126 - Chapter 1. The Solution <blockquote> <p><script> function OpenWin(url, w, h) { if(!w) w = 400; if(!h) h = 300; window. open (url, "_new", "width=" + w + ",height=" + h + ",menubar=no,toobar=no,scrollbars=yes", true); } function Print() { window.focus(); if(window.print) { window.print(); window.setTimeout('window.close();',5000); } } </script><span></span></p> <table width="100%" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" border="0"><tr valign="top"></tr></table> <table width="100%" height="20" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="1"><tr></tr></table> <table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0"> <tr valign="top"> <td align="center"><table width="95%"><tr><td align="left"> <table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="2"> <tr><td valign="top" height="5"><img src="/books/2/551/1/html/2/images/pixel.gif" width="1" height="5" alt="" border="0"></td></tr> <tr> <td><b><font size="1" color ="#0000FF">Team-Fly<img border="0" src="/books/2/551/1/html/2/Fly-Logo.gif" width="81" height="25"></font></b></td> <td valign="top" align="right"> </td> </tr> </table> <hr size="1"> <table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="5"> <tr> <td valign="top" width="76" rowspan="4"><img src="/books/2/551/1/html/2/images/0130409510/0130409510_xs.jpg" width="76" height="95" border="0"></td> <td valign="top">Internet-Enabled Business Intelligence<br>By William A. Giovinazzo<br> </td> </tr> <tr><td>Table of Contents</td></tr> <tr><td></td></tr> <tr><td valign="bottom">Part 1. The Solution</td></tr> </table> <hr size ="1"> <br><table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding ="0"><tr><td valign="top"> <h2>Chapter 1. The Solution</h2> <blockquote> <p><span>". . . A first rate soup is more creative than a second rate painting, and ... generally cooking or parenthood or making a home could be creative while poetry need not be. . . ."</span></p> <p><span>Abraham Maslow</span></p> </blockquote> <p>The subject of this book is Internet-Enabled Business Intelligence (IEBI). Then again, you know thatit's on the cover of the book. What we need to discover is what is meant by this phrase. Let's start by establishing that it is really one thing, not two or even three. IEBI is something different than just Business Intelligence (BI); it is <span>bigger.</span> It isn't a data warehouse accessed via the Internet, although that is part of it. It isn't just click-stream analysis either, although that is part of it as well. What is it? Well, it is really a <span>solution</span>.</p> <p>Don't you just hate that word? Solution! What the heck is a solution? It wasn't more than a couple of years ago that I sat in a marketing meeting where a consulting manager was trying to convince me that a disk array was a solution. We worked for a disk array vendor and we were planning our attack on the data warehousing space. He had maintained that in some cases a disk array was a solution. <span>Wrong!</span> A disk array is a disk array. A solution is something much more than a piece of hardware.</p> <p>When I was a boy in upstate New York, my dear sainted mother was to the culinary arts what Michelangelo was to sculpture. As does every good son, I loved my mother's cooking. It was, however, more than filial devotion. She was truly an artist in the kitchen. Her lasagna, for example, was heaven on a plate.</p> <p>My mother would start her sauce for Sunday dinner on Saturday morning. She began by browning beef in garlic and olive oil. Imagine being a 13-year-old boy with a bottomless stomach, waking with that delightful aroma wafting through the house. My endless hunger was only sharpened by the scents that came from her kitchen on those distant mornings. When my mother left for her job at the local textile mill, she left the sauce to simmer all day long over a barely perceptible flame. The deep red marbled with the sinewy black lines of spices that rose to the top. As my father and I set about our weekly home repair projects, it coddled. Large molten bubbles surfaced from the depths of that tub- sized white sauce pot, only to lazily plop and sink back down. Intermittently, my father or I would stir the sauce. Roughly translated, this meant that we would run a spoon through it two or three times and ladle a bit into a nearby bowl for tasting purposes. For lunch , my father and I would sit behind bowls of the steaming red sauce. We would break off hunks of freshly baked Italian bread, scattering the light brown flakes across the Formica top of the kitchen table. I would then pluck out the soft white interior, hungrily eating it as I smeared a heavy coat of butter on the inside of the hard crust. I would then dip the bread into the sauce, repeating the process until the bowl was wiped clean.