SaaS, BI and decision management - James Taylor's Decision Management

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August 01, 2007
SaaS, BI and decision management

I had an interesting call with Aaron from SeaTab last week. SeaTab is a SaaS BI vendor focused on retail, CBG and supply chain. Aaron was briefing folks as SeaTab had a new release out - we did not get into the details as I was more interested in general questions but you can see the press release they put out here. Aaron went through the basics of the product, describing it as very user configurable, down to calculations in individual reports. The integration of structured data from almost any source is a big focus and the product boasts that it requires no physical data warehouse or marts - it has no pre-defined dimensionality. Indeed there is no ETL or DW or BI - all of this is handled by SeaTab. Users upload flatfiles incrementally to a virtual DW where they are de-normalized and tokenized for performance. SeaTab works with customers to define a logical data model so have some data definitions and the logic/no-dimensionality allows for quick updates for changes to data sources. While SeaTab is mostly focused on reporting for large numbers of users - front line e.g. sales tracking, reorders - they do some monitoring and automated responses e.g. reorders based on some calculation involving stock levels and activity. So far so good but how does this relate to decision management? Well in a couple of ways.

Firstly you can do decision management using SaaS also - for instance Fair Isaac has the concept of a decision service provider that does exactly - and if you do then SaaS BI is interesting as a way to provide support for those decisions that could not be automated 100%. Secondly it is true that many organizations find the development of the basic analytic environment they need to understand data so that they can move on to predictive analytics is time-consuming and costly to set up and a SaaS solution might allow for quicker development of infrastructure suitable, longer term, for decision management. However, the ease with which SaaS BI can be integrated with decision services is perhaps the most compelling reason for considering them together.

Because decision services have well define interfaces, encapsulate all the complex business logic and are easy to change they are easy to integrate. Even well designed decision services do not automate 100% of decisions, however, and it is not unusual for a referred decision (one that could not be automated) to need a tightly focused report or visualization to accompany it. The use of SaaS BI might allow rapid integration to support decisions so that the decision service could return either a decision or a the reasons a decision could not be made along with a URL to a SeaTab page that would help with the manual decision-making.

Of course I also think the SeaTab folks should think about how they offer decision management SaaS in addition to their SaaS BI but the BI section of the blog goes on and on about why I think that so I won't repeat it.

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