Self-service mashup capabilities--which let non-IT workers handle some business intelligence (BI) development tasks from within their browsers, Excel spreadsheets, and other client applications--can reduce pressure on IT staffs while satisfying the ongoing need to develop and revise reports, dashboards, cubes, and other analytic applications and data structures.
"Mashup-style self-service BI relieves developers from having to respond to an incessant stream of user requests for low-level changes," says James Kobielus, lead author of a 20-page Forrester report, in an announcement. "Instead, users can make those changes themselves at the client level, without affecting back-end data models." Kobielus adds that mashup-style BI leverages organizations' investments in both BI tools and interactive Web 2.0 technologies.
One practitioner is Pfizer, which uses the Composite Information Server software from Composite Software, the announcement says. The big pharma's IT group developed an intranet business intelligence mashup supporting ad-hoc query, forecasting, planning and modeling for its pharmaceutical sciences product executives making investment decisions. The intranet delivers information from disparate internal data sources (global information factory, project and portfolio management, inventory and supply chain) and allows the reuse of data across multiple subject marts.
- the report is available from Forrester