The (Pittsburgh) Tribune-Review is trying to take business intelligence to a new level, using software from Business Objects SA and integration services from Decision First Technologies Inc.

The newspaper (daily, 105,286; Sunday, 163,215) used to conduct departmental reporting in a fashion familiar to a lot of newspapers, according to Ed Kost, chief information officer of Tribune-Review Publishing Co. When a manager wanted a report from either the circulation or advertising side of the business, the request had to be submitted to a designated individual on the IT staff, and that report would be generated individually - populated with whatever data was most current at the time.  

Moreover, the report would be static, prohibiting the manager from manipulating the data. If he or she wanted the report couched in a slightly different way, a new report request would have to be submitted.

That all changed with the deployment of Business Objects’ software, Kost said. Because the app had to link with the Tribune-Review’s disparate databases, Atlanta-based reseller Decision First was tapped to handle integration and training.

“We sent two of our people to a training session with Decision First for about a week, in Chicago,” Kost said. “Then for two or three days we had a training session here as well.”

Proper structuring

The Tribune-Review used the software to mine several databases, including a Progress database from Publishing Business Systems that handles general subscriber data and a Microsoft Access app that contains information about new building construction.

 “The most challenging part of the installation was the proper structuring of the database used for the reporting tools,” Kost said.

“There are a couple different ways of doing databases. The first way of doing it is the hierarchical sense, with different levels. Then there’s the methodological way, which has the business reason(s) at the center point, with the connections out (looking like) the spokes on a wheel, or a star. That’s ultimately where we’d like to be, because you never know what rationale is going to be used to get each report.

“If you set it up in a hierarchical type of structure, with tables built on tables, you may never be able to extract what it is you want to get to.”

A business intelligence software app allows an organization to capture data from different areas of the enterprise and combine them into live, interactive reports.
Graphic: Mitch Hite, Decision First Technologies

Linking Business Objects’ software to the daily’s databases was only part of the project. Next up: enabling real-time reporting, a function Kost expects to make available to Tribune-Review managers later this year.

“For instance, if you’re a preprint sales manager and you need to know the ZIP codes and the clusters, and you don’t want to pull something that’s dated six months ago, you should be able to pull that immediately, since we’ll do nightly scheduled dumps from the databases and extractions from the other systems.”

More productive

In addition to the business benefits, making real-time information more accessible to middle and upper management frees IT departments to be more productive as well, according to Scott Golden, vice president of professional services at Decision First.

“To allow (management) to interact with the data, sort it, group it, drill down into it and do analysis on it without having to re-involve IT, is going to help them be more productive,” he said. “Having more information at their fingertips is, in the end, going to let them make better decisions.”

Business Objects’ “dashboard” model yields additional benefits, Golden said. Dashboard views let users see key business metrics in real-time as database entries are updated. If reports indicate unusual activity, for example if circulation stops rise above a predefined level, a graphical indicator light illuminates, thus alerting the manager to open the interface to that database to determine the cause of the increased stops.

That same report could also be pulled from a completely separate database that monitored Web site traffic, and the department managers could analyze whether there was a correlation between the two statistics.

“This kind of live reporting used to take six Java programmers six months, and in the end it was very expensive,” Golden said. “Now we’re to the point where we can usually have production-ready dashboards running in three weeks.”