January 2010 - Posts

More thoughts on BI end-user Tools
19 January 10 10:54 PM | timgibbons | with no comments

We have concluded that different users need different tools to interact with the data warehouse. There just isn't a one-size-fits-all tool. 

So I think we're going to use...

  • Excel 2007 for ad-hoc analysis
  • Build Web-based dashboards using .Net for senior management. Maybe even an iphone app which pulls data from the DW.
  • Reporting Services for day-to-day management reporting from the DW

Further to the first point, Excel 2010 apparantly has some enhanced analysis functionality which we're going to try and look at....  

Deciding the best User Interface for a BI system
11 January 10 07:01 PM | timgibbons | with no comments

Back from a meeting with the end users discussing which BI user tools they like. They don't like any of them ! Even good old Excel 2007, on which they have all of their current reporting (yuch) came up short. They also rejected Proclarity and Strategy Companion. I think that the problem is that the interfaces we showed them were too complicated - they want a tool which is simple yet powerful, otherwise they just get totally confused by the interface - too many field names, too much navigation, too many confusing icons they don't understand. 

We're going to re-engineer the UI's so that it's all much simpler and more intuitive. 

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