BI Blogs

Just a sampling of articles and posts I bookmarked and tagged this week:

Valuing Business Intelligence | Advice and Opinion
What is BI? According to Bill DeGeneres: “Business Intelligence is a business function with clear goals and a mission: to collect, analyze, evaluate, and disseminate relevant business intelligence information, metrics and status, for assisting leaders and managers in making informed decisions that change behaviors and move the business toward meeting goals, objectives and strategy.”

datadoodle » If DM Review says so
Goal: make Marco your audience too. He’s just trying to sell names, after all. (Datadoodle is quickly becoming one of my favorite blogs.)

iMedia Connection: Bloggers, influence and your brand
I’m definitely a Watson, but I’m not sure about my actual reach. Interesting research regardless.

Do You Actually Have to Listen to an Album to Review It? - Blogs Editorial @ FolioMag.com
Maxim not a bastion for journalist integrity? This whole fiasco cracks me up.

Getty Images Sold for $2.4B - M and A and Finance @ FolioMag.com
Not sure why this really surprises me. Of course, I’ve been out of the loop for a few months.

Global Neighbourhoods: Two Social Media Camps in the Enterprise
Reminder: Avoid the Moose. But the question remains: how to convert people in camp #2 to camp #1?

Chris Volinsky, director of statistical research at AT&T Research Labs will deliver the keynote address for the communications industry track at SAS Global Forum in San Antonio. In addition to his expertise in advanced analytics for telecommunications, Chris is a member of a team of researchers that provided the best recommendation algorithm in the Netflix prize. The team has several published papers on their winning strategy.

Continue reading “Netflix prize winner to deliver SAS Global Forum keynote”

Fiction and fantasy are great for books and movies, but not for sales. Your sales pipeline is your company’s lifeblood. Everything depends on it. But, looking at your pipeline, how can you tell how accurate or real it is? Are the sales opportunities in the pipeline just hopeful wishes, or are they real opportunities? Are […]

Below are our public courses for March. If you don’t live in the Boston area or don’t
want to get on a plane, we also offer onsite data warehousing courses (which can be customized to match the unique issues you’re facing). Send me an email for details.

Course: Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing: Project Management
March 10 - 11   

Learn the
skills you need to usher your projects through all phases of planning and
implementation. The course provides a solid basis on: test data, metadata planning,
data stewardship, governance, backup planning, ROI measurement, documentation,
support preparation, user training, communications planning, and other elements
of a successful data warehouse.
Course Description
Register

Course: Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing: Architecture
March 
24 - 25    

Learn basic
architectural concepts;  industry
terminology; data integration; hub-and-spoke, federated, and independent
architectures; top-down, bottom-up, and hybrid data warehousing methodologies;
project management implications of various approaches; how to determine the
best-fit architecture and methodology for your data warehousing program; best
practices; and industry trends.   
Course Description
Register

And, coming up in April:

Course: Fundamentals 
of Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing

April 10-11

Learn basic
concepts of business intelligence and data warehousing; industry terminology; critical
success factors & risks; business intelligence applications, uses and users;
data Integration Framework (DIF); data warehousing & business intelligence
development processes; culture, politics & organizations; best practices;
and industry trends.

Course Description

Register

Business Intelligence Strategy definition is typically the first step in an organization’s endeavor to implement BI (Business Intelligence). This phase is very crucial as the overall execution direction hinges on decisions taken in this stage.

The precise approach to the BI Strategy definition includes the following steps:

1. Business Area Identification - Identify and prioritize the business area(s) for which BI is considered. Ex: Human Resource Analytics, Supply Chain Analytics, Enterprise Performance Analytics etc.
2. Process Mapping Document - Once the business area is identified, map out the individual processes involved in that particular domain. This can be a simple flow-chart that shows the entry and exit criteria for each sub-process.
3. Business Questions Enumeration – Based on the subject areas involved in the business domain, enumerate the list of questions that are to be answered by the analytical layer.
4. Data Elements Segregation – For each of the process steps, identify the data elements. These data elements, after subsequent validation (in conjunction with business questions) would translate into dimensions and facts during the data modeling stage.
5. Data Visualization – Develop a prototype (set of screenshots) on how the data would be visualized for each business question. Business Analysts and domain experts are typically involved at this stage.
6. BI Architecture Synopsis – At a fundamental level, BI architecture is fairly straightforward. The architecture is almost always a combination of the following processes: Extraction (E), Transformation (T), Loading (L), Cubing (C), and Analyze (Z). The number of layers, type of reporting etc. are a combination of ETLCZ components. Ex: ETLZ, ETLTLCZ, ELTZ, ELCZ are some options for BI architecture definition.
7. Next Steps Document – The ‘Next Steps’ document would list down the other requirements of / from the analytical infrastructure. These can be points around Tool Evaluation, User profiles, Data volumes, Performance considerations, etc. Each of these requirements would translate to an assessment to be carried out before the actual construction begins.

The most common mistake is to start thinking about technology aspects before the actual business requirement is finalized. A precise definition of business questions goes a long way in designing a scalable and robust BI infrastructure.

