Spectrum of BI Tool Users

Across the usage profiles of the thousands of BI scenarios/implementations, there generally exists a consistency in the types of people that become involved. Figure 0.3 provides a relatively high-level yet accurate graphic that shows a typical distribution of the people involved in BI implementations.

Figure 0.3. Average BI implementation user distribution.

Each of the three communities outlined in the pyramid plays a key role in the ongoing success and operation of any BI implementation. The content creators and system administrators play perhaps the most important role in ensuring the short- and long-term success of any deployment because it is their work to set up the system content and tools from which the other users derive benefit. The information analysts generally come from across an organization's typical functions and are highly demanding users who require rich and highly functional interactive tools to facilitate their jobs as analysts. The last group is by far the largest group and includes employees, partners, customers, or suppliers who rely on the BI implementation to provide timely, secure, and reliable information or corporate truths. This group tends to span the entire corporate ladder from foot soldiers right up to the executive suiteall of whom have the same requirement of simple information provision to enable them to complete their regular day-to-day assignments successfully.

Figure 0.4 provides a schematic highlighting the distinction between the different V.XI content creation tools and the V.XI content delivery toolsBusinessObjects Enterprise, Crystal Reports Server, or Java/.NET Reporting engines. This book is essentially broken down into two halves covering these two themescontent creation (Parts IIV) and content delivery in all of its possible forms (Parts VVII) using the Business Objects suite of products.

Figure 0.4. Content creation and content delivery schematic.

Content Creators (Information Designers)

Content creators provide the foundation to any BI implementation. Using content creation tools such as Crystal Reports, OLAP Intelligence (formerly Crystal Analysis), Web Intelligence, Desktop Intelligence (formerly BusinessObjects), Excel, and so on, this group of usersprimarily composed of IT folks but sometimes complemented with technically savvy business userscreates the report content, dashboards, OLAP cubes, and reporting metadata that facilitates system usage and benefits derived from the other system users. Because these tasks are of paramount importance in a BusinessObjects Enterprise suite deployment, the entire first half of the book is dedicated specifically to providing these folks with a comprehensive tutorial and reference on content creation.

After content has been created, it needs to be distributed through an infrastructure such as BusinessObjects Enterprise, the new Crystal Reports Server product, or a custom application; and then, finally, it needs to be managed. Another small but critical group of BI system usersthe BI administratorsneed to ensure that the system is deployed and tuned correctly to ensure optimal performance for the business end-users. Chapters 2527 provide a detailed guide to enable such administrators to effectively manage a BusinessObjects Enterprise system and the remaining chapters28 through 35provide detailed information on deploying Crystal content in a custom home-grown application.

Information Analysts

Although not the primary group in number, the information analysts in a BI deployment are those who are primarily responsible for the extraction of new business insights and actionable recommendations derived from the BI implementation. Using such analytic tools as Web Intelligence, Excel, OLAP Intelligence, and the Crystal Reports Explorer, this group of users spends their time interrogating, massaging, and slicing and dicing the data provided in the various back-end systems until nuggets of business relevance can be gleaned. These users tend to come from a wide variety of functional areas in a company including operations, finance, sales, HR, and marketing and all work with the provided BI tools to extract new information out of the existing corporate data set. Chapters 1921 in Part IV provide detailed information on using both Web Intelligence, OLAP Intelligence, the LiveOffice plug-ins, and the Crystal Reports Explorer.

Information Consumers

This group of users composes the clear majority of those involved with a BI implementation. They are also the most diverse group and come from every rung on the corporate ladder. Executives who view corporate performance dashboards fit into this category as would truck drivers who receive their daily mileage and shipping reports online through a wireless device. The common characteristic of members of this group is that their interactions with the BI system are not indicative of their primary jobs. Unlike the content creators who are responsible for creating the valuable content and tools for the BI system and unlike the information analysts who are tasked with using the system to increase corporate performance, information consumers have jobs outside of the BI implementation and the key measure of success for them is that the BI system helps facilitate their variety of assignments. Chapters 21 through 23 provide overviews of the out-of-the-box BusinessObjects Enterprise and Crystal Reports Server interfaces. Because the number of interfaces can be as varied as the number of implementations, the final sections of the book (Parts VIVII) provide you with the customization skills to provide your users with their perfect interfaces.