The Science of Visual Analytics
September 1, 2010
Today LUCRUM hosted our second BI Symposium. Once again, it was well attended and we had some great speakers! I’m hoping that this becomes a regular event. If you have yet to attend, I encourage you to come to our next event (to be scheduled).
Our first speaker was Mr. Stuart Woodward, President OD OcuCue. (http://ocucue.com/) OcuCue is an interesting start-up that’s all focused on data visualization. I always love listening to visual experts. There is such a science to visual design. It’s about understanding the psychology of how users think and perceive what they see. If you are creating a dashboard, you have to design it in the way people think – we read from left to right, heavy color should be at the lower left hand side, etc.
“Good design has two key elements. Graphical elegance is often found in the simplicity of design and complexity of data.” – Edward Tufte
Mr. Woodward’s company creates meaningful dashboards that are icon based. They go beyond speedometers and graphs and actually create a customized dashboards with icons that are meaningful to the company using them. One example that he showed was for a hospital. There are some rooms that can only take female patients or only male patients. To show bed availability, their dashboard has a pink pillow or a blue pillow to represent which rooms are available. Hmmm…never thought of that!
How are you presenting data to your users? Are you simplifying the message? Setting up the information from left to right? Are your colors meaningful? (ie Red should mean bad, green is good)
OK…gotta run and listen to the next speaker!
- Jodie
Using Business Intelligence to Drive your own Recovery.
June 29, 2010
eWeek published a video describing the value of using Business Intelligence to find and exploit market and revenue opportunities. Great point, and very well worth the 6:49 it takes to view it. Many organizations are using BI to understand some of the basic historical results of their business. It’s the next level of organization who begins to answer questions like the below using their BI toolset:
- What are my customer’s buying is a basic question, but moreover, what products do they buy together?
- Which products do they buy when times are tough?
- What did they buy during the last recovery?
- What aren’t they buying, and what should I recommend they buy?
All great questions, and clearly a value add of a strong BI platform.
eWeek – Using-Business-Intelligence-to-Find-Your-Economic-Recovery
LUCRUM powers the new Cleveland Museum of Art website
May 24, 2010
This snapshot shows the new home page for the Cleveland Museum of Art, featuring personalized content, exhibitions information, and highlighted objects from the collection.
It’s a treat when we have the opportunity to publicly showcase work from our portfolio. This week, we invite you to view the results of our most recent assignment with the Cleveland Museum of Art and their new website.
This event marks the successful completion of a two year effort to set a new standard for how museums engage with their visitors. The engagement has followed the LUCRUM iStream methodology – starting with our high-value Stakeholder Alignment Session, though a process of analysis, collaboration, transformation, and now launch – to result in this groundbreaking experience. The website was developed in partnership with the museum staff and award-winning Pentagram Design, based in New York.
One of the most compelling features of the new website is enhanced access to the museum’s encyclopedic collection of over 40,000 objects - many of these iconic works of art are now accessible online, as well as woven into the pages of the site. The objects become part of the fabric of the experience. Large images and a wide range of search options make it easy to wander for hours in the online collection – I encourage you to give it a try!
The redesigned collections browser offers visual access to over 40,000 objects in the Museum's collection.
You’ll not find a single security guard with arms crossed, daring you to approach for a close-up look. Interaction is encouraged, and you are invited to add comments to their favorite objects or tag them with key words so that they are easier for others to find.
The new site also paves the way for more in the way of multimedia features, to provide diverse perspectives on individual works of art and offer behind-the-scenes views of areas within the museum that are not accessible to the general public.
In planning the experience, the design and development teams examined the best online practices of retail and consumer product brands. Social media is heavily integrated into each page of the new site as well, with an option to share content with various online services or add events to a personal calendar. Links are also supplied to the museum’s own Facebook, Twitter and blog accounts.
The simplicity of the navigation was also a key to improving the overall experience for site users. Everything on the site is as close to the homepage as possible, which eliminates the kind of multiple clicks and top-down hierarchical navigation found on a lot of websites. An expanded calendar provides day-by-day views of all activities at the museum, with direct links to more information about the events or to the online box office.
LUCRUM engineered the site using a number of advanced technologies and design innovations. And while the end experience is highly visual and is delivered in an engaging, interactive way, the some of the real marvels are “under the hood.” Think about it – the key to the site’s richness is in the data that it makes available, and the way in which you can engage with that data to find “hidden meaning” and value that was not immeditately obvious.
Sound familiar? The same data strategies and fundamental approaches we use in our business intelligence assignments apply here too. Over the next few weeks, we’ll be talking more about how we applied these principles and how they lead to successful technology projects. In the meantime, take a moment to enjoy the website, and let us know what you think!
-Eric
Visualization: Rules for BI
May 13, 2010
“In God we trust; all others must bring data.”
- W. Edwards Deming
At our BI Symposium on May 6, 2010, Jeff Shaffer provided us with great insight on how the way we present our data can be just as important as what we present. Jeff is not a big fan of pie charts. In fact he has 4 rules:
- Don’t use pie charts.
