Wayne Chambliss and Rich Rabin of Kofax Altosoft gave a presentation at Kofax Transform, most of which was a demo, on becoming an operational intelligence guru. This is my first real look at the Altosoft analytics product, acquired by Kofax about two years ago, since that’s not my main focus unless it’s particularly tied to process in some way.
Rabin used their graphical design tool to define the location of the metrics datamart, the data source (a variety of databases, or a file drop location), then define metrics by mapping the data fields, and applying aggregations and formatting. Although there is inherent complexity in understanding the use of the underlying data, the tool seems to make it pretty easy and fast to define the data and metrics, then load the data into the datamart and calculating the initial metrics. Once that was done, he created a graphical dashboard related to the defined metrics, and could preview and run it directly. No SQL, no coding. If you want to get more complex, there’s a full expression editor, but everything is still done graphically within the same tool. You can directly examine the underlying generated SQL if you really want to.
It’s also possible to create a record to use as a data source, which is a similar abstraction concept to a database view, but with the addition functionality of heterogeneous data sources, derived fields, mappings and even field renaming. This allows someone to create metrics and dashboards based on records, without having to understand the underlying data sources.
Lots of other functionality here, including setting user authentications and access rights, scheduled loading of data sources into the metrics mart, dynamic filtering on dashboards and pivoting charts, much of which is available directly to the end users on the dashboard.
He wrapped up with a very brief process intelligence demo, where it’s possible to specify metrics directly based on a Kofax document capture process.