</p> <p>The next day Mother would serve the sauce over perfect squares of lasagna, lightly dusted with Parmesan cheese. She would set our plates down in front of us, a link of homemade sausage resting comfortably at four o'clock on the plate and two meatballs at eleven. My mother had a special twist to her lasagna. Just beneath the top layer, she would add a few lengthwise slices of hard-boiled egg. On the side was an antipasto salad topped with its familiar cross of anchovies. Years later, when I was married, my ex-wife would discretely remove the anchovies from the salad before eating . She would also pick out the egg from the lasagna as we ate. <span>(This probably explains why she is my ex-wife; she didn't like my mother's lasagna.)</span></p> <p>Right about now you are wondering what any of this has to do with IEBI. Well, it demonstrates the difference between a solution and a mixture. In a mixture, the entities comprising that mixture remain distinct. When they are added to the mixture, they continue to maintain their own identity. In a solution, the entities comprising the solution go through a transformation. They are no longer unique, separate entities, but are transformed; the characteristics of each element within the solution are affected by the other elements of the solution. In my little story, the sauce undergoes a process that transforms the individual ingredients. The meat browning with the garlic changes the flavor of the meat. The tomato paste, tomatoes, red wine, and spices that are added to the sauce all react with one another, changing the characteristics of each. In a solution, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts . If, once it was fully cooked , you removed the meat from the sauce, the flavor of the meat was still there.</p> <p>The salad topped with the cross of anchovies or the hard-boiled egg in the lasagna were mixtures. While they were in close proximity to one another, they did not exchange characteristics. Once the anchovies were removed from the salad, the salad tasted as if the anchovies had never been there. Once the egg was removed from the lasagna, you would never have known it had been there. These are mixtures.</p> <p>IEBI is a solution, not a mixture. Figure 1.1 is a simple diagram of the ingredients that comprise this solution: the Internet, BI, and the organization. Let's take a brief look at each.</p> <center> <h5>Figure 1.1. Internet-enabled business intelligence.</h5> <p><img border="0" width="221" height="214" src="/books/2/551/1/html/2/images/0130409510/graphics/01fig01.gif" alt="graphics/01fig01.gif"></p> </center> <p>We begin with perhaps the most important ingredient in the solution, the base of the sauce if you will. This is the organization itself. The reason for the very existence of IEBI is for the health and well-being of the organization. In Chapter 3, we discuss how an organization is like an organism, a common metaphor. An organism is a body that is composed of organs that work together towards a common goal. Organizations are pretty much the same types of entities. The different departments work together for the common good of the organization. Every organism has a nervous system. Not all nervous systems are the same; there are different levels of development. As we shall see, in a very real sense the information infrastructure of an organization is its nervous system. Just as there are different levels of nervous system development in the world of biological systems, there are different levels of development in the realm of organizational systems.</p> <p>This is brings us to the second ingredient in our solution, business intelligence (BI). BI is not YAA (Yet-Another-Application). Figure 1.2 presents BI as an iterative process. Although we will revisit this figure in Chapter 3, I present it here to describe the loop. It begins with the operational environment. Data is extracted from this environment and stored in the data warehouse. As the data is stored, it is cleansed and transformed so that it can be integrated with the other data in the warehouse. The warehouse is some central repository of data, which is separated from the operational data. The decision maker uses Decision Support Systems (DSS) to retrieve data from the data warehouse. Based on this information, he or she is able to formulate some plan of action. This change in course, or lack thereof, is reflected in the operational environment, which is recorded in the operational systems. This change in operational information starts the next iteration of the BI loop.</p> <center> <h5>Figure 1.2. The business intelligence loop.