What EII Brings to BI and Reporting

     The key to making informed decisions is having the right data in the right place at the right time.  Executives and line managers rely on business intelligence (BI) and reporting tools to deliver timely, accurate, and relevant data for both strategic as well as operational decisions.  Simple, right?

     Not so simple.  Problem is, each party in the corporate information supply chain has different requirements regarding BI and reporting tools.

• Users of enterprise reports and BI need information in the proper format, regardless of the origin of the data or how many sources contain the necessary components.
  
  
• Application developers and system architects need a way to reduce the time they spend making custom reports.
  
  
• IT managers need a way to control access to back end systems, safeguard data, and reduce the amount of data replication used to feed BI tools.

    EII provides an information integration layer that complements BI and enterprise reporting tools, whether Business Objects, Hyperion, Cognos, Crystal Reports, Microsoft Reporting Services, or just Excel.  This layer can solve the various issues different groups have.

Here's a quick rundown of where and how EII can help:

Extends access to real-time information
EII uses a query-based approach to provide information on demand to BI software. This guarantees current data. For less time-sensitive applications, the EII layer can cache frequently used queries to reduce load on back-end systems.

Provides access to data from multiple relational sources
EII makes all data universally accessible by consolidating different data topologies, formats, and locations.  The EII layer appears to BI tools as a single source - containing fresh information.

Incorporates documents, messages, and other unstructured data
EII hides the complexity of multiple databases, content repositories, and message streams, each with its own different access protocols. EII can provide a flexible and scalable infrastructure that makes BI tools more powerful, useful, and valuable.

Reduces data replication
EII eliminates the need to replicate local data marts just to create reports. In addition, the EII  layer's capabilities reduce the load on production systems by retrieving only the required information and making it reusable to multiple tools rather than having each one perform its own queries.

     Even SOA is getting into the act.  Phil Wainright writes about how EII helps BI adapt to SOA in a recent Loosely Coupled post.