BI Workspaces: BI Without Borders

Recently Intelligent Enterprise published an article, commenting the Forrester Report called "BI Workspaces: BI Without Borders", written by Boris Evelson.

The Forrester Report defines BI Workspaces as "a data exploration environment where a power user can analyze production, clean data with near complete freedom to modify data models, enrich data sets, and run the analysis whenever necessary, without much dependency on IT and production environment restrictions."

According Forrester report, various compliance requirements have in many ways restricted the flexibility of reporting and analysis, and affect demands of analysts and power-users. Perhaps most restrictive is the architecture of many BI environments, which creates a cascading effect of interdependent components.

The Cascading Effect Of Interdependent BI Components:


The report defines three approaches to providing BI Workspaces, using MOLAP (multidimensional online analytical processing), BI SaaS and DW SaaS, and In-Memory Analytics.

The report also offer four recommendations to use BI Workspace:
- Include BI workspace functionality in overall BI requirements
- Support BI workspace users by providing clean and timely data
- Understand the implications of using a different technology/approach for BI workspaces
- Consider risks associated with SaaS-based BI/DW.

You can obtain a free download of the report in the Forrester website (registration required).

I think this is a good report that shows an interesting approach to analyzing data.