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cezarovidiu

Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms - 0 views

  • 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.
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  • These capabilities enable organizations to build precise systems of classification and measurement to support decision making and improve performance. BI and analytic platforms enable companies to measure and improve the metrics that matter most to their businesses, such as sales, profits, costs, quality defects, safety incidents, customer satisfaction, on-time delivery and so on. BI and analytic platforms also enable organizations to classify the dimensions of their businesses — such as their customers, products and employees — with more granular precision. With these capabilities, marketers can better understand which customers are most likely to churn. HR managers can better understand which attributes to look for when recruiting top performers. Supply chain managers can better understand which inventory allocation levels will keep costs low without increasing out-of-stock incidents.
  • descriptive, diagnostic, predictive and prescriptive analytics
  • "descriptive"
  • diagnostic
  • data discovery vendors — such as QlikTech, Salient Management Company, Tableau Software and Tibco Spotfire — received more positive feedback than vendors offering OLAP cube and semantic-layer-based architectures.
  • Microsoft Excel users are often disaffected business BI users who are unable to conduct the analysis they want using enterprise, IT-centric tools. Since these users are the typical target users of data discovery tool vendors, Microsoft's aggressive plans to enhance Excel will likely pose an additional competitive threat beyond the mainstreaming and integration of data discovery features as part of the other leading, IT-centric enterprise platforms.
  • Building on the in-memory capabilities of PowerPivot in SQL Server 2012, Microsoft introduced a fully in-memory version of Microsoft Analysis Services cubes, based on the same data structure as PowerPivot, to address the needs of organizations that are turning to newer in-memory OLAP architectures over traditional, multidimensional OLAP architectures to support dynamic and interactive analysis of large datasets. Above-average performance ratings suggest that customers are happy with the in-memory improvements in SQL Server 2012 compared with SQL Server 2008 R2, which ranks below the survey average.
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    "Gartner defines the business intelligence (BI) and analytics platform market as a software platform that delivers 15 capabilities across three categories: integration, information delivery and analysis."
cezarovidiu

Data Quality, Data Governance, and Master Data Management (MDM) - 0 views

  • Modern business applications produce ever more relevant and actionable information for decision makers, but in many cases the data sources are fragmented and inconsistent. Despite tremendous advancements at the application layer, nearly all IT initiatives succeed or fail based on the quality and consistency of the underlying data.
  • CIOs are responsible for making information available to their businesses in a consistent and timely basis, but in most organizations, information management is seen as a delegated set of tasks and is not the CIO’s top priority.
  • “Key initiatives such as master data management, data virtualization, data quality, data integration and data governance are employed by just a fraction of organizations that should be mastering the science of information management,”
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  • While CIOs are aware that effective information management results in faster decision-making, according to the Ventana study, only 43% of organizations have undertaken information management initiatives in data governance, data integration, data quality, master data management and data virtualization during the last two years, and less than one fifth have completed those projects. The largest obstacles to completing information management projects are insufficient staffing (68%), inadequate budget (63%) and insufficient training and skills (59%).
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    "Modern business applications produce ever more relevant and actionable information for decision makers, but in many cases the data sources are fragmented and inconsistent. Despite tremendous advancements at the application layer, nearly all IT initiatives succeed or fail based on the quality and consistency of the underlying data."
cezarovidiu

Top Mistakes to Avoid in Analytics Implementations | StatSlice Business Intelligence an... - 0 views

