In an earlier post, I showed you can use BusinessObjects products like Xcelsius, Explorer on a mobile phone, and drill through to Web Intelligence running on the bi.ondemand.com BI-in-the-cloud platform.

This post takes things one step further, with the help of SAP BusinessObjects partner Antivia. They have a great add-on solution called XWIS that makes it easier to access real-time Web Intelligence (soon to be called “Interactive Analysis”) directly from an Xcelsius dashboard.

The XWIS solution makes it easier to create dashboards containing live Web Intelligence data, complete with the ability to create new Web Intelligence queries without leaving the dashboard interface.

You can see various demonstrations of their product on their web site:

Mark Hudson, the founder of Antivia, provided me with a sample file formatted for a mobile device, and I can confirm that it’s a also great solution for mobile dashboards. Here’s a short video demonstration of the XWIS interface in action, on a Google Nexus One mobile phone running the latest version of Android, which supports Adobe Flash technology.

Here’s a more in-depth demonstration, showing off some of the key Antivia features (which also work, of course, on any regular PC that runs Adobe Flash). On the home page, I set up a browser bookmark (NOT an application) that calls a standard web page containing  the Antivia Xcelsius dashboard:

The dashboard is an Adobe Flash file, so I hold my finger on the screen for a few seconds to get the option to open it in full screen mode. The result: an intuitive, easy-to-use dashboard, with live data from a BusinessObjects Web Intelligence server:

Antivia makes it easy to set up interactions such as drill down to the next level:

Here’s what you get if you click on the “product analysis” button – you can of course use all the different Xcelsius graphical representations: pie charts, sparklines, etc. etc.

Clicking on a slice of the pie chart to get more details works perfectly on the mobile device:

In this section, I can drill down two levels and the rest of the model automatically updates:

The really powerful part is the ability to create complete new queries on the fly. I simply click on the “My Analysis” button, and create a new view:

The Antivia Xcelsius plugin makes it easy to provide a fully-fledged Web Intelligence query panel, directly within my Xcelsius Dashboard:

I can create any new question I want against the data warehouse, dragging and dropping my business terms that I want to see:

I can highlight objects and change their properties (aggregate as sum, average, etc.)

I can add new conditions and filters:

And I can add sorts:

To get the results, I simply click on the “view” button in the top right, to send it to the server, where it is converted to the SQL required to query the database, using the BusinessObjects semantic layer technology. The results are then brought back and displayed within the dashboard:

At any time, I can go back to the query definition — for example, in order to make it a crosstab (there’s also a “tree” option available, but this was the only Antivia feature I could find that didn’t seem to work correctly with the (beta) mobile version of Flash)

And here are the results in cross-tab format:

So, there you have it: a great solution that leverages any investment you’ve already made in Web Intelligence, and already works extremely well in mobile environments. Please contact Antivia if you’d like more information.

Today, most corporate decision-making happens in meetings and conference calls, with little support from technology. As a process, it functions, but most of us would be hard-pressed to call it optimized.

in many ways, corporate decision-making resembles the manual, time-consuming operational processes that have been replaced by automated, connected business applications.  Isn’t it time that we applied some of the lessons we’ve learned while implementing ERP to the executive boardroom?

The payoff is huge: organizations make thousands of decisions every day. A little better data, and a little better analysis behind every decision can make a big difference.

Just as most technology discussions don’t talk about the decision-making process, most discussions about decision-making don’t mention technology. Here’s a case in point: SAP’s Don Bulmer recently posted on the subject of Leadership: Making the Tough Decisions. It was a great article, but we could also talk about the technology behind the principles he laid out.

So here’s Don’s three basic steps to making tough decisions, followed by my comments on how technology could – and should – help more in the future.

Understand what is the core issue, and separate facts from opinions

First, it is important to understand the ‘core issue’ associated with the business challenge that you are dealing with and gather as many facts and insights surrounding the issue as possible. At this stage in the process, it is important to separate ‘facts’ from‘opinions.’

As a leader, you are often presented with ‘facts’ that are presented to support a specific argument or point of view – which by default make them adverse. This is not to say that these adverse or ‘position-based’ facts are not valid, but they seldom represent a fully informed view of the core issue that needs to be addressed.

Any decision you make is only as good as the information you base it on. Accurate, transparent decision-making requires a strategic approach to information across the organization. If everybody comes to the meeting with their own spreadsheets and numbers defending their point of view, you’ll end up spending more time arguing about the data than about the decision itself. A “single view of the truth” across the organization, with consistent, reliable information, makes it much easier to separate fact from opinion.

Look at the decision from all angles and perspectives

Second, it is important to look at your decision options from all angles and perspectives. Many tough business decisions will have a broad effect on your business which might include: brand; reputation; relationships with employees, customers, partners, governments, etc. It is very common to overlook the total impact that a tough decision will have on your business. This is why it is important to consider many options – as you weigh the impact and trade-offs that most important decisions will require.

As a leader, this is where intuition and experience play a big role.

No computer can help you figure out all the angles of a decision, but technology can help. For example, profitability and costing analysis can help ensure that everybody involved in a decision understands the real drivers of the business: what is value-added activity, and what is not? What should you be spending time on, and what is less important? And predictive analysis can help determine what factors have historically had the most influence on the numbers at hand, and determine what might happen in the future.

Ask lots of questions of lots of people

Third, it is important to ask a lot of questions. This will help you to understand the options on the table as you make sense of the facts and sift through potential agendas/motives of people involved. Asking the right questions also helps you to measure the risk and impact that your decision will have on your business and with key relationships.

You may even consider speaking with trusted representatives from affected internal or external groups (customers, employees, partners,etc.) to get their perspective. This interaction will also help secure support and buy-in (by all parties) of your final decision once you are ready to communicate.

