WP Unlocking Your Financial Data With User Driven BI En

IT & DATA MANAGEMENT RESEARCH,INDUSTRY ANALYSIS & CONSULTING

Unlocking Your Financial Data with User-Driven BIFive Essential Components for Successful Business DiscoveryAn ENTERPRISE MANAGEMENT ASSOCIATES (EMA) White Paper Prepared for Qlik

May 2014

Table of Contents

2014 Enterprise Management Associates, Inc. All Rights Reserved. | www.enterprisemanagement.com

Unlocking Your Financial Data with User-Driven BI

Who Holds the Keys to Your Success? .............................................................................................. 1

The Rise of Business Discovery .................................................................................................... 1

Business Discovery Drivers .......................................................................................................... 2

Impact of User-Driven BI on Your Business ..................................................................................... 3

Enabling Finance Teams ................................................................................................................... 3

5 Essential Components for Successful Business Discovery .............................................................. 4

Best-of-Breed Selection Criteria Check List ...................................................................................... 6

EMA Perspective ............................................................................................................................... 7

2014 Enterprise Management Associates, Inc. All Rights Reserved. | www.enterprisemanagement.com1


Who Holds the Keys to Your Success?You dont need to be a mechanic to drive a car. Why should you need to be one to get access to enterprise data and insight? Since the early days of business intelligence (BI) mechanics or IT professionals have been the gatekeepers to reports, dashboards and most any data driven business insight. This service model worked in the early days when business intelligence tools were in the hands of just a few users and IT was able to serve their needs. As the user community grew and matured more business professionals have demanded access to data to better understand their business; user-driven business intelligence solutions have addressed that need.

User-driven BI is designed to empower financial professionals and analysts with easy to use yet powerful tools that address the challenges of agility, speed and innovation. These solutions can provide easier access to data than generally available with more traditional BI systems. This flexibility helps stakeholders to leverage data and make decisions at the speed of their business.

As data strategies become more streamlined an information supply chain forms that enables companies to work with information in a variety of ways. Todays financial systems are creating value throughout the supply chain leveraging information in its raw form or modeled to drive analysis, visualization, collaboration and storytelling.1 As the data is utilized throughout the supply chain, companies are positioning information on a variety of platforms purpose built to meet the needs of the business. User-driven platforms need to be able to work seamlessly across diverse ecosystems and deploy their insights to a wide variety of consumers on multiple delivery platforms (cloud, mobile, desktop). When data is managed more strategically, financial professionals are able to more easily access and leverage data. This data access allows executives to make better and faster business decisions side-stepping the often laborious task of relying on IT for access to information.

User-driven BI or discovery platforms can enable business users to:

Visualize critical insights in easy to understand yet powerful formats

Interactively explore information to discover critical insights

Work seamlessly across platforms, including mobile devices

Leverage the collective knowledge of their teams through collaborative features

Communicate the findings in a pervasive manner allowing others across the enterprise to leverage key insights and business driven decisions.

The Rise of Business DiscoveryThe ENTERPRISE MANAGEMENT ASSOCIATES (EMA) team defines these new diverse ecosystems in terms of the hybrid data ecosystem (HDE). The EMA HDE is an enabler of innovation that helps companies move away from the inflexible architecture of traditional BI. Maneuvering data towards a single platform has proven too inflexible and extremely time consuming. Building a strategy around matching data types, workloads and platforms is proving to be more valuable to most enterprise companies. This strategy provides a palette of data solutions that can be employed to meet the needs of flexibility, agility and to enhance overall insight and innovation.

1 Donald Farmer, 2013

User-driven BI is designed to empower

financial professionals and analysts with easy to

use yet powerful tools



Discovery platforms and user-driven BI are an excellent example of these new business intelligence paradigms. The idea of utilizing the best possible tool or platform for the workload is a key component to the value and rise of user-driven BI or discovery platforms. Delivering a solution purpose built to meet the needs of line of business professionals empowers them, speeds time to insight and enables decisions to be made at the speed of the business.

Discovery platforms are very much a product of necessity in traditional business intelligence architectures. They address the largest obstacles standing between business leaders and action by creating an environment of self-service and insight. A discovery platform user poses the tools necessary to make decisions without relying on IT for critical access and assistance. Purpose built platforms often deliver custom interfaces and features specifically designed to make adoption of these platforms easier by the business and are designed for various levels of expertise making it easier for more users to utilize insights. The rise of discovery platforms is setting a new standard of agility, usability and value for line of business professionals.