  • Mistake 1.  Not putting a strong interdisciplinary team together. It is impossible to put together an analytics platform without understanding the needs of the customers who will use it.  Sounds simple, right?  Who wouldn’t do that?  You’d be surprised how many analytics projects are wrapped up by IT because “they think” they know the customer needs.  Not assembling the right team is clearly the biggest mistake companies make.  Many times what is on your mind (and if you’re an IT person willing to admit it) is that you are considering converting all those favorite company reports.  Your goal should not be that.  Your goal is to create a system—human engineered with customers, financial people, IT folks, analysts, and others—that give people new and exciting ways to look at information.  It should give you new insights. New competitive information.  If you don’t get the right team put together, you’ll find someone longing for the good old days and their old dusty reports.  Or worse yet, still finding ways to generate those old dusty reports. Mistake 2.  Not having the right talent to design, build, run and update your analytics system.  It is undeniable that there is now high demand for business analytics specialists.  There are not a lot of them out there that really know what to do unless they’ve been burned a few times and have survived and then built successful BA systems.  This is reflected by the fact you see so many analytics vendors offer, or often recommend, third-party consulting and training to help the organization develop their business analytic skills.  Work hard to build a three-way partnership between the vendor, your own team, and an implementation partner.  If you develop those relationships, risk of failure goes way down.
  • Mistake 3.  Putting the wrong kind of analyst or designer on the project. This is somewhat related to Mistake 2 but with some subtle differences.  People have different skillsets so you need to make sure the person you’re considering to put on the project is the right “kind.”  For example, when you put the design together you need both drill-down and summary models.  Both have different types of users.  Does this person know how to do both?  Or, for example, inexperience in an analyst might lead to them believing vendor claims and not be able to verify them as to functionality or time to implement. Mistake 4.  Not understanding how clean the data is you are getting and the time frame to get it clean.  Profile your data to understand the quality of your source data.  This will allow you to adjust your system accordingly to compensate for some of those issues or more importantly push data fixes to your source systems.  Ensure high quality data or your risk upsetting your customers.  If you don’t have a good understanding of the quality of your data, you could easily find yourself way behind schedule even though the actual analytics and business intelligence framework you are building is coming along fine. Mistake 5.  Picking the wrong tools.  How often do organizations buy software tools that just sit on the shelve?  This often comes from management rushing into a quick decision based on a few demos they have seen.  Picking the right analytics tools requires an in-depth understanding of your requirements as well as the strengths and weaknesses of the tools you are evaluating.  The best way to achieve this understanding is by getting an unbiased implementation partner to build a proof of concept with a subset of your own data and prove out the functionality of the tools you are considering. Bottom Line.  Think things through carefully. Make sure you put the right team together.  Have a data cleansing plan.  If the hype sounds too good to be true—have someone prove it to you.
cezarovidiu

Filling a Critical Role in Business Today: The Data Translator - Microsoft Business Int... - 0 views

  • a lot of articles calling data scientists and statisticians the jobs of the future
  • there are more immediate needs that, when addressed, will have a much greater business impact.
  • Right now we have huge opportunities to make the data more accessible, more “joinable” and more consumable. Leaders don’t want more data – they want more information they can use to run their businesses.
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  • Every company has hundreds of millions of records about their sales, expenses, employees and so on, with dozens of insights yet to be discovered through simple comparison or triangulation of relevant data.
  • Why don’t we focus on this? I think because it’s very difficult to do – being successful in this “data translator” role requires a unique set of skills and knowledge, the combination of which I call the BASE skillset: Business understanding Ability to synthetize and simplify Storytelling skills Expertise in data visualization
  • Business Understanding This one seems obvious, but it doesn’t mean simply understanding the financials of a business. Rather, it means truly knowing the operational details, the incentives, the install base, market growth, penetration, the competition, etc. An analyst can’t just know the technical aspect of a report or the math behind the numbers, but what is truly driving a pattern in terms of product quality, competition, incentives and/or offerings. The best analysts are able to mathematically isolate the key levers of a trend and then suggest actions to react to or take advantage of those trends. Ability to Synthetize and Simplify This is, in my opinion, the most underrated and underappreciated skill. Combing through thousands of data points and netting out 3-4 key issues in under 10 minutes, and then communicating these to a group of execs with very different analytical skills, is truly difficult. The key is to make it simple but not simplistic, which means you still capture the complexity even as you get to the few core insights. It requires a very thorough effort to gather all the relevant information before categorizing, prioritizing and deciding if it is significant. After a while, you become an expert and can sniff things out quickly. At the same time, there is the danger of missing anomalies when you jump to conclusions based only on a summary look.
  • Storytelling Skills There are stages that should be followed when explaining complex ideas, something data translators are frequently expected to do. The best storytellers start by giving context and trying to couple the current discussion to something the audience already knows, ensuring the story is well structured and connected. We have to move from a “buffet style” business review with thousands of numbers packed in tables to a layered approach that will guide the audience to focus first on the most relevant messages, diving deeper only when necessary. Minto Pyramid Principles, which are built around a process for organizing thought and communication, are helpful in making sure you really focus on what is important and relevant, versus being obsessed in telling every fact. Expertise in Data Visualization I am glad to finally see so much focus on Information Visualization and I believe this is correlated to the explosion of data. Traditional methods of organizing data do not facilitate an intuitive understanding of key information points or trends. For instance, the two examples below contain data on car sales across the U.S. The first, an alphabetized list, is much less intuitive than the second, which shows those sales on a map in Power View. With Power View, right away you can identify the states with the highest sales: CA, FL, TX, NY. (Workbook available here)
  • There is no better way to see patterns or trends than data visualization, making expertise in this area – both technical and analytical – critical for data translators.
cezarovidiu