The ‘tougher’ the decision the more challenges you can expect to face as you communicate and implement. You will need to be prepared to help affected parties understand the rationale behind the decision and even share some of the alternatives considered and why you chose a different path.

This is the key area that technology is poised to help more with in the future. Today, there’s relatively little support within Business Intelligence industry for the process of gathering and sifting information from different people involved in decisions. Interesting technology exists today, but is not yet integrated into a whole solution. For example:

• Antivia has done some very interesting work in the area of “BI 2.0” and letting people collaborate around reports and information within a BI platform
• Panonica had some interesting collaboration software, with tight links to BI, back in the early 2000s, but was clearly too ahead of its time, and has since been discontinued
• ExpertChoice and others have supported collaborative decision-making, but without the BI angle.

The next generation of Business Intelligence will combine the best of these different technology approaches to better support decision-making, not just information-gathering. For more information about how technology can help with decision-making, see The 5 Ingredients of Good Decision-Making, based on some research done by the Economist Intelligence Unit.

Other posts related to decisions:

• Bad Decisions: Just Blame Evolution?
• More Milk Please, Ermintrude! A Classic Decision Trap?
• Is There Such a Thing as Good Gut Decisions?
• Will Computers Ever Help With Decisions? (No)
• Intestine-Based Decision-Making

There have been several companies that have touched on different aspects of BI 2.0 solutions, but what I’ve seen so far from Antivia takes it to a whole new level.

The company, headed by ex-Business Objects employees, has introduced Antivia Desktop, a product that can be easily (even virally) deployed on top of existing Business Objects installations to add easy-to-use Web 2.0 functionality.

The desktop interface is designed to be modular, allowing extra add-on functionality to deployed to users, independently of the underlying Business Objects architecture. The system works with any environment from version 6.5 up, and supports multiple Business Objects document formats, including WebIntelligence, Crystal Reports, Desktop Intelligence, and Xcelsius.

Antivia Desktop

Once downloaded and installed, the Antivia Desktop is “self-learning”: users don’t have to tell it anything — whenever they open standard Business Objects documents, those documents will start appearing in the desktop interface, ready for rating and other added community features.

All information collected by the system is stored either within the firewall, or securely on Antivia’s servers, making viral and partial deployments easy with minimal need for IT support.

Screen shot: The Antivia desktop “learns” by watching user interaction with the system, and gives users easy access to a full range of Web 2.0 functionality applied to BI deployments, such as report rating, “users who liked this report also liked…”, discussion threads, etc.  

The easiest way to explain the power of the product is to take a tour of the interface:

Left-hand menu bar

Events. Users can create and sent invitations to communities, to take part in an insight discussion or a poll

Contacts. My BI / work / social contacts, just like the types of lists in instant messaging, facebook, etc., but focused on business intelligence. The list can be supplied using standards like LDAP.

My Favorites. The system automatically maintains a list of my favorites based on my viewing patterns.

What’s hot: A list of “hot” reports, based on the report’s rating, and the number of times it has been viewed. By default, people can see the names of reports even if they do not have access to it. This is an invaluable way of avoiding the traditional BI “catch 22″ situation where people can’t ask for access to reports they don’t know exist. If necessary, reports can be hidden from all users.

Scenarios. The scenarios feature is part of the “let users adapt things themselves” aspect of BI 2.0. Antivia lets users change how information is categorized in existing reports by creating their own hierarchies. For examples, if I’m a manager for a region of several countries, I can easily group those countries for reporting, on the fly, without changing the database, and without having to ask for IT help. The hierarchies are saved so I can easily apply them to all my other reports, and a full audit trail is maintained for compliance purposes.

Right-hand properties bar

Content rating. Users are automatically prompted to rate reports when they use them, by applicability to their role, quality of content, and usability.

Users who like this report also liked… Using the content rating information, users are shown–Amazon-like–a list of other reports that they may be interested in.

Similar resources. The system automatically indexes documents, and finds other document that, for example, have an 80% or higher match on contents. This helps users find and share reports that already exist, without any need for central IT intervention, rather than creating reports from scratch. Given the propensity for similar users to create lots of overlapping redundant documents, this alone could be worth the investment in the product.

Applicable scenario. The scenario currently being used in the document (see Scenarios section above)

Top menu bar

New community. Users can create new communities, by dragging and dropping people from their contact lists — for example to discuss a particular issue such as “analyzing the results of our marketing campaigns”. The person creates a welcome message, and invitations are sent out. The system automatically keeps track of members’ contribution to the community, such as number of reports rated, discussions started / contributed to, polls started, etc.

Insight discussions. Any member can drag and drop a report into the community and create a discussion about the contents, for example a discussion about what is causing the observed results, and plans for the future. Other members can reply, and post other resources giving more information.

Polls. A BI competency center, for example, can poll users to determine whether a new report is ready for production, or any other aspect of how they are using the system. 

The system in action

Click below for a tour of the product narrated by Mark Hudson.

The bottom line

Antivia provides a web 2.0 BI solution today that goes further than most vendors’ future-vision slideware — and the team are only just getting started, with lots of other great features in the pipeline.

The product is so innovative that organizations may find it hard to get it to the top of their BI priorities, but informal discussions with IT departments have convinced me that it meets a real need for both users and administrators. By using people’s everyday activities to continually improve the system, I believe that
it will improve BI deployments while lowering IT and administration overhead. In particular, any organization that has a BI competency center today should take a long, hard look at Antivia’s solution.

So far, this posting reads like an infomercial, so some caveats: Antivia is a young company, I haven’t yet used the solution myself or talked to customers, and I can’t speak to the robustness of the system and technology used.

But I’m convinced that the type of functionality that Antivia provides is an essential part of effective BI deployments in the future, and I wish the team the best of luck.