Introduction

What is known today by the name Business Intelligence (BI) has an origin and evolution that should be looked at in order to introduce the concept that will be the subject of this article: “BI Usability”.

One of the principal goals of BI is that users find the information they need to make decisions in due time and proper form. The form includes, among other things, the format in which the information is presented and the level of interaction expected to obtain the desired result. The previous points make up the term “BI Usability”.

Usability can be defined as software’s ease of use, in which factors such as the familiarity of the design, comfort, attractiveness, level of interaction permitted, response time, etc. also come into play.

Various definitions of usability have been selected to complement the concept: (*1):

Top 10 stories from Information Management:

• “Best in BI? Ask the Crowd” by Jim Ericson

• “Pros and Cons of Using a Vendor Provided Analytical Data Model in Your BI Implementation” by Boris Evelson

• “BI, Analytics and Statistical Science” by Steve Miller ... 

In his blog Boris Evelson explains the more relevant results of the las Forrester Wave about Enterprise Business Intelligence Platforms.

These are the last movements, extracted from it:

1. IBM Cognos, SAP BusinessObjects, Oracle, and SAS continue to lead the pack.
2. Information Builders, Microsoft, and MicroStrategy move into the Leaders category.
3. TIBCO Spotfire and Actuate maintain their Strong Performer status.
4. QlikTech and Panorama Software move into the Strong Performer category.

Dear,
on this occasion I presented from group eGluBI/OpenBits a feature called "FilterTwoListComponent" for Pentaho CDF.
Transcribe some of the documentation:
Description..

On Tuesday we had the promised post-holiday BI Beers and, as on previous occasions, in a relaxed atmosphere, left very interesting topics of conversation.

On this occasion we could not overcome the previous record, but 10 people attended, which is not bad. Again many of those who attended the last, which means that like it. In the usual were Xavier y Mara, Enric, Pau, David, Juanjo, and Jorge Fernández,who was finally able to re-animate combined event. The new additions were Antonio Valle, of Gobierno TIC and Jordi Rodriguez, which I also repeated in the next. We failed to Fabian Isabel, who had promised to come to ask about BI...

There are three Spanish suppliers of business intelligence software. I am referring to Apesoft, Litebi And Bingo Intelligence.
Interestingly, the products of these three BI vendors are very different. Apesoft software is essentially a report generator in Excel, with some additional features that facilitate the automation and distribution of these reports. Litebi solution provides software as a service, ie, data and applications are on their servers, and clients access via a simple yet powerful web interface. And finally, Bingo Intelligence platform that offers a smart client to access corporate information in a very visual ...

Last week I attended a Web Seminar Oracle that presented the new features of Oracle Business Intelligence 11g.

The truth is that I was pleasantly surprised, because these improvements solved what I considered so far the main weaknesses of the Oracle BI Suites .

Most significant to me is the integration efforts made in the portal since it can use most of the tools of the suite, and thus reduce the feeling of working with different products. For instance, you can create operational BI Publisher reports from the same portal, and has created an integrated scorecarding tool that allows you to define KPI's, and 'react' with Agents and Actions, another pending issue of the suite. The part of administración system has also been integrated into Enterprise Manager.

Other improvements are those which have been introduced in the creation and display Dashboard, the possibility of using interactive maps, and above all the possibility of using also Answers MOLAP data sources such as Essbase cubes, which enables integration Hyperion, greatly improves the analytic reporting and enables dynamic navigation for multi-dimensional hierarchies, and other features in the reports.