White Paper Library: Enterprise Business Intelligence and Web Reporting

Please select one or more papers from the list below by checking the box to the left of each paper and clicking on the "submit" button at the bottom of the page.
Analyst Reports
Analytics
Architecture
Business Strategies
Complementary Technologies
Data Management & ETL
Development & Deployment
Legacy Extension
Management & Administration

Analytics

Data Visualization: Gaining Perspective

Explore the benefits of using a data visualization tool to identify business problems that are hidden in large volumes of data. WebFOCUS Visual Discovery uses color, isolation, and chart interactions to reveal masked conditions. Data visualization tools like WebFOCUS Visual Discovery make relevant information pop out, using unique chart types like paraboxes, cone charts, and scatter plots. Once abnormal conditions are exposed by data visualization, traditional BI tools can then be deployed to investigate and monitor situations on a regular basis.

Advanced Data Visualization and Analysis

Learn how turning raw enterprise data into intuitive and visually perceptive illustrations can make it easier to measure and compare information while spotting critical trends, patterns, and relationships.

Leveraging Real-Time Information to Enhance Financial Planning, Management and Control

Learn how comprehensive financial analysis can help you obtain a complete, consolidated view of corporate performance and deliver timely, accurate financial information.

Architecture

WebFOCUS Product Roadmap

Information Builders is the first vendor to offer a scalable Web-based BI platform that supports production-level BI applications. The proof of this is in the myriad applications with more than 100,000 users in operation today. But we do not intend to rest on these laurels. Our 24-month product development plans for WebFOCUS will allow us to break down the barriers to pervasive BI and between decision and action. We define our goals with three words - reach, simplicity, and timeliness. Development plans to attain these goals are underway.

The Foundation of High-Value Business Intelligence: A Description of the WebFOCUS 7.1 Architecture

This paper, written by Information Builders CEO Gerald Cohen, discusses the benefits of a modular architecture for BI: applications can be scaled with less hardware; server environments can be managed with fewer human resources; and analytical business intelligence, end-user information delivery, electronic publishing, and operational business intelligence applications can be implemented with a single system. This leads to easier installations, lower maintenance costs, and shared re-use of common components.

Deploying an Operational Business Intelligence Architecture: The WebFOCUS 7 Data Integration Framework

The best business intelligence solutions use a data integration framework to optimize data access and BI processes at the source: the systems that run the business.

Why We Scale: Superior Technology That Provides Business Intelligence Scalability

This paper describes the six technological advantages responsible for WebFOCUS' advanced scalability.

Scalability: Ensuring Long-Term Value for Business Intelligence and Reporting Investments

This paper examines the connection between scalability to enterprise BI and reporting value, and recommends strategies for ensuring BI scalability.

Scaling Business Intelligence to Leverage Server Consolidations

Server consolidation delivers the dual benefits of reducing costs and improving performance. And once servers are consolidated, they can dramatically improve the company's access to -- and use of -- its business intelligence systems.

Business Strategies

Business Intelligence on the Mainframe

WebFOCUS, Information Builder's fully-integrated enterprise BI platform, leverages the advantages of IBM's System z to deliver a highly reliable, scalable, mainframe-based operational reporting environment that maximizes performance and minimizes risk.

The Most Widely Used Business Intelligence Paradigm – Enabling Pervasive BI with Guided Ad Hoc Reporting

Guided Ad Hoc solutions are used in thousands of companies of all types and sizes. These businesses have been able to recognize the true impact that BI can have, by putting the power of reporting right in the hands of their end users.

How Business Intelligence Should Work – The Connection Between Strategic, Analytical, and Operational Initiatives

In this paper, we'll investigate the various levels of business intelligence, discuss the challenges organizations face with today's typical BI deployments, and highlight how to make strategic, analytical, and operational initiatives work seamlessly together to enhance performance and boost competitive advantage across an entire organization.

Optimizing Performance Across Your Supply Chain

A firm's supply chain is the essence of how it delivers value to its customers. Deploying a supply chain performance management solution is a challenging process. This paper outlines critical steps and key factors in optimizing performance management for your entire supply chain.

Is a Data Warehouse the Only Option? Seven Styles of Data Integration

There are many ways to access data for analysis and reporting. You should analyze each business challenge to understand whether a data warehouse or another type of information-access method presents the best solution. This white paper identifies seven basic ways to integrate and access data to solve various business problems.

Business Intelligence Best Practices for Dashboard Design

Dashboards help organizations make better business decisions. The way in which they are created is not trivial and attention must be paid to the details. Employing visual design standards and principles are important, but are only part of the journey. The way in which data is integrated from the enterprise is just as important. It requires proper planning to address what users need to see, where the data is coming from, how soon it can be delivered, and ensuring that it is accurate and consistent.

