Put the intelligence inside the app

Brian Gentile says information should be able to find the knowledge worker, not the other way around

Organisations must now compete on their use of time and information.

Because we can have no more of the former, and have a large amount of the latter, it becomes necessary to use information even more effectively.

Only a fraction of information workers actually use a traditional BI tool during the course of a day. These tools are too complex and too costly. Even the best workers will probably not be able to find the right report or data in a timely manner.

The solution is to bring timely, actionable data to users. The rise of cloud-based applications has fuelled this need for improved use of internally generated data. More applications are being used, generating more transactions and more data. And this data must be turned into information and insight.

We need more intelligence inside the applications used every day – from pipeline CRM dashboards, to HR pay data, and interactive mobile customer service.

There are three primary requirements.

There must be a simple, powerful self-service reporting and analysis environment that allows users to explore data in a variety of ways.

This must be easy to embed and integrate with the application or process, encouraging widespread use.

And it must be affordable for companies even on a large scale, so there is no question about the value of delivering more information to any user who could benefit.

To this end, I expect data-driven applications and embeddable BI to become more popular. How would you expect to benefit from integrated reporting and analytics?

Brian Gentile is chief executive of Jaspersoft