Project Description
The following instruction should be taped to all Business Intelligence professionals’ notebooks: Don’t forget about other types of information.
So, what could we do to improve the new version’s adoption and satisfaction rates? Make it easy for users to find, understand and rely on the new versions by building on one of BusinessObjects most basic components: InfoView.
- Availability – Can I find the document I need when I need it without too many steps?
- Reliability – How was the information I am viewing created?
- Adaptability – How do I get the information I need if there is no existing document?
Availability was addressed by making sure the content collected during the requirements phase was used to populate the Description and Keywords fields in InfoView. Through the built-in Content Search feature, these fields are easily searched using both simple and Google-like queries.
Reliability, that sense that the information you are viewing can be relied upon was addressed by showing each user how to see where the data on which the document is based came from. This was made relatively easy through BusinessObjects core lineage features, now built into WebIntelligence. Users can now easily trace a document’s information from the report back to the query and, with Metadata Manager, all the way back to the originating data source.
Finally, adaptability was met through another great but lesser used feature of Content Search: automated universe and query identification by which the user receives a set of links which, when clicked, will automatically launch WebIntelligence using the universe which would provide the values the user seeks. Another link, alongside the first, even populates the query with the columns matching the Content Search query.