2013 ERP research: Compelling advice for the CFO : Enterprise Irregulars - 0 views

  • ERP vendor selection. As the following graph shows, the primary candidates for ERP software were SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, Epicor, and Infor:
  • The cloud question. Despite the hype, only 14 percent of respondents are using ERP delivered as Software as a Service (SaaS). Although the best cloud vendors can deliver superior security and reliability than most internal IT departments, market momentum to ERP in the cloud is not there yet, as the following diagram illustrates:
  • Important lessons. Implementing an ERP system is always complex because the deployment drives changes to both data and processes that extend across departmental boundaries inside the organization.
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  • Software projects aren’t just technical endeavors. They’re also political, financial, emotional, structural, strategic, process and people-centric initiatives. Ignoring any one of these dimensions is done at the project manager’s peril.
  • Today’s CFO must balance the demands of two competing forces: the extraordinary wave of innovation (and the process changes these bring) against the regulatory, control-driven forces who want every process, every exception, and device to be documented, controlled and secured. In recent years, CFOs have spent tens of billions of dollars (or more) with audit firms to document the control points and risks within their existing ERP solutions.
  • ERP can bring significant benefit but implementation requires careful attention to both business planning and technology activities. For this reason, achieving project success and business value demand that CFO and CIO work together as a collaborative unit.
  • Therefore, it is essential to create this partnership and show your entire organization that the business and technology teams can communicate, collaborate, and share knowledge on a systematic and consistent basis. This collaboration is the true underlying strategy for gaining maximum value from ERP or any other enterprise initiative.
cezarovidiu

Magic Quadrant for Sales Force Automation - 0 views

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    "Market Definition/Description Sales force automation (SFA) applications support the automation of sales activities, processes and administrative responsibilities for B2B organizations' sales professionals. Core functionalities include account, contact and opportunity management. Additional add-on capabilities focus on improving the sales effectiveness of salespeople, such as sales configuration, guided selling, proposal generation and content management, and sales performance management support, including incentive compensation, quota, sales coaching and territory management."
cezarovidiu

What is business intelligence (BI)? - Definition from WhatIs.com - 0 views

  • 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.
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  • The potential benefits of business intelligence programs include accelerating and improving decision making; optimizing internal business processes; increasing operational efficiency; driving new revenues; and gaining competitive advantages over business rivals. BI systems can also help companies identify market trends and spot business problems that need to be addressed.
  • BI data can include historical information, as well as new data gathered from source systems as it is generated, enabling BI analysis to support both strategic and tactical decision-making processes.
  • BI programs can also incorporate forms of advanced analytics, such as data mining, predictive analytics, text mining, statistical analysis and big data analytics.
  • In many cases though, advanced analytics projects are conducted and managed by separate teams of data scientists, statisticians, predictive modelers and other skilled analytics professionals, while BI teams oversee more straightforward querying and analysis of business data.
  • Business intelligence data typically is stored in a data warehouse or smaller data marts that hold subsets of a company's information. In addition, Hadoop systems are increasingly being used within BI architectures as repositories or landing pads for BI and analytics data, especially for unstructured data, log files, sensor data and other types of big data. Before it's used in BI applications, raw data from different source systems must be integrated, consolidated and cleansed using data integration and data quality tools to ensure that users are analyzing accurate and consistent information.
  • In addition to BI managers, business intelligence teams generally include a mix of BI architects, BI developers, business analysts and data management professionals; business users often are also included to represent the business side and make sure its needs are met in the BI development process.
  • To help with that, a growing number of organizations are replacing traditional waterfall development with Agile BI and data warehousing approaches that use Agile software development techniques to break up BI projects into small chunks and deliver new functionality to end users on an incremental and iterative basis.
  • consultant Howard Dresner is credited with first proposing it in 1989 as an umbrella category for applying data analysis techniques to support business decision-making processes.
  • Business intelligence is sometimes used interchangeably with business analytics; in other cases, business analytics is used either more narrowly to refer to advanced data analytics or more broadly to include both BI and advanced analytics.
cezarovidiu

Gartner Positions Oracle in Leaders Quadrant for Master Data Management of Product Data... - 0 views

