Build vs.

Buy: Dashboard, Reporting, and Analysis Capabilities in Your Software Applications

INTRODUCTION Most software applications deal with data and can therefore benefit tremendously from systems for analyzing and presenting it. Users at all levels need to view, analyze, and take action on data and components such as dashboards and reporting provide added value. When faced with the need to include such modules in their software, most ISVs arrive at the crossroads of build vs. buy. Building can often seem at first to be the ideal solution. You are a software development firm with software development expertise. No other organization could know your application and meet your needs better. With a skilled development staff already in house, it may seem illogical to pay a third party for a component to embed into your application. However, as we will outline in the following white paper, there are numerous objective parameters to consider regarding building any type of reporting, dashboard, or business intelligence (BI) component. QUALITY AND COMPLEXITY Simple, static data reports that resemble a basic spreadsheet may be quick and easy to incorporate into your system; however, it is likely your users will have higher expectations. There are numerous capabilities that transcend basic reporting that may be demanded by your users, if you havent already received such requests. In addition to actual development work, you will need to come up with a vision for how everything will work together. You must determine how interactive to make your reports, how easily users can drill down, etc. Best practices in dashboards and reporting are well established and therefore ISVs not already possessing such expertise would have a difficult time building competitive components. A BI module that is truly useful and competitive has the following varied characteristics.

Executive Summary
Since most software applications process data of some kind, the vast majority of ISVs and SaaS companies eventually evaluate embedded dashboards and reports to present that data in meaningful ways to their end users. If they chose to proceed, the next decision is whether to buy an OEM solution or build it themselves. This paper highlights what criteria you should consider when deciding to build vs. buy, and in which situations one solution is preferable to the other.

Visualization and Analysis

The true added value of a BI solution is in the visualization and analysis components. These components have become too specialized and sophisticated for most non-BI manufacturers to build from scratch in a timely and cost-effective manner. Visualization tools include heat maps and complex geographical maps, interactive charts and graphs with drill-down capability, AJAX-based dashboards and Flash-based key-performance indicators. Sophisticated and useful analysis tools include analysis grids, interactive data viewers, and OLAP cube viewers with advanced filtering options.

Ad hoc and Self-Service Reporting

Ad hoc reporting capabilities enable nontechnical users to build, modify, and distribute reports. This empowers individuals to use the solution to answer their business questions as the occasion requires without having to request queries from IT, therefore reducing the IT burden. Demands for ad hoc, or self-serve capabilities continue to grow as this ability to interact with data reports is considered crucial. Such capability that both empowers users while lightening the IT workload is bound to make your application favored among many in your customer base. Users evolve from mere consumers of data to authors of reports and content. Such users must have enough resources to allow them to do this in a robust way. Unfortunately, ad hoc capability is more complex and time consuming to build from scratch since it must contain elements that, in a managed reporting environment, would be set up by a developer.

FLEXIBILITY An in house solution can be built to meet your exact business needs and customized for maximum advantage. Instead of trying to integrate a third party solution, you can create something from the ground up that is built to work with your existing application. Mostly likely your team knows how your customers are reporting on data from your application and your needs currently focus on providing a few specific types of reports and dashboards. However, the current uses of your application will likely change. Third party BI solutions include extensive dashboard, reporting, and analysis capabilities, enabling you to provide your customers with powerful options without repeatedly undergoing extensive development cycles. With each upgrade of your product, the reporting module will require further updating and QA cycles. Conversely, as third party products evolve, your roadmap also benefits from enhancements to embedded dashboards and reporting, which are automatically made available. A third party solution also provides you with the advantage of easy experimentation. If you are unsure as to whether certain dashboards and reports are right for your application, a third party solution can allow you to explore options first. You can pilot various reports and even consider charging additional fees for premium BI capabilities rather than spending valuable resources building in house without prior knowledge of how your market will respond.

There are cost-effective BI modules on the market that are data source neutral, enabling your application to extract data from any valid OLEDB, ODBC or OLAP-based source as well as any number of non-database sources. More importantly, these solutions have enough flexibility to admit new data sources that may not exist at the moment, but that can be accessed without any substantial modification to the application.

Web-Based
BI is most useful when it becomes part of the fabric of an organizations operations. To accomplish this, it needs to be used and shared by as many employees in as many functions as possible. By providing wide access via web-based reporting, your application can become pervasive throughout your customers organizations and built into the everyday workflow of numerous users as opposed to just an elite group of technical or management personnel. This increases reliance on your application, increasing customer retention as well as potentially increasing revenue streams, depending on your licensing models. Web-based applications have the added value of being easy to install and upgrade. Flexibility also includes the ability to run on different Web browsers, accommodating users vast array of choices. Incorporating various browsers into your development and QA cycles of your reporting capabilities only adds yet another layer to your release schedule and another potential item that may delay the launch of your product. Finally, ensuring that users have broad access to their BI additionally requires seamless integration across the widest variety of platforms possible, including all types of mobile devices.

