinctively and
efficiently accessed and summarized by adhoc queries and business
reports.” Why Dimensional Modeling Dominates in Business Reporting
Software and systems are growing in power
and interoperability, and data is flooding through the enterprise as
never before. How to understand it all, is a big question.
“Combining data mining, statistical and numerical
analysis and data visualization, the use of business intelligence
applications is, as a result, spreading fast. What is differentiating
competitors in the field is the BI application’s ability to perform
compound, ad hoc queries on large data sets on the fly and graphically
display and distribute results in an intuitive, easily comprehensible
format [...] ‘Most business problems are inherently multidimensional,
and how those dimensions are displayed makes all the difference’” Putting the Business Intelligence Puzzle Together
