BI and KM marriage now official

In a move that's good news for the market and great news for a young knowledge management vendor, the world's largest privately held software company is adding a knowledge management extension. Data warehouse and decision support vendor SAS Institute is integrating knowledge management software from

Intraspect to create a Collaborative Business Intelligence (CBI) solution.

With $870 million in annual revenue, SAS has historically addressed the business intelligence and data warehousing needs of Fortune 500 companies. As these business intelligence systems have evolved, SAS has seen its business flourish. Adding a collaboration component is seen as a natural extension.

"SAS software brings together the wide range of data that is spread throughout the organization, and converts that data into understandable business information," said Barrett Joyner, president, SAS Institute.

"However, business users need information in context, such as who wrote a report, why they wrote it, and what the report means. This is the essence of knowledge and SAS sought a partner who could help us rapidly knowledge enable our products. Intraspect Software is helping make CBI real today by providing knowledge-enablement technology."

"Collaborative business intelligence is our definition of knowledge management," said Michael Stierhoff, self-described KM guru and one of three SAS associates leading the initiative. CBI general business messaging software delivers business information in context at time it's needed.

Stierhoff called the deal "a marriage of business intelligence tools with KM technology. It's a wonderful marriage," he said. "It adds an enablement layer to our business solutions tool set. What we didn't have was the knowledge layer--putting information in context."

Stierhoff has witnessed "an entire new group of users for the SAS system" as data analysis has grown from managing volumes of transaction data to handling both online transaction processing and analytical processing.

Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) once a data mining and decision support tool, enables employees at all levels of an organization to make better decisions.

"Now nearly everyone in an organization needs to look at information," said Stierhoff. "These people don't want to build stuff," he said. "They just want to get right to work."

OLAP is used in a variety of business areas, including sales and marketing analysis, financial reporting, quality assurance, profitability analysis and pricing applications. Regardless of where data resides, it is accessible to requesting applications on any supported platform on a network, including Web-based applications.

This gives quick views of complex relationships in summarized data. OLAP offers summaries of complex multidimensional analysis.

SAS software features a set of interfaces to all major databases and data sources. Native engines grab all the data stored in these repositories and the SAS system transforms it, cleans it and pulls it into a data warehouse.

After pulling information in, the SAS system cleans out redundancy. "The key here is that information is dynamic, said Stierhoff. "You now have the ability to get understanding from someone else's input."

SAS has been using the CBI system internally for several months starting with sales and marketing and R&D, said Hillary Freeman, SAS strategist for emerging technologies. "We wanted to share across divisions, and it caught on like wildfire."

SAS provides access to the analytical data; Intraspect brings knowledge in context. "We don't put business intelligence in one world and knowledge management in another world," said Stierhoff. "We now have the two combined."

"By combining what SAS is in and what Intraspect is in covers just about everything" organizations are looking for in terms of KM systems, said Intraspect President Jim Pflaging. "Taking data delivery and analysis and putting it in the hands of the workers is a sure win."

Similarly, Stierhoff acknowledged that data warehouse in and of itself isn't worth much. "It's when you apply it to a business problem that you achieve things," he said.

Pricing may prove challenging for SAS to implement. According to Stierhoff, the knowledge management extension will cost between $25,000 and $150,000 "depending on what you're doing with it." However, he points out, "where does business intelligence stop and collaboration begin? That's the gray area."

"Customers have been intrigued by knowledge management, but are looking for applications that are safe and they can trust," Intraspect President Jim Pflaging pointed out. Pflaging is confident that these concerns will be met by an established vendor like SAS putting its name on a KM product.

"Together, we will significantly broaden the reach of business-intelligence systems by making them accessible to non-technical professionals."

Pflaging sees CBI as a tool for top executives to access current analysis about an organization by conducting "what if" scenarios in real time. "What's the benefit of having all this information if your top executives can't access it?" Pflaging asked. "With CBI, now they can."

Analysts were consistently favorable in their view of the collaboration.

"With its Collaborative Business Intelligence solution, SAS Institute is making it practicable for enterprises to capture the elements of the decision making process and to make that corporate knowledge available to a much wider audience, including front office decision makers," said Bob Moran, a decision support VP at the Aberdeen Group. CBI will allow organizations to protect and increase corporate knowledge and thereby fuel innovation."

"These decisions need a collaborative environment where they can be documented, discussed, refined, and reused--in the same way that many organizations already manage other kinds of knowledge," said Phil Russom a business intelligence analyst at Hurwitz Group.

The SAS/Instraspect solution brings the decision-support and collaborative workplaces together, so that threaded collaborations can add value to the decision-making process."

The Intraspect Knowledge Server (IKS) now in version 2, can be thought of as a "group memory" tool where information with context is collected, disseminated and available for reuse. It addresses six distinct information processing functions:

• Information Collection -- Import objects visible in a client web browser; upload any files visible to the client file system; send in any E-mail message, with attachments, from any SMTP-compliant E-mail application.

• Information Sharing -- On-line workspaces for collecting and organizing information, with versioning and access control. Personal and public spaces integrated into enterprise object repository to support individual usage and simplify wide-area collaboration. Integrated commenting to allow collaborative review of content, or for taking personal notes.

• Information Organization -- Hierarchical organization of information, with single copies of objects in multiple folders to support multiple contexts of information (re)use.
• Integrated Discussion--Discussions held within the workspaces where documents are shared. Messages automatically threaded and parsed for attachments. Existing discussion lists can be routed to the IKS.

• Discovery and Search-- Automatic indexing for full text search of all collected documents including binary formats, E-mail messages and remote web pages.

• Universal Subscription -- Subscription to any object, including workspaces, individual documents, and persistent searches. Notification of changes to subscribed objects delivered asynchronously to end-users.

According to Stierhoff, two SAS clients, including "a major Northeast retailer from the data warehousing side" helped prompt interest in the knowledge management space.

For more coverage of SAS' KM extension, see the cover of the February issue of KMWorld magazine.