Business Discovery DriversThere is a set of drivers at work driving this change within the BI landscape. Each driver on its own may not be the force necessary to make enterprise companies rethink their strategy, but as a combined force they are nearly impossible to ignore.

MaturingUsersandApplications There are clear shifts converging on our analytic and operational environments. Great demands are being put on traditional systems to support the maturing needs of end users and to address the creativity required by a new breed of knowledge worker. User-driven analytics are changing the game and putting power in the hands of finance professionals and reducing the load put on IT teams and departments. A more complex analytics workload coupled with a larger, more diverse population of users is taxing traditional systems beyond their abilities, creating a need for more diverse platforms and solutions.

Economics Commodity hardware, low cost storage and memory are creating an opportunity to address projects that once were beyond the fiscal reach of most companies. The ability to add new, purpose-built solutions to the data management landscape is affordable for many and driving a decentralization of the enterprise data warehouse (EDW) in favor of solutions better suited to specific needs.

TechnologyAdvancements The spirit of Moores law2 is alive and well in the enterprise. The systems available today eclipse the scale and performance of those we invested in just a few short years ago. This ongoing improvement arc is fueling our ability to address faster and more complex analytics. In-memory computing and massively parallel processing (MPP) are now common technologies deployed to power analytics and applications dependent on data.

ValuableDataSources For years, we have been forced to ignore various data sources that could prove valuable to our work processes and analytic insights. These data sources came in structures and sizes not easily accepted by traditional platforms. The combination of the above drivers now makes it possible to leverage traditional and new data sources in our projects. New data sources such as social data, machine generated data and sensor data are all important to powering more complex analysis of our businesses.

2 Moores Law, Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moores_law

User-driven analytics are changing the game and

putting power in the hands of finance professionals



The combination of these drivers causes IT to look beyond traditional strategies to an array of platforms that can support the growing needs of their user community. Cloud, discovery platforms, data marts, enterprise data warehouses, analytic platforms, Hadoop, NoSQL and operational systems are purpose built to meet these new hurdles and enable innovation. By acknowledging these drivers forward-looking companies see great value in providing user-driven BI and discovery platforms to finance executives, especially when their data is spread over a diverse ecosystem of solutions and platforms. As data grows within the enterprise, it is even more critical for the business to see and leverage all data that affects its business.

Impact of User-Driven BI on Your BusinessWork processes that support decision making come in all shapes and sizes. The one below depicts a standard process that data professionals have to go through to capture the business insight. In absence of user-driven BI and/or discovery solutions, users have to rely on the assistance of IT team for all of these steps. This dependence can cause delays in implementation and added work for business stakeholders coordinating between the various IT teams. User-driven platforms are uniquely positioned to impact each of these areas.

User-driven platforms can provide easy access to better understand the data available and how it impacts the finance professionals. Leading platforms avoid the need for tedious data preparation and transformation. These two steps generally account for 60%80% of the time spent when executing analytic projects. This is especially true when initial analysis creates a demand for additional data. User-driven solutions remove this burden from IT and empower the business user with an agile solution that provides insight at the speed of business and perhaps a competitive advantage over competition thats forced to operate in traditional data management service models.

Enabling Finance TeamsRegardless of industry vertical all corporations rely on their finance group to provide insight, accounting services and management of the financial foundation that supports and enables the companys strategic initiatives. Overall corporate health and well-being is supported by the finance function and all other areas of the business are dependent upon it for success and resources. This reliance on finance isnt a new challenge, but over the past decade the demands have shifted from a passive consumer relationship to one that demands much greater insight and performance from the finance group. Line of business executives have learned to run their business with data and a critical source of this information is produced and managed by finance.



In turn, finance is demanding more from IT to create a consistent stream of data from critical system to ensure accuracy and the proper speed of response. Innovative financial organizations are empowering their teams to address these new pressures by utilizing user-driven solutions that support data access and analytics to help speed response and insight.

As finance serves a greater corporate community they are often challenged to deliver a more standardized view of the business while incorporating a global view of the companys financial information. Because the environment has become so dynamic, financial professionals can no longer rely on manual data wrangling and off-system excel spreadsheets to properly share and distribute data. This is further exasperated by globally disparate data and diverse accounting practices. In the past financial data was managed in a silo a model that doesnt support todays progressive demands for insight and information. Furthermore, as governance and compliance issues grow in importance it is critical for finance to deliver data in a transparent fashion avoiding offline data sources, private spreadsheets and other manual processes that can affect accuracy, speed and collaboration.

