BI SEARCH AND TEXT ANALYTICS - The Data Warehousing Institute

BI SEARCH AND TEXT ANALYTICSBI search is a big bang forthe buck, since it helps allBI users and IT.• BI search is a baby step, so just take it. Simple configurations that index the reports of asingle BI platform are relatively cheap and easy, especially when your BI platform has thecapability built in. Given that all users benefit from BI search—even IT people whose loadis lessened by its self service—it makes a big bang for the buck.• Start with one platform, but try to incorporate others into the scope of BI search. Thisapplies to organizations with multiple BI brands. Multi-platform BI search eases the pain ofping-ponging among platforms to gather related reports. And it can be a compelling stopgapalternative to expensive and disruptive platform consolidations.BI search assists withmany BI tasks, but won’treplace tools.• Don’t expect BI search to replace anything. BI search assumes a BI platform is already inplace. Search is an alternate way of finding reports, but it can’t replace the BI platform’staxonomy. It can find data, but it’s not a full-featured query tool. It can find report sectionsand paste them into new reports, but it won’t replace report authors or authoring tools.• Recognize that text analytics requires a fair amount of development time. It’s not as fastand easy to deploy as BI search. You need to decide what entities and facts to look for. Plus,you must work out data models for extracted entity records and the target database or indexthey’ll go into. Plus, you’ll probably need ETL jobs to transform extracted data into the datamodels that your data warehouse and other applications need.• Expect vendor products to evolve. Software vendors have barely scratched the surface interms of tying search and text analytics directly into business intelligence tools and datawarehouses. The flurry of vendor partnerships and promised products seen in 2006 is agood start. But this is a moving target that will continue moving for years, as partneringvendors deepen interoperability and new products finally see the light of day. In the meantime, users must investigate vendor offerings for their current as well as future capabilities,plus the depth and ease of integration in multi-product configurations.32 TDWI RESEARCH