Smaller Businesses Try AnalyticsSmaller Businesses Try Analytics

QlikTech's QlikView system doubles as an integration service, pulling data out of the group's Microsoft SQL Server, Pervasive, ProvideX, and Sybase databases. "All the databases have different structures," Eberline says. "Thus far, we've not run into anything we can't retrieve." Bonita Bay's senior operational managers have dashboards that give them summaries from their point-of-sale systems and general-ledger accounts. The information tells them how their businesses are faring on a daily basis, whether staffing levels are correct compared to where the business is making its profits.

Business executives at company headquarters also have dashboards to display key performance indicators and other visual summaries of the business. But they can also drill down into the data to view, for example, how one fitness center is faring versus another or whether activity has picked up on a golf course that's been experiencing a slowdown.

Eberline says the QlikView system has been in use for just four months and is already used by 75 club managers, 14 executives at headquarters, and 25 accounting-department staffers. Altogether, 125 out of 1,500 Bonita Bay employees make use of the QlikTech system in some way. Formal user training will take place later this month, but most non-IT staffers are able to come up to speed on QlikView with "a light amount of training," Eberline says. Two database administrators support the system and build end-user dashboards with it.

Administaff Inc. is another company benefiting from business-intelligence technology. The provider of employee-management services serves as the human-resources department for 5,000 small and midsize businesses around the country, with a total of 80,000 employees. To give them access to their employee data, John Sheridan, director of business and technology development, needed a simple-to-use business-intelligence system that could display its results in a browser window.

Sheridan implemented Information Builders Inc.'s WebFocus to give HR representatives and business executives the ability to work with their company data. A company's president, for example, can study the impact of payroll over an extended period, while individual employees can review their pay stubs on a paycheck-by-paycheck basis. Users work from browser windows to log on to a secure Lightweight Directory Access Protocol server that identifies them and sets privilege levels on the information they may access.

Clients don't have to wait for Administaff technologists to build reports for them. The WebFocus Studio Developer and other tools let them build their own reports and view the data from a central Administaff repository. A CEO might want to assess employee morale by reviewing how many workers are participating in his company's 401(k) plan, since joining the plan is often associated with intent to stay with a company.

At first, WebFocus provided clients with static, standard reports that Administaff staffers had prepared for them. "Now we provide them with the ability to create and save their own reports," Sheridan says. Administaff provides a simplified report-creation service. Users who understand scripting languages may use WebFocus Studio Developer to draw up more-sophisticated reports.

"Our clients are more and more demanding of information and reports," Sheridan says. Unlike the early days, when a handful of database administrators worked with business intelligence, Administaff's system has to be able to keep up with the company's growth and also scale out to thousands of simultaneous small-business users, all looking to reap the benefits of business-intelligence technology.

Joel Nakamura/theispot.com

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