- If you use pie charts, be careful in chosing the number of items you chart.
- If you use pie charts, be sure they are “centered at noon”.
- If you use pie charts, make sure that they sum to 100%
Jeff shared lots of bad charts, lots of REALLY BAD charts and summed it up with some great looking dashboards. I encourage you to check out his presentation!
- Jodie
Creating the BI Roadmap
May 12, 2010
Last Thursday, May 6, 2010 at our BI Symposium, we brought together 4 BI Leaders to discuss BI success and failure and share their ideas for making BI Better. Steve Hangen and Dennis Brown shared their story with us. Steve and Dennis have brought BI to WinWholesale using the Microsoft tools that they already had on-site. Using MS SharePoint, SQL Server and Reporting Services, Steve and Dennis have created an easy-to-use system that brought $2M of margin improvement in the first 3 months of the tools’ release.
We were Tweeting during the event. Here are the nuggets of info we learned from Steve and Dennis:
Not all of their slides could be shared due to the confidential nature of some of the dashboards, but here is the rest of their presentation.
Enjoy!
- Jodie
Simplicity and Transparency
May 11, 2010
Last Thursday we had a great turnout for our first ever BI Symposium. Our host was the NKU METS Center. If you never been, you should check it out! It’s a wonderful facility! It’s truly state-of-the-art!
Our first speaker of the day was Dr. David Holcomb. David really set the tone well with his presentation on Simplicity and Transparency. Do you think of data as an asset? If so, treat it like the rest of your assets:
- Acquire it
- Prepare it
- Deploy it
- Manage it
So many times, we skip (or underfund) the “manage” step or at worse, skip all 4 steps and keep the data hidden from the organization.
David’s presentation can be found below. Enjoy!
– Jodie
BI and Software-As-A-Service (BI SaaS)
May 3, 2010
Who moved my cheese…again???
Economy challenges always seem to prompt new business models and productivity increases. Remember 10 years ago and the dot.com bomb?? Prior to 1999, websites were being developed in great numbers but there was no revenue model to support it. Those companies failed…others, that found a way to take a seemingly free service and get paid for it thrived. Additionally, with the fall off in the economy, people had to find a way to deliver the same services their customers were used to but do it for less. Voila! Off-shore resources!!
In the last several years though, even off-shore resources are expensive. Seasoned IT professionals (baby boomers) are retiring and taking valuable company info along with them. Profit margins for most companies continue to erode as spending has slowed. DASD has gotten significantly less expensive and bandwidth has quadrupled (or more?)! Those “free” websites now charge fees, but they aren’t outrageous. Given these changes, it makes sense that more and more applications are moving into the Cloud.
As you know, here at LUCRUM, “we do BI”. Respoinding to our customers, we implemented Agile BI concepts long before it was fashionable. We are able to get BI projects up and running in significantly less time than our “big 6″ competitors (and do it for less!). As we continue to investigate ways to get data to our customers faster, we have become fascinated with the Cloud. Certainly there has to be a way to take all of these company assets, secure them in the Cloud and give users better/faster access to their data.
We’ve investigated a few companies that are doing this today: Good Data, OCO, BIRST, and PivotLink. What’s interesting about each of these companies is that they’ve taken the common business problems – Sales and Finance – and created models to support them. I was fortunate to participate in a meeting with Good Data last week. I’m excited to learn more about each of these companies and even more excited to see how LUCRUM can support BI in the Cloud!
Stay tuned!
- Jodie
Using Excel to run MS SQL Stored Procs
April 13, 2010
Today I had an opportunity to install a spreadsheet for a customer. It may seem simple…a spreadsheet…but the power it gave to it’s user was unimaginable.
I’ve been working in IT since 1993. In that time, I’ve become the Excel champion. Excel is cheap (relatively), installed nearly everywhere, and most everyone knows how to use it. IT rejects Excel…because it’s cheap and easy. We technicians like things to be complicated. It makes us feel smart when we can deploy an app that most people would never understand. But year after year, I find that the cheap, simple Excel spreadsheet is the one thing that can always get you a “thank you” and “you’ve made my job so easy” response from a customer.
With today’s install, I was able to get my smart guys to even look at Excel as something complex. Using a stored procedure in MS SQL 2005 and the data connection in MS Excel, we were able to create an Excel Macro that allows a user to click on a menu item and execute that stored procedure using parameters in the Excel spreadsheet.
After creating the connection, the next step was to establish parameters/prompts in the spreadsheet.
Now that the parameters were established, the user could bring back the data into a table in Excel to view the results. We chose to hide that tab and instead allow the users to manipulate with a simple but elegant Pivot Table (this did require some macro work).
THERE! DONE!
Now, with some additional time, we could clean up the macro, create some error handling and actually move the running of the stored proc to the macro…with…some…additional…time. The solution is clean and simple and the user is happy. For prototyping and user solutions that are going to just a few people, sometimes easier and faster is better.
- Jodie
Business Intelligence Symposium May 6th!
