Skip to main content

Home/ BI-TAGS/ Group items tagged learning

Rss Feed Group items tagged

cezarovidiu

8 Principles That Can Make You an Analytics Rock Star -- TDWI -The Data Warehousing Ins... - 0 views

  • Great design, high-quality code, strong business sponsorship, accurate requirements, good project management, and thorough testing are some of the obvious requirements for successful analytics systems.
  • As a professional in the field, you must be able to do these things well because they form the foundation of a good analytics implementation.
  • Successful analytics professionals should follow a set of guiding principles.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • Principle #1: Let your passion bloom
  • If you do not love data analytics, it will be hard to become an analytics rock star. No significant accomplishments are achieved without passion. For many people, passion does not come naturally; it must be developed. Cultivate passion by setting goals and achieving them. Realize that the best opportunity in your life is the one in front of you right now. Focus on it, grow it, and develop your passion for it! That excitement will become obvious to those around you.
  • Principle #2: Never stop learning
  • Dig down deeper about the business details of your company. What, exactly, does your company do? What are some of its challenges and opportunities? How would the company benefit from valuable and transformative information you can deliver? Take the time necessary to learn the skills that are valuable for your business and your career. Keep up-to-date with the latest technologies and available analytics tools -- learn and understand their capabilities, functions, and differences.
  • Deepen your knowledge with the tools that you are currently working on by picking new techniques and methodologies that make you a better professional in the field.
  • Principle #3: Improve your presentation skills and become an ambassador for analytics
  • persuasiveness and effectiveness
  • Improve your presentation and speaking skills, even if it is on your own time. Excellent and no-cost presentation training resources are readily available on the internet (for example, at http://www.mindtools.com/page8.html. Practice writing and giving presentations to friends and colleagues that will give you honest feedback. Once you have practiced the basic skills, you need to enhance your skills by improving your
  • You must be able to explain, justify, and "sell" your ideas to colleagues as well as business management. Organizational change does not happen overnight or as a result of one presentation. You need to be persistent and skillful in taking your ideas all the way up the leadership chain.
  • Principle #4: Be the "go-to guy" for tough analytics questions
  • Tough analytics problems typically don't have an obvious answer -- that's why they're tough! Take the initiative by digging deep into those problems without being asked. Throw out all the assumptions made so far and follow logical trial and error methodology. First, develop a thesis about possible contributors to the problem at hand. Second, run the analytics to prove the thesis. Learn from that outcome and start over, if needed, until a significant answer is found. You are now well on your way to rock star status.
cezarovidiu

Visual Business Intelligence - Naked Statistics - 0 views

  • 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.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • I am happy to announce that I’ve just found the book that does this better than any other that I’ve seen: Naked Statistics: Stripping the Dread from the Data, by Charles Wheelan (W. W. Norton & Company, 2013).
  • Wheelan teaches public policy and economics at Dartmouth College and is best known for a similar book written several years ago titled Naked Economics.
  • In Naked Statistics, he selects the most important and relevant statistical concepts that everyone should understand, especially those who work with data, and explains them in clear, entertaining, and practical terms.
  • He wrote this book specifically to help people think statistically. He shows how statistics can be used to improve our understanding of the world. He demonstrates that statistical concepts are easy to understand when they’re explained well.
  • If you read this book, you’ll come to understand statistical concepts and methods such as regression analysis and probability as never before.
  • Statistics is more important than ever before because we have more meaningful opportunities to make use of data. Yet the formulas will not tell us which uses of data are appropriate and which are not. Math cannot supplant judgment.
  • “Go forth and use data wisely and well!”
cezarovidiu

Why Soft Skills Matter in Data Science - 0 views

  • You cannot accept problems as handed to you in the business environment. Never allow yourself to be the analyst to whom problems are “thrown over the fence.” Engage with the people whose challenges you’re tackling to make sure you’re solving the right problem. Learn the business’s processes and the data that’s generated and saved. Learn how folks are handling the problem now, and what metrics they use (or ignore) to gauge success.
  • Solve the correct, yet often misrepresented, problem. This is something no mathematical model will ever say to you. No mathematical model can ever say, “Hey, good job formulating this optimization model, but I think you should take a step back and change your business a little instead.” And that leads me to my next point: Learn how to communicate.
  • In today’s business environment, it is often unacceptable to be skilled at only one thing. Data scientists are expected to be polyglots who understand math, code, and the plain-speak (or sports analogy-ridden speak . . . ugh) of business. And the only way to get good at speaking to other folks, just like the only way to get good at math, is through practice.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Beware the Three-Headed Geek-Monster: Tools, Performance, and Mathematical Perfection Many things can sabotage the use of analytics within the workplace. Politics and infighting perhaps; a bad experience from a previous “enterprise, business intelligence, cloud dashboard” project; or peers who don’t want their “dark art” optimized or automated for fear that their jobs will become redundant.
  • Not all hurdles are within your control as an analytics professional. But some are. There are three primary ways I see analytics folks sabotage their own work: overly complex modeling, tool obsession, and fixation on performance.
  • In other words, work with the rest of your organization to do better business, not to do data science for its own sake.
  • Data Smart: Using Data Science to Transform Information into Insight by John W. Foreman. Copyright © 2013.
cezarovidiu