  • For the fourth consecutive year, Gartner, Inc. has named Oracle as a Leader in its “Magic Quadrant for Master Data Management of Product Data Solutions.” (1)
  • “MDM is a technology-enabled discipline in which business and IT staff work together to ensure the uniformity, accuracy, stewardship, semantic consistency and accountability of the enterprise's official, shared master data assets. Master data is the consistent and uniform set of identifiers and extended attributes that describes the core entities of the enterprise, such as customers, prospects, citizens, suppliers, sites, hierarchies and chart of accounts,” according to Gartner.
  • By enabling organizations to consolidate product information from heterogeneous systems, Oracle Product Hub creates a single view of product information that can be leveraged and shared across functional departments in the enterprise, as well as externally with trading partners.
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  • "In any product company, accurate product information is a foundation for all major business initiatives, and this requires a robust, comprehensive and flexible product MDM solution,” said Jon Chorley, vice president, supply chain management product strategy, Oracle. "We believe Oracle's position in Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Master Data Management of Product Data Solutions highlights our ability to provide best-in-class functionality across the industry’s most complete MDM portfolio. By using Oracle MDM solutions, companies can obtain a high-quality, common enterprise product record and are better able to support their key business initiatives.”
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    "Gartner Positions Oracle in Leaders Quadrant for Master Data Management of Product Data Solutions"
cezarovidiu

BI Brief - Four Legs of a Successful Business Intelligence (BI) Project Team - 0 views

  • 1. Project Sponsorship and Governance 2. Project Management 3. Development Team (Core Team) 4. Extended Project Team
  • 1. Project Sponsorship and Governance IT and the business should form a BI steering committee to sponsor and govern design, development, deployment, and ongoing support. It needs both the CIO and a business executive, such as CFO, COO, or a senior VP of marketing/sales to commit budget, time, and resources. The business sponsor needs the project to succeed. The CIO is committed to what is being built and how.
  • 2. Project Management Project management includes managing daily tasks, reporting status, and communicating to the extended project team, steering committee, and affected business users. The project management team needs extensive business knowledge, BI expertise, DW architecture background, and people management, project management, and communications skills. The project management team includes three functions or members: Project development manager - Responsible for deliverables, managing team resources, monitoring tasks, reporting status, and communications. Requires a hands-on IT manager with a background in iterative development. Must understand the changes caused by this approach and the impact on the business, project resources, schedule and the trade-offs. Business advisor - Works within the sponsoring business organization. Responsible for the deliverables of the business resources on the project's extended team. Serves as the business advocate on the project team and the project advocate within the business community. Often, the business advocate is a project co-manager who defers to the IT project manager the daily IT tasks but oversees the budget and business deliverables. BI/DW project advisor - Has enough expertise with architectures and technologies to guides the project team on their use. Ensures that architecture, data models, databases, ETL code, and BI tools are all being used effectively and conform to best practices and standards.
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  • 3. Development Team (Core Team) The core project team is divided into four sub-teams: Business requirements - This sub-team may have business people who understand IT systems, or IT people who understand the business. In either case, the team represents the business and their interests. They are responsible for gathering and prioritizing business needs; translating them into IT systems requirements; interacting with the business on the data quality and completeness; and ensuring the business provides feedback on how well the solutions generated meet their needs. BI architecture - Develops the overall BI architecture, selects the appropriate technology, creates the data models, maps the overall data workflow from source systems to BI analytics, and oversees the ETL and BI development teams from a technical perspective. ETL development - Receives the business and data requirements, as well as the target data models to be used by BI analytics. Develops the ETL code needed to gather data from the appropriate source systems into the BI databases. Often, a system analyst who is a expert in the source systems such as SAP is part of the team to provide knowledge of the data sources, customizations, and data quality. BI development - Create the reports or analytics that the business users will interact with to do their jobs. This is often a very iterative process and requires much interaction with the business users.
  • 4. Extended Project Team There are several functions required by the project team that are often accomplished through an "extended" team: Players - A group of business users are signed up to "play with" or test the BI analytics and reports as they are developed to provide feedback to the core development team. This is a virtual team that gets together at specific periods of the project but they are committed to this role during those periods. Testers - A group of resources are gathered, similarly to the virtual team above, to perform more extensive QA testing of the BI analytics, ETL processes, and overall systems testing. You may have project members test other members' work, such as the ETL team test the BI analytics and visa versa. Operators - IT operations is often separated from the development team but it is critical that they are involved from the beginning of the project to ensure that the systems are developed and deployed within your company's infrastructure. Key functions are database administration, systems administration, and networks. In addition, this extended team may also include help desk and training resources if they are usually provided outside of development.
cezarovidiu

