“A tale of autonomy, bridges, and collaboration…or the ABC of playing nicely”
The last couple of weeks at Strategy Deployment Ltd have been quite satisfying. Several of our customers are interested in using business intelligence tools with their i-nexus data.
We understand that our customers will always have bespoke requirements. The i-nexus solution comes with a very rich set of generic report templates which give you your data in Excel. Great for customers that want to be able to manipulate raw data, create pivot tables, dashboards, and all manner of charts, particularly those based in finance. However, as there is a bit of manual entry work involved, we have found that IT departments are investing heavily in Business Intelligence tools. The most common ones we’re seeing are Microsoft Power BI, Qlik, Tableau, Dundas and Cognos. These tools give our customers the freedom to write their own reports and dashboards to suit their reporting cycle without having to rely on and pay for a third party to do it for them. Autonomous control.
And here’s the great thing. The i-nexus solution plays nicely with others. Once commercial agreements are in place, we can connect our customers’ BI tool directly to the i-nexus data warehouse which contains all the customer data. This is a one-off activity following a meeting with our customers’ IT organisation, our i-nexus partners, and our own Implementation Team.
There are three methods of connecting: single IP address, a range of IP addresses, and via a virtual private network (VPN). The decision is made by the customer based on their security policies. This ensures that i-nexus can recognise the connecting service as an authorised user, protecting the customers data. Secure Bridges Built.
Once set up is complete, our i-nexus partners provide a short training session on the data tables and ongoing support for further queries. Our customers can then nominate their report writers who can begin to write their own dashboards, calling on i-nexus for the occasional ad hoc support. Co-operation across the team creates self-sufficiency for our customers. All the heavy lifting is taken out of reporting and control is placed at our customers fingertips. Empowerment through Collaboration.
So, it’s been a very productive fortnight at Strategy Deployment Ltd. Why now? End of year reporting for December 2021 could be focusing our customers minds. Concerns about the manual work require a lateral solution to address the key reporting events that our customers are facing. Is there an easier way? Is there a better way? The i-nexus solution is a team player. It integrates very nicely with a whole range of preferred BI tools.
As easy as ABC.