Analysis Outside the Box

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The following Blog was written by Richard Lewis Managing Director of Connexica 

The great explorers such as Marco Polo, Vasco da Gama, Christopher Columbus and Dora the Explorer all stretched the boundaries and went beyond the norm.

These people found things out.

Discovered new places, new things, new tastes, and smells and went where others feared to tread.

Exciting times! Neil Armstrong was an explorer, he trod where other people had never gone before just like Captain Kirk and Avon from Blake 7…

Exploration and the ability to find stuff out helps us to progress, to innovate, to educate and improve.

Software development is a mixture of plagiarism and discovery.

Plagiarism – by re-using, copying and re-applying things that work…+ Discovery – by adding insight, value and coming up with ideas to create something new.

In the world of business intelligence (the world I operate in), the idea behind it all is to discover things and find stuff out. The reality is something different.

Old Skool BI relies on a team of people to find stuff out and present what they’ve found as a set of structures such as warehouse FACT tables, cubes or universes.

The people that then want to find stuff out (the business users) can then find out what the people that defined and restricted what you can see have already discovered.

Data discovery? No way… It’s more data dictation and insight starvation (#cliché)

So old BI is about finding out stuff that someone (the IT department) already knows…

Is this what businesses really want today?

We want business users to look at the factors influencing the success, growth and limitations of the organisation not IT.

Google and search provide users of any level the ability to find stuff.

The only restriction is what the user wishes to search for and their ability to interpret results and make sense of their search results.

We at Connexica use search technology at the heart of our business intelligence solution CXAIR. It isn’t SQL or OLAP it’s Search.

If you want to find stuff out, use CXAIR. If you want to find stuff that’s already known use anything else.

Don’t be Truman Barbank, be Columbus or Armstrong… go on a journey of discovery not wonder around Seahaven with a fear of getting your feet wet.

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