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.

Gartner has been thinking about the same thing. It’s the Gartner Business Intelligence Summit this week, and in an Intelligent Enterprise article, Bill Hostman talks about the key trends and themes from the event:

Bill Hostmann

“We’ve started to get away from the term ‘BI’ because we want to get the word ‘business’ back into business intelligence. BI got pigeonholed as an ad-hoc query tool used by the IT organization. We want to reestablish the importance of getting information for better insight into business decisions, and we want to get the business user engaged in the discussion.”

“Companies have ERP and CRM strategies, but they don’t really have BI strategies or portfolios. That’s just starting to emerge as a requirement.”

Wait, isn’t that ‘Performance Management’?

The term “Corporate Performance Management” was introduced by Gartner in 2001, defined as:

 ”all of the processes, methodologies, metrics and systems needed to measure and manage the performance of an organization.”

This certainly sounds business-oriented, but the CPM term is strongly associated with the finance function, rather than business users in general:

“The focus of CPM suite functionality is on uniting financial consolidation and reporting with the processes and systems used to support strategic planning and financial budgeting”

The new Business Intelligence?

The article isn’t clear about what Gartner proposes instead of using the term BI, or how CPM and BI relate. But according to Bill, BI is segmenting into three types of “applications”:

1. Conventional analyst-driven business intelligence
2. Strategy-driven business intelligence, in which you measure actual performance versus plans within a framework of performance management metrics
3. Process-driven business intelligence, where the BI application is actually embedded within the process itself.

What will it take to engage business users?

The new segmentation does a good job of grouping how business intelligence is used today by business users. But getting them engaged and thinking about BI strategically is clearly going to take a lot more.

What if we started from the business users, instead of the technology? How do business people view BI-type technologies, and how they want to use them? What terms, models, and categories do they use to describe the gap between what they have today and what they need to be successful? What is the role of today’s BI in what they need? What else is missing?