April 6, 2010
Join us on Thursday, May 6, 2010 at the NKU METS Center for a half-day symposium of collaborative learning, focused on business intelligence. The Business Intelligence Symposium brings together regional business & IT executives to learn how their peers have been implementing data analytics, business intelligence solutions and Dashboarding. The emphasis of the symposium is to share ideas, stories, experiences, and business cards. Case studies, along with live demonstrations will be presented. Breakfast and lunch will be provided in a collaborative environment that facilitates peer networking and BI discussions for an enhanced learning experience.
View the agenda below and register today for $49 at the following link: http://tinyurl.com/yef3khh
Agenda:
7:30am – 8:00am Registration and Breakfast
8:00am – 9:00am David Holcomb, PhD – Director, Data Management, Western Union Simplicity and Transparency – How to do Effective Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence (Presentation)
9:00am -9:45am Mr. Steve Hangen – CIO, WinWholesale BI Roadmap – A Project, a Journey, a Culture (Presentation and Demo)
9:45am -10:00am Coffee Break & Conversations
10:00am – 10:45am Mr. John R. Ward – Director, Health Systems Integration, TriHealth The New Era of Healthcare Clinical Information Systems Unstructured Data – Internal/External
10:45am –11:30am Mr. Jeff Shaffer – Vice President of Legal Operations, Unifund Visualization – Running a business with Dashboards and Scorecards (Presentation and live Demo)
11:30am – 1:00pm Lunch /Panel Discussion led by Dr. David Holcomb and guest speakers
Instant Business Intelligence
March 23, 2010
Have you ever wanted to combine data from your accounting systems, your customer relationship management systems, your ERP systems, or data sitting in the cloud (such as salesforce.com)? Are you tired of getting a different story regarding the “state of your business” from each one of these systems?
You might be thinking to yourself, “Yes, but it’s too difficult to get access to each system and pull the data together.” Or “Oh, I have to get our corporate IT department involved and I don’t have time to wrestle with the “process.”
You need to make critical business decisions fast and need an easier way?
YourView – The Vision
LUCRUM has a deep history working with data. We had a vision to create a product that helps bring data together through an easy and intuitive application. As we started looking at the problem from a different angle, we found that the solution is less about data and more about combining data to help answer “top-of-mind” business questions. Imagine viewing on one report your forecasted sales data and customer purchase history. You can start answering question like:
- What is my expected versus realized revenue gap?
- Are my sales reps properly aligned?
- In what industries are my biggest customers?
- What else could I be selling them?
- What are my realized margins per sales person?
The answers to your questions maybe sitting right on your own computer. It could be in a report or in the various Excel spreadsheets you use everyday. If you can access the data, then YourView can help you gain a better understanding.
Solution
YourView allows data to be combined from multiple data sources using a very simple application like Microsoft Excel. Most line of business applications allow data to be sourced to Excel through a reporting or export feature. In addition, YourView allows you to source data directly from cloud services (salesforce.com). Once the data is inside YourView, each different source can be combined together into a single view utilizing a common business entity such as customer name. Combining the data is performed through YourView’s simple Business Entity Mapper feature. The data is then loaded into a relational data mart, which can be used to seek answer to the “top-of-mind” questions about your business.
Specifications
YourView is a Microsoft Windows desktop application, which allows multiple data sources to be loaded, categorized and mapped, and then loaded into a Microsoft SQL Server database. Data is modeled using the Business Entity Mapper, which defines the business categories and measures. YourView will create a physical database and will load the data into the database. YourView utilizes LUCRUM’s dynamic data loader toolkit (DDLT) as the ELT (Extraction, Loading, and Transformation) engine.
Features:
- Load data from Microsoft Excel 2003
- Connect directly to salesforce.com and pull data into YourView (requires an authorized SFDC account with API access)
- Edit the imported data directly inside YourView
- Classify data as business dimensions (categories) and facts (measures)
- Converts data into SQL Server Types: varchar, nvarchar, decimal, integer, and bit
- Performs data validation to help find and determine data integrity problems
- Creates a physical database and loads the data based on the model generated from the Business Entity Mapper
Requirements:
- Microsoft Windows XP SP3/Vista/Windows 7
- Microsoft.NET 3.5 SP1
- Microsoft SQL Server 2005/2008 Standard Edition or Express Edition
- 1 GHz Processor or Higher
- 400 MB RAM
- 10MB of Hard Disk Space for product installation – additional disk space is required for the YourView deployed data mart
Polls
Loading ...Recent Comments
Tags
What we're talking about...
- RT @marksmithvr Blog: Kalido Does Data Governance Right http://bit.ly/b2mQmR #DataGovernance #Kalido #CIO #MDM #Data #DataQuality 2010-06-22
- Figured out folders. Love that! #iPhone OS4 2010-06-22
- Upgraded to iPhone OS 4. When will I see multitasking? 2010-06-22
- Shocking?!? RT @OneMicrosoftWay Microsoft puts Messenger on the iPhone's App Store - http://arst.ch/lcy 2010-06-22
- Been off of Twitter lately due to lack of access at new client. Boy have I missed a lot! 2010-06-22
- More updates...