Public sector

viewpoint
Corporate Performance Management
Paul Barber
President, PROPHIX Software
Business intelligence
for the public sector
Paul Barber looks at the challenges of extracting the right data to integrate with a true BI solution
A true business intelligence (BI)
solution simplifies information
discovery and analysis, making
it possible for decision makers
at all levels of an organisation
to easily access, understand,
analyse, collaborate and act
on information, anytime and
anywhere. Unfortunately, typical
BI solutions tend to support only
traditional data sources that were
designed to enhance business
applications. Therefore, BI in
the public sector only becomes a
worthwhile investment when data
trapped in several application silos
is integrated.
Solutions such as PROPHIX have
the ability to integrate data from
multiple sources into a single unified
view of the business, making the
most of the plethora of information.
PROPHIX Software is the leading
developer of solutions designed
to automate financial processes
including budgeting, planning,
reporting, analysis, and performance
management and helps solve the
common challenge of the quality of BI
information by improving the source
data with its underlying technology.
Data integrity involves a whole
segment of the software industry
devoted to improving the integration
of data from existing systems. Extract,
transform, load (ETL) tools are used
exactly as it implies – extract data,
transform it to make it more accurate
or consistent, and load it into a
database for eventual display – and
are sold mainly to larger companies
that have many legacy systems. Midsized
companies that use enterprise
resource planning (ERP) systems often
have less of a need for ETL tools since
the ERP takes care of storing data in a
consistent format. However, even if a
company has an ERP, it may be better
to avoid allowing a BI system direct
access to production data. Directly
accessing real-time production data
can cause performance issues with
those production systems.
A key component to the success
of a BI application is an efficient and
reliable data retrieval process; hence,
PROPHIX Software embraces the
superior functionality of Microsoft’s
Online Analytical Processing
(OLAP) database for BI applications
– Microsoft SQL Server Analysis
Services (SSAS), the standard
OLAP database in the industry.
The functional advantages of OLAP
include the speed of data retrieval,
flexible reporting capabilities, and
sophisticated calculations that can be
defined in the OLAP database.
Previously called multidimensional
databases, OLAP databases have been
”A key component to the
success of a BI application is
an efficient and reliable data
retrieval process”
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