Leading user-driven platforms are aimed at these challenges and while meeting the new demands for data, they are also impacting finances ability to be more agile and meet the diverse information challenges of complex organizations. Projects driven by user-driven platforms are realizing greater return on investment as they enable faster insights with the ability to be more flexible when utilizing data.

Delivering financial data and insight within the organization is only part of the challenge for many financial professionals. Large companies are responsible for consolidating that information and accurately reporting it to the public. Crossing this finish line every month is a massive undertaking for companies that lack collaborative, transparent and agile platforms. Many companies are still struggling with disconnected data, proprietary systems and costly and inaccurate manual work processes.

To move at the speed necessary in todays highly competitive marketplaces financial professionals need solutions that empower their ability to execute on accounting, compliance and most importantly maintaining and building the strategic foundation required for their companys success.

5 Essential Components for Successful Business DiscoveryEmpowering finance with faster and deeper insights is an easy value proposition to endorse. Its important to examine your data management ecosystem to ensure youre well prepared to support user-driven platforms. Each platform will include features that can automate or assist in executing on these components. The users view these critical components differently but they illustrate areas where both play a role in the success of user-driven projects.

Delivering financial data and insight within the

organization is only part of the challenge for many

financial professionals.



Finance Challenge Business Description Why its Essential

Financial Planning and Analysis

Does your existing system support your needs to quickly and accurately plan and analyze?

Utilizing user-driven solutions can enhance a companys ability to execute quicker, deeper and more insightful financial planning and analysis. Armed with these capabilities, financial professionals can attain better insights to business units and make faster decisions.

Integration of multiple general ledgers via user-driven analytics will provide a clearer and more accurate view of financial information and provide a better overall platform for forecasting.

Advanced functions such as scenario based analysis, planning and budgeting can provide a competitive edge and surface information that can greatly impact the business.

Expense Management

Do you have the visibility into systems and data to effectively manage expenses

Expense management can have a fast and direct effect on monthly profitability and is especially impactful within large to enterprise-sized companies that are managing significantly expense exposure.

Being able to identify redundant expenses and other cost savings opportunities are ideal workload for user-driven solutions. Quick access to data and user-driven paths to better and faster insight enable finance professionals to proactively manage expense costs, driving greater profit to the bottom line.

A greater level of expense management insight allows finance to play a proactive role in project management through more detailed cost analysis and better management of margins impacted by poorly managed expenses.

Revenue/Profitability Management

Can you impact margins and risks with to impact success?

Management of revenue and profitability are affected by many variables across a company. Better management of these critical facets of the organization can be driven by innovative and insightful finance professionals armed with agile user-driven analytic solutions.

All too often companies make ill-informed go-to- market decisions based on poor insights and assumption around market trends, competition and pricing. User-driven solutions bring data access and detailed discovery analytics to bear on these challenges enabling companies to avoid risk and underperformance by delivering the needed insights at the speed of the business.

These solutions also drive better communication between stakeholders by providing the necessary information quickly and accurately. Finance is able to empower the business units to see a more detailed and valuable view of performance to better manage product portfolios.

Cash Flow and Balance Sheet Management

Does your present solution enable you to operationally manage cash flow, AR and AP?

User-driven analytics help finance professionals apply current technology to the traditional challenges of managing AR and AP. Coupling better access to this data with stronger, more insightful tools empower financial professionals to reduce aged accounts receivables and improve cash flow.

User-driven analytics help the finance group to impact liquidity and cash reserves for the company resulting in a more agile business environment and a stronger corporate foundation.

Compliance and Risk Management

Can you get to the root of compliance and regulatory issues while aligning to business strategies?

Identifying processes that cause or run contrary to corporate compliance and risk models is a critical task for finance professionals. Reducing or eliminating fines, penalties, risk and fraud create immediate and long-lasting return on investment.

User-driven BI platforms can integrate the disparate data from within the enterprise along with third party information to better identify and manage these risks. By creating a comprehensive view internal controls and policies can be executed and enhanced.

Beyond managing these issues lies the challenge of delivering transparency. A clear view of regulatory and compliance data enables innovative companies to save time, money and reputation when faced with investigations and inquires. User-driven platforms enable this level of execution.



Best-of-Breed Selection Criteria Check ListEMA utilizes a set of standards within its business intelligence continuum to identify common traits and best of breed functionality for various solutions. In the case of user-driven solutions a focus on data acquisition, data management, business analytics and knowledge delivery are critical.

