Month: August 2011

What should companies consider before investing in a Business Intelligence solution?

Peter James Thomas business intelligence, linkedin

Racking up for a climb

linkedin   Business Intelligence Group

 
The following is a lightly edited transcript of a reply I posted to a question asked on the LinkedIn.com Business Intelligence Group. This was entitled What should companies consider before investing in a BI solution?.

I suggest some of the following:

  1. What business problems would a BI solution address?
  2. Within these, what questions do people want to ask and what action will the answers lead to?
  3. Why can’t these people get the answers today, or – if they can – what is wrong with them (incomplete, inaccurate, not detailed enough etc.)?
  4. What is the business impact of the lack of these answers (poor decision-making, missed opportunities, inefficient processes, poor monitoring, lack of tools to manage people’s performance)?
  5. If these questions were to be answered, broadly speaking, which different data sources would need to be brought together (assess different country / divisional systems and different types of systems – sales, Finance, manufacturing, distribution, marketing, complaints, external data, others)?
  6. How aligned are the various different elements within these (e.g. customer records, products, territories etc.)?
  7. To what level is the data required to answer the questions identified above captured (are there gaps and does new data need to be entered)?
  8. How accurate is this data (does it actually reflect business events)?
  9. What is the overall quantity of both historical and current data that needs to be looked at and how much of this regularly changes?
  10. How frequently will users need to ask questions and how up-to-date does the answer need to be?

 

 

Tiny Trilogy

Peter James Thomas business intelligence, technology , ,

The last in a series of mini-posts, normal (aka more prolix) service will be resumed soon.

Although tinyurl.com was a pioneer in URL shortening, it seems to have been overtaken by a host of competing services. For example I tend to use bit.ly most of the time. However I still rather like the tinyurl.com option to create your own bespoke shortened URLs.

This feature rather came into its own recently when I was looking for a concise way to share my recent trilogy focusing on the use of historical data to justify BI/DW investments in Insurance. There is something satisfying in thinking that the following will persist as long as tinyurl.com does:

• http://tinyurl.com/bi-insurance-part-1
   
• http://tinyurl.com/bi-insurance-part-2
   
• http://tinyurl.com/bi-insurance-part-3

It is nice to make a [semi-] permanent mark from time to time!
 

 

You have to love Google

Peter James Thomas google, Pure Mathematics

…well if you used to be a Number Theorist that is.

Google / Fermat

It’s almost enough to make me forgive them for Gmail’s consider including “feature”. Almost!
 

 

Words fail me

Peter James Thomas Statistics , ,

Unpredictability defined

No, not a post about England’s rise to be the number one Test Cricket team in the world, that is to come. Instead this very brief article refers to a piece on the BBC that, in turn, cites a paper in Geology entitled A 7000 yr perspective on volcanic ash clouds affecting northern Europe (you will need to have a subscription, or belong to an institution that does to read the full text but the abstract is freely available).

The BBC’s own take on this is summed up in the title of their bulletin, Another giant UK ash cloud ‘unlikely’ in our lifetimes. My fervent hope is that this is lazy, or ill-informed, journalism rather than a true representation of what is in the peer-reviewed journal (perhaps all the main BBC journalists are on holiday and the interns are writing the copy). To state the obvious, in general, the fact that something happens every 56 years does not guarantee that the events are always 56 years apart.

For a more cogent review of predicting volcanic erruptions, see my earlier post, Patterns patterns everywhere.