One of the ironies of business intelligence is that those who need information the  most have the least access to it.  In practical terms, this means that the CEO, sales director or CFO need an IT person to design a report before they can make sense of the company database.  In effect, the IT department regulates decision-making and access to data for everyone from customers to management.  The downside of this is the cost involved and the time taken to get a result..  Reports take between 24 hours and three weeks to produce.  By the time the report is finished, the requested report could well be useless.

The situation started in the early days when data was a foreign concept that only nerds and people in dark rooms could access.  Data was a practical necessity instead of a decision-making resource.  Once managers understood the value of the data, there was pressure on the IT systems to make it available in an understandable format.  The first great leap forward came when IT was able to design reports.  These days they are bundled with the enterprise resource programme (ERP).  The next step was query reporting which allowed you to make a request for a specific report.  The IT person then wrote the required code and after many man-hours you had a report from which you could extract the information you needed. Many businesses still use this method to extract intelligible data from their databases.  OLAP was the next attempt to convert the database into a business intelligence tool.  OLAP is a virtual summation of your database that sorts it into bite-size chunks of relevant data.  The software is generally divided into separate business intelligence tools that interpret the database and rearrange the data for easier interpretation.  The problem with OLAP is that if you request data that falls outside the scope of the software’s new view of your database, the query cannot be answered.  Installing an OLAP business intelligence tool is also a long and costly exercise that generally takes around nine months. 

Progress Software’s EasyAsk is an application that instantaneously extracts reports from a database.  EasyAsk is able to interpret natural English, making complex data reports accessible to any user.  EasyAsk is like Google for your database, only smarter.  It allows almost everybody (depending on their level of access) to search the database for meaningful business intelligence using plain English with instantaneous results.  The cost of the product is relatively low because of its flexibility.  EasyAsk does not try to reinterpret a database in an OLAP fashion.  Rather it “floats” above the database and picks the bits it needs in order to answer the question.  This feature makes it independent from any other reporting structures that might already be in place.  It also makes EasyAsk easy to install.  A typical installation will take less than two weeks. 

The sceptical reader may ask:  “if EasyAsk is the magic bullet, why isn’t everybody using it?”  The answer is that they are starting.  International giants such as Sony, HP, Siemens, GAP, and BASF use EasyAsk.  Locally Nedbank, Europ Assistance, IHD, Matrix and Momentum have already invested in EasyAsk.

Business intelligence can finally be accessed in a way that makes business sense.  EasyAsk’s ability to give access to any authorised user, with little help from the IT department, makes it the business intelligence tool to finally overcome the business irony.