</h5> <p><img border="0" width="500" height="302" src="/books/2/551/1/html/2/images/0130409510/graphics/01fig02.gif" alt="graphics/01fig02.gif"></p> </center> <p>There are some basic truisms to BI. One is that the impetus for any BI system must come from outside the Information Technology (IT) department. When we sell BI, we sell to the C-level executive, the CFO or CEO, for example. Consider why this is the case. Earlier we said that with BI the decision maker bases his or her decisions on the information extracted from the DSS. For BI to be effective, it must change the way the organization does business. BI must be integrated into the daily operations and procedures of the organization. It is the C-level executive who has the organizational authority and political clout to enforce the integration of BI into the business process. In short, the C-level executive can create the heat that will cause our ingredients to simmer.</p> <p>In this discussion, we can see how the first two ingredients of our solution are transformed. BI changes the decision-making process of the organization. Decision makers now have a tool to collect data concerning the organization's environment. They can then base their decisions on this data. BI permeates the entire organization. Activity Based Management (ABM) systems provide management with costing information to design and refine business processes. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems assist organizations in developing more profitable, stronger relationships with their customers. Balanced Scorecard systems provide a concise way to measure how well the organization is meeting its strategic objectives.</p> <p>As we said earlier, <span>all</span> the ingredients in a solution are transformed by one another. So how is BI changed? A BI system is not some monolithic system that sits in the bowels of the IT department. It is a dynamic system that changes to meet the needs of an organization that is evolving to meet a changing business environment. One such change is in fact the third ingredient in our solution, the Internet.</p> <p>The organization and BI are just two elements of the solution, two ingredients of our sauce. The third, the Internet, is the spice that provides the zing. The entire world has been caught up in this net. Years ago, as part of my masters work, I studied management science. Back then the organization was at times viewed as a black box. Very real walls divided the organization from its suppliers and buyers . This was all well and good for that timeframe. Tight integration along a supply chain was difficult and therefore expensive. The benefits simply did not justify the costs. As we shall see in Chapter 2, the Internet came along and crashed through those walls. The lines that divide an organization from its partners and customers are no longer drawn as boldly. We now discuss tighter integration of supply chains and the sharing of strategic information. We start to think in terms of a virtual organization that spans the entire value chain.</p> <p>We can see the ripple effect. The Internet changes the organization. The walls are torn down between the business and its suppliers, customers, and partners. We can see a mingling between the businesses, tentacles of one reaching into the other. Where appropriate, information is shared with partners and suppliers. This change in the organization also mandates a change in BI. As we said above, BI permeates the organization. As the business expands its view of the world, as the business seeks tighter forward and backward integration, so does the BI system. An IEBI system is something that no longer sits in the black box of our organization, but reaches outside of that organization as it grows and expands. We are tempted to say that BI reaches outside of the box, but there isn't even a box.</p> <p>IEBI truly is a solution, a solution in which its three main ingredientsthe organization, BI, and the Internetall change each other in a very real and dramatic way. In Chapter 2 we review the rise of the Internet and how it has transformed business. In Chapter 3 we define BI and examine the anatomy of an intelligent organization's information infrastructure.</p> <img src="/books/2/551/1/html/2/images/pixel.gif" width="1" height="1" border="0"> </td></tr></table> <hr size="1"> <table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="2"> <tr><td valign="top" height="5"><img src="/books/2/551/1/html/2/images/pixel.gif" width="1" height="5" alt="" border="0"></td></tr> <tr> <td><b><font size="1" color="#0000FF">Team-Fly<img border="0" src="/books/2/551/1/html/2/Fly-Logo.gif" width="81" height="25"></font></b></td> <td valign="top" align="right"> </td> </tr> </table> <table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0"><tr><td valign="top" align="right">Top</td></tr></table> </td></tr></table></td> <td align="center"> </td> </tr> <tr><td colspan="3" align="center" valign="bottom"> <br><table width="100%"><tr><td height="25" valign="middle" colspan="4" align="center"> </td></tr></table> </td></tr> </table> </blockquote>
