At the IFSUG conference this week in Cary, NC I met Stephen Harris from Bank of America. Stephen gave the talk “Manage Your Partners Before You Manage Your Dashboards: Designing Great Dashboards” covering the business aspects of successfully implementing dashboards. When you back up for a second to consider the requirements of the developers, outside of the tool functionalities, you realize that a dashboard reporter must have 5 specific skills.

1. Investigator: Customers of new dashboards don’t know what they don’t know. You need to ask a wide variety of questions to determine what their needs are and what goals they are trying to fulfill.
2. Creative: You must be creative enough in your design to fulfill the user’s needs make an intuitive user interface.
3. Sales: Sometimes the recipient of the toolset isn’t keen to learn the new tool or they do not see the benefit of moving to it. You need to sell them on the fact that this new tool will give them more timely actionable information.
4. Trainer: After you finally convince them to use the system, you have to patiently teach them how to use it.
5. Project Manager: But throughout the entire process, you also need to continually communicate how the dashboard project development is going.

As the dashboard creator, if you have a weakness in a particular area add another person to your team to help ensure dashboard implementations are successful.

For more reading material about the business side of dashboard implementations, check out Dashboard Spy.

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Today at IFSUG, Chuck Patridge presented a wonderful talk about how to complete fuzzy matching using BASE SAS tools. Chuck has been programming SAS since 1979 and has been tasked multiple times with coming up with in-house solutions to address business needs without the software costs that are typically associated with solving these complex data problems.

When specifically addressing fuzzy data matching, Chuck suggests that we consider it an algebric equation. Standardize/cleanse the left side and then standardize/cleanse the right side – then begin the process of matching the two sides together.

Here is the high-level strategy:

1. Cleanse: Up/Low Case all the data, use the ZIPSTATE function to find the true ZIP code, drop street types (Ct, Ln, St, etc), drop other ‘noise’
2. Normalize: Create standard tables to translate or normalize data and use HASH, Perl regular expressions, custom formats, etc to normalize or standardize the data table
3. Compare: Chuck recommends using the POINT= option to compare 1 record in the 1st table with all the records in the 2nd. To improve processing he also recommends that you restrict the sizes of at least one of the tables (such as by birth year, state, etc).
4. Further Comparisons: There are various ways to further improve the matching. Chuck suggests removing vowels and using standard SAS functions such as SOUNDEX to eliminate data differences due to typos. You can also use SUBSTR to compare smaller portions of an attribute, such as the last 7 digits of the telephone number (to reduce impact of area code changes).
5. Score Rank Results: Finally when running through the comparisons of various attributes, score results based on % of similarities.

As you build this out, understanding the data is absolutely required. Foreign addresses, common abbreviations, and what constitutes as noise depends on the industry or source of information. Chuck also recommends that the routine is built off of test data (or copies of production data) and are routinely checked by the ETL team for continually improvement of the match %.

Looking for more information? Chuck actually published a white paper on this topic years ago it is still very useful for SAS programmers to this day. Thanks Chuck for this great resource!
http://sconsig.com/sastips/obswww15.pdf

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CIBER Inc.
5251 DTC Pkwy., Suite 1400
Greenwood Village, CO, 80111
USA

Press release date: February 22, 2012

MAKES BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE A PLUG-AND-PLAY IMPLEMENTATION

GREENWOOD VILLAGE, Colo., – For businesses and organizations that want the power of business intelligence and performance management without the complexity of traditional implementations, CIBER has created three new integrated packaged solutions that consolidate multiple Oracle software packages into single plug-and-play solutions.

CIBER now offers integrated packaged solutions for Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (OBIEE) and Oracle Business Intelligence Applications (OBIA), Oracle Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) and Higher Education Analytics. Each pre-configured, patched and integrated solution comes with a prebuilt data extraction layer, data warehouse, as well as dashboards, reports and KPIs (key performance indicators). This enables users to start exploring delivered analytic content as soon as installation is complete – typically in a matter of hours.

All three integrated solutions include installations of Oracle Essbase, Oracle Fusion Middleware, Oracle Database 11g and Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition Release 11.1.1.5. The Oracle BI packaged solution includes Oracle BI Applications Release 7.9.6.3, Informatica PowerCenter and Oracle Data Integrator to give users visibility into data associated with financial systems, human resources, project analytics, procurement and spend, and supply chain. This turnkey solution offers the kind of decision-making support one expects from top-tier BI software, plus it is scalable and customizable to leverage Oracle BI investments or third-party data sources that companies may already have in place.