Big Data ... How do I turn it on? - 0 views

  • How Do I Learn to Ride a Bike if I Don’t Own a Bike? I get it.  A lot of businesses went out and bought the bike.  In fact, some of them bought a bike that would be the envy of a Tour de France cyclist.  Now, they’re trying to learn how to ride it.
  • Hey, that’s fine.  Smart business people don’t live a linear life.  You get the tools and implement the tools – all while you’re learning the tools. 
  • There’s no “on button” for Big Data.  You need people who will put their hands into it, manipulate it and find the valuable insights.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Data science is about finding insightful, meaningful relationships and correlations that can create a competitive advantage. 
  • Big data may sound like the new high-tech and flashy toy, but it’s not.  There isn’t an “on button”…it’s the data science professionals that make your data speak.
cezarovidiu

PL/PDF generate and manipulate PDF with Oracle PL/SQL - 0 views

shared by cezarovidiu on 14 Feb 13 - Cached
  •  
    "Oracle Reporting & Document Generation PL/PDF is simply the easiest and most flexible way to create professional reports from your Oracle database. The data access is the fastest and safest, because our products work in the database. There is no need for extra servers and extra costs! We provide native PL/SQL solutions which is the best way to work with the Oracle data. All Oracle developer in the PL/SQL language know and use, so no need to learn a new programming language."
cezarovidiu

Saving Current Values with Cascading LOVs - 0 views

  •  
    "Saving Current Values with Cascading LOVs A friend, Monty Latiolais, recently asked an interesting question regarding cascading LOVs: Say you've got two LOVs...STATES and CITIES. They both default to 'ALL' and 'ALL'. Since CITIES is dependent on STATES, as soon as STATES is changed, CITIES is blanked out. What should happen is that CITIES gets re-evaluated as in the following example... let's say STATES is ALL and CITIES is "Houston". If one then changes STATES to "Texas", CITIES should remain "Houston" as that is a valid value for CITIES. So basically, is it possible to maintain the selected value of an item if that same value exists in the list of values after refreshing? That's a great question! Thanks to new events in the APEX framework and Dynamic Actions the solution is far easier than it would have been in the past! Click here to see the demo but continue reading to learn how it all works… There are a three main events you need to be concerned with when it comes to cascading selects: change apexbeforerefresh apexafterrefresh The change event is a standard part of JavaScript and the DOM. This event fires when the user manually changes the value of the select list but can also be triggered programmatically via JavaScript. The apexbeforerefresh and apexafterrefresh events are custom events in the APEX framework. They fire just before and just after AJAX requests refresh something on the page. The events work with many items and regions that utilize this technology. In this example we have two select lists: parent and child. If you change the value of the child select list then the change event will fire and that's it. But if you change the value of the parent select list a lot more happens to the child select. Here are some of the highlights: The current LOV values are cleared out The apexbeforerefresh event is triggered An AJAX request brings back new values. This only happens if optimize refresh is set to false optimize refresh is set to true and
cezarovidiu

What Skills Does an Oracle BI Developer Need in 2011? - 0 views

  • OBIEE 11g skills, both in terms of new functionality (mapping, analyses, KPIs and Scorecards etc) and new infrastructure (WebLogic, EM, OPSS etc) A smattering of Essbase skills, focused mainly on the integration with OBIEE and Essbase (and the many workarounds and gotchas) Good ODI skills, both in terms of the basics, but also being able to write knowledge modules, integrate with OBIEE, deployment and migration Solid database skills – OBIEE gave the illusion through aggregates etc that database tuning was redundant, but time has shown it’s by far the biggest success factor in a project – get the database design and optimisation wrong, and your project is toast. You need to know partitioning, materialized views, index types, and increasingly, you need to get yourself on an Exadata project as customers are buying the technology but you can’t teach it to yourself at home BI Apps skills, but watch out for everything changing when BI Apps 11g comes out, and be prepared to learn the Fusion Apps and JDeveloper if you want to stay in the game Looking to the future, keep an eye on technologies such as in-memory (TimesTen), mid-tier caching (Coherence), plus technologies such as Business Activity Monitoring (BAM), “big data” (Hadoop, large data sets, NoSQL), complex event processing and maybe products such as Qlikview, just in case Oracle buys them, or at least to know what the competition are up to, or more importantly pitching to your boss
  • The other thing to bear in mind of course, if you’re an Oracle BI developer, is that you need to have great business, communication and data modeling skills.
cezarovidiu

