Group items tagged

Integration BI infrastructure: All tools in the platform use the same security, metadata, administration, portal integration, object model and query engine, and should share the same look and feel. Metadata management: Tools should leverage the same metadata, and the tools should provide a robust way to search, capture, store, reuse and publish metadata objects, such as dimensions, hierarchies, measures, performance metrics and report layout objects. Development tools: The platform should provide a set of programmatic and visual tools, coupled with a software developer's kit for creating analytic applications, integrating them into a business process, and/or embedding them in another application. Collaboration: Enables users to share and discuss information and analytic content, and/or to manage hierarchies and metrics via discussion threads, chat and annotations.

Information Delivery Reporting: Provides the ability to create formatted and interactive reports, with or without parameters, with highly scalable distribution and scheduling capabilities. Dashboards: Includes the ability to publish Web-based or mobile reports with intuitive interactive displays that indicate the state of a performance metric compared with a goal or target value. Increasingly, dashboards are used to disseminate real-time data from operational applications, or in conjunction with a complex-event processing engine. Ad hoc query: Enables users to ask their own questions of the data, without relying on IT to create a report. In particular, the tools must have a robust semantic layer to enable users to navigate available data sources. Microsoft Office integration: Sometimes, Microsoft Office (particularly Excel) acts as the reporting or analytics client. In these cases, it is vital that the tool provides integration with Microsoft Office, including support for document and presentation formats, formulas, data "refreshes" and pivot tables. Advanced integration includes cell locking and write-back. Search-based BI: Applies a search index to structured and unstructured data sources and maps them into a classification structure of dimensions and measures that users can easily navigate and explore using a search interface. Mobile BI: Enables organizations to deliver analytic content to mobile devices in a publishing and/or interactive mode, and takes advantage of the mobile client's location awareness.

Analysis Online analytical processing (OLAP): Enables users to analyze data with fast query and calculation performance, enabling a style of analysis known as "slicing and dicing." Users are able to navigate multidimensional drill paths. They also have the ability to write back values to a proprietary database for planning and "what if" modeling purposes. This capability could span a variety of data architectures (such as relational or multidimensional) and storage architectures (such as disk-based or in-memory). Interactive visualization: Gives users the ability to display numerous aspects of the data more efficiently by using interactive pictures and charts, instead of rows and columns. Predictive modeling and data mining: Enables organizations to classify categorical variables, and to estimate continuous variables using mathematical algorithms. Scorecards: These take the metrics displayed in a dashboard a step further by applying them to a strategy map that aligns key performance indicators (KPIs) with a strategic objective. Prescriptive modeling, simulation and optimization: Supports decision making by enabling organizations to select the correct value of a variable based on a set of constraints for deterministic processes, and by modeling outcomes for stochastic processes.

Business intelligence is a data analysis process aimed at boosting business performance by helping corporate executives and other end users make more informed decisions.

Business intelligence (BI) is a technology-driven process for analyzing data and presenting actionable information to help corporate executives, business managers and other end users make more informed business decisions.

BI encompasses a variety of tools, applications and methodologies that enable organizations to collect data from internal systems and external sources, prepare it for analysis, develop and run queries against the data, and create reports, dashboards and data visualizations to make the analytical results available to corporate decision makers as well as operational workers.

Leaders headed by Microsoft (NASDAQ MSFT), the world's biggest software company; Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL), the No. 1 database developer, and International Business Machines Corp. (NYSE: IBM), the No. 2 computer maker, showed off new software and analysis tools to enable retailers to make more from the consumer dollar.

The company also said that using in-house software analysis permits retailers to forecast trends and have merchandise made quickly to capitalize on them. Its “birth of a trend” analytics has determined what it calls “steampunk,” or a science-fiction and fantasy mix based around gothic machinery and 19th-century geniuses like Jules Verne and H.G. Wells will be a big trend in 2013.

