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Applying Predictive Analytics to IT Performance - When we say business drives technology, what do we mean by that, and how do you apply that to your business world? Well, if you look at the advances of technology, over time in the long history of technology advances, sometimes we get a little bit ahead of the business world. Now in the last few years, a big emphasis has been placed on the value that technology can bring to the business. And I really see a maturing in terms of the need for data warehousing. In a long spectrum form, it used to be, at a point in time, a nice to have thing. While we are not at that point now, for the most part, we’re moving towards this kind of business intelligence resource as a have-to-have type of thing. Business intelligence has really moved into a strategic place. Companies use data essentially to help drive their business, to make better decisions. At the same time, the business itself is changing. For any business, if you read the papers, or take a look at what’s going on, there is always change in business, but now, the change is really accelerating in many ways...
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Balanced Scorecard Design - A balanced scorecard converts an organization's behind the scenes strategic business model into its daily marching orders. This scorecard sets the stage for what needs to be done in the future and lays out a plan of attack to achieve that goal. The business and its employees are "scored" in different categories which allows management to see opportunities for improvement. Balanced scorecards provide a framework for how a business should be run and enable executives to track their progress along the way...
Best Practices for Successful Business Analytics Adoption - Today we are talking about adopting business analytics and what we have found to be best practices for their successful adoption and use inside the enterprise. The first observation is that we noticed that organizations that outsource their IT activity, I can’t remember if it’s IT specifically related to business intelligence products, but organizations that outsource their IT activity, depend on external consultants rather than develop the position internally, they tend to be less mature and get less benefit out of the IT solution. The theory is that those external resources don’t know the business as well as internal resources. The second point to make is that sometimes organizations are not ready to improve business analytics. They realize they have to make improvements but they are not ready. It relates largely to business justification. Often we have seen IT organizations driving the BI project, and they just don’t understand it well...
BI Analysis - information on why to evaluate InetSoft's business intelligence analysis software. The visual analysis capabilities are very intuitive to use, yet powerful in their ability to uncover patterns or identify outliers, thanks especially to a 100% Flash user interface and homegrown charting engine refined over a decade...
Big Data Analytics - There has been a lot of talk this year about the wonderful world of big data and big data analytics. What is driving big data today? When we talk about big data, we’re often talking about volumes of data, and what is driving that tremendous increase in volume. I’ve heard people call it tsunami of data that is now. Things that are driving that volume are a lot of new channels or new sources of data coming into the enterprise. This includes digital data, data like click stream traffic, things like mobile applications. It also includes a lot of sensor data that is coming off our vehicles or coming off of production lines. All of these news sources of data are generating not only large volumes of data. To be honest database companies have solved the issue of large volumes of data for some time now. What we’re talking about now is how do we solve some of the new challenges around big data analytics. That includes both being able to take in these news sources of data, which are not well structured...
Building an OLAP Cube for Analysis Services - Have a look at the simple example of what happens in that kind of interaction as an analyst. You can’t really see what’s not there. So, a report, a query, a dashboard, even a cube, if you’re building an OLAP cube for analysis services, or OLAP, or something like that have strict sets of data. And what happened is you have personally restricted the data that is visible to a person which means you’ve lost some contextual information. Is this 10% of the data or 90% of the data in the database? You wouldn’t know. You wouldn’t be able to look at the distribution of data in that data set and know what’s going on unless you knew the constraints that were applied. Now, imagine the person working in Excel, or Access, or something else. You run six reports, you put them into six tabs in Excel, you have now lost the ability to unhide your initial constraints. The constraints keeps you from doing a full analysis because a lot of times the answer lies not in the ‘x’, the constraint that you’ve applied. The answer lies in the not ‘x’, the part of the data that you did not retrieve. So, you have to write a second report to get that information and compare it to the first one. Or you have to retrieve the whole set and somehow sort those things out. All of these options, if you’ve worked with BI tools before, you understand have problems. So, you have to be able to surface constraints and show them to people. Now, the report shows the data well, but it typically does not show the constraints that we’re applying to retrieve that data. This often leads in the BI world to problem solving for us as the BI professionals supporting others. These aren’t the constraints you’re looking for. You have the report using these constraints, but you left out some data. That’s why your numbers don’t match...