Inventory Aging Query Oracle Applications R12 - 0 views

    • cezarovidiu
       
      SELECT ev1.INVENTORY_ITEM_ID,   ev1.ITEM_CODE ITEM,   XXRG_HR_PKG.get_org_name(:ORG_ID) ORGANIZATION,   ev1.DESCRIPTION,   SUM(Buk11) buk11,   SUM(Buk21) buk21 ,   SUM(Buk31) buk31 ,   SUM(Buk41) buk41,   SUM(Buk51) buk51  FROM   (SELECT ev1.INVENTORY_ITEM_ID,     ITEM_CODE,     DESCRIPTION,     (     CASE       WHEN age BETWEEN :BUK1_DAYS_FROM AND :BUK1_DAYS_TO       THEN SUM(aqty)       ELSE NULL     END) Buk11,     (     CASE       WHEN age BETWEEN :BUK2_DAYS_FROM AND :BUK2_DAYS_TO       THEN SUM(aqty)       ELSE NULL     END) Buk21,     (     CASE       WHEN age BETWEEN :BUK3_DAYS_FROM AND :BUK3_DAYS_TO       THEN SUM(aqty)       ELSE NULL     END) Buk31,     (     CASE       WHEN age BETWEEN :BUK4_DAYS_FROM AND :BUK4_DAYS_TO       THEN SUM(aqty)       ELSE NULL     END) Buk41,     (     CASE       WHEN age >= :BUK5_DAYS_FROM       THEN SUM(aqty)       ELSE NULL     END) Buk51   FROM     (SELECT        ITEM_CODE,       DESCRIPTION,       TRANSACTION_DATE,       TRANSACTION_QUANTITY,       SUM(TRANSACTION_QUANTITY) OVER(PARTITION BY INVENTORY_ITEM_ID ORDER BY TRANSACTION_ID,TRANSACTION_DATE)+ NVL(NQTY,0) BFF ,       (       CASE         WHEN TRANSACTION_QUANTITY > SUM(TRANSACTION_QUANTITY) OVER(PARTITION BY INVENTORY_ITEM_ID ORDER BY TRANSACTION_ID,TRANSACTION_DATE)+ NVL(NQTY,0)         THEN SUM(TRANSACTION_QUANTITY) OVER(PARTITION BY INVENTORY_ITEM_ID ORDER BY TRANSACTION_ID,TRANSACTION_DATE)                       +NVL(NQTY,0)         ELSE TRANSACTION_QUANTITY       END) AQTY       --,TCOST       ,       NVL(fnd_conc_date.string_to_date(:TILL_DATE),SYSDATE)-fnd_conc_date.string_to_date(TRANSACTION_DATE) AGE,       inventory_item_id     FROM       (SELECT V1.TRANSACTION_ID,         V1.ITEM_CODE,         V1.DESCRIPTION,         TRUNC(         CASE           WHEN V1.TRANSACTION_TYPE_ID = 4
cezarovidiu

Art Of BI Coverage of Business Analytics in 2013 | Art of Business Intelligence - 0 views

  • 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.
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    "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."
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.
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  • 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

Why BI projects fail -- and how to succeed instead | InfoWorld - 0 views

  • A successful initiative starts with a good strategy, and a good strategy starts with identifying the business need.
  • The balanced scorecard is one popular methodology for linking strategy, technology, and performance management. Other methodologies, such as applied information economics, combine statistical analysis, portfolio theory, and decision science in order to help firms calculate the economic value of better information. Whether you use a published methodology or develop your own approach in-house, the important point is to make sure your BI activities are keyed to generating real business value, not merely creating pretty, but useless, dashboards and reports.
  • Next, ask: What data do we wish we had and how would that lead to different decisions? The answers to these questions form top-level requirements for any BI project.
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  • Instead a team of data experts, data analysts, and business experts must come together with the right technical expertise. This usually means bringing in outside help, though that help needs to be able to talk to management and talk tech.
  • Nothing makes an IT department more nervous than asking for a feed to a key operational system. Moreover, a lot of BI tools are resource hungry. Your requirements should dictate what, how much, and how often (that is, how “real time” you need it to be) data must be fed into your data warehousing technology.
  • In other words, you need one big feed to serve all instead of hundreds of operational, system-killing little feeds that can’t be controlled easily.
  • You'll probably need more than one tool to suit all of your use cases.
  • You did your homework, identified the use cases, picked a good team, started a data integration project, and chose the right tools.
  • Now comes the hard part: changing your business and your decisions based on the data and the reports. Managers, like other human beings, resist change.
  • oreover, BI projects shouldn't have a fixed beginning and end -- this isn't a sprint to become “data driven.”
  • A process is needed
  • and find new opportunities in the data.
  • Here's the bottom line, in a handy do's-and-don'ts format: Don’t simply run a tool-choice project Do cherry-pick the right team Do integrate the data so that it can be queried performance-wise without bringing down the house Don’t merely pick a tool -- pick the right tools for all your requirements and use cases Do let the data change your decision making and the structure of your organization itself if necessary Do have a process to weed out useless analytics and find new ones
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