CIBER’s integrated packaged solution for Oracle EPM includes Oracle EPM System Release 11.1.2, Oracle Data Integrator and Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition Release 11.1.1.5. Using this integrated solution, workers can easily access and analyze financial management and performance data as well as planning and budgeting capabilities. It delivers reporting capabilities that track and present historical, current and forward-looking information in easy-to-digest formats.

For the higher education market, CIBER has added Oracle’s PeopleSoft EPM 9.1 Data Warehouses for Campus Solutions, Human Resources, and Financials, as well as Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Release 11.1.1.5, thereby empowering users to make better decisions, analyze causes when there is a gap between performance and goals, update plans to meet market conditions, meet enrollment projections, maximize funding opportunities, elevate student performance and more.

All of the integrated packaged solutions can replicate and scale in environments in hours instead of weeks or months, thereby helping to decrease installation time and expense. At the same time, the plug-and-play functionality of the integrated packaged solutions allows users to get acquainted with the power of analytics immediately. This in turn helps enable them to better envision how best to model their analytic solution and easily identify requirements for phase-two, in-house development projects.

“Many clients see the value and benefits of business analytics, but have been reluctant to commit the time, effort and resources required for a traditional installation,” said Dennis Kause, CIBER’s Business Intelligence practice director. “These integrated packaged solutions take the pain out of BI installations and replace it with a robust, ready-to-go package that delivers almost instantaneous value.”

For more information on CIBER’s three new integrated packaged solutions that leverage Oracle software to quickly and effectively deliver the benefits of Business Intelligence, visit CIBER’s website at www.ciber.com or http://www.ciber.com/erp/oracle/packaged-business-intelligence-strategy/.

CIBER is a Platinum level member in Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN).

About CIBER, Inc.

CIBER, Inc. is a global information technology consulting, services and outsourcing company applying practical innovation through services and solutions that deliver tangible results for both commercial and government clients. Services include application development and management, ERP implementation, change management, project management, systems integration, infrastructure management and end-user computing, as well as strategic business and technology consulting. Founded in 1974 and headquartered in Greenwood Village, Colorado, CIBER has more than 8,500 employees and operates in 19 countries, serving clients in North America, Europe and Asia/Pacific. Annual revenue in 2010 was $1.1 billion. CIBER trades on the New York Stock exchange (NYSE: CBR), and is included in the Russell 2000 Index and the SP Small Cap 600 Index. For more information, visit www.ciber.com.

SOURCE CIBER, Inc.

CONTACT: Jon Lentz, Media Relations of CIBER, Inc., +1-303-220-0100, jlentz@ciber.com

Web Site: http://www.ciber.com

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Article source: http://news.thomasnet.com/companystory/CIBER-Debuts-Integrated-Packaged-Solutions-Leveraging-Oracle-Software-851269

BI award winners with their certificates from ITWeb.

The ITWeb business intelligence (BI) award winners for 2012 were the Foschini group and Santam, walking away with the BI Excellence award and BI Innovation award, respectively.

The BI Excellence award recognises a project that serves as an example of excellent best practices and technical expertise used to deliver measurable business benefits. The finalists in the category were AccTech Systems and Foschini. The Foschini group’s project focused on BI for HR, and judges said it demonstrated good attention to overall architecture and that it was well executed.

The BI Innovation award honours the project with the most innovative use of BI tools and techniques that deliver measurable business benefits. The BI Innovation award finalists for this year were saidWot and Santam. Judges explained that saidWot’s project demonstrated the use of multi-structured social media, while Santam’s aimed at data mining focusing on business benefits.

The judges for the awards this year were Ranka Jovanovic, editorial director at ITWeb; Dr Barry Devlin, founder and principal of 9sight Consulting; and Bill Hoggarth, divisional director at CQS Performance Solutions.

Devlin noted that the two aspects he took into consideration when judging this year’s awards were a good story and the technical quality of the project’s approach. This is the third year that the awards took place.

For more information about ITWeb’s upcoming events, click here.

