Leveraging Success
Business intelligence driven from a data warehouse is a sound and proven system. Web services can both enrich the dividends that organizations realize from these systems, and make them easier to deploy and maintain.

While building a warehouse will never be an effortless task, the standards-based interoperability provided by Web services promises to make it considerably easier and less costly. Furthermore, Web services can provide business users with greater flexibility in accessing fluid data as needed. With a Web services/BI system, data does not need to be moved into a warehouse, but may be sourced directly from applications-and a warehouse as well, if desired.

It should be noted that the Web services flavor of BI is best suited for "light" query and reporting (the sort that most business users require). It complements a warehouse, but does not replace a warehouse for deeper, multi-dimensional analysis and advanced data mining.

A central tenet of Web services is its use of standard protocols for interoperability among incompatible applications, chiefly XML or Extensible Markup Language, SOAP or Simple Object Access Protocol, UDDI or Universal Description, Discovery and Integration, and WSDL or Web Services Description Language. These protocols make it much easier for developers to connect disparate systems. And today, support for these protocols is built into many leading data integration platforms and analytic BI tools.

Enriching Applications
Most users use some flavor of enterprise applications for financial reporting, product and supply chain management, and sales and marketing. The problem is the information in those applications that frequently raise more questions than it answers.

It's often raw data-raw numbers, with little to no context and texture to indicate its importance to the business and its relationships with other information. And in many cases, the application itself is a cul de sac that does not have the answers to your questions.

The questions may be fairly simple: Why are our sales down in the Northeast? Why is our inventory growing? Which are our best and worst performers in online sales vs retail? What is complex is getting a straight answer because bits and pieces of the truth are scattered about. Web services is a powerful agent that can dissolve barriers among your enterprise applications and enrich them with analytic BI functionality that enables a broader audience of users to run on-the-spot queries and seamlessly "drill through" to various systems.

For instance, a purchasing manager may see through an accounts receivable application that her company spent $500,000 with a particular supplier last year. The supplier's contract is up for renewal. How did that supplier perform in terms of component quality, on-time delivery and adherence to a service-level agreement? How does the supplier's pricing compare to a rival that supplies comparable components to the company's South American manufacturing facility?

That information is not in the accounts receivable application, of course. Locating it may require password access to unauthorized applications or old-fashioned phone calls and e-mails, all of which wastes valuable time.

If this company has evolved to a service-oriented architecture, the subject applications communicate freely via XML, SOAP, UDDI and WSDL. That same fabric supports the embedding or integration, of an analytic BI layer that puts real-time information at the decision-maker's fingertips.

Bringing Order to Chaos
As physicists studying chaos theory have observed, small perturbations can manifest themselves in wildly divergent results. This phenomenon, frequently called the Butterfly Effect, holds that the butterfly's fluttering over China theoretically results in a massive storm system over western New York.

A parallel in business is not difficult to imagine: A small, flawed part originating in the Far-East results in a costly product recall and loss of credibility for a Buffalo-based manufacturer. Real-time visibility into information as supplied by Web services and BI gives the company a much better chance to react to adversity and minimize damage.

Web services are in its early phases. Chances are that most deployments in your organization will, for the time being, be largely tactical, perhaps linking applications to support transaction processing. As these systems are being built, however, business and IT professionals have an excellent opportunity to brainstorm on how Web services not only eases development and smoothes the IT infrastructure, but delivers long-term strategic value to decision-makers in the form on business intelligence.

Ramendra Mandal
maildqindia@cybermedia.co.in
The author is the country manager, Informatica India

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