The Impact of Web Services on Business Intelligence

Web services will significantly improve the way managers and analysts perform business intelligence (BI). In this article, we will explain how web services have become a key source of external data, how analysts will use this data, and how IT managers can support this new data source.

Business analysts have found that the internet is a great source of data. They can retrieve financial, marketing, and competitive data from web sites like Yahoo, Amazon, and Hoover’s. It is, however, very difficult for these analysts to get the information from their browser into Excel. Once the data are in Excel, the analysts can easily manipulate the data and produce the insights their managers need.

Amazon.com provides a good example of the type of competitive market data that is available through web services. Amazon provides access to detailed data on each item it sells. For books, this includes author, publisher, title, list price, Amazon price, and Amazon rank. They provide a web service for doing a search by any of these fields and returning detailed information on the books that meet the search criteria.

Excel provides an excellent client for web services. Using a simple Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) macro, an analyst can retrieve a list of books that meet a specific search criteria. The analyst can then use Excel’s data analytic capabilities—sorting, PivotTables, and charting—to analyze the data and generate a PowerPoint presentation.

Without web services, the analyst would have to copy this information from many Amazon screens and paste it into Excel. This process is both time-consuming and error-prone.

What is the impact of web services on IT managers? First, building some simple Excel add-ins could be a quick win for IT. Look at the web services offerings provided by your data vendors and the free web sites that your analysts use. Work with your analysts to build some simple web service clients in Excel. With a small bit of effort, your organization might see a large gain in analyst productivity.

Next, investigate whether web services can support automated reporting. A publisher could use Amazon web services to produce a daily report on the rank of their books relative to competitors. This simple Excel program could produce a chart and table that appears on the CEO’s intranet.

Finally, examine how web services can be integrated with a data warehouse. The web services external data can be combined with internal data in the data warehouse.

For many reasons, web services will grow. The technology serves a real need and is supported by all the leading software vendors. IT managers and business analysts should not overlook the business value of using web services for improving analyses and business intelligence.