Project Description

The following instruction should be taped to all Business Intelligence professionals’ notebooks: Don’t forget about other types of information.

We recently supported a leading automaker as they rolled out SAP BusinessObjects-based replacements for key production line reports. These reports have been in use since the first vehicles rolled off of the line. The users requested these updates and were looking forward to using them. The replacements, while better, faster and more flexible could not, initially, be as good as one which a user knew as well as the back of their own hand.

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.

BusinessObjects ships with the core of our solution already in place: Content Search and Encyclopedia, both available from InfoView. Since the release of BusinessObjects XI, users have been able to locate the document they need through a variety of search mechanisms built into InfoView. We were not surprised to learn, though, that Content Search is a minor part of most users’ training if at all. Furthermore, the Encyclopedia, whose features were first released in Application Foundation 3.x, is also underutilized by most organizations. The critical success factors to adoption fall under the following three qualities:

  • 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.

The key to using both Content Search and Encyclopedia is similar to that of most features: clearly define your need, meet that need through application and training, and continually reinforce best practices so that poor ones don’t crowd out good ones.