• 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

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

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:

1. Don’t use pie charts.
2. If you use pie charts, be careful in chosing the number of items you chart.
3. If you use pie charts, be sure they are “centered at noon”.
4. 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

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

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:

1. Acquire it
2. Prepare it
3. Deploy it
4. 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

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

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

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

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

Think about the conversations on Facebook.  Your friend from out of town posts the question, “I need ideas for a 9 year old birthday party in the Cincy area”.  Within minutes, the suggestion start rolling in:

Everyone that is your “friend” can comment on the question.  Responses are real time.  If the friend had sent an email, it would bounce through the servers and firewalls.  Some would lose the mail message into their junk items, some would not respond, some would think to do it later (and then not do it).  With Facebook, the question shows up in my “Most Recent” list.  It’s there if I want to respond now or later.  Responding is easy.  All can see one another’s responses (unlike email where I may not be on a reply list).  You are engaged in the conversation because it is easy and allows for debate.

If Facebook were smart they would take some of the same concepts in their free version and create a Business Edition.  This edition would be installed within my firewall and rely on Active Directory for the users.  New employees would be set up as they would be in email.  The “friend” concept would be abolished as we are all colleagues that need to communicate with one another and all employees would be in my list.  I no longer need a separate IM client, as that feature is already built in.  Email is also built in…do I need corporate email?  (FB mail does not allow for attachments, only links…).  Additionally, my HR or event planners could post events and recieve RSVPs.  The calendaring isn’t great in FB – perhaps that’s an enhancement???  To me, having a conversation with my colleagues just became considerably easier.  Imagine the IT department:

Wow…wouldn’t that be great!!  What features would you add to the business edition of Facebook?

- Jodie