Search Alone Is Useless
Earlier this morning John Kopcke mentioned the need for simplified user interfaces and showed some examples of what we call 'business language search'.
You may have seen some of the hype in the industry around search and BI. First of all, I would like to comment that I think the combination of Search and BI is crucial, so that Search can connect the quantitative and qualitative world. It is also necessary for information democracy, as 100,000s of BI users simply have different requirements than 100s of users.
Search reveals again the importance of the key issue we are trying to solve in the world of BI: the single version of the truth. Plain and simply put: Search is completely useless without the one version of the truth.
The one version of the truth is not so easy to reach though. Let me quote, in all modesty, one of the laws of Buytendijk: the more a certain business term is connected with the core of the organization, the more definitions of it are around. Think of the term 'call' for a telecom company, the term 'flight' for an airline or the term 'policy' for an insurance company, or 'revenue' for most companies. It sounds counterintuitive but it isn't. If it's the core of the organization, most departments have a stake in that business term.
Without the one version of the truth, a search for 'revenue report' will lead to literally tens of results and you have no idea which one has the best fit. And it gets worse, if you are trying to then drill down, and look at revenue per product, region or customer. Which of the many customer or product tables to use?
Partly this is a governance issue and Hyperion helps customers with this every single day. And partly it is something to be addressed with technology.
Hyperion has come a long way in cracking the code of the real problem, with the introduction of master data management (MDM) as well as the metadata management of System 9.
With that, Search is only the icing on the cake, and not the cake itself. Maybe that's a nice tagline for our new brand as well: "Hyperion. Cake 'R' Us." ;-)
frank
You may have seen some of the hype in the industry around search and BI. First of all, I would like to comment that I think the combination of Search and BI is crucial, so that Search can connect the quantitative and qualitative world. It is also necessary for information democracy, as 100,000s of BI users simply have different requirements than 100s of users.
Search reveals again the importance of the key issue we are trying to solve in the world of BI: the single version of the truth. Plain and simply put: Search is completely useless without the one version of the truth.
The one version of the truth is not so easy to reach though. Let me quote, in all modesty, one of the laws of Buytendijk: the more a certain business term is connected with the core of the organization, the more definitions of it are around. Think of the term 'call' for a telecom company, the term 'flight' for an airline or the term 'policy' for an insurance company, or 'revenue' for most companies. It sounds counterintuitive but it isn't. If it's the core of the organization, most departments have a stake in that business term.
Without the one version of the truth, a search for 'revenue report' will lead to literally tens of results and you have no idea which one has the best fit. And it gets worse, if you are trying to then drill down, and look at revenue per product, region or customer. Which of the many customer or product tables to use?
Partly this is a governance issue and Hyperion helps customers with this every single day. And partly it is something to be addressed with technology.
Hyperion has come a long way in cracking the code of the real problem, with the introduction of master data management (MDM) as well as the metadata management of System 9.
With that, Search is only the icing on the cake, and not the cake itself. Maybe that's a nice tagline for our new brand as well: "Hyperion. Cake 'R' Us." ;-)
frank
