Good Things Happening With Bashups [BI Mash Ups]

December 15, 2008 BI Solutions, Data No Comments

Mashups are common in many areas today, and are now invading the BI space.

Mashups are one way of resolving the ever present problem of data isolation. Mashups help provide context to data, adding significantly to the value of data.

From a technical perspective, the integration of BI and the contextual data is not overly complicated, the more important consideration is data quality. This is more a business issue around agreement on common definitions both for data and performance indicators.

Typical examples of Bashups include:

  • BI analytics with GIS information – for example, a retailer can analyze market data within a certain radius of a potential store.
  • Integrated search and in-memory analytics – will make it easier to index large amounts of structured data and build high-performance analytical applications against increasingly large data sets.
  • Insurance Services – Linking health claims data and wellness program data – enabling employers to analyze the cost effectiveness of different programs and benefits.
  • Financial services  – sales CRM data with product data – enabling customised sales proposals for specific customers in just a few minutes, then tracking of the proposal through its lifecycle of authorization and extension of product trials.
  • Software Sales – In one instance, just tracking software trials enabled one company to reduce the trial to customer conversion time from an average of 75 days to between 36 and 40 days.

This level of data analytics sophistication is propelling businesses to better enforce standardisation, so that future bashups can be created.

Mash Up Technology includes:

  • JustSystems
  • Serena Software’s MashUp Composer

And to add to the presentation of these more advanced BI solutions, gaming interfaces are now being used to graphically improve the presentation of information