Review: Panorama Necto Socially-Enabled Business Intelligence
Panorama Software has been in the business of business intelligence (BI) for more than 14 years. The company offers a suite of business intelligence applications that are designed to help your company make better, more profitable business decisions and then track the results of those decisions.
Until recently, Panorama's NovaView solution was the company's standard business intelligence solution for query and analysis reporting, performance dashboards, key performance indicators (KPI) scorecards, modeling, advanced visualization, and automated report distribution.
Seeing a need to move beyond “traditional” business intelligence processes, in May 2011 the company released a second suite called Panorama Necto, a socially-enabled business intelligence solution that provides collaboration and automated intelligence capabilities.
Business Environment Changes Prompt Business Intelligence Changes
Panorama's belief is that traditional BI does not deliver in today's changing business environment and that the process of using analytic tools to make better business decisions should be easy. Many companies never venture beyond the “basics” offered in their BI software to really understand what's in the BI package.
With the Necto release, Panorama addresses a number of issues commonly reported with traditional BI solutions. The first is that business intelligence can be complicated for end users. Cost overrun and complications in using the business intelligence solution after deployment are often cited as reasons why business implementations fail. Necto addresses this issue with self-service capabilities in the BI.
From the company's perspective, they have seen a number of business environment changes that just are not compatible with most traditional BI systems. Before we discuss how Necto performs, it is important to understand the three main concepts that Panorama based this release around:
1. Social Intelligence Connects Users and Data – social business intelligence enables BI users within the organization to connect data, insights, and people across the enterprise. In Necto users can conduct and track conversations inside the BI.
2. Contextual Discovery with Intelligent BI Engine – in Necto, contextual discovery is used to recommend the right reports to the right user at the right time. The intelligent BI engine is Panorama's Automated Intelligence Driving Engine (AIDEN). It learns users' behavior and automatically provides users with relevant data and insights contextually. The system can spot issues from volumes of data and automatically identify the causes of these.
3. Self-Service BI Relieves IT – the third interesting concept behind Necto is the way self-service is integrated making the BI both an automated and visual process. Users shouldn't have to submit a request to IT to have reports created, but that is often the case with traditional BI solutions. Necto provides a user interface and automated processes that lets business users to easily create their own views, reports, links, and analysis frameworks to reduce dependence on IT for report generation and data mining.
So, with a focus on self-service, social intelligence and obtaining relevant data with an intelligent BI engine, Necto moves beyond traditional business intelligence into what the company refers to as Business Intelligence 3.0.
How Panorama Necto Business Intelligence Works
For business users, the core of Necto business intelligence is Panorama Workboards (or customized dashboards). Workboards is where business users can work with different sets of data and add social communication and collaboration on top of the data layer.
In Workboards, users are working within the business principles set by administration, such workflow, data access by user and so on.
When users login to the BI system, the main homepage is where you find quick access buttons to Favorite Workboards, Recent Workboards and My Relevant Workboards.
The first two are rather self-explanatory by name and the third offering (My Relevant) is where Necto's intelligent BI engine knows what you have used in the past, what others in the organization ‘like you' have used and recommends Workboards that are highly relevant to you.
Often users tend to stay within their BI comfort zone and might not venture beyond the “basics” offered in the system. This is where Necto recommendations can expand the way you use the BI and lower IT requirements and involvement for reporting.
Also located on the homepage for quick access are Recent Discussions and Waiting Discussions. This area of the BI is where you can follow others inside the BI system to follow-up on conversation regarding specific data or Workboards and you can also follow other users in the system (Twitter style).
By following other users you can choose users who are responsible for the insights you need to use or those who you can learn from.
The Workboards are laid out to provide immediate visualization of the data so you can see issues immediately. Through the easy interface to simple drag-and-drop actions it does appear to meet that goal.
There are also some useful time-saving features in Necto as many of the typical BI reports are automatically generated or can be performed quickly with one-click actions. For example to compare sales results between 3rd and 4th Quarter there is no need to load in previous quarter data. In Necto you simply use the Insights Button to compare previous quarter (or year) to current reports.
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