By Chris Bucholtz
October 1, 2008

We’ve covered business intelligence and analytics – especially when they’re aimed at the smaller business end of the spectrum – and how it can impact CRM for quite a while. One of the recurring themes is the idea of making analysis of complex business data something that can be performed rapidly – not by a business analysts whose chief talent lies in knowing how a particular piece of software works, but by a CEO or VP of sales or some other executive whose talent lies in knowing what to do with the numbers once he or she has them. We talked to LucidEra’s Ken Rudin about this earlier in the year, and clearly his team understands the value of ease of use in the analytics space.

Last week, I had a chance to see eThority’s BI interface, and it’s clear that President and CEO Mike Psenka and his team gets this concept inside and out. The interface on its eponymous Enterprise Edition BI solution is so simple it may disorient first-time users, but the whole point of the product is to make analytics a tool that’s easy enough that anyone can use it with little or no training. That’s a smart move – you never know who may have the bright idea, and it seems wise to allow people to analyze their own hunches and notions without bogging down an analyst with requests for help.

The solution allows users to create analyses on the fly, choosing elements for comparison on a drag and drop basis and then watching as the solution spits out answers. It’s customizable, a feature included to allow users to tailor what they see to the level of complexity they need. And it can integrate with existing data warehouses and data marts. The solution works with open standards like XML, X.12, ODBC and HL-7, and it also includes integration tools to work with other systems and applications.

But what Psenka is really proud of is the idea of the “user-obvious interface,” and a solution that requires no training. He’s almost right on target: effective users of BI tools do indeed need training –not in tools, but in their own businesses. That knowledge is what makes BI tools useful, and interfaces like eThority’s make getting to that utility a much shorter trip.