Omniscope Business Case

What are the benefits? 

Omniscope generates return on investment from many cumulative, beneficial impacts on how data is made accessible and visible as it moves through your organisation, up and down the reporting chain, and outwards to customers, suppliers and partners. Omniscope can save countless knowledge-worker man-hours being spent on time-consuming data manipulations to produce presentation-quality reports. Omniscope/DataPlayers can be added ro almost any existing reporting chain, and also add value as an initial 'datamart' and report/'dashboard' prototyping solution for complex BI reporting/data warehousing projects, reducing risk and speeding resolution of key data and process issues, resulting in better specifications, warehouse/cube designs and increased productivity of expensive specialists across the entire reporting solution technology stack.

Omniscope adds value by being more accessible, effective and less expensive (average cost per-seat) across the entire workflow/reporting chain compared with chaining multiple, discrete applications (departmental databases, spreadsheets, presentation packages) together with web-based presentation options bundled in suites of business intelligence tools. Omniscope-based solutions can connect to difficult-to-maintain multi-dimensional cubes, relational 'datamarts' and SQL reporting libraries, all of which create costly technology barriers between your data and the ever-changing reporting requirements of end users and customers.

Omniscope data management and reporting:

• Improves data accessibility, via end-user, self-service visual drag-and-drop DataManager ETL workspace
• Improves data quality, providing multiple visualisations of entire data sets
• Enables faster, more flexible reporting using smaller, simpler SQL libraries
• Integrates isolated spreadsheet data into reporting quickly and simply
• Minimises the applications involved in extracting data and delivering reports
• Provides cost-effective, scalable, 'hybrid' desktop client - internal and external
• Integrates with web applications powerfully and quickly
• Delivers links to related documents, images, video clips, web pages/services etc.
• Protects published data from re-use and misuse

Improved data accessibility

Improved data quality via visualisation

Potentially costly data problems persist because they lurk unseen in transactional tables of relational databases, invisible to everyone. The best way to improve data quality is to make all the data (including defective data not easy to query for) visible to those who know it best. Omniscope scales to permit large data tables to be 'dumped' rather than selectively extracted. Delivering comprehensive dumps (reporting views) in Omniscope makes patterns/outliers in the data visible to those who know the data best. Using Omniscope, business users can quickly isolate and correct defective records, and forward a corrections file to the database administrator in a variety of file formats. (back to top)

Faster, more flexible reporting

Most organisations have insufficient staff who know both the underlying structure of their relational databases and the SQL language in which queries are written. Technical staff struggle to write and maintain a growing library of queries, each tailored to specific users and reports, distracting them from other important tasks. End users on the other side of the 'SQL bottleneck' experience frustrating delays to develop or update reports. Omniscope automates the production of large-scale views or 'meta-reports', e.g. a single table containing all people (and all things related to the people), or places (and all things related to places) etc. as compact Omniscope files. Omniscope users can open even very large meta-reports and use intuitive, non-SQL, Omniscope visual filtering to focus on the data and create the presentations they need. (back to top)

Integrates isolated spreadsheet data

Not all report data is held in 'back-end' transactional databases. Some data is held locally in spreadsheets or small local databases. Omniscope allows anyone to merge/join tabular data from diverse sources without using a database, writing any code or mastering arcane, non-standard database manipulation tools. (back to top)

Minimises chain of report processing applications - avoiding the 'Office shuffle'

Reporting on large data sets typically involves using local databases like MS Access to manage tables extracted from back-end transactional databases, then spreadsheets like MS Excel to analyse tabular data, and finally presentations prepared in MS PowerPoint to make charts illustrating the data. Omniscope enables this process to be done with a single application and very compact data file that refreshes itself automatically from back-end data sources, with all analysis and visualisations and reporting pages updated automatically. PowerPoint slides can be imported into Omniscope, and  Flash DataPlayer 'dashboards' exported to PowerPoint, Excel & PDF documents with full interactivity. Even static, printed versions of PowerPoint and Acrobat PDF documents can be generated directly from Omniscope. (back to top)

Cost-effective, scalable 'hybrid' web/desktop client

The Omniscope free Viewer is a 'hybrid' desktop/web read/query-only client that can be widely distributed for free. All the visualisation, filtering and web-browser functionality is available in the free Viewer. The development, support and licensing cost-per-seat of Omniscope-based reporting/data publishing solutions are usually much less than alternatives. Omniscope files can replace database feeds - subscribers no longer need to maintain their own databases in order to receive the data in a secure, searchable, query-able, re-usable format. (back to top)

Integrates with web applications

Omniscope's web services integration makes it a powerful alternative to the browser as a local client. Web-based solutions involving structured data presented to the end user for filtering and analysis, and communicating the results of user choices back to the server can be delivered using only Omniscope. Using Omniscope as a web services client makes better use of desktop computing resources, permits multiple simultaneous browser views and eliminates costly design/development of user interfaces. (back to top)

Links to related documents, images, and services

Any value in any cell of an Omniscope file can be part of an embedded parametric link (URL) to a page or file located elsewhere. This means that Omniscope files can be used as topical 'mini-portals' full of 'micro-links' to remote documents, images, video clips (and sub-clips), web pages, blogs etc. Omniscope files are perfect for presenting searchable abstracts of document or image/video archives. Users can search through attributes of remote material, then link to selected files with one click. Image galleries, video 'jukeboxes' and other topical collections of diverse file types can all be collated and distributed via compact, portable .IOK files, accessible to anyone using Omniscope free Viewer. Automated refresh and comprehensive content protection settings (e.g. requiring users to be logged into a specific web site before the file will open) enable all types of publishing, commercial and non-commercial. (back to top)

Protects published data

Omniscope files can be locked by their creator to prevent copy-paste or any other means of exporting the data and images inside the file. Proprietary encryption and compression protects data from mis-appropriation past the likely useful life of the data. Using Enterprise Edition, files can be locked to the company domains, such that former staff who no longer have valid online accounts cannot open any of the company Omniscope files. Posting data on the web in Omniscope files prevents automated harvesting and re-purposing your data by, for example, price comparison sites. (back to top)