Business Intelligence: The Strategic Imperative for CIOs

The CIO's role becomes more strategic as organizations use information to create a competitive advantage. This paper – using evidence from benchmarks created with IBM to test WebFOCUS' performance on System z running z/OS and Linux – helps CIOs to balance demands for information accessibility and processing power.

Worst Practices in Business Intelligence: Why BI Applications Succeed Where BI Tools Fail

This paper provides insight into the top four worst practices for business intelligence. It also provides guidance on how to avoid or overcome worst practices in order to tap into the true power of BI. By reading this paper, you will have a solid understanding of how to avoid BI failure and achieve success with your BI initiatives.

Process-Driven BI: Building Smarter Business Processes

Improving operational efficiency involves more than simply automating labor-intensive activities. It requires organizations to continually seek out new methods of managing increasingly complex business processes. By injecting business intelligence technology directly into critical business operations, you can ensure that the right people get involved at the right time to make decisions that impact your bottom line.

Implement a Best-of-Breed Fusion Center

Knowledge is power, and today's law enforcement professional must be a knowledge-based worker. From the police chief to the patrol officer, everyone needs the latest information to rapidly gain awareness and understanding of the events in their jurisdiction. A well-designed Fusion Center can make this possible, but accessing, consolidating, and then distributing the myriad information sources required by a Fusion Center is no mean feat. This paper discusses the critical components and success factors required to design and implement a best-of-breed Fusion Center in order to effectively fight, and even prevent, crime.

Business Intelligence Goes Operational: On the Front Lines Making a Bottom-Line Difference

Learn how to include everyone - even front-line operational staff - in the push to improve organizational decision-making.

Fostering a Culture of Accountability: Three Approaches to a Performance Management System

Using technology, companies create a culture of accountability by involving everyone, at all levels. Read comparisons among the three current technical approaches to managing performance.

The Real-Time Enterprise: IT Becomes Strategic Again

Learn how companies are quickly moving to build flexible systems architecture so they can accommodate more dynamic business processes and accelerate information velocity throughout the enterprise.

Delivering on the Enterprise Business Intelligence Mandate – Success Factors for a Standardized Solution

This white paper explains the specific business and architectural success factors to consider when selecting one enterprise business intelligence suite to serve as the enterprise standard.

Achieving Compliance – Meeting Today's Reporting Requirements With Business Intelligence Technology

Learn about the challenges and solutions for meeting the reporting requirements of government legislation, industry-specific standards, or corporate governance.

Establishing a Culture of Measurement - A Practical Guide to Business Intelligence

This paper serves as a synopsis of Information Builders' philosophy of business intelligence. By using this paper as a model, you'll learn how to establish a culture of measurement and begin a powerful cycle of continued improvement within your organization.

Architecture of the WebFOCUS 7 Server for Autonomic Operation

The autonomic server is Information Builders' next-generation WebFOCUS architecture.

Integrated Business Intelligence Suites Positioning Paper

Read about the emergence of enterprise business intelligence suites and how they satisfy the information requirements of users across the enterprise and beyond

The Cost of a Question - Examining Total Cost of Ownership for Business Intelligence Solutions

Reduce the purchase, maintenance, and implementation costs of business intelligence by standardizing on a single solution that meets all of your reporting and information delivery needs. Compares the TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) of BI solutions from Cognos, Business Objects, and Information Builders.

Information Now - by Gerald D. Cohen

Information Builders' CEO Gerry Cohen describes how successfully mastering the three dimensions of business intelligence scalability will provide universal access to real-time information and improve decision-making across your organization.

Strategic Delivery and Management of Enterprise Information

Discusses how WebFOCUS information delivery and management solutions help organizations dynamically deliver vital business information to the right people at the right time, and effectively store and manage it for future use.

Managing Total Cost of Ownership for Business Intelligence

Learn how you can reduce the total cost of business intelligence and reporting for your organization.

Complementary Technologies

Everyone Sells: The Value of Business Intelligence in Retail

The Value of Business Intelligence in Retail

Monitoring Trading Partner Agreements

iWay Activity Monitor integrates BAM and BI technology to capture end-to-end transaction and workflow data across multiple applications and business units, summarizing and displaying trading partner metrics to help managers make informed decisions.

iWay Software Secure Messaging Option

iWay Service Manager's Secure Messaging Option allows buisness users, and their partners, to enhance the security and harden the integration infrastructure used to exchange messages between organizations.

Controlling Excel Chaos With Business Intelligence

Providing direct, secure access from Microsoft Excel to corporate data presents a significant challenge. This paper first outlines the vulnerabilities of Excel, and explores strategies to counteract these shortfalls. It then describes push solutions that serve up corporate data from centralized Excel sourcebooks and add-in desktop functionality that lets expert Excel users pull data directly from corporate data sources. And finally, it proposes structured ad hoc applications that are flexible and agile in answering the impromptu questions of non-expert Excel users. This paper was updated in August 2007 to include information about WebFOCUS Quick Data, our add-in feature for Excel.