Data Source Neutrality

A valuable BI module must be flexible enough to adapt to todays ever-changing technological landscape. Such flexibility begins with the ability to tap into different data sources, of both the database and non-database variety. Forcing your customers to use, or stay with, a particular database, for instance, is limiting, costly, and impairs the usefulness of your application. When considering building or buying a BI module, it is important to look beyond current architecture. The data sources from which your solution extracts data now are unlikely to remain static in perpetuity. While it may not be particularly challenging to create a reporting module that works with all of your applications current data sources, those sources are likely to change and updating your application accordingly can be costly and time-consuming. New data sources continue to evolve and grow in use, such as SOAP/Rest Web services, RSS and ATOM feeds, and Google Web services.

Actionable Reporting
Reporting and analysis does not and should not stop at presenting accurate information in a timely fashion. There is a whole workflow that should be built into a BI solution that makes it easy for the user to get the report when it matters: save, modify, or archive it for easy future access, share the information at a click of the mouse, and, if needed, act on the information without leaving the report. Automatic report scheduling is a useful feature in this regard. With it, the report developer or the user himself can schedule a report to run on a regular basisfor instance, every day at 8:00

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AM, to start the day with a full command of the critical numbers. When coupled with email capability, the usefulness of this feature is compounded, since the same report can be emailed automatically or manually to as many users as needed. The ability to export reports to a variety of formats (e.g. Excel, PDF, XML, etc.) also makes the BI functionality both more pervasive and actionable. The more sophisticated and useful BI modules also enable users to act on the information received without leaving the report for instance, by clicking on the reorder button when a bestselling item is near out of stock, with the order getting written back automatically to the database. This feature is particularly valuable when accompanied by automatic business alerts, which inform key personnel when a critical situation has reached a pre-established threshold. Building such workflow adds another layer of complexity because it involves incorporating numerous moving parts. Actionable reporting involves not just outputs but back-end processes, scheduling capabilities, and controls, as well as interacting with other services, perhaps additional third party products. This adds complexity to the processes of developing, testing, and launching, resulting in a more difficult and time-consuming process. EXPERTISE & FOCUS Third party vendors have BI expertise resulting from their stringent focus that an ISV or SaaS company would not be able to acquire in any reasonable timeframe. Buying allows you to leverage a vendors expertise without investing the time to learn the intricacies of a new business. Additionally, buying enables you to maintain your focus on your core business and those competences driving your competitive advantage. Taking development staff off core features that add value to your application removes focus from the source of your competitive advantage. The opportunity cost of such distraction is worth considering in the build vs. buy decision. Additionally, detailed and consistent documentation and knowledge transfer is required to ensure future ability to update your reporting module as the original developers may leave the company. When in house experts are no longer with the organization you may find yourself stuck with a proprietary system that no one knows how to use, or worse yet, fix when inevitable problems arise.

COST

Development Costs
As outlined above, reporting and dashboard solutions can be very sophisticated and the development efforts required to meet user demands are therefore extensive. Developer time is often viewed as a sunk cost, so the cost of building and maintain an in house solution is often underestimated. Without detailed time tracking, it is impossible to know the total developers time required to create a new application, whether for internal use or for sale. Building BI in house can also pose a human resources challenge. You may be able to staff your team so that the dedication of resources to reporting has no detrimental effect on the progress of other projects. In this case, workflow problems may arise when the majority of the reporting work is completed, leaving you overstaffed. The workflow and problems involved may create another hurdle for both operations and human resources.

Ongoing Maintenance Costs

The addition of any components to your development efforts inevitably adds to your maintenance burden. Creating a multidimensional BI component with numerous attributes such as basic reporting, ad hoc capability, scheduling, and alerts further contributes to your maintenance efforts. Comparatively, most third party vendors are constantly improving their products in a backwards and forwards compatible manner to ensure seamless upgrades so your component is also well maintained. Relying on a third party to manage maintenance for you can result in being able to upgrade your BI component through a one-click process. TIME TO MARKET Fast time to market is essential in order to capture and maintain competitive advantage in the market place. Delaying the launch of a product can result in market share being stolen by competitors who are faster to supply a solution that meets endusers needs. Integrating an embeddable, component-based third party module can dramatically reduce time to market as opposed to building from scratch. An embeddable third party solution can help you immediately add value to your products without delaying your launch.

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EMBEDDABILITY In deciding between building and buying a reporting component, the embeddability of available components is an important issue to consider. An inability to seamlessly integrate a third party component can result in a fractured, inconsistent, and confusing user experience. A consistent look and feel is crucial to a positive user experience and this requires a high degree of embeddability so all components appear to be one single product. Fortunately, highly embeddable third party BI apps are available. For details on the benefits of embeddability and how to select products that meet your embedding needs, refer to LogiXMLs white paper, Embeddability: Slapping On Your Logo vs. True Embeddability and Why You Should Care.

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