Using Email to Get the Conversion (Without Stalking) | ClickZ - 0 views

  • 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.
  • your email has to add value to your customers' 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.
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • Rule #1: Don't ask for more information than you'd personally be willing to give. Asking for too much information in an opt-in form can be a major deterrent to visitors who would otherwise be likely to sign up.
  • Make signing up as simple as possible by requiring only the bare minimum. In many cases, this means just the email address. Every field you add to your form beyond that will decrease the chances of someone filling it out.
  • Here's another tip: If you really want to convince a visitor to opt in to your communications, make it clear that the value they'll receive greatly outweighs the hassle of signing up
  • An opt-in form that says something like "Sign up for our newsletter," doesn't offer any benefit to the visitor. Give people a reason to opt-in by offering them something they'll care about, like: "Sign up for our monthly newsletter and gain instant access to our 57-page e-book on X."
  • Offers of buying guides, e-books, case studies, online videos, and instant coupons are all great incentives to test.
  • I recently welcomed two kittens into the family and we buy our supplies from Petco. As soon as I signed up for Petco's Pals Rewards program, the store proceeded to email me every single day with a new coupon offer. Can you guess what I did? Yep, I opted out. I'll still buy pet supplies from Petco, but at some point, the annoyance became greater than the value of the coupons.
  • One of the most critical steps in structuring your e-commerce email campaign is to set the publish frequency to align with the types of products you're selling and who you're selling to. At a bare minimum, segment your audience into two broad categories of current customers and prospects.
  • When you're communicating with prospective customers, offer discounts, promotions and pre-sale notifications and buying tips in your emails, to move them along the conversion path.
  • You can further segment your email list by those you send to frequently, those you send to less frequently and those you send to only sometimes.
  • You'll find your sweet spot by tracking conversions from the list, looking at the opt-out rate and by allowing your audience to manage the frequency of the communications (for example, by giving them the option to change the frequency before they opt out entirely).
  • When most people opt in to receive B2B email communications, they are at the top of the conversion funnel; the "awareness" stage. A smart B2B email campaign will then provide the right content to bring the buyer deeper into the conversion funnel, with content specific for each stage of the buying cycle.
  • Here are some ideas to get you started: Explore learning concepts that get the reader up to speed on the ideas surrounding your services, and that demonstrate your brand's unique perspective.  Dive into the ideas behind why a service like yours is so important to customers, what to look for in a company, and how your service or ideas compare to others.  Answer common questions your prospective customers have at each stage of the buying cycle and even after the purchase.
  • Don't forget you're not selling to rational people. Most of the buying decisions in a B2B environment are based on what could happen if the choice is wrong. Unlike the consumer market, where an item can be easily returned if it doesn't meet the buyer's needs, making the wrong purchase decision in the B2B arena could be extremely costly.
  • Your goal as the marketer is to arm the potential buyer with content that will reduce any fear and uncertainty about selecting your business over the competition.
  • Think of topics like, "7 Biggest Mistakes People Make When Choosing [insert your service here]" as a basis for building your case. If you have a sales team, ask them for the most common objections they hear from prospects, and create your content around the specific concerns known to be top-of-mind for many buyers.
cezarovidiu

Choose Your Own Adventure: Map Buyer Personas in a Content Marketing Program | ClickZ - 0 views

  • learn more about the brand or to be entertained or educated in some way.
  • Mapping out the ifs-ands-or-buts pathways for each persona can become complicated, so automation solutions such as Infusionsoft that offer a drag-and-drop interface can make the mapping of the funnel stages manageable.
cezarovidiu

Analyzing Human Data: Take a Dive to Find Out What Your Customers Really Feel - Content... - 0 views

  • What really interests me, and what I think should interest marketers, is what I’ll call signals – one of which is intent. Intent is critical because it can predict action. For example, “Is this person shopping to buy a product like my product?” “Is this person unhappy and needing some form of attention?” “Is this person about to return the product for a reason that is addressable?”
  • Sentiment is one ingredient of intent. If someone is happy, sad, angry … that can be determined via sentiment analysis technologies.
  • Many tools struggle with context.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • An example I hear over and over again is “thin” – good when you’re talking about electronics, but bad if you’re talking about hotel walls or the feel of hotel sheets. To do sentiment analysis correctly, you need refinement. You need customization for particular industries and business functions.
  • The market, unfortunately, is polluted with tools that claim to have sentiment abilities, but are too crude to be usable. Even with refinement (e.g., the ability to handle negators and contextual sentiment), approaches that deliver only positive and negative ratings don’t take you very far.
  • There are definitely easy, inexpensive entry points that can meet basic, just-getting-started needs: tools for social listening, survey analysis, customer service (handling contact-center notes, for instance), customer experience (via analysis of online reviews and forums), automated email processing, and other needs. These technologies are user friendly, available on demand, as a service.
  • Text mining:
  • Digital Reasoning, Luminoso and AlchemyAPI.
  • Image recognition and analysis: Image analysis now automatically identifies brand labels in pictures.
  • VisualGraph (now owned by Pinterest), Curalate, Piqora (nee Pinfluencer), and gazeMetrix.
  • Emotional analysis in images, audio, and video: These companies promote analysis of speech and facial expression primarily for structured studies
  • • Affectiva conducts webcam emotional analysis for media and ad research, including development tools to integrate emotional study in mobile apps. • Emotient performs emotional analyses in retail environments, evaluating signage, displays, and customer service. • EmoVu by Eyeris tests the engagement level of both short- and long-form video content. • Beyond Verbal studies emotion based on a person’s voice in real time.
1 - 20 of 23 Next ›
Showing 20 items per page