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.

The Ago() “time series function” can be used to show data for a  previous time period, as long as the previous time period corresponds to a level that has been defined in the period hierarchy. A typical period hierarchy containing day, month, quarter, and year levels would allow you to use the Ago function to construct measures showing data for day ago, month ago, quarter ago, year ago (or N days ago, N months ago, etc.).

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.

SiSense’s survey finds that salaries for data professionals are on the rise across all geographies. The annual earnings of a data professional can range from an average of $55,000 USD for a data analyst to an average of $132,000 for VP Analytics. As many as 61% of the survey respondents reported higher earnings in 2012 compared to 2011, and only 12% reported lower earnings.

Other highlights of the survey findings include: Data professionals are highly educated. 85% of the respondents have some college degree, 39% have a Master’s degree, and 5% are Ph.D.’s. Those with doctoral degrees earn on average 65% more than those with Master’s degrees, who in turn earn 16% more than those with Bachelor’s degrees. On the job experience is even more important than education in determining salary levels. On average, professionals with ten or more years of experience earn 80% more than those with 3 years or less.

At the same time, the survey shows that those with 6 years or less make up as much as 59% of the data profession workforce.

The reality of the inbox is that people subscribe to a lot more stuff than they are committed to reading. As a result, they sift through the advertising and marketing noise to find the gems--the messages they connect with and that add value to their lives.

From your initial sign up process to the content and frequency of your messaging, your most important job is showing your audience that you respect the privilege of being invited into their inbox.

SuiteCRM was forked from the 6.5.x branch of SugarCRM because a segment of the community felt that SugarCRM Inc. was paying too much attention to its commercial editions and dragging its feet on updating the community edition. In addition to packaging up the latest SugarCRM codebase, SuiteCRM added a number of third-party extensions, resulting in a new system that is comparable to SugarCRM Professional in terms of features and functionality.