The financial and healthcare industries continue to face increasingly more stringent compliance requirements. Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are turning to business intelligence (BI) tools to help make sense of the mountains of data and to meet the stiff compliance regulations. Often though the most difficult, expensive, and complex part of using such systems is the challenge of organizing information into a standardized format and building the correct processes to get the right data through the correct BI tool.

Guided Intelligence has implemented a solution, the Guided Intelligence Analytical Server (GIAS) that uses the FusionWare Integration Server to provide secure point-and-click ASP-based BI on-demand to transform data into a powerful analytical application to meet compliance mandates. Such applications were typically only available to large companies with million-dollar data warehousing systems before GIAS was introduced.

Automating Systems in Accordance with the New Standards
Following the important movement that’s underway to standardize information into one format for financial reporting as initiated, for example, by the XBRL consortium (http://xbrl.org/), Guided Intelligence worked on building a viable solution to sell to end users via channel partners. The company needed to find an XML server that would help build the framework for transforming its quasi-automated process into a completely automated, push-button system. The end result is the Guided Intelligence Analytical Server (GIAS), providing a service-oriented architecture as the basis of a Business Intelligence on-demand or BI as Web Service solution.

One of the company’s target markets is the financial industry, a business that’s heavily involved in compliance and always looking for ways to exchange data per Sarbanes Oxley.

Building a Framework
Guided Intelligence chose FusionWare (www.fusionware.net) technology as the framework for its automated system. The FusionWare Integration Server enables companies to build and deploy robust integration solutions rapidly and cost-effectively because of its built-in code generators, wizards, and query builders through an easy-to-use point-and-click interface.

The FusionWare Integration Server provides the complete runtime infrastructure for the Guided Intelligence ASP model, requiring no extra servers or databases. It also provides the development environment that lets Guided Intelligence build the core Web Services that enable files in an application to be transformed into analyticals cube on-demand without having to pre-define them. The processes created help define automated scripts to transform data from a user’s application into a standardized format that drives the cubes, dashboards, and other analytical presentation models. Essentially, the company is enabling existing reporting models or forms to be transformed into OLAP (Online Analytical Processing) cubes that let people understand better what’s going on with their data. OLAP is a metaphor for a data storage model in a BI environment modeled after a Rubik’s cube.

FusionWare met all of Guided Intelligence’s criteria from a technology perspective. Guided Intelligence was also impressed with FusionWare’s unique willingness and ability to understand what it was trying to accomplish and, therefore, deliver results.

“We had been following the industry trends, working very closely with several players in the XML world, and evaluated the leading vendors in this space,” said Guided Intelligence president Warren Richman. “We chose the FusionWare Integration Server because the product met all of our criteria from a technology perspective, but what really drove our decision was the FusionWare team – they are sensitive to the needs of their channel partners and really deliver on what they promise in their marketing.”

Transforming Data into Sophisticated Analytics
Using its ASP-based usage model, Guided Intelligence developed a solution targeted at the financial services market called Audit Intelligence. For roughly what a CPA would charge a client an hour, a company can get the benefit of the entire Guided Intelligence Analytical Server. Normally, it could take days or weeks to set up a sophisticated OLAP cube and accomplish the same thing. With FusionWare technology driving the Guided Intelligence Analytical Server, the customer doesn’t have to worry about hiring expensive .NET or Java consultants to customize its solution or add complexity to its existing infrastructure with additional systems such as application servers, Web servers or databases.

With pushbutton simplicity, Audit Intelligence integrates a customer’s data, takes financial statement information, and transforms it into a forensic application for analyzing a business’s financials over multiple periods of time. Any organization that needs to validate the integrity of a company can use this powerful, yet easy-to-use tool.

CPAs, financial planners, CFOs, internal auditors, and certified fraud examiners will have an effective way of getting at all the information. Instead of having to worry about how to gather information from diverse data sources, they can just focus on analyzing it. The FusionWare Integration Server’s powerful data and application connectivity capabilities simplify the integration of the customer’s back-end systems.

Another benefit of providing an “expert” system is that it helps address the critical shortage of trained CPAs for firms and their clients that have to meet guidelines. As the article “Accounting Firms Scramble To Find Experienced CPAs” by Suzanne McGee published in Career Journal points out:
    
Public-accounting firms are ramping up efforts to hire and retain senior-level talent as new auditing and accounting rules continue to fuel clients’ need for their services http://www.careerjournal.com/salaryhiring/industries/accounting/20050322...

Similarly in healthcare the requirements for better management of information for more efficiency in managing a medical practice is both facilitated and encumbered by the rigid HIPAA requirements. In much the same way that Guided Intelligence transforms financial data, its applications for healthcare can transform medical billing data into a rich source of analytics including practice analysis, financial analysis and documentation compliance analysis.

Opening the Channel
The Guided Intelligence Analytical Server can be delivered both as an ASP solution or installed in an enterprise. Guided Intelligence was able to create a “frictionless” process that requires virtually no manual data manipulation. This was important because it wanted to drive its price point to a level the SME market it was calling on could afford. Guided Intelligence delivers its solutions through channel partners who focus on that market.

Guided Intelligence VARs can offer Audit Intelligence and any of its other applications to their partners as branded applications. This indirect model is also ideal for application portals or transaction-based models to include an analytics model.

The Future
The next phase of Audit Intelligence running on the Guided Intelligence Analytical Server will let people analyze any publicly traded stock through a portal. The pushbutton automated system will allow the automated transformation of publicly filed financial statements through the SEC’s Edgar database into Audit Intelligence, which will analyze multiple years worth of financial data and help identify trends in ways that relate to fraud, misstatements, or other financial shenanigans. These are tools that have previously been unavailable to small companies.

With this increased functionality, any of Audit Intelligence’s users can compare private trial balance information and public companies. These companies will be able to look at their own financial statements and put them in the same format, model, and terminology as they would industry leaders. This opens potential areas for benchmarking, mergers, and acquisitions.

Using FusionWare’s HIPAA-compliant transformation capabilities, Guided Intelligence will be targeting other applications including healthcare, CRM and expense analysis to help companies connect and make sense of exhaustive amounts of unstructured and structured data, and comply with strict regulations.