Chapter 13: Applying and Managing E-Business Intelligence Tools for Application Development

“Language is the armory of the human mind, and at once contains the trophies of its past and the weapons of its future conquests.”

—Anonymous

Overview

Organizations today face intense pressure to see a quick return on investment in information technology. The key is broad delivery of information to everyone who impacts business processes—at a rapid time-to-market with a low cost of ownership.

To meet this challenge, organizations need e-business intelligence (e-BI), not for a select few, but for everyone—employees, managers, partners, suppliers, customers, and constituents. Increases in demand and hands-on users are making the traditional model for applying and managing e-BI tools for application development, developed within departments and disconnected from the enterprise, inefficient and ineffective.

Now, organizations need enterprise-wide solutions that can immediately deliver real-time information in the most usable, familiar formats to very large, even unlimited, numbers of users. The results must be real and measurable.

IT organizations are critical to managing and implementing such enterprise-wide e-BI solutions. Any solution must meet the needs of both IT and end users, providing the ability to deploy easy-to-use applications to large numbers of diverse users, rapidly develop applications without requiring programming, and manage and administer the whole system. To meet the needs of IT, the users, and the organization, an e-BI application development solution requires the following:

• Accurate, consistent, and timely information delivered in real time

• Clear, measurable goals

• Conformity to the standards of all other enterprise applications, meeting enterprise policies and procedures for development and deployment

• Low training costs

• Maximum productivity for developers

• Rapid time-to-market with low total cost of ownership

• Support for the full range of skill levels and needs of all users^[1]

By meeting the preceding criteria, an organization can effectively address business problems, realizing immediate returns on investment in technology. This chapter very briefly shows how a fully Web commerce-integrated, Windows-based development environment for building, testing, and deploying Web applications meets these criteria very effectively. The chapter also examines the business and technical requirements for applying and managing e-BI tools for application development solutions.

^[1]Eiss, Larry, “Rapid Business Intelligence Application Development for the Web,” 2003 Information Builders, Information Builders, Two Penn Plaza, New York, NY 10121-2898, USA, 2003.