The latest BI interfaces make it easier for firms to visualise business opportunities
For years the US Food Stamps Agency has collected data for each transaction that involves food stamps. But using this data to spot stores that fraudulently accept the vouchers for other goods or cash has rarely been easy.

"Administrators used to have to look at a massive green bar report with one transaction per line and try to spot anomalies," said Bob Hazelton, GIS product manager at business intelligence (BI) software specialist Information Builders. "They were left relying on tips from a hotline to try and spot fraud."

The State of Louisiana, however, is taking a different approach to the problem and has implemented a BI application from Information Builders that reports where transactions are happening on a map of the state. "Presenting the data on a map immediately highlights suspicious activities," explained Hazelton. "You can see the shops people are travelling long distances to reach, which suggests those stores may be accepting stamps fraudulently. The agency's fraud-detection rate has climbed significantly as a result."

BI vendors are increasingly convinced that rather than simply making their products look good, the latest generation of sophisticated user interfaces delivers real operational benefits. The replacement of simple graphs, pie charts and spreadsheets with interactive geographical maps, performance gauges and animated graphics is not simply a case of "eye candy", they argue. It is allowing firms to genuinely maximise returns from their past BI investments.

"What you are buying is time," said Stephen Brobst, chief technology officer of data warehousing specialist Teradata. "A hundred analysts looking at traditional reports could work it out eventually, but it takes them far less time with advanced visualisation tools."

Advocates of advanced user interfaces are convinced the explosion in the amount of data held at many firms means they have little choice but to upgrade their user interfaces if they want to get any return on their underlying reporting systems.

"The amount of data in most organisations is now so large that it is impossible to look at it in any depth without visualisation tools," argued Kevin Quinn, vice-president of WebFocus product marketing at Information Builders.

User friendly interfaces are also essential for firms keen to roll BI functionality out to larger numbers of users, according to Frank Buytendijk of BI vendor Hyperion.
"Traditional BI deployments would have around one power user to every 50 users, but when you roll BI out enterprise-wide you may have one power user to 10,000-plus users," he said. "That means that if you want people to make the right conclusions based on the data in front of them, they need to be able to easily understand and interpret it as they are not going to be able to call on a power user to make it clearer."

Don Campbell of Cognos insists IT directors must help deliver this ease of use, particularly as users become increasingly used to intuitive, Google-style web interfaces. "Generating reports that only 10 percent of staff can use is not maximising your BI investment," he argued. "A little bit more effort with the interface means you can massively increase the return on investment."