It’s that time of year again… back-to-school time! And while you’re likely not getting prepared for your first day back in the classroom, it never hurts to learn something new.

When it comes to the Business Intelligence industry, change is inevitable. To keep up, BI solutions are rapidly adding new features and functionality; and sometimes, these new things can be easy to miss or difficult to understand.

To help you stay up-to-date on Business Intelligence essentials, or just to learn something new, we’ve created a glossary of BI terms, A through Z. We’ve also added comments to certain terms that relate specifically to Wyn Enterprise. Check it out!

A - Ad hoc - Ad hoc reporting is a BI process where non-technical end-users can generate BI reports without needing IT. Ad hoc reporting enables end-users to ask their own questions and create their own reports.

B - Business Users - A business user can be any individual within an organization. Embedded, self-service BI empowers business users to leverage analytics as part of their standard workflow, enabling more data-driven decisions to be made.

C - Categories - In Wyn, the Categories tab of the UI Settings page allows you to create categories to help organize your reports and dashboards easily. Categories are secured based on roles and permissions. Admins and users have rights to add, edit, or delete a category or a sub-category.

D - Data storytelling - Data storytelling is the art of communicating insights from a dataset using narratives and visualizations. It can be used to put data insights into context and inspire action from your audience. Wyn includes an easy-to-use designer which lets users design dashboards and visuals based on the story they want to tell.

E - Embedded BI - Embedded BI is the integration of business intelligence solutions within business process software. Embedded BI provides software with data visualization, analytics, dashboards, and reporting capabilities. Instead of using a standalone application, embedded BI enables business intelligence directly within an organization's business applications.

F - Front End Portals - Wyn’s Front End Portals make getting started easy. The three portals provide different functionality for different user groups. The three portals include a Documents Portal, a Resource Portal, and an Admin Portal.

G - Governance - With easy-to-use dashboard and report designers in the same web-based application, data governance allows end-users to develop their own ad-hoc dashboards and reports based on the secured data. It also will enable admins to model business data in a structure familiar to users.

H - Holistic - Enterprise business intelligence provides a holistic view of the business. Embedding BI takes this a step further, integrating data analytics, dashboards, and BI reporting functionalities into an organization's existing software applications, reducing end-user push-back and minimizing the learning curve.

I - Interactive dashboards - Interactive dashboards allow you to visualize, analyze, and identify trends. Empower end-users to design interactive dashboards to promote analysis and strategic decision-making.

J - Jump To - Jump To is an interactivity function within Wyn Enterprise that allows users to move within reports/dashboards as they explore the data and visuals available to them to understand the data story better.

K - KPIs - Knowing and measuring Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) can help businesses achieve their desired results faster. BI solutions can help you build a variety of KPIs, monitor them, and report them out more quickly.

L - Localization - Localization is the process of adapting content, products, and services to specific local markets. Wyn Enterprise offers localization, meaning you’re in control of your dashboard and reports. Authors have the ability tolocalize titles, labels, data visualizations, and more. Localization can help to increase user adoption and even open up new markets.

M - Monitoring - Instead of constantly watching your dashboard, set data monitoring rules so Wyn Alerts can tell you, in real-time, when something is happening, good or bad. In Wyn, you can integrate your push-notifications with the platforms you use every day - Slack, MS Teams, and email.

N - Native multi-tenancy - Native multi-tenancy provides a secured centralized environment with built-in support for user context, row-level filters, and role-based security. With Wyn, you can manage your BI resources and data across all your customers from a single environment.

O - Organizational Security - Organizational security is a set of rules or procedures created by an organization to protect its sensitive data. With Wyn Enterprise, choose support for a variety of industry-standard protocols, including OAuth2, OpenID Connect, and other federated security systems for complete organizational security. Or choose from Wyn’s built-in extensibility for the security module to integrate with virtually any authentication methodology or security system your organization is currently using.

P - Permissions - Permissions ensure the appropriate people access the correct data and information across all verticals. Setting security roles keeps confidential information confidential. Role-based permissions allow admins to organize and funnel data to the appropriate users. These permissions streamline processes and ensure a smooth end-user experience.

Q - Queries - Queries are requests for information from a database. Embedded BI makes it easy to run queries because data models can create the query on demand, making it easier and faster to get the data needed for dashboards and reports.

R - Reports - Reports show the prepared and analyzed data from a BI tool, including actionable insights. WynReportseliminates the manual process and provides users with an intuitive and easy-to-use BI reporting tool. Wyn's reporting module is driven by the same ActiveReports engine that has led the industry for 20+ years.

S - Self-Service - Self-service BI empowers your team to independently explore, analyze, and generate insights with data visualizations, interactive dashboards, and BI reports. It also helps to bring disparate data sources together and combines them for easy analysis, offering a single source of truth. 

T - Total Cost of Ownership - Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) is an estimation of the expenses associated with purchasing, deploying, using and retiring a product. Wyn Enterprise’s unique server-based licensing allows you to scale your business and the user base with no additional cost. This gives you the lowest TCO for any embedded BI solution.

U - User Context - In Wyn, the User Context allows for additional use identification priorities to add content to the queries that are executed for dashboards and reports. This allows for additional automated filters to implement data governance rules and multi-tenancy use cases.

V - Visual Gallery - The Visual Gallery tab in the dashboard designer is a great way to reuse a scenario, container, or grouped component of an existing dashboard into another dashboard. You can copy the widget (dashboard scenario, container, or grouped component) of a dashboard by simply dragging and dropping that widget from the Visual Gallery tab on the design area.

W - White Label - White labeling allows you to customize themes and styles to match your corporate brand style. With Wyn Enterprise, you can seamlessly white-label portals, reports, and dashboards as part of your own app.

X - Xpressions (Yes, it’s “expressions” but “X” is a tough letter!) - Analytical expressions in WynDashboards is a formula that uses a set of built-in functions, operators, and constants that empowers end-users to define ad-hoc calculations to arrive at newly processed information. Business users can use these expressions from simple summarization such as sum and count to complex decisions, like a percent of the total, conditional aggregations, etc.

Y - Your choice… of environment, UI, data, and more! Wyn Enterprise is a flexible embedded BI platform that allows you to choose what works best for you and your company.

Z - Zen - Zen is a peaceful and calm feeling. Experience the Wyn Difference and feel a sense of zen and freedom from stress that often comes with traditional BI.

And there you have it… Business Intelligence, from A to Z. To learn even more about BI and Wyn Enterprise, check out our Wyn video for an in-depth end-user demo.