Just received a posting from a colleague and had to check it out.  Microsoft unveiled a new technology they have been working based on the work of the late Jim Grey and it is amazing technology.  Sometimes we get caught up in our everyday lives and don’t realize just how small we really are in respect to the entire universe.  It is amazing technology and the images are breathtaking and I can’t wait to download this in the Spring.  Way to go Microsoft!  Watch the video for yourself and read more about it and download it from the site.

 

I was half asleep as the TDWI keynote warmed up early last Thursday morning. Bob Paladino is not a bad speaker, but at first the good scrambled eggs and coffee were better. Then he got into the Southwest Airlines story, and I looked up.

The five guys at my table also looked up. They picked up the handouts for the first time and followed along.

(more…)

Colleague Mike Larimer has started a blog, http://projectrenegade.blogspot.com/.  In this project he talks about Smart Space, a very innovative new Oracle product in the BI and EPM family. Here are a few sentences from his blog entries, that set the scene:

Smart Space is a radical departure from the traditional BI/EPM application. For years the BI/EPM market has been focused on providing more and more features. These features are added to backend services bringing us to the ’system’ we have today. However most of these features are simply added to existing user interfaces. Over time these interfaces, though packed with features, have become difficult to use, underperforming and nearly impossible to customize. […]

 

With Smart Space, we have taken a completely new approach. It is simple and elegant.

Smart Space uses “gadgets,” directly placed on the desktop. Mike defines gadgets as:

Gadgets (or Widgets) are mini applications that expose key content(bits of data) or features generally from an larger (full) application and they deliver these feature or data in a simple and visually pleasing manner.

Typical gadgets on the desktop could be the weather forecast, stock prices, a to do list, and a web cam checking on the children in the day care center.

Gadgets are a true innovation, when it comes to Oracle’s objective to make BI pervasive. For many operational users, who are not sitting behind a pc all day, even opening up a web browser and start a report or dashboard can be too much hassle already. I’ve been using the following example for a while now. Imagine you are the manager of three fast food restaurants. You’re probably busy the whole day helping out everywhere. Sitting down in an office, and checking “sales per hour” in a real-time fashion simply won’t happen. Yet, it is important information. Having a screen somewhere in the back of the kitchen, with 3 simple dashboard gadgets on the desktop, showing sales per hour, combined with 3 webcam gadgets showing how many people stand in line in each restaurant, may help you to manage the other 2 restaurants while you are working in the 3^rd. You can call the other and tell them to open up a new cash register, if it is busy and the sales per hour drops.

Or imagine you are operational manager in a zoo, and you need to decide if you will put icecream in front of the entrance store, or a load of umbrellas for sale. A simple weather forecast gadget combined with real-time visitor numbers, somewhere on a screen where you have a look at once in a while makes a great difference.

In short, using gadgets helps you use entirely new audiences with your BI investments.

In his blog, Mike also shows a few examples of gadgets, I copied one below. One thing is certain, Mike has a great taste in music!

–frank

Here’s a window into my inbox. This morning I received the following 3 links from friends:

Walton Faces Ferrell. I’m a huge fan of the Bill Walton voice and his enthusiastic, hyperbole-laden commentary style. I actually met him at an airport once and dropped a little BW on him directly. He loved it. He told me he’s the […]

Yesterday FOLIO: told me YouTube wanted to partner with me. Today, they tell me Facebook wants my content. Well, okay, they’re not talking to me specifically, but both of these social media hot shots are courting magazines for partnerships. Or - at least - they’re trying to encourage magazines to develop a channel/profile on their sites to engage with readers.

But is that the case for sascom readers? There are thousands of you out there, and a few of you have friended me on Facebook - but if you already have four or five different ways to see our content re-purposed online, do you want another? A separate YouTube channel for sascom is out of the question right now, but I could create a Facebook group. Would Facebook be convenient for you? If the answer is yes, add me as a friend on Facebook and tell me to start a group for sascom magazine. If I get even a handful of requests, I’ll do it.

Who drives “the truck” to SAS Global Forum? How many SAS employees attend? Who creates the 3-D graphics used in the opening presentation? What’s new and different this year in San Antonio?

You’ll find the answers to these questions - and more - as Alan Hoffler and Brendan Bailey pull back the curtains on SAS Global Forum in the new video series, “Inside SAS Global Forum.”

Brendan, a multi-media project manager at SAS, operates the video camera and Alan, a technical training specialist for SAS, mans the microphone. Together, they’re roaming the halls of SAS to show us what goes on behind the scenes to pull off a large conference like SAS Global Forum.

In two weeks, they’ll be roaming the conference hall in San Antonio to show you what goes on during the conference. They’ll be recording it all, posting the videos to YouTube and publishing the videos right here on the sascom voices blog. Check back later today or tomorrow for the first vlog from Brendan, who isn’t afraid to tell us his three favorite blog reads:

• Steve Rubel’s Micropersuasion.
• Joseph Jaffe’s Jaffe Juice.
• DailyKos.

As Nation Chief for the YMCA Guides & Princesses program of the YMCA of the Triangle - the largest father-child program in the country with over 11,000 members - Brendan also has his own r />