In the EMA Business Intelligence Continuum, the initial level is data acquisition. Best of breed, user-driven platforms depend on strong and accurate data acquisition. These functions are generally built into the platform or achieved via a partner technology.

Data access functionality must be easily administered.

Multiple data source integration is critical for better insight and user-driven interaction.

Highly configurable security features are especially important for platforms that share insights and feature collaborative functionality.

After data acquisition, user-driven platforms need to manage the data from an organizations source systems. Data management can include the following data governance disciplines:

Data quality and cleansing to maintain standard organizational standards.

Metadata management for consistency with data definitions within an organization for areas such as product, customer and analytical measurements.

Data retention and archive to maintain the appropriate level of information within a business intelligence platform for the domain of analysis of the platforms mission.

With data ingested and properly administered from the data acquisition and data management layers of the EMA Business Intelligence Continuum, a user-driven platform can then perform analysis on the data to transform it into information.

Best of breed user-driven platforms should deliver simple query results and more importantly multi-dimensional analysis leveraging a diverse group of data sources.

Advanced platforms may deliver predictive analytics as well.

The ability to easily explore data enhances the discovery process and adds value that is critical for user-driven environments.

Knowledge delivery represents the last section of the EMA Business intelligence Continuum thats applicable to user-driven platforms. When information is generated from the business analytics layer of a platform, it is critical to communicate this knowledge with a wide audience outside of the users/operators of the platform.

The ability to easily explore data enhances the discovery process.



User-driven platforms focus on dashboards and can deliver various levels of dynamic access to the data presented as a graphical interface via web, mobile or client application.

Advanced systems deliver collaborative feature sets that enable users to leverage the knowledge of their team or company to make faster and better decisions.

Some platforms are also focusing on better ways to communicate or tell the story of their insights with infographics and advanced delivery methods.

EMA PerspectiveUser-driven BI and discovery platforms are answering the need to empower the business users within enterprise-sized companies. Leading platforms have proven equal to the challenge for data acquisition, data management, business analytics and knowledge delivery. Some are striking a balance between IT support and control while empowering business users. The ROI of these platforms are easy to calculate as they are affecting time to value decision cycles with speed and agility, off-loading work from IT, and providing a competitive advantage to companies that adopt these solutions.

EMA identifies user-driven discovery platforms as a necessary tool to enable analytic success within companies of all sizes. In particular, EMA feels that financial teams benefit from user-driven BI and data discovery platforms. Financial departments need to operate not at the speed of their IT teams response rate, but rather at the pace necessary to drive revenue and manage expenses and support corporate strategies. Waiting for IT teams should not be an excuse for capitalizing on these opportunities to better manage the company no matter what type of organization. User-driven BI and data discovery platforms can arm financial teams with the measurement information that their less agile competitors are incapable of attaining. This leads to additional opportunity and greater market share.

About Enterprise Management Associates, Inc.Founded in 1996, Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) is a leading industry analyst firm that provides deep insight across the full spectrum of IT and data management technologies. EMA analysts leverage a unique combination of practical experience, insight into industry best practices, and in-depth knowledge of current and planned vendor solutions to help its clients achieve their goals. Learn more about EMA research, analysis, and consulting services for enterprise line of business users, IT professionals and IT vendors at www.enterprisemanagement.com or blogs.enterprisemanagement.com. You can also follow EMA on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn.

This report in whole or in part may not be duplicated, reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or retransmitted without prior written permission of Enterprise Management Associates, Inc. All opinions and estimates herein constitute our judgement as of this date and are subject to change without notice. Product names mentioned herein may be trademarks and/or registered trademarks of their respective companies. EMA and Enterprise Management Associates are trademarks of Enterprise Management Associates, Inc. in the United States and other countries.

2014 Enterprise Management Associates, Inc. All Rights Reserved. EMA, ENTERPRISE MANAGEMENT ASSOCIATES, and the mobius symbol are registered trademarks or common-law trademarks of Enterprise Management Associates, Inc.

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Sales organizations need to operate not on the

speed of their IT teams response rate, but rather

at the pace of imagination

Who Holds the Keys to Your Success?The Rise of Business DiscoveryBusiness Discovery Drivers

Impact of User-Driven BI on Your BusinessEnabling Finance Teams5 Essential Components for Successful Business DiscoveryBest-of-Breed Selection Criteria Check ListEMA Perspective

WP Unlocking Your Financial Data With User Driven BI En

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