Tag: Analytics
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Reporting Database Design Guidelines: Dimensional Values and Strategies
I recently found myself in a series of conversations in which I needed to make a case for dimensional data modeling. The discussions involved a group of highly skilled data architects who were surely familiar with dimensional techniques but didn’t see them as the best solution in the case at hand. I thought it would…
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Tableau Rollout Across Five Dimensions
Standing up any new analytics tool in an organization is complex, and early on, new adopters of Tableau often struggle to include all the complexities in their plan. This post proposes a mental model in the form of a story of how Tableau might have rolled out in one hypothetical installation to uncover common challenges for…
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Analytics Requirements: Avoid a Y2.xK Crisis
Even though it happens annually, teams building new visualizations often forget to think about the effects of turning over from one year to another. In today’s fast paced, Agile world, requirements for even the most critical dashboards and visualizations tend to evolve, and development often proceeds iteratively from a scratchpad sketch through successively more detailed…
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Tableau Startup: First Lessons Learned
As I mentioned in the February post, I’m new to Tableau, and as the tone of that post implied,enjoying it very much. Tableau is a robust and flexible solution for data delivery. Like Qlikview, which I worked with a while ago, it is supported by outstanding, and free, introductory training and a very active user community.…
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No Silver BI Bullet: Tableau Edition (It’s a good thing!)
For complex work, a very simple app requires a very smart user. That point was driven home to me in Tableau Fundamentals class this week. I don’t see that as bad news at all. Not so long ago I wrote a piece that attempted to inject a bit of reality into the claims then made…
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Three things about “Interview with a Data Scientist”
Recently, I posted “Interview with a Data Scientist” at my company’s blog site. In it, my friend and colleague Yan Li answers four questions about being a data scientist and what it takes to become one. In my view Yan’s responses provide a bracing reminder that data science is something truly new, but that it rests on…
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Business Intelligence Requirements: The Payoff’s in the Details
A technique for reporting requirements has emerged as the de facto standard in the business intelligence community. The technique, which emerged in the mid-2000s, is new enough to be as yet unacknowledged by the requirements analysis powers that be. David Loshin describes how it works in this 2007 post: Start with a business question about…
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No silver business intelligence bullets, but still a bright upside
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…