Producers and Consumers of Analytics in Traditional BI Consumption Models
This video explains the roles of analytics producers and consumers in the traditional business intelligence consumption model.
Producers were authors proficient in building primarily static, fixed-format reports, which were distributed to their consumer counterparts. Producers spent a lot of time on formatting. And changes to reports were time consuming to implement. Often consumers needed to educate authors about data domains and how to query data to get the needed results. In the traditional consumption model, consumers were front-line executives who simply accessed reports to support their decisions. Ease of access and presentation quality were the top priorities.
Transcript
I'm Anurag Tandon, VP of Product Management at Zoomdata. I've spent about 18 years in the BI and analytics space. I’m here to talk about BI personalities in the modern BI age.
Traditional Producers Build Reports
So, in the traditional BI era, you had the consumption model and then you had producers who will build reports in this type of model. You would call them BI authors, report builders. You know, you can give them different names. But, these are the people who are focused on building the reports that are needed by the users on the front lines, and focus was a lot on, obviously, the right data but then also on the presentation of the data and the format in which the data was available. Was it print ready? Was it PDF? Was it pixel perfect online?
Format and Access Were Critical
And so, the BI authors were really the jockeys to put those reports together and in the format that the users want them and then be able to provide it to the users when they need them. It was less about the consumers of that information being able to interact with the data, but it was more about the accessibility of the data. And so, it didn't matter that they had to jump through hoops to get the format just right as long as it went there, right, it arrived to that kind of look and feel. So, they might spend days and weeks getting the format right, but once it is developed and produced, those reports existed in the organization for a while.
Traditional Consumers: Executive Decision Makers
So, if you look at the consumers in the traditional BI era, these were people who are meeting with customers, meeting with suppliers, executives who need to make decisions, people actually working with the data. And for them, it was all about accessibility of the information. I need to prepare for a board meeting tomorrow or the next week. Do I have the data in the right place, do I have the data in the right format, do I have my executive packets prepared with all the right information and the right reports in there. It was a lot about the ease of access and was less about the ease of use because there wasn't as much of an expectation of interactivity with this kind of data.
Changes Were Costly In Traditional BI Model
Changes to this kind of information because it was prepared so well in advance, any type of changes to the format, any type of changes to the content, any type of changes in requirements became very costly in this traditional BI model for such consumers.