Best Practices in Enterprise Reporting for Growing Businesses

For growing organizations that own iSeries, AS/400, or System i5 hardware, Information Builders offers a unique range of platform-optimized solutions that access and integrate any database or application in order to provide enterprise reporting and business intelligence. Learn how companies such as Eastern Mountain Sports, Collections Etc., and Bradley Corporation use WebFOCUS for System i5 to make informed business decisions.

WebFOCUS for SAP: Maximizing The Value of Your SAP BW/NetWeaver Investment

Learn how WebFOCUS for SAP delivers simplified reporting and operational business intelligence capabilities to SAP users, including the ability to combine SAP and non-SAP data into actionable reports with rich visualization and analysis capabilities.

Information Builders' WebFOCUS and Unisys Enterprise Scalability Benchmarks

Scalability testing of WebFOCUS on the Unisys ES7000 family of servers clearly demonstrates performance that scales to meet global enterprises' most challenging BI and reporting requirements.

Tackling the Data Management Challenge Through Server Consolidation

Obtaining the best data for specific applications requires more than simply the ability to connect to like sources using similar semantics. It means making decisions about how fresh the data must be, where it must ultimately reside, and in what forms users need it. Navigate the challenges of data and server consolidation with help from Unisys and Information Builders.

The World-Class Combination for Boosting Business Intelligence Performance - Mainframe Scalability, Linux Flexibility, Enhanced Affordability

The complexity of today's IT environments necessitates BI standardization and hardware consolidation without sacrificing performance and functionality. With WebFOCUS for Linux on IBM zSeries, Information Builders and IBM achieve that rare combination of massive scalability, high availability, robust functionality, and low TCO. Learn how companies are saving time and money deploying WebFOCUS for Linux on IBM zSeries.

Geographic Information Systems and Business Intelligence: Perfect Together

Laden with examples, this paper presents a vision of the synergistic power of integrating geographic information with business intelligence applications.

The Power of Two: Extending IBM WebSphere With Information Builders' WebFOCUS Services for Java Environments

Learn how WebFOCUS brings information about your business processes, operations, sales, and supply chains to IBM WebSphere-generated e-business solutions.

Data Management & ETL

Often Overlooked Best Practices: Ensuring Data Warehousing Success for P&C Insurers

Adhering to three data model-related principles can prevent data warehousing chaos for P&C insurance companies.

Leveraging Your Data Architecture for Enterprise Business Intelligence

Find out how to leverage your data architecture in order to shorten business cycles, increase responsiveness to changing business conditions, and gain a competitive edge.

Resource Governance and Analysis for Enterprise Business Intelligence

Demonstrates the benefits of enhancing your business intelligence system with in-depth resource analysis and preemptive governing capabilities.

Development & Deployment

Mobile Business Intelligence Reporting: A Roadmap for Success

How an organization approaches mobile BI will inevitably impact the health of the entire enterprise. With more and more employees traveling and working remotely, organizations that meet the demand for mobile BI will benefit from maximized productivity by enabling users to get the information they need wherever they are. This paper helps to identify key issues, highlight paramount considerations, and map the necessary steps to successfully implementing a mobile BI reporting solution.

Delivering Next Generation User Interfaces Using AJAX

This paper explains why Information Builders chose to use a component-based AJAX architecture for its new report and graph authoring solution - WebFOCUS Power Painter. The first section puts AJAX in the context of the emerging Web 2.0 technologies. The second section focuses on the overall AJAX architecture and how Information Builders used it to leverage the development of Power Painter.

Enabling Rapid ROI: With Java Based Business Intelligence Applications

Learn how to leverage the processing efficiencies of Java-based application servers to deploy business intelligence applications to more people at a lower per user cost.

How to Quickly and Cost Effectively Deploy Information on a Wide Scale Basis - Structured Ad Hoc Reporting with WebFOCUS

Structured ad hoc report templates have brought business intelligence deployment to a new level.

Rapid Business Intelligence: Application Development for the Web

Shows how to rapidly develop applications for all users and broadly deploy them via the web.

Legacy Extension

Mainframe FOCUS Release 7.6: CPU Performance Improvement

The 7.6 release of mainframe FOCUS employs the new IBM/C compiler to achieve CPU performance improvements of 10 and 20 percent and more compared to the previous release. In many cases, it restores performance levels to those of 7.0.8R from 1999. This paper details the benchmark process and results for various mini-applications from which you can extrapolate the gains you might achieve on your own applications by upgrading to 7.6.

FOCUS Web Integration Using WebFOCUS

Directed to owners of FOCUS reporting environments, illustrates how leading organizations have minimized cost and time for moving legacy systems to the Web.

Management & Administration

Deploying and Managing Enterprise Wide End-User Reporting Environments

Learn how to deploy secure, wide scale business intelligence applications that provide the ability to personalize and specialize views of the information.