Balanced Insight Consensus® 3.2 Released

CINCINNATI, OH – JULY 18 – 2005 – Balanced Insight today announced the release of Balanced Insight Consensus® 3.2, a powerful process automation and collaboration tool. The already-robust stature of the current Balanced Insight Consensus® platform has made significant inroads with Balanced Insight’s customers who are looking to bring a common language between their IT and business users. The launch of Balanced Insight Consensus® 3.2 will make organizations even more empowered to bring semblance, understanding and agreement upon data and business definitions.

“We continue to evolve the Balanced Insight Consensus® product line with a set of enhancements that align with how our customers are utilizing the platform,” notes Tom Hammergren, president and CEO of Balanced Insight.  “These evolutions – specifically in the area of workflow technology and configuration rules – will improve the ultimate governance and approval around semantic stewardship, thus further bridging the IT and business gap within an organization."

With this release of Balanced Insight Consensus®, the labor-intensive process of giving disparate enterprise data a consistent business meaning — what Gartner calls semantic reconciliation — becomes highly automated, making the resulting information more trusted, more usable, and more valued. Balanced Insight Consensus® becomes the assistant to the enterprise data stewards that ensures the quality, use, and literacy of the information assets throughout the enterprise. Balanced Insight Consensus® supports flexible workflow processes to enable approval by stakeholders and/or stewardship counsels.

Balanced Insight Consensus® 3.2  provides the following enhanced feature set:

Approved workflow capabilities: The Balanced Insight Consensus® Approver module enables the process automation for gaining consensus on key terminology, designs and structures as they relate to the business intelligence solution being proposed or built.

Automated notification capabilities: The Balanced Insight Consensus® Foundation module now incorporates a configurable, targeted notification engine that optimizes review and approval processes. Notifications are sent to stewards via email correspondence, thus allowing them to better understand the status of their review queue along with the status of their team. These notifications provide an excellent mechanism for driving the functional and technical stewards to complete their review cycles, which are often a secondary task assigned to them outside of their primary job responsibilities.

Collaborative issue/resolution capabilities: The Balanced Insight Consensus® Facilitator module provides technology-assisted facilitation to expedite the delivery of resolutions for conflicted terminology and items that are rejected by stewards during the approval process. This module provides key productivity tools to a chief steward or facilitator and allows them to:

1) monitor all projects inputted into Balanced Insight Consensus®

2) see where they are in their review

3) see what items are in conflict and require resolution and

4) perform proxy approval actions during collaborative stewardship sessions.

Analytical and reporting tools: The Balanced Insight Consensus® Insight module provides a set of key analysis and reporting capabilities to assist those involved with Balanced Insight Consensus® to monitor key metrics around the stewardship processes such as:

A. Time-to-promotion analysis. Specifically, how long is the duration from the time a set of semantics are contributed to the Balanced Insight Consensus® Repository until they are published.

B. Stewardship dashboards. Specifically, how engaged are the stewards and what is the quality of their review activities.

C. Artifact change analysis. Specifically, what artifacts are most volatile, which are being utilized most throughout the enterprise, and where resources should be invested.

Balanced Insight Consensus® 3.2 also brings with it an expansion of the Balanced Insight Consensus® Integrator module to include industry standard relational database DDL (data definition language) enabling interfacing to IBM DB2, Oracle, Microsoft SQL, Sybase Adaptive Server, Teradata, as well as others; Common Warehouse Model (CWM) and XML Metadata Interchange (XMI) format to support various modeling, business intelligence, ETL (Extract, Transform, and Load) tools supporting this industry standard.

About Balanced Insight
Balanced Insight, based in Cincinnati, Ohio, helps companies double the return on their business intelligence (BI) and performance management investments. Its signature Balanced Insight Consensus® software is a company-wide platform that brings business focus to the BI development process and automates the arduous task of giving all data a consistent business meaning — what Gartner calls semantic reconciliation. This process leads to more trusted and widely-adopted BI investments with lower ongoing support costs.
For more information visit www.balancedinsight.com