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Article source: http://www.itweb.co.za/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=52319:itweb-bi-award-winners-announced&catid=69

Ideas Worth Spreading

I had an epiphany of sorts lately after viewing the following video from TED. Simon Sinek gave a talk about how great leaders inspire action and gave three powerful examples. Like most thing I hear I asked myself “How does this apply to BI?” and for me it turned on a light bulb.

Watch this video, it’s 18 minutes well spent.

Applying this Concept to Business Intelligence

Most BI Professionals talk about the latest technology, emerging trends, software, star schema designs, delivery methods, mobile BI, “big data”, in-memory, etc… the list goes on and on, but in my 15 years I’ve never heard a BI professional explain WHY they work in the “BI Space”! Most everyone works for a paycheck, but that old adage of “Do what you love, and the money will follow”… how many BI practitioners fall in to that bucket? My guess would be more than most when it comes to technical jobs, but I would also guess that most have never given any thought about why. What we do is hard, there is not getting around it, so there has to be a level of passion for data and analysis that comes with the job. I will admit it, until watching this video I didn’t give it any thought, but I was able to answer the question very easily.

Why do I do it?

“I work to enable better business decision by leveraging what already is known against things that are not known. Through this process I attempt to provide insight in to the company’s inner workings and make those who use the data more successful and productive.”

How do I do it?

“By leveraging best practice methodologies, and applying it within the reality that is the business environment realizing that those two don’t always align”

What do I do?

“I build data warehouses and business intelligence solutions that meet business requirements”

If we approached the business users from this inside-out approach to “sell” them BI, what do you think the result would be? I think this method has potential to improve user adoption rates, improve the requirements process, and contribute to the overall success of BI projects. Am I a dreamer? Probably, but it makes perfect sense! If someone came to me selling the Why rather than the What I think I would be much more engaged in what was going on… we have to get the business to believe what we believe, not buy what we are selling.

If you are reading this, sit down and figure out why you do BI… what do you believe? Then take the next step and rather than selling the what to the business, try to sell the why!

Article source: http://smartdatacollective.com/markbradbourne/47520/selling-bi-are-we-doing-it-wrong

Reliable and well researched business information is central to a company’s abilities to identify new opportunities and manage competitive risk. But that information must be of practical use by time-pressed staff. And in a globalised market, being able to support staff in local languages is a key benefit. Espicom Interactive, launched February 2012, provides the solutions information professionals have been waiting for.

Chichester, West Sussex. UK (PRWEB) March 06, 2012

Espicom Business Intelligence, the provider of market and industry analysis for the global pharmaceutical and medical device industries has announced the launch of Espicom Interactive.

For many companies the cost of business information represents a significant investment. Its practical use in defining commercial strategy and in understanding market environments is critical to success. However, the value of such investments is only really beneficial if the service empowers staff to greater efficiency in its use. Business information should be a support to effective decision making and not a burdensome administration task.

Espicom Interactive is a new service which combines Espicom’s class-leading information services with an online delivery that is feature rich in user benefits which save time and money. Gone are the days of laborious copying out of text – save it instantly to MS Word. Tables, graphics and illustrations are instantly opened and saved in MS PowerPoint and MS Excel. Field staff and agents worldwide will benefit from instant machine translation into 9 languages, which cover key emerging markets such as Brazil and China.

Eric Wigart, Chairman of Espicom comments, “We understand that customers need critical information for their practical day-to-day planning and development work. Such information is to be used, not just read. For 30 years Espicom has been at the forefront of meeting the informational needs of clients, and with the launch of Espicom Interactive we can save them a whole lot of time and effort in using it”.

For further information on the service, please click on the link to Espicom Interactive. To access Espicom Interactive and review a sample document which will let you try the service for yourself at no charge visit http://www.espicominteractive.com

About Espicom

Espicom Business Intelligence is a leading publisher of medical and pharmaceutical market analysis. With over 50,000 users worldwide its reports, news services and analysis products are used regularly by key decision makers in industry, government and commerce. A full catalogue can be found on the web at http://www.espicom.com

Contact

Ian Taylor, Research Director

ian_taylor(at)espicom(dot)com

Tel: +44 (0) 1243 756019

For the original version on PRWeb visit: http://www.prweb.com/releases/prweb2012/3/prweb9252124.htm

Article source: http://www.chron.com/business/press-releases/article/Espicom-Takes-Business-Information-Use-to-a-New-3384274.php