Business Agility and Business Analytics - Now let’s answer some of the questions that have come in. Talking about business agility and business analytics, where does the cloud fit to this type of business problem, or is there one? Well the cloud fits in lots of different areas, one in particular that you know, not every company is going to have these capabilities, and I think you’re going to see the rise of cloud services organizations that provide these capabilities to companies that don’t have the resources to manage them internally. This can alleviate some processes. It can automate some processes. What are some best practices for implementing a business intelligence solution? The BI technology and the BI tools are just as important as the business processes you have got. It seems there is not just a technology fix. There are a lot of best practices and business processes. In fact I think that’s most important. It’s about governance, and it’s about ownership and all these other business practices that you put into place...
Business Analysis Software - a description of the benefits of InetSoft's business analysis software, how it is robust enough to grab the attention of executives, meet the demands of power users, and scale up for organizations of any size...
Business Analysis Tool - When analyzing a business, management will commonly employ a selection of diverse tacticsincluding SWOT analysis and quantitative analysis. An ERP (enterprise resource planning) system can then be used as one of the many repositories of corporate data that needs to be analyzed. SWOT analysis outlines a business's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. It involves specifying the objective of the business venture or project and identifying the internal and external factors that impede or assist in achieving that objective. Quantitative analysis works in financial matters using numerical techniques to plan and execute the next move...
Business Analysts in State and Local Government Agencies - If we look at business analysts in state and local government agencies, it’s a little bit different story there. State and local government agencies are often played with. And gosh I don’t how they do it, but they really are played with a lot. The biggest one of late is because of budget cutbacks at state and local agencies, there is a tremendous push to eliminate waste, waste where projects are concerned. One of the first places that they are looking are at the requirements and practices. It’s interesting to know that as these requirements practices are getting better, there has been increased pressure on some of the outsourced vendors that are working with state and local agencies to also get better. So, you are going to see some of the other trends manifest themselves as a result of this one as well. And this is not an isolated situation. This is not just the U.S. government. It’s the Canadian government. It’s the Singaporean government, the Japanese government, and the Indian government. It has spread all over the world. We are starting to see you a very slow proliferation as the world of business analysis grows...
Business Analysts with Experience in Programming and Development - Nowadays most of the times employers are expecting business analysts to have experience in programming and development. They are expecting them to share the developer’s load if required now. To what extent is that correct? If you asked some North American analyst probably you might find them in violent disagreement that programming may not be a requirement. I say the more knowledge and more experience you have the better to help propel it forward. I would caution, however, business analysts with rich programming backgrounds are likely to not be objective observers. So there are pros and cons. I think if you got it, great, if you don’t, then you would probably be a little bit more objective than somebody with it. The poll came in. We got 41% saying yes, second place is 25% that we are using the hybrid and waterfall initiative. After that we have No, and last we have we’re thinking about it. So, but ‘we’re thinking about it’ is 14%, so it’s a little more negative. Thanks everybody for contributing. I am very pleased to see that with the numbers, so here we go...
Business Analytics - an interview by the BI Network's editor and founder, Ron Powell, of Luke Liang, founder and CEO of InetSoft, about the company's evolution from a reporting tools vendor to a provider of business analytics software and other business intelligence technologies. We actually divide users into three groups. First, we have the front-line users. Those people typically don’t have sophisticated training. They need very simple interfaces, and there should be close to zero training required to get them productive. That’s what is great about interactive dashboards. Simple pointing and clicking allows a great deal of navigation that is very intuitive. The second type of user is the manager. They typically want a little more sophistication. They want to control their database access a little bit more. For example, they want to be able to change their own dashboards. They want to be able to drill down to the details. But they in no way want to become data analysts. That’s the third group of people, the business analysts or the power users. Those are the people who specialize in understanding the database, understanding the data, so they can very dynamically generate new information. And this is really the group that we see analyzing away, and really wanting to get into the powerful features beyond the reporting side. These are the people who are actively seeking this kind of analysis that we have been talking about here...
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