Mighty Mashups: Do-It-Yourself Business Intelligence For The New Economy

Enterprise business intelligence (BI) professionals face severe resource constraints, and the soft economy keeps budgets tight. One consequence is a lengthening queue of user requests to develop and revise reports, dashboards, cubes, and other analytic applications and data structures. To reduce the pressure on IT and satisfy user requests, information and knowledge management (I&KM) professionals provide users with self-service "mashup" capabilities. BI mashup tools let information workers handle some BI development tasks themselves from within their browsers, Excel spreadsheets, and other client applications. Mashup features, available in various vendors' BI environments, let nontechnical users build personalized, context-rich, role-tailored, ad hoc views of disparate data and explore information in greater depth. These features can enhance information worker productivity, accelerate delivery of actionable intelligence, and reduce the development burden on overstretched IT staff in a tight economy. Still an emerging practice, mashup-style BI leverages organizations' investments in both BI tools and interactive Web 2.0 technologies.