|
TELECOMS AND SOFTWARE NEWS
|
|
|
New IBM Cognos mashup brings self-servicing to BI
Helena Schwenk
New IBM Cognos mashup brings self-servicing to BI
As part of IBM's commitment to business analytics, the company has expanded its enterprise mashup portfolio to include a new business intelligence (BI) offering called IBM Cognos 8 Mashup Service. This announcement demonstrates how IBM is pooling together its expansive analytics and application development expertise to bring more ad hoc self-servicing capability to the BI application development paradigm.BI mashups offer new opportunities in the enterprise domain
The IBM Cognos mashup service is an application programming interface (API) that exposes content from Cognos 8 BI as a web service for use in other mashups and applications. Mashups - typically web applications created by combining information from more than one source to deliver new capabilities - have seen considerable success and uptake in the consumer world, so it's no surprise that they are also making an appearance in the enterprise domain. The business value of mashups is their potential to rapidly and cheaply source and integrate data to suit particular business requirements. For IT, mashups offer the potential to make software reuse more of a reality and drive down the cost of application development. Assuming that the potential to provide business value is there, the usage scenarios for BI mashups are plentiful. For instance, a mapping mashup can be used by a sales manager to overlay sales reports into a GIS application to get a picture of store performance throughout a region. Similarly, sales managers can mashup business reports with client interaction history to better manage and forecast pipelines. If the service is used in conjunction with IBM's Mashup Center, users can also access and combine different widgets into a mashup, and view recent changes and ratings of a mashup, look at tags and view the most discussed mashups - hence providing more enterprise-class management features to the BI mashup paradigm.BI mashups support short-term, custom, tactical applications The value of enterprise mashups is also tightly linked to underlying Web 2.0 ideals that bring together a rapid and less expensive development process with the ability to make information more self-servicing, open, collaborative, reusable and shareable. Mashups by their nature are self-servicing because they can empower end users to source data, and build and deploy mashup applications without having to fully rely on the BI IT team.If created and applied correctly, the mashup service allows users to create quick, tactical, ad hoc BI applications that can complement the existing self-serve capabilities of the Cognos 8 BI platform. They have the potential to increase productivity and create new business opportunities and outcomes that simply weren't possible before. However, the trick is to ensure that if the application becomes business critical, in either an operational or strategic sense, then careful consideration is given to how the mashup is incorporated into a business application or Cognos 8 BI platform in the longer term. Having to deal with disparate, isolated and conflicting mashups is unlikely to strengthen the business case for their introduction or ongoing use.Business and IT need to work together
Furthermore, because mashups empower end users, a careful balancing act needs to be maintained that ensures end-user flexibility is sustained while upholding the control and manageability that IT demands over the application development and deployment process. IT should also be aware that the usefulness of mashups is also predicated upon the existence of ready-to-use web services. Data governance remains an important issue, as IT needs to ensure confidential information is not inadvertently made available, and that management and owner guidelines are adhered to. Enterprise mashups therefore have to address other requirements that consumer mashups often do not, such as security, data quality, governance, and integration with other tools and applications. In addition, it is inevitable that questions will arise about who is responsible for versioning, cataloguing, supporting and maintaining mashups. Companies therefore need to consider these issues carefully before diving head-first into mashup development.The Cognos mashup service represents a collaborative effort The introduction of the new mashup service is a small but important move by IBM. It also demonstrates a level of collaboration between separate IBM product groups, in this case Cognos, InfoSphere and Lotus (Mashup Center includes InfoSphere MashupHub and Lotus Mashup). This is something that is not all that easy for a company of IBM's size and scale. However, by pulling together the company's rich set of technology capabilities it has demonstrated its potential to deliver interesting, innovative and alternative modes to BI application development to market.
About:
This article is an extract taken from Ovum's Straight Talk service. This daily email bulletin provides our expert's views and opinions on important news and events in global IT and telecoms. If you have a comment or question regarding this article then please submit your details here:
If you would like to find out more about Straight Talk please contact StraightTalk@ovum.com
If you would like to find out more about Ovum services then please click
here for details
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Search
|
|
|
|
|
Contact Us
|
|
|
Expertise
|
|
|
|
|
