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cezarovidiu

BI-ul se democratizeaza la nivel operational - 0 views

  • Practic, avem de-a face cu coborârea din sferele abstracte a BI-ului tradiţional către „enterprise intelligence“; o formă de „democratizare“ a BI-ului a devenit accesibilă maselor de utilizatori finali, pe baza ideii că instrumentele specifice acestui concept (analiză, raportare, semnalare etc.) trebuie să permită şi să ofere suport pentru luarea deciziilor în timp real.
  • Potrivit specialiştilor, „mutaţia“ menţionată reprezintă o evoluţie naturală, realizată sub presiunea pieţei, care impune luarea tot mai rapidă a unor decizii din ce în ce mai complexe la nivelul managementului operaţional în mod cotidian. Este vorba, practic, de o reorientare a conceptului de BI, de la tradiţionalul „data-centric“ spre mai pragmaticul „process-centric“, menit să permită un răspuns mai agil la provocările din piaţă.
  • Astfel, aplicaţiile de BI operaţional nu mai sunt rezervate doar analiştilor de business din top management, ci sunt accesibile şi directorilor executivi, managerilor şi utilizatorilor finali cu putere decizională. Prin intermediul acestui nou concept, managerii departamentelor de vânzări şi staff-urile din centrele de suport beneficaiză de informaţii relaţionate cu lista de activităţi zilnice şi de workflow-uri şi ghiduri de analiză, care îi ajută să interpreteze şi să analizeze informaţiile pe baza cărora trebuie să ia deciziile.
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  • Astfel, potrivit rezultatelor finale, 66% dintre respondenţii studiului realizat de Ventana au indicat faptul că cel mai important câştig obţinut la nivelul întregului business în urma implementării unor soluţii de BI operaţional în cadrul companiilor lor este în creştere în eficienţă la toate nivelurile. (În completare, 60% dintre subiecţi au indicat faptul că îmbunătăţirea serviciilor oferite clienţilor reprezintă principala prioritate urmărită prin dezvoltarea aplicaţiilor de BI operaţional.) Alţi 53% consideră ca principal beneficiu faptul că au realizat reduceri importante de costuri, în timp ce 48% creditează orientarea spre abordarea operaţională a BI-ului drept principalul factor diferenţiator faţă de concurenţă.
  • Factorii diferenţiatori Rezultatele evidenţiate de studiul Ventana sună mai mult decât promiţător şi confirmă previziunile optimiste ale analiştilor privind creşterea pieţei pe această zonă, cotată cu o evoluţie chiar mai rapidă decât a pieţei aplicaţiilor de BI tradiţional. Pentru a evidenţia mai clar distincţia, iată punctele esenţiale în care abordarea operaţională diferă de cea tradiţională: audienţă, granularitate, timp de răspuns şi disponibilitate. Iată, pe scurt, fiecare parametru explicitat: Audienţa: plaja de utilizatori ai dezvoltărilor de BI operaţional include angajaţi implicaţi în activităţi operaţionale (agenţi de vânzări, personal tehnic, personal din contact centere etc.), care trebuie să ia rapid decizii cu impact semnificativ la acel nivel, dar şi manageri care trebuie să urmărească în mod curent indicatorii de performanţă operaţionali pe anumite niveluri. În cazul în care compania ce a implementat o dezvoltare de BI operaţional a reuşit să stabilească o corelare clară între indicatorii de performanţă strategici (Key Performance Indicators) şi metricile din plan operaţional, audienţa include şi persoane din senior management, care pot investiga în adâncime modul în care sunt respectate direcţiile strategice stabilite. Concluzia - audienţa aplicaţiilor de BI operaţional este mult mai mare decât în BI-ul tradiţional.
  • Timpul de răspuns: intervalul de răspuns pentru aplicaţiile de BI operaţional este semnificativ mai mic decât în BI-ul tradiţional. Cele mai multe module operaţionale necesită date al căror „grad de prospeţime“ poate varia de la câteva secunde la câteva minute. Acest fapt impune condiţii speciale în ceea ce priveşte furnizarea datelor în timp real, pentru că sunt necesare în luarea deciziilor în procesele operaţionale, care necesită un timp scurt de reacţie. Granularitate: spre deosebire de soluţiile de BI tradiţional care agregă date pentru a furniza o perspectivă ideală asupra performanţelor companiei, aplicaţiile de BI operaţional necesită un nivel mult mai mare de granularitate al datelor pentru a adresa nevoile specifice la nivel operational. (Nu este valabil însă în cazul tuturor aplicaţiilor de „operational BI“ - anumite date necesită date agregate provenind din data warehouse. Exemplul cel mai uzitat: parametrul „customer lifetime value“ utilizat de agenţii din contact center.) Disponibilitate: Aplicaţiile de BI operaţional sunt menite să furnizeze suport direct proceselor tranzacţionale de business sau de suport. Ceea ce înseamnă că perioada de inactivitate a acestor aplicaţii afectează direct abilitatea companiei de a încheia tranzacţii şi de a oferi suport clienţilor. Consecinţa logică – aplicaţiile trebuie să prezinte un grad ridicat de anduranţă.
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.
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  • 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

