A: With the proliferation of low cost data storage most Media organizations today are accumulating large amounts of data about their business - sales, inventory, financial and customer data. Business Intelligence is the process of mining this vast repository of data to support executive decision processes.
Q: But Media organizations already have existing legacy solutions to providing these reports so why do they need a new system?
A: There are two problems they need to solve. The first reason is that these solutions were designed to provide reporting on a single or a small group of channels or stations. Many of these groups are very large as a result of mergers and acquisitions and are expanding with the deployment of digital channels - the data is becoming enormous and cannot be easily processed with traditional methods.
The second reason is that these legacy solutions addressed a segment of the business and not all of the business. For example separate systems are often deployed for sales management, Program acquisition and scheduling, traffic scheduling, billing and accounting and on-air automation. Business Intelligence addresses these problems in an elegant fast and efficient way.
Q: So how does Business Intelligence do that?
A: All Business Intelligence solutions start with a data warehouse or datamart. Traditionally these data warehouses extracted transactional data from the various departmental applications and consolidated them into a central database. However, traditional reporting methods on large amounts of data have proven to be challenging, time consuming and laborious. Business Intelligence applies a process of extraction, transformation and loading of the data that results in a normalized and cleansed database to which a media specific Star Schema is applied to create OLAP cubes. Queries can then be run against the cube to create a fast and reproducible set of analysis results, graphs etc.
Q: What is an OLAP cube?
A: OLAP stands for On-Line Analytical Processing. It provides fast analysis of data that is essentially multi-dimensional. Queries can be run against the OLAP cube which potentially can produce results 1000's of times faster than queries on traditional relational data.
Q: If Business Intelligence is a generalized tool then why can't any Media company employ it utilizing their own internal resources or with their own IT department?
A: The problem is that it requires a considerable amount of planning and great deal of knowledge about the data that is accumulated in the various application systems. There is a need to understand what the relationships are between the data and how this flows to meaningful reports. Those skills are not readily available in most organizations and generally attempts at Business Intelligence have been flawed.
Q: So how does Decentrix solve that problem?
A: Decentrix brings a team of professionals that have extensive knowledge in the Media industry. Key executives were responsible for managing and or developing many of the mission critical applications that are used by broadcasters, cable networks, cable MSOs and satellite operators today. They have applied their extensive knowledge to creating a fast track process that uses predefined modules specifically built for Media Company analysis. This toolset is called BIAnalytix and is built over the latest best-of-breed business intelligence solutions from Microsoft.