You can’t learn data visualization by memorizing a set of rules. You must understand why things work the way they do.

you must be able to think statistically

This doesn’t mean that you must learn advanced mathematics, nor can you do this work merely by learning how to use software to calculate correlation coefficients and p-values.

What this means in practice is that when the BI Server component starts up, it creates and reserves a number of threads in advance, determined by a number of parameters including SERVER_THREAD_RANGE.

You can see these threads running and ready to perform tasks for the BI Server component by using a tool such as Process Explorer for Windows

Thinking it through a bit, any given single query is, to a certain extent, only really going to use a small part of the total amount of CPUs available on a server, because it’s not the BI Server that runs queries in parallel, it’s the underlying database. For example, a single analysis against a single Oracle Database datasource would only really need a single BI Server thread to handle the query request, but when the underlying database receives the query, it might use a large number of its CPUs to process the query, returning results back to the BI Server to then pass back to the Presentation Server for display to the user.

By the end of 2013, 72% of business executives will have tablets as their main means of consuming an Organization’s KPI’s and other analytics, scorecarding, etc

Although Roambi, and Microstrategy seem to be doing all of the right things with Mobile BI, there are several major BI Vendors that are not or there is simply room for improvement.  Also on the topic of Mobile BI, one of the barriers of 2012 was the concern for securing Mobile BI within an organization.  There has been a rise of solutions but no true standardization.  Oracle has produced their Mobile Security Tool Kit for Oracle BI and we will dive into that very soon as well (have Mac OS, will travel).

We hope this year to compare Oracle Endeca along with QlikView, and Spotfire to break apart the vendor specific functionality and give rise to insights on how to form successful solutions to the overall problem of self-service analysis of Big Data and traditional Data Warehouse data.

Free reporting software Now enhanced for mobile intelligence Perfect solution for departments Scalable as your needs expand For Windows, Unix, Linux, Solaris, HP-UX, and AIX operating systems and any data source, including Hadoop, SAP BW, Microsoft Analysis Services, Essbase, and IBM TM1.

Simple development and maintenance of Mobile apps and dashboards Powerful Visual Data Discovery capabilities Packed with robust analytics Free online support and training Perpetual license to use forever Quick Start Guide brings you from download through your first report

Microsoft Power Query is an Excel add-in that enhances the self-service Business Intelligence experience in Excel by simplifying data discovery and access.

Power Query enables users to easily discover, combine, and refine data for better analysis in Excel. Power Query includes a public search feature that is currently intended for use in the United States only.

Channel Optimization. Many marketers struggle to optimize each individual channel, let alone optimizing at a customer level across many channels. To the extent that Big Data can help marketers understand what is important in the moment and across touch points, that could be valuable, but it seems more of us need stronger attribution models and analytics methodologies more than access to data. Big Data does seem to be valuable if you want to understand which customers are highest value within each channel and across channels, because the platforms that manage Big Data can handle both structured and unstructured data - which is what you need to truly include Web/clickstream and social data in your analysis.

Big Data has been all the rage. But fast data, even if it is small, can be more valuable than complicated masses of information.

Here's why: All the focus on "bigger is better" has overlooked the fact that most Big Data segments have not been validated with a business application or value.

Those kinds of analytics can help you find the right streams to access and work with, and also can help you build out robust programs that identify valuable customers.

The amount of data in our world has been exploding, and analyzing large data sets—so-called big data—will become a key basis of competition, underpinning new waves of productivity growth, innovation, and consumer surplus, according to research by MGI and McKinsey's Business Technology Office.

For example, a retailer using big data to the full could increase its operating margin by more than 60 percent.

important factor of production, alongside labor and capital.

Gartner defines advanced analytics as, "the analysis of all kinds of data using sophisticated quantitative methods (for example, statistics, descriptive and predictive data mining, simulation and optimization) to produce insights that traditional approaches to business intelligence (BI) — such as query and reporting — are unlikely to discover."

packaged analytics applications that target specific business domains

Revolution Analytics