WebFOCUS User Administration Services. (Internet News).

Information Builders, has introduced its new WebFOCUS User Administration Services in a white paper outlining the need for business intelligence solutions to meet increasing demands for large scale 'self-service' applications.

The white paper reports that the success of initiatives by companies in the 1990's to invest in IT infrastructure and provide a variety of Web services and applications to employees, partners and customers, has resulted in a growing demand for more Web services to support ever increasing numbers of users.

To meet these demands software products used to develop business intelligence applications must be capable of delivering information to increasingly larger and broader sets of users. At the same time these solutions need to offer increased labour productivity to keep up with the demands of managing cost and time-to-market.

Information Builders' white paper draws a distinction between the business requirements of any such solution and the technological requirements. The ideal solution should align both business and IT goals so that the crucial business goal of high return on investment can be met.

Business requirements

Technological requirements

According to Giga information Group, most organisations have provided business intelligence applications to between only 5 and 7 per cent of the people who could use them. To increase this rate and provide more information to more people, organisations need to identify the different responsibilities, skill levels and needs of the many users across an enterprise, and have a better understanding of the information users.

The IT system must integrate five essential functions to meet IT requirements. The solution must contain:

* a presentation layer or graphical user interface (GUI);

* a security system or extensions into standard security environments

* a cataloguing scheme for describing the information available to the solution

* an information delivery engine for accessing data, turning it into information and delivering it any format

* an information creation solution for managing the delivery scheme

Information Builders' new WebFOCUS User Administration Services is an integrated set of tools providing an out-of-the-box solution to meet all the technical requirements for implementing wide-scale applications. Whether an enterprise needs to deploy single applications one at a time, multiple applications through broader Web reporting portal or deploy an enterprise information portal, WebFOCUS User Administration Services offers integrated solutions for each strategy.

The entire system, across all five functions, must be capable of providing broad access to multiple data sources including legacy data, and support delivery to thousands of users. Almost all enterprises use both email and web based mechanisms for the delivery of information and this must be supported to provide full coverage within the enterprise. The solution should also integrate with corporate portals and enterprise information portals, and support both its own integrated tools and external development tools.

To download a full version of the white paper please visit: http://www.ibi.com/products/whitepapers/index.html