BI Product Information
This is a table of contents of useful product information about, and benefits of, MetaDash's business intelligence software for dashboards, reporting, and analytics:
Ad Hoc BI for Self-Service Reporting - Style Intelligence, MetaDash's flagship BI product, is a complete business intelligence suite, with a heavy focus on end-user self-service. A large number of application software systems utilize 'production reporting.' These programs are bound by their limited access to a database through pre-programmed menus. Style Intelligence, on the other hand, allows you to create specific, customized queries without in-depth IT knowledge. With this level of self-service, you can answer very targeted business questions that production report developers may not have even considered. Ad Hoc analysis can be used to create new reports or drill deeper into created reports for additional detail...
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Click this screenshot to view a three-minute demo and get an overview of what MetaDash’s BI dashboard reporting software, Style Intelligence, can do and how easy it is to use. |
Advice for the Process of Defining KPIs - What is some advice for the process of defining KPIs? When you are getting down to the departmental level, the metrics become very specific. And sometimes they need help figuring out what are those metrics. Some industries like government, education, and healthcare share this kind of information, what the standard metrics they are using, because they’re not in hyper-competitive marketplaces. It’s a little more challenging for other businesses such as in financial services. Sometimes a key metric can be a secret way for tracking the performance of their business or their marketing campaigns, so they’re reluctant to share that knowledge or methodology...
Adding Business Intelligence on Top of IT Systems - Something that our own IT department does is use business intelligence on top of our systems center. Our systems center Operations Manager uses it to manage the health of our IT infrastructure and to monitor it. So what we have heard a lot of is that IT pros want more and more robust solutions to be able to analyze the data...
Advantages of Mobile BI - So I will spend a couple of minutes talking about making the case for mobile BI and some of the advantages that we see according to people who use mobile Business Intelligence. We are then going to take some time to look at some of the best practices that we see that enable people to find to derive the most value from the investments in mobile BI. We will also talk a little bit about the devices and platforms we see people using and also we will finish up talking about the future capabilities...
Agile BI, not Automatic BI - Forrester's Boris Evelson wrote a very good piece on agile BI, something we've been championing for the past 3 years in our "Easy, Agile, Robust" tagline. The rest of the paper goes on to discuss “metadata-generated BI” which is “one such example of a new technology supporting Agile BI”. These metadata-generated BI applications essentially do the same work a traditional BI environment requires (building a data warehouse), but much of it is automated. By automating the initial data work, yes, a lot of time and effort must be saved, but the problem is: you may not get what you want...
Agile BI Info - MetaDash's agile business intelligence software provides end-users with data mashups and interactive visualizations in its Web-based BI platform. MetaDash's agile business intelligence provides maximum self-service, flexible adaptation and data mashups...
Agile BI Software - MetaDash offers agile BI software for your company's self-service reporting needs. The single Web-based application provides a streamlined, intuitive interface for all users, business executives and database analysts...
Agile Business Intelligence - The direct data access models built with MetaDash's patent-pending Data Block technology, as well as the dashboards and reports are all self-service enabled. This accommodates both formal and experimental changes to a level that is unique in the BI space...
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Click this screenshot to view a three-minute demo and get an overview of what MetaDash’s BI dashboard reporting software, Style Intelligence, can do and how easy it is to use. |
Agile Business Intelligence Solution Centers - Just last week actually as we were researching this we found a new term Agile Business Intelligence Solution Centers. They are more than just competency centers, which cross over between the technical side and the end users side. The best practices for enterprise software development in terms of support don’t work for business intelligence. The unique BI requirements include less reliance on the traditional software development cycle and project planning and more emphasis on reacting to the constant change of business requirements. So this is different than other enterprise systems or a resource scheduling system. This is something that is more dynamic and requires more end user input to define and work correctly. Earlier generation BI support organizations are less effective because they often put IT in charge and remain IT centric. That means they continue to be mostly project based and focus too much on functional reporting but ignore the data. And as we look at the market, our view is that you need to enable more collaboration with end users and IT. They need to be working much more together than in the past...
Agile Executive Dashboard Software - Looking to create an agile executive dashboard for top management? MetaDash's agile BI solution not only allows for the
creation of visually appealing and communicative dashboards...
Aligning Business Intelligence Strategy with Business Strategy - When we started this Webinar we talked a little bit about BI in general what you can get from it and why a BI strategy is really critical and important. You probably all have seen data like what you see on the slide here today. Clearly, companies who take a more data-driven, fact-driven approach to how they run their company, their organization, they do perform better compared to the competition. And this is certainly why BI is essential. It lets you understand what’s going on and also see the impact and the outcome of decisions in business strategies that you are implementing. So if you take a more data-driven, fact-based, less gut-feel based approach to running your company, definitely, you can expect a competitive differentiation...
An Alternative to Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services - Looking for an Alternative to Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services? Consider MetaDash's Style Intelligence for your BI needs. MetaDash's versatile mashup engine...
An Alternative to SAS Business Intelligence - The MetaDash promise of easy, agile, and robust business intelligence is now backed up by a professional analysis.