13 things to consider when implementing a CRM plan | Econsultancy - 0 views

  • These are few of the benefits of implementing a good quality CRM All of your clients’ information is stored in one place, it’s easy to update and share with the whole team. Updates by colleagues should be saved immediately. Every member of your team will be able to see the exact point when your business last communicated with a client, and what the nature of that communication was. CRMs can give you instant metrics on various aspects of your business automatically.  Reports can be generated. These can also be used to forecast and plan for the future. You will be able to see the complete history of your company’s interaction with a client. Calendars and diaries can be integrated, relating important events or tasks with the relevant client.  Suitable times can be suggested to contact customers and set reminders.
  • Finding one system that will fit your needs in one package may not be possible, so be aware that you may need to customise it to fit into your company. There are infinite possibilities here so don’t get too carried away as costs will rise accordingly.
  • Ensure that the CRM works on mobile devices and can be accessed remotely. Employees aren’t necessarily sat at their desks when it needs to be used or updated. Real-time updates are necessary for ensuring that clients aren’t contacted twice with the exact same follow up.
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  • Will it work for Outlook, Gmail or whichever email provider your company uses? 
  • Does you CRM have full social media integration? It’s vital that any customers or clients interacting with you on social channels can be included in your CRM updates. You will find this happens increasingly as your public facing channels become more popular. For more detailed information download our best practice guide CRM in the social age.  
  • Do you have a fully CRM trained analytics team that can study and understand the data and reports the system will generate? It’s probably wise to implement a cleansing plan for your existing data before the new system is implemented. Sifting through contacts to remove any duplicated or defunct leads.
  • Having an extra piece of software in the company, especially one as integral as this, means there’s a lot more to manage and possibly to go wrong. Make sure you have the technical support in place to ensure its smooth running.
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

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.
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  • 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

Google Reader (250) - 0 views

  • 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.
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  • The BI Server wouldn’t have any use for any more query threads, as it can’t really do anything with them – the exception to this being queries that generate multiple physical SQLs, for example to join data from multiple sources together and return a single set of data to the user, for which the BI Server could benefit from a higher CPU count if each of these queries in turn led to lots of threads being used – but two queries, in themselves, don’t neccessarily require two CPUs, because of course the BI Server, and the underlying CPUs, are themselves multi-threaded.
  • To conclude then – all things begin equal, the BI Server should make use of all of the CPUs that the underlying operating system presents to it, with the OS itself deciding what threads are scheduled against which CPUs. In-theory, all CPUs on the server are available to each BI Server component, but each OS is different and it might be worth experimenting if you’re sure that certain CPUs aren’t being used – but this is most probably unlikely and the main reason you’d really consider vertical scale-out of BI Server components is for fault-tolerance, or if you’re using a 32-bit OS and each process can only see a subset of the total overall memory. And, bear in mind that however many CPUs the BI Server has available to it, for queries that send just a single SQL statement down to the underlying database server, adding more CPUs or faster CPUs isn’t going to help as only a single (or so) thread will be needed to send the query from the BI Server to the database, and it’s the database that’s doing all of the work – all that this would help with is compilation and post-aggregation work, and enabling the server to handle a higher number of concurrent users. Invest in a better underlying database instead, sort out your data model, and make sure your data source back-end is as optimised as possible.
cezarovidiu

Rittman Mead Consulting » Blog Archive » Using OBIEE against Transactional Sc... - 0 views

  • The best practice in business intelligence delivery is always to build a data warehouse.
  • Pure transactional reporting is problematic. There are, of course, the usual performance issues. Equally troublesome is the difficulty in distilling a physical model down to a format that is easy for business users to understand. Dimensional models are typically the way business users envision their business: simple, inclusive structures for each entity. The standard OLTP data model that takes two of the four walls in the conference room to display will never make sense to your average business user.
cezarovidiu

OBIEE 11.1.1 - (Updated) Best Practices Guide for Tuning Oracle® Business Int... - 0 views

  • One of the most challenging aspects of performance tuning is knowing where to begin. To maximize Oracle® Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition performance, you need to monitor, analyze, and tune all the Fusion Middleware / BI components. This guide describes the tools that you can use to monitor performance and the techniques for optimizing the performance of Oracle® Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition components.
  • Click to Download the OBIEE Infrastructure Tuning Whitepaper
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.
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