Tag Archives: Business Intelligence

Data Management: So Easy a Caveman Can Do It?

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I recently stumbled upon one of The Martin Agency’s hilarious Geico caveman ads and wondered, rather geekily, why they didn’t do one about data analysis. I think if a caveman suddenly arrived in the 2010s he or she would see parallels between his life and the activities of today’s knowledge worker. When I thought it through, it seemed obvious that knowledge workers need to be more like farmers and less like hunter/gatherers if they want to achieve the full potential of business intelligence.

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A New Framework for Data Management?

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HubAndSpokeI hold a strong prejudice that IT paradigms are useful for about 30 years. The PC was dominant from 1980 to 2010, “online” mainframe systems from 1970 to 2000, and so on. If that’s the case then time’s up for Bill Inmon’s data warehousing framework. So far no widely held pattern has emerged to help us envision data management in today’s big data, mobile BI, end-user visualization, predictive analytics world, but at their recent Business Technology conference, Forrester Research took a swing at it by presenting their 2009 “hub and spoke” organizational strategy as a data management vision. Continue reading →

Relational DB Pros: The Times They Are A-Changin’

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Recently I read a thoughtful post DBQuestion
at the PASS Business Analytics Conference site discussing how different the world is now for database professionals. Author Chris Webb focuses on the data science side in this post. His analysis made me think of the challenges and opportunities “big data” serves up to relational database designers.

To me these challenges are fundamental. Big Data and NoSQL bring lots of what we know about data elements, inherent data design, and data management into question. I think considering these elements closely leads to a sensible to-do list for relational database professionals. Continue reading →

Skills of the Data Architect

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One common theme in recent tectonic shifts in information technology is data management. Analyzing customer responses may require combing through unstructured emails and tweets. Timely analysis of web interactions may demand a big data solution. Deployment of data visualization tools to users may dictate redesign of warehouses and marts. The data architect is a key player in harnessing and capitalizing on new data technologies. Continue reading →

No silver business intelligence bullets, but still a bright upside

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When Tom Petty sang, “Hey baby, there ain’t no easy way out” he wasn’t referring to business intelligence (BI) reporting but he might have been. Current generation reporting engines, AKA data visualization or data discovery tools, market their products with statements like these, emphasizing quick development and ease of use:

  • “The democratization of data is here. In minutes, create an interactive viz (sic) and embed it in your website. Anyone can do it— and it’s free.” (Tableau Products Page)
  • “Easy yet sophisticated report design empowers your employees to design professional and telling reports in minutes not days” (Windward)

I like these tools, and I do believe that they can provide a leaner, more productive, and more informative approach to BI reporting than some more mature products.  However, none is a silver bullet for all data integration and reporting woes. Continue reading →

Why is your reporting project late?

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In my experience, some BI projects ultimately finish as a success, but exceed budget and schedule targets and fall short of functional goals along the way. On projects like this, somewhere in the midst of report development, things get sticky and tasks fall behind schedule as the team runs into unexpected complexities. Continue reading →

A QlikView QuickStart: first steps for learning QlikView desktop

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QlikTech’s QlikView reporting and analysis tool is among a new class of Business Intelligence (BI) software tools. As Ben Harden reported in a recent blog post, BI vendors like SAP, Microsoft, and IBM have traditionally sold “to the IT enterprise, but companies like QlikTech and Tableau are targeting the business and bypassing IT. Their tools are quicker to stand up, more intuitive and don’t need the configuration, support, and hardware that the bigger players require.”

A Quick Overview

At first look QlikView is fairly accessible to those experienced with BI tools. A “.qvw” QlikView file contains three classes of user-facing components: a script-based data integration language that runs when the user requests a “reload”, a data modeling component that looks deceptively like a relational data modeling tool, and a familiar array of data visualizations: graphics, charts, lists, etc.

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Abstracting and recombining all the way to the bank

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In the past I’ve never understood what people really mean they say “think outside the box” but Jim Harris, in a recent OCDQ blog post, helped me figure it out.

Mr. Harris ends with this provocative line: “the bottom line is Google and Facebook have socialized data in order to capitalize data as a true corporate asset.”  The post starts with a cold war analogy and proceeds to describe how Facebook and Google have made big money as “internet advertising agencies:” offering free services with which users (like us) serve up personal data in return for use of the service, then selling advertising space based on our data (hopefully anonymized).

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Data quality and data governance lessons from national health care

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Who would want to be a national health care administrator?  Who would want the responsibility for managing health care and formulating health policy for tens or hundreds of millions of people?  It seems obvious that such decisions would rely on quality data.  A recent interview impressed upon me how much data managers can learn from a field where data recording millions of separate life and death decisions aggregates to support decisions on the future allocation of health care resources.

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But is it art? Skills of the next generation BI professional

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There’s a data explosion going on and perhaps the strangest result is that business intelligence analysts need to become more artistic.

Recently my friend Ben Harden directed my attention to a post from Steve Bennett of Oz Analytics on the future of BI. One challenge to analysts that Mr. Bennett cited was the unprecedented explosion in data quantity to “an almost inconceivable 35 trillion gigabytes” by 2020.  Part of the solution, according to the post, is “actionable insight”, as illustrated by Harry Beck when he created the now-iconic map of the London underground network from the previous rather spaghetti-ish version.  What Mr. Beck did was to distinguish significant from insignificant detail for the intended audience and present that detail in a clear and appealing way.

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