Business Intelligence and Data Analytics
Business Intelligence solutions were once the domain of only the
largest of organisations but thanks largely to Microsoft the cost of
entry into this market has been dramatically reduced. Many BI vendors
are now using the Microsoft toolset embedded in SQL2000 to provide very
sophisticated business analytics.
For Not for Profit organisations the choices are quite limited but the
following organisations have embraced Business Intelligence from
different perspectives and provide a unique view of NfP data.
Tate Bramald approaches BI from a
finance perspective and has developed the GeniusTM series of
products which includes nfpGeniusTM a product which
integrates data from finance and fundraising systems into an Intranet
Data Warehouse.
Westwood Forster,
software developers of Visual Alms, have approached BI from the
fundraising perspective and have developed OLAP technologies to provide
NfP fundraisers with donor based analytics.
However what often escapes many organisations which are considering
Business Intelligence solutions is that there are many capabilities
within the Microsoft Office toolset which could provide a high
percentage of their needs without recourse to a full blown BI
implementation. Microsoft Excel comes with a companion product
called Microsoft Query which enables reasonably technical users to query
most databases and extract information into Excel worksheets or, for
more extensive datasets, into OLAP cubes.
The most complex part of the process is the
understanding of the data structures of the databases which are being
queried. This can be learned and indeed most quality database
vendors will provide a data schema to help with the process. Sadly
one major vendor (Blackbaud and Raiser's Edge) requires users to
purchase a special module to interrogate the data although there are
ways around this using embedded querying functionality.
The original concept of BI was embodied in the
Intranet Data Warehouse whereby data from diverse systems was collected
in a separate database (often SQL2000) where OLAP technologies would be
used to provide very fast querying capabilities which did not reside in
the feeder databases. The Data Warehouse was used to collect data
and combine it in such a way that the different data structures could be
simplified and combined thus bringing data from finance, membership,
fundraising, payroll etc. systems into one simple format. This was
done largely because the different systems when originally implemented
were not set up in a consistent way particularly with respect to
transaction coding schemas.
There is a lesson here and if your systems are
set up correctly it is possible to use the simple (and cheap) tools
provided by Microsoft Office to prepare sophisticated management reports
based on Excel pivot tables and OLAP and then to publish them to the
organisation's Intranet, Extranet or Internet sites.
For further information please Ask Charlie at Charlie@askcharlie.co.uk.
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Action plan
Business Intelligence and Data Analytics
