Vendors are rushing into the emerging area of Predictive Analytics with a marketing zeal but there is often a large gap between their product capabilities to deliver mathematically correct Predictive Analytics.

Stephen Few makes an excellent point of this marketing and reality gap when discussing dashboards in his article Dashboard Confusion that appeared in intelligent enterprise as follows:

“I remember asking my IBM account manager how IBM defined the new term in vogue at the time — data warehousing. His response was classic and refreshingly honest: "By data warehousing, we mean whatever the customer thinks it means." In other words, no matter what data warehousing means to you, we do it (and are ready to accept your purchase order for it).”

Business Intelligence and Business Performance Management tools are largely about reporting and dashboards on past data.  However, Predictive Analytics is focused about interpreting the past data and looking into the future.  For example, BI dashboards by themselves can be misleading, giving too many "false" positives or negatives.  Presented below is a dashboard from Business Objects (a major Business Intelligence vendor).  The "gauges" show their needles in the green to signify all is well.  However, what directions are these needles going?  If the needles are in the green but dropping rapidly to the red how would we know?

Without knowing the direction of the needles a false sense of security can develop.  A sharp upcoming decline would be a significant problem but the dashboard gives us no clue.  Without the ability to know where the needle was last or to look ahead where it might probably be, we merely have data without context from which the wrong decision can follow.

Presented below is the ISIS Predictive Dashboard™ that mitigates the limitation of traditional dashboards by using an arrow in lieu of a gauge.  The arrow has two indicators, namely, the color is the duration of a trend and the arrow is the direction of the leading indicator of the trend.  A green arrow pointing down indicates a good trend that is about to shift to strongly bad or a red arrow pointing up is a bad trend about to turn strongly good.  Along with the predictive arrow are the quantitative indicators to targets as well as a link to a graph.

Budgets

 ISIS Discovery & Predictive Analytics has the remedy for the most dreaded annual event . . . the company budget.

 ISIS can compress the average budget cycle of 10 weeks to one week and without the use of spreadsheets or IT support.  ISIS forecast and budgeting includes the following features:

 ·          Granular & Analytic Forecasting – to any line in the GL or a person or product and throughout any organizational hierarchy (e.g. department, region, division, corporate, etc.).  ISIS has sophisticated mathematics so next year’s forecast is based on mathematical calculations rather than “gut” feel or just using last year’s data.  From this quantitative forecast, users can then make adjustment based on their experience and knowledge of future events.  Thus a forecast for any size company is made in minutes from the top down or bottom up.  In this manner users have the highest confidence and the most buy-in to the upcoming plan.

·          Time Selection – to prepare budgets on weekly, monthly and quarterly time intervals

·          Work Flow & Process Control – enables each authorized user to make changes in their budget then submit it for review and approval

 ·          Web Distribution – through the company’s intranet so the cumbersome process of distributing reports or spreadsheets is eliminated

 ·          Enterprise Security – is fully enabled through the ISIS Security Administrator

 ·          Consolidations – to any hierarchical structure are automatically made without any programming

 ·          Modeling – to go enable the testing of various scenarios all on-the-fly and without programming or spreadsheets

While typical Business Intelligence and Budgeting tools automate the collection and aggregation of budget data they do not do the hardest part; i.e. generate the forecast data.  Only ISIS Solutions fully integrates forecasting to generate the budget numbers and enable your organization to leverage powerful mathematics that dramatically cuts the time and money spent creating the annual budget as follows:

Day 1:

 ·          Granular Analytic Forecasting & Modeling – The ISIS software leverages sophisticated mathematics to generate next year’s forecast in seconds based on quantitative data and confidence levels versus by “gut” feel or just using last year’s numbers. 

 ·          The executive team can then test (and model) various growth scenarios “on the spot” during the meeting.  Once the group settles on a growth target that the supporting data quantitatively indicate is achievable, the ISIS software generates a unique top-down plan for the entire company to each sales representative for each customer and each product. 

 ·          It is critical to note that the individual plans were not simply an average based on the high level target, but instead a customized plan based on the sales history of each product at each distinct customer location.

 Day 2:

 ·          Web Distribution & Data Security – The newly constructed forecast/budget is made available via the Company’s Intranet so the cumbersome process of distributing reports or spreadsheets is eliminated.  The ISIS software also limits access to sensitive data so an individual could only see information that was within their area of influence.

 ·          Managers met with their teams to review the plan at the product and account level.  As the review process proceed, the Managers use the WebServer interface to enter suggested modifications to the plan, complete with annotated notes, based on the input from the team.

·          It is critical to note that the time required to complete this process and associated anxiety level is significantly reduced because the people are simply reviewing a pre-constructed plan making the whole process less subjective and more fact-based.     

 Day 3:

 ·          Process Control & Consolidation – The individual plans were automatically consolidated based on multiple dimensions (reporting hierarchy, product and customer) providing the Managers with a unique ability to balance and refine the plan.  Once satisfied, the Manager submits the proposed changes for approval using the browser interface.

 ·          The finance manager automatically receives a list of all the proposed changes within the ISIS software complete with the annotated notes.   

 Day 4:

 ·          Refining the Plan – The executive team meets with the finance manager to review and make decisions about each Manager’s proposed change.  The review team also makes significant use of the consolidation functionality mentioned above to generate refined bottom-up forecasts on multiple dimensions based on the proposed changes.

 ·          The final draft is distributed via the WebServer for review and final comment.

 Day 5

 ·          Finalizing the Plan – The finance manager automatically receives a list of all the proposed changes within the ISIS software complete with the annotated notes.  The finance manager meets with the executive team to review and make decisions about each proposed change. 

·          The executive team finalizes the budget and rolls it into the next year’s plan and out to all Managers via the WebServer.  On an ongoing basis the Plan can be continuously compared to actual results and the assumptions underlying the Plan tested. 

Data Integration

At the heart of the ISIS is its unique non-relational Data Array that enables the following advantages:

With ISIS data can be supplied from any application. ISIS merely takes a flat file copy of any data source and the ISIS Loader will load ISIS. It does not matter if the data source has fields extraneous to the ISIS Data Array, as the Loader will simply strip away any unneeded field.

The Data Array permits ISIS to retrieve large amounts of numeric data far faster than any relational database and complete mathematical calculation in one pass in memory.