APOS Insight provides a snapshot of your system at a moment in time to show you complete metadata on:

• Users
• User groups
• Roles
• Rights

APOS Insight extracts this metadata to the Insight tables, which can be reported against for extensive security analysis.

APOS Insight's snapshot in time of your security information is not just important for detailed analysis. It is also important because it allows you to see your security structure's big picture, and how all the parts relate.

• Track when changes occur in your system - APOS Insight monitors the BI Audit Log for changes, so you know precisely when any object in your system changes, and who made the changes.
• Analyze the history of changes to objects within your system - APOS Insight makes audit history easily accessible for detailed analysis, supporting your change management processes and governance objectives.
• Audit your security structure to meet corporate governance standards and protect sensitive information.

You can use the information provided by APOS Insight -- the granular and the structural -- to compare multiple systems and analyze differences, allowing you to plan and efficiently execute

• Migrations
• Upgrades
• System consolidations

Enhanced metadata analysis allows you to automate the creation of:

• Report inventory - a complete and organized listing of reports and content that exists within your system, and where it resides.
• Report catalogs - a comprehensive view into the reports in your system, the structure of those reports, and the data elements that are utilized within.
• Report documentation - document the composition and data connections of your report catalog.

The ability to capture and manipulate metadata provides critical understanding for any BI team's success in preparing for upgrades and migrations, and in establishing a detailed and easily managed report catalog.

BI teams tasked with enforcing information governance use APOS Insight to flag reports in their catalog that contain sensitive information, such as ePHI, PCI, or PII (healthcare), or financial control data, and to maintain audit readiness.

Working smart in your SAP BI deployment involves reducing technical debt wherever you can  by having a full understanding of how every move affects your report catalog, and reducing the number of cascading changes you need to make.

Database schema changes, updated universes or any other changes to data sources will have an impact on your reports and dashboards. Measuring that impact and assigning the resources to make the necessary changes to reports is an ongoing challenge for BI platform managers. APOS Insight lets you manage the impact on:

• Reports
• Universes
• Business views
• Dashboards

Use APOS Insight to gain a comprehensive understanding of which reports will be affected by changes to the data sources.
As an example of why this comprehensive understanding is necessary, see how APOS Insight can help with financial reporting controls change management in System Change Auditing below.

APOS Insight's audit capabilities ensure you stay on top of change in your BI environment. Analyze detailed audit information to support your change management documentation, and use impact analysis to achieve financial report / internal control compliance and to accelerate EHR upgrades.

APOS Insight audit runs services for reports, universes, and security structure on a configurable schedule, and these services extract metadata to record system content changes. Changes are recorded to the APOS Insight audit database, and you can run reports and dashboards against the tables in that database in support of your change management workflows.

APOS Insight's KPI module takes a snapshot of various aspects of your SAP BusinessObjects system and creates metadata of these snapshots for comprehensive off-line analysis and reporting. Included in these snapshots are:

• System status snapshots - current load and activity levels of all SAP BusinessObjects XI components;
• System structure snapshots - current information about servers, users, user groups, folders, reports, etc.; and
• Report design snapshots - current information about the report design content of all your reports.

Because KPI combines log data with the wealth of data captured by KPI's snapshots, the APOS Insight solution provides a very broad picture of the transactions occurring within your SAP BusinessObjects system, allowing you to make informed decisions concerning issues such as licensing and migration, and allowing you to manage change proactively.

The deep system introspection provided by APOS Insight is essential to the formulation of a complete understanding of your SAP BusinessObjects deployment and the flow of information within it. Using such knowledge, you can foster a culture of transparency and accountability.

APOS Insight provides the in-depth knowledge you need to optimize your SAP BI environment and infrastructure, establish complete confidence in your content, enable industry-specific regulatory compliance, and to deliver well managed BI to your organization. Its enhanced metadata management and audit capabilities make it the perfect tool to enforce a report change management policy.

APOS Insight improves access to the SAP BusinessObjects log by capturing log information, de-normalizing it, and loading it into topical tables for easy reporting. These tables provide comprehensive audit information on:

• Web Intelligence Audit Events
• Common Audit Events
• Analysis Audit Events
• Platform Audit Events
• LCM Audit Events

APOS Insight provides a rich view of the system by taking snapshots of system information at specified times and intervals and posting them to an accessible database structure for subsequent analysis. Each snapshot shows a detailed picture of system components and objects.

Because APOS Insight combines log data with the wealth of data captured by its own system snapshots, it provides a much broader picture of the transactions occurring within your SAP BusinessObjects system, and a complete record of who changed what and when.

If you are involved in the flow of information within a public company, you need to be aware of your obligations under Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) and/or other legislation that regulates your industry. Increasingly, executives in public companies are becoming liable for misstatements of information, regardless of whether they were aware of how such misstatements occurred.

It is no longer a question of what you know, but of what you should know, according to regulatory expectations.

What this potential liability means for finance, internal audit, business intelligence, and information technology practitioners is that they need not only to develop ironclad change management procedures, but also to develop methods for authenticating those change management procedures to the satisfaction of external auditors. Read more: Internal Controls, Audit, Business Intelligence, Change Management