Quiz January, 2012 – The Dreaded Time Zone Question
January 24, 2012 by btaub
Filed under Business Intelligence, Data Warehousing, Latest, Quizzes & Surveys
WARNING: This month’s quiz is harder than it seems at first! Are you up to it?
We recently worked with a client that does business all around the world. They capture millions of transactions which they then bring into a dimensional data warehouse for analysis.
The problem is that this company, and their customers, need to analyze their data indexed to any time zone. So, for example, if a transaction takes place in Mumbai at 0200, it might be analyzed in the Mumbai time zone as 0200 or the New York time zone as 1530 or as any other time zone in the world.
Now the question; assuming a standard relational database, what is the best way to model this data to provide correct time and date results as well as adequate query response time?
HINT: In formulating your answer, consider the impact of date, not just time.
The Myth of Self Service BI
January 17, 2012 by Thoughts from the Dataspace
Filed under Business Intelligence, Data Warehousing, Latest
Most business intelligence efforts start with a statement like the following, “Let’s build a BI system so our employees can get whatever data they need, when they need it.” While well intentioned, statements like these are misguided.
The truth:
- If folks do their jobs today without using a shiny, new BI tool, why are they going to put extra effort into learning your snappy new tool?
- Most folks don’t get a big thrill out of accessing data - BI is like a dishwasher, a tool for getting a job done. Do you want to go to classes and learn a panoply of new things just to use your dishwasher?
- Most folks’ data needs are limited to a relatively narrow range of topics (e.g. sales folks typically don’t need to access HR data).
- Even with data warehouses and strong metadata, BI tool vendors have not yet produced a tool that gives anyone simple access to every piece of data in an organization.
The implications:
- A few folks do have the need, desire & technical skills to get and analyze their own data. These folks are called data analysts.
- While it’s not sexy in terms of BI (is anything sexy in terms of BI?), the vast majority of folks have structured jobs that require access to a limited range of data and they usually need it in some set format (e.g. this week’s accounts receivable aging report). Assume that these folks need BI tools that provide predefined reports into which they can enter a few parameters - tools like WebFocus, Crystal Reports, and SQL Server Reporting Services. Also assume that these folks will NOT create these reports on their own - you will need technical experts to create and maintain these reports.
- You are far more likely to see wide usage of your BI systems if your business processes are designed to be data driven. Business process design, along with a culture change towards being data-focused is a prerequisite to widespread BI adoption. It is also hard, time consuming work.
- Widespread BI adoption isn’t always the correct measure of success. A $2 million BI system that serves just one user could be a major success if that one person makes or feeds input into multi-million dollar decisions.
So, if you want a clear path to ROI, rather than starting out to build a BI system, start out to change your organization. Then, figure out how and where BI is necessary to enable that change.
Not to Offend, But You Are Thinking All Wrong About BI (Probably)
November 29, 2011 by Thoughts from the Dataspace
Filed under Business Intelligence, Data Warehousing, Latest
What’s the first step in building a data warehouse or a business intelligence system? Defining the key performance indicators (KPIs), right? Wrong! KPIs are certainly great to know and can definitely apply when you’re developing BI applications like management dashboards. But, BI is NOT about management dashboards or data warehouses or query and reporting or QlikView or Business Objects…
Business intelligence is simply about capitalizing on data that was captured for other purposes.
I was struck by this thought over the Thanksgiving holiday when speaking to my brother in law. He’s an executive with an up-and-coming, private-equity-financed distributor. One night, his CEO had an epiphany
We know what people buy but we don’t know if what people buy is generally correlated with other things that they buy, or should buy. If we knew this, we could encourage folks buying one thing to also purchase its natural accompaniment.
For those of us who have been in the BI business for long enough, this is a take on the classic ‘beer and diapers’ data mining example (click here for more on this BI ‘fable’).
This is certainly a use of BI, of capitalizing on data assets but it doesn’t really work in the way that folks expect BI to work:
- It doesn’t really start with a definition of KPIs
- While it may use a data mining tool, it doesn’t use dashboards or query tools or other, common, reporting tools
- It may use a data warehouse but it may, also, just use data assembled for a one-time analysis
In any case, when thinking about BI, the vast majority of companies need to stop thinking about BI. BI is not the point. Doing something extraordinary is the point and, if using data assets gets you to extraordinary, then BI is the mechanism.
