Personal BI, a Positioning Statement

We have been in the BI business for a good number of years. Our mission is to drive down the cost of delivering BI and widden it's market accesibility. As such we clearly recognise the relevance and difference between Personal and Professional BI.

Here's some simple points that you should bear in mind before using any Personal BI products:

• If you unaware of the Data Quality issues you have, Personal BI will present your inaccurate data to complete accuracy, and the results will masquerade as "the truth"
  
  
• On the other hand, if you are aware that you have data quality issues, Personal BI is a very cost effective way of idenfitying the scale of the problem
  
  
• If your data is extremely complex, and you find yourself having to run query upon query upon query in order to get at the information locked away in it, you need a data warehouse and not Personal BI
  
  
• If in order to get to the answers to your business questions, it is necessary to combine data from multiple data sources, you need a data warehouse and not Personal BI
  
  
• Personal BI is an extremely cost effective way of getting business information where it might not otherwise be available or accessible
• One-off analysis of single data sets
• Limited skills or budget to build a Data Warehouse (accepting the limitations of not doing so)
  
  
• Personal BI is an extremely cost effective and efficient way of prototyping small requirements in order to assess the appropriateness of data analytics
  
  
• Personal BI provides a significantly less traumatic entrance point into OLAP cubes, data analytics and the power and flexibility they provide
  
  
• Personal BI is a very simple way of unlocking the information stored in static reports via the life breathing facility of data analytics
  
  

Personal BI in the form of CUBE-it Zero is not a panacea for all Business Intelligence requirements, for example take a look at the following high level overview function comparison chart between our corporate strength Data Warehouse development toolset Data Academy and CUBE-it Zero

Feature	CUBE-it Zero	Data Academy
General Features
Load and save cube definitions from an external file to allow swapping cubes with colleagues without having to ship the actual cube or source data
Combine data loading with simple transformations to result in a cube build
Allow cube build to consist of multiple steps
Data Loading
Load data from different data source types
Load data from disparate sources simultaneously
Support incremental as well as full data loads
Allow data loads to run independently of other activities
Allow for comprehensive mapping of data types and naming conventions during data load
Isolate data source from destination in order to protect against communication errors
Data Quality Checking
Support technical data quality checking
Support business rules data quality checking
Support interactive data correction with automatic correction learning
Allow bulk data correction prior to data quality checks
Quarantine data on serious data quality breeches
Transformations
Allow simple select type transformations
Allow combining of data loaded from disparate sources
Simple transformation of data as a cube source
Support for incremental transformation builds
Supports complex pivot transformations
Support for complex unpivot transformations
Mapping of data source to target
Star Schemas
Support for standard dimensions
Complex transformations for dimension creation
Support Type 1,2,3 & 6 Slowly changing dimensions
Support for custom built time dimensions
Support for shared and dedicated dimensions
Complex transformations for fact table creation
Automated mapping of dimensions to fact tables
Dimension and fact table incremental build
Support for inferred missing dimension members with automatic update on subsequent member arrival.
Simple Cube Builds
Default dimension and measure names
Build single dimension attribute cubes
Support dimension hierarchies
Support for all standard measure aggregations
Complex Cube Builds
Use star schema as a cube build source
Fully customisable dimensions
Support for multiple attributes in a dimension
Support for unknown member behaviour definition
Multiple named hierarchies in a dimension
Calculated measures

Our experience dictates that no one solution is the answer to all business requirements, and this is no more true that with Business Intelligence.

If you don't need any of this complexity, then Personal BI in the form of CUBE-it Zero is the answer.