The business model should intelligently draw together all the information from various different historical and real-time sources. It should then make this information available to the business users in such a way that is easy to understand and navigate, without them needing any technical knowledge of underlying systems. Designing the business model is frequently the most time-consuming and contentious portion of any analytic application development cycle because it defines how the data is hierarchically structured.

For example, a financial services company would typically define a particular territory by regions, broken out by districts and supported by a client relationship manager. This structure enables an end user to navigate the business by starting at the country level, selecting a country and drilling down to see the regions of a particular country, drilling down again into a particular region to see each district, and then drilling down to see the client relationship manager associated with a particular district. The user can then drill down to an even deeper level and locate the names and account balances of each client associated with a particular relationship manager.

The Right Information at the Right Time Defining the various hierarchies and data relationships is critical to ensuring that information is easy to find. Executives, managers and frontline employees need varying degrees of information, presented in a format that allows them to perform critical job functions more effectively. For example, a consumer goods company's sales manager needs to know total revenue by brand per quarter and the average length of a sales cycle for the various types of distribution outlets to negotiate better business terms. By contrast, the company's call center service representatives need to access their average call-handling time relative to pre-agreed targets. Marketing managers want to know which customers to target in forthcoming campaigns to effectively up-sell and cross-sell their products.

A business model defines the main information the user can navigate and display. However, it doesn't actually do any of the navigation and displaying. For that purpose, organizations need to evaluate and select a user presentation tool that will convert the information into reports, charts and graphs. The presentation tool must enable users to interact with the information, such as filtering portions of the data, drilling down into more detail or navigating between different reports. Typically, this tool must also provide some level of generic portal functionality so organizations can flexibly design how they want the data to be presented.

The reports, graphics and dashboards should be designed to answer users' most common questions and satisfy most of their immediate needs for information and insight. However, answers to some questions will often lead to further questions, which will require additional reports or graphs. Traditionally, IT departments created the report, which invariably resulted in a significant delay and potentially led to lost business opportunities. To maintain and update accurate reports, the presentation tool must provide an ad hoc interface to the data. This component enables users to quickly create their own analyses by selecting the types of data they'd like to see in the report or graph. Such a self-service model allows users to receive answers to specific questions in minutes, not weeks.