To create its comparison of MetaDash Style Intelligence and SAS Business Intelligence, analyst firm G2 Crowd compiled reviews and ratings done by independent users of the two BI vendors, comparing the BI tools in the areas of reporting and building reports, self-service, advanced analytics, and the strength of the overall platform...
Applying Business Intelligence to Manufacturing - What I want to specifically talk about today is how do you get competitive advantage and what are we seeing in terms of companies trying to get competitive advantage using business intelligence. Manufacturers as much as ever are seeking that competitive advantage right now in an age of uncertainty. More specifically that I want to talk to you about research that we’ve found over the last several years. This research report is based on manufacturers worldwide. It surveys them on what they are worried about, what they are doing, how they are trying to succeed and its really interesting when you start taking a look at some of the trends and where people had been spending money over the last year or two and where they seem to be spending money now and where they think that advantage lies. That’s what I want to share with you today is a little bit from that research. Now, if we go to the next slide please. We know that manufacturers are under pressure around the world. It is not just in one market. It is worth remembering even as uncertain as we feel now that it wasn’t too long ago, probably two years ago, that we would be talking to manufacturers whether they are in the United States or in other markets. Depending on the industry, it was not unusual to see people with revenues that had fallen year and year by 30%, 40%, 50%...
Automated Reporting Tools - Gathering and analyzing data by hand can become a daunting and ineffective approach in creating reports for your organization. What's more frustrating is doing all the work to get results that doesn't satisfy your needs. Traditional BI methods, although useful, can sometimes feel outdated and slow. In some cases, it can have adverse effects on your organizational goals. At MetaDash, we've transcended those conventional methods with our innovative automated reporting tool, Style Report...
Autonomous Business Intelligence Teams - I think you are going to find that some of your business intelligence teams are almost completely autonomous. They’ve got really good skill sets, they know how to integrate and analyze and report data and they kind of want to run on their own. Other decentralized teams you may have are going to need you to hold them by the hand and sort of walk them through everything. So see what kind of hand you have been dealt and draw this picture of your organization. I think the great first place to start is with crafting your strategy and then think about some of those ideas I talked about before about what is right for your organization. Do we want the divide and conquer, where we just say, okay, for these subject areas, the central team is going to have control on governance, and we’ll just divide up all of the remaining subject areas by these different departments. Maybe that is the right approach for you guys or maybe the franchise model is, where we come up with a very globally consistent way that we integrate, report and analyze data and we just open up lot of franchises in these departments. Or maybe it's the bottoms-up approach where you basically say, you know what, in these departments, you guys can do whatever you want...
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Click this screenshot to view a three-minute demo and get an overview of what MetaDash’s BI dashboard reporting software, Style Intelligence, can do and how easy it is to use. |
Best Business Intelligence - Don't want to be saddled with a massive BI software deployment that hogs resources and demands a major hardware investment? Don't want to have to figure out which BI application in the solution is the right one to use for particular dashboard, report, or analysis...
Best BI Mashup - MetaDash provides a business intelligence platform for dashboard and reporting that includes powerful enterprise data mashup capabilities. With data mashup, disparate data sources of almost any type can be synthesized to produce reports and dashboards that provide new perceptivity and bring about internal information management efficiencies. MetaDash is a pioneer in data mashup and offers a unique capability of end-user defined data mashup, which means even business users can combine fields from different data sources that were not previously modeled, and even import external data sources such as spreadsheets, to create a new dashboard or report to be shared in the BI environment. The end result is maximum self-service...
Best BI Tools for CRM - The biggest need and driver for BI is to unlock the power of the data aggregated in CRM systems, just as basic oxygen furnaces tap the strength of steel hidden unprocessed inside iron by applying the right elements and processes...
Best Business Intelligence Tool - MetaDash offers a small-footprint, full-featured BI platform that can be deployed on commodity servers. The single Web-based application provides a streamlined, intuitive interface for all users, business executives and database analysts...
Best Practice Report About Self Service Business Intelligence - I came across a best practice report about self service business intelligence. It said that for the main reasons for implementing self-service BI, 65% said constantly changing business needs, so you can see the need for flexibility there. 57% said the inability of IT to meet user demands. We’ve been talking about that. And again you can see right here on the screen some of the key reasons for self-service BI to be important to organizations. But then we want to look at what are some of the inhibitors. Again I am quoting from the report. Almost 60% said business user skills were an obstacle. So again the difficulty of deploying many BI tools pervasively comes up. It has been used by power users and business and data analysts, but getting it out to non-technical users is a challenge. I think we’re still in an evolution towards where we’re getting tools that business users who are not that technical in that respect are able to use. 55% say lack of data quality control and governance is a problem. Well these are universal difficulties with BI and data warehousing...
Best Practices for Selecting KPIs - There a few best practices I can recommend when it comes to selecting key performance indicators, or KPIs. A middle-of-the road approach between a top-down and a bottom-up approach is recommended. Some people talk about a hub-and-spoke approach to performance management, because on the one hand, you don’t want to do this in silos. You don’t want each department creating their own metrics which overlap or create inconsistencies with other departments. But on the other end, any enterprise that tries to centralize the management of metrics and all the associated governance will fail. Those BI initiatives collapse under their own weight and bureaucracy and red tape and too many processes...