BI systems need DATA and every business has terabytes of real data which can provide them with the information and knowledge they need to make the right decisions on time. But the key is to turn that data into information in a timely, efficient and effective manner once the WHAT AND WHY questions are answered i.e., what information is needed, what matters and why that is required.  In today’s market, every business is in a RACE. The race to conquer others. The race to generate more gains/profits. The race to foresee the risks early on so that they can be avoided.  So time is of the essence here.

An optimized BI system integrates large volume of external and internal near real time data to allow management to create opportunities by making intelligent decisions after performing predictive analysis of their approach on the business. A good BI System is like a GPS. An effective GPS is one that not only shows you a route to your destination but also guides you when you hit roadblock, gives up-to-date external conditions (constructions / traffic) information, provides multiple routes to choose from, suggests you with alternatives for shorter and fastest routes, predict the total time based on your driving behavior, tells you what to expect next etc. Just knowing the path to your destination is not sufficient. You need to know many other factors during the whole ride to reach destination on time and without any hurdles.

For a good integrated BI system, a good Data warehouse architecture needs to be in place.  Data warehouse architecture is “an integrated set of products that enable the extraction and transformation of operational data to be loaded into a database for end-user analysis and reporting”. Below are the pictorial representations of different “flavors” of DW architectures.

Methodologies used by different architecture:

Kimball’s DW Architecture – Is based on ‘Bottom-UP’ methodology.

Inmon’s DW Architecture – Is based on ‘Top-Down’ methodology.

Dan Lindstedt’s Data Vault DW Architecture – Is based on ‘HYBRID DESIGN’

The first two design methods have some limitations for Data Warehouse layer such as inflexibility and unresponsiveness to the changing departmental needs during the implementation phase, insufficient auditability of data back to its source system, inability to integrate unstructured data, inability to rapidly respond to changes (organizational changes, new ERP implementations) or difficult to load type 2 dimensions in real time. This is where DATA VAULT came in to rescue. Data Vault follows a ‘HYBRID DESIGN’ methodology which follows ‘TOP-DOWN ARCHITECTURE WITH A BOTTOM-UP DESIGN’.

The model is a mix of normalized modeling components with type 2 dimensional properties. In this model, the DW serves as a backend system that houses historical data which is integrated by the business keys. All data ‘good, bad, incomplete’ gets loaded into the data vault and all the cleansing and application of business rules takes place downstream i.e., out of DW. This means that Data Vault model is geared to be strictly a data warehouse layer, not as a data delivery layer which still requires physical or Virtual star schemas or cubes for Business Users or BI tools to access.

Bill Inmon in 2008 stated that the “Data Vault is the optimal approach for modeling the EDW in the DW2.0 framework.”

In Part 2 and 3, I am going to explain different components of Data Vault and it’s power with the help of some examples.  That will clearly explains why the Data Vault should be a preferred “flavor” for different businesses.

- Jyothi Kaparthi

As a programmer, I spend a lot of time on the computer at work and at home. I was having lot of problems with my eyes. They hurt all the time and I always felt drained. The glare of the lights in the office was painful. My solution was to create a pair of computer glasses. I’ve been using them for 8+ years and could not be happier. I don’t wear glasses, but I want to keep my eyes protected and healthy. I went and had an eye exam and told the doctor about my problems. I worked with him on creating a pair of glasses tailored to my needs. He had a computer in his office and a kit that let him build test glasses with different lenses. I sat at his computer while trying different lens combinations. I chose lenses with a slight magnification to them. This allows me to use a smaller font to view more code on the screen, but it appears larger which helps my eyes. I also added an anti-glare coating to protect my eyes from the glare from lights and the monitor. The first time I put on the glasses I was amazed at how my eye instantly stopped hurting.

Since my first pair I have had another pair made. Since I am older, I needed a slight prescription, but they still work very well. I also added scratch resistant lenses since I carry them around a lot. I also wear my glasses in meetings since the glare from the light hurts my eyes. The glasses are not cheap (about $200), but well worth the money. Here are some other suggestions from around the web on reducing eye strain: 

1. Take a break every hour to stretch your legs as well as your eyes. Look out a window and focus on far away objects. Close your eyes for a while.
2. Keep your eyes hydrated. Dry eyes leads to irritation and strain.
3. Get your eyes check annually to check for problems or if you need a prescription correction.
4. Use high resolution LCD monitors. Adjust the brightness and contrast to a comfortable level.
5. Use dual monitors and place them at different distances so your eyes have to refocus as you look at each monitor.
6. Adjust your font size and type to one that is clear to you. Change out white background to a light shade of blue or other light color. White backgrounds are very harsh.
7. Change the viewing distance of your monitor. Sitting to close causes eye strain. Move your monitor back and increase the font size.
8. Don’t work with all the lights off. Can cause I high contrast between monitor and room. Dim lights if you have trouble with bright lights
9. Use a TFT and enable Clear Type (or equivalent technology). Ensure it is also correctly tuned for your system using the Clear Type tuner.
10. Limit your computer screen time when not at work.

Remember to take care of your eyes and happy coding. 

 - Jeff Rollins

This story parallels an area in Information Technology called “Business Intelligence.”   Business Intelligence is also known as “Data Warehousing” and “Executive Information Systems” with dash boards or digital cockpits.  The IT organization provides a rich repository of data for the business knowledge workers.   Providing data has become so important; in addition, the tools leveraged have become more and more rich in functionality.  And yet, the number of business users truly leveraging this kind of technology-oriented business information environment lags the productivity that the organization could receive.  Simple questions like:  who are my best customers and why?  What’s my best product and what is its margin contribution?  Why is my market share in a particular geography increasing where in another market it’s declining?   How can I get my business results information faster so I can be more informed on the ever-changing aspects of the market?   A user says, I can make a lot of informed decisions….how can I make even more of them instead of hire more decision-makers?   The business and market questions go on and on and on.

As IT professionals, we are used to being held accountable to deadlines with ever changing resources and requirements.   In the world of Decision-Making, as data warehousing managers, we often are rushing to meet these same deadlines.  Often the deadlines and deliverables overshadow the underlying purpose for building the data warehouse. The good thing about bad times is that they force us to slow down and painstakingly evaluate what we are doing. So, although there are dark clouds ahead, there is a silver lining in the reality of our environment in having to do “more” with “less” resources. 

Here are 3 tips to consider making your Data Warehousing environment even more “ready” for business decision-makers. 

1. Meet with the Business Decision-Makers frequently.   I am suggesting that a weekly meeting at a minimum would be beneficial in order to review their data, listen carefully to understand what data they are really using, and what data they may be leaving behind.   Is the data they are leaving behind the result of not understanding how to use the data, is the data no longer relevant to their decisions, or perhaps the data is too summarized or too detailed?
2. Document the business flow of the data graphically using business terms, not technology metadata definitions.  Distribute the business document to all business and IT users so that everyone really knows how the data is being used in the context of business.   Too often, we revert to memorizing the technical definitions and only use them.  We lose the business context and as new people join the data analysis, the true business definitions are lost. 
3. Proactively have discussions sponsored by IT with the Business Users about the cleanliness of the data and how IT is transforming the data.    Show them the techniques that you are using to cleanse the data and transform it so that there’s a common repository of data that they can use.   The more the Business Users understand what you do in context of the IT problem, the more they will provide their insight into how