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Is the 4Sight BI product built for insurance? |
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Can the product be customized? |
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What is a Dashboard? |
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What is a KPI? |
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What is a business intelligence (BI) Platform? |
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What is in the BI Platform? |
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What application servers does the BI Platform work with? |
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What operating systems does the BI Platform support? |
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What is a "Solution-Oriented" Approach? |
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How does the BI Platform scale? |
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What security is available? |
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If I already have a security infrastructure, will Reporting leverage it? |
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Is the 4Sight BI product built for insurance? |
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YES, it’s built exclusively for the insurance industry. |
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Can the product be customized? |
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Yes, we can definitely mould the product to meet your needs. We provide ad-hoc reporting which allows the end user to create their own reports and save them, or publish them to other users at their organization. |
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What is a Dashboard? |
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There are three main types of dashboards: |
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Operational dashboards - they help with core operational processes. Most often they show real time information. These dashboards focus on monitoring rather than analyzing information or management. |
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Tactical dashboards - they help with departmental processes and projects. They are more about analyzing. |
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Strategic dashboards, also known as scorecards: (or scorecards) monitor the execution of corporate They help to manage and monitor specific objectives. |
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What is a KPI? |
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KPI stands for Key Performance Indicator(s). KPIs help with Management support, business goals/requirements, businessm alignment, business-IT partnership, integration, scalability and adaptability. KPIs are used to measure an item, like you might measure the width of an object. |
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What is a business intelligence (BI) Platform? |
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A comprehensive development and runtime environment for building complete solutions to business intelligence problems. The BI Platform is the infrastructure and core services that integrate business intelligence components to complete the BI Suite. This includes the infrastructure necessary to build, deploy, execute and support applications. |
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What is in the BI Platform? |
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The BI Platform is the underlying infrastructure which supports 4Sight's reporting, analysis, dashboard, data integration, and data mining capabilities. The 4Sight BI Platform provides the architecture and infrastructure required to build complete solutions to business problems, and is designed around these low level BI services. Authentication, logging, auditing, workflow, rules engines and a solution engine provide the foundation of the platform, while service-oriented components such as 4Sight Reporting, Analysis, and Dashboards provide the higher-level, business user functionality. This Service Oriented Architecture allows the components to be called by the solution engine autonomously. Solution documents are used to define the order and relationships between these calls allowing the platform to be programmable without changing code. |
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What application servers does the BI Platform work with? |
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The BI Platform server is written entirely in Java and runs on J2EE compliant application servers. Currently we use JBoss for our primary development platform, but we encourage developers to use it on their J2EE application server of choice. |
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What operating systems does the BI Platform support? |
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The BI Platform server is written entirely in Java and runs on J2EE application servers. As long as it is deployed into a compliant J2EE server, the operating system is not a factor. Currently all versions of Windows from ME to XP are supported as are many versions of Linux, Mac OS X, Solaris and other UNIX platforms. |
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What is a "Solution-Oriented" Approach? |
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The realization that business problems are solved using processes and procedures and usually require information presentation, analysis, and delivery (BI) has lead to a Solution-Oriented approach. The process exists to solve the business problem and it is the solution. 4Sight centers it's solutions around a workflow core and a Service Oriented Architecture. |
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How does the BI Platform scale? |
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The BI Platform server is J2EE based and will benefit from scalability services available from the Application Server it is deployed into. Clustering, connection pooling and caching are examples of application server scalability services. The Service Oriented Architecture also helps the BI application server scale. Services are called, they perform a task, save state information and terminate. This stateless approach allows processes to be swapped out and memory to be recovered between invocations.
The BI Platform uses a sophisticated combination of business rules, services, assured messaging, workflow, clustering, and auditing providing the following benefits:
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Business rules are used to identify exception cases filtering out non useful data, freeing memory and reducing spam.
Workflows with subflows are used to reduce the overhead of storing redundant definitions
Subflows use assured messaging to call services to generate reports
Clustering can be used to distribute report generation and delivery
Auditing tracks that each exception is handled successfully |
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What security is available? |
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The BI Framework uses Acegi Security for a pluggable framework to implement and combine multiple authentication schemes and credential stores and CAS for platform-neutral single sign-on (SSO). |
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If I already have a security infrastructure, will Reporting leverage it? |
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Yes, the BI security supports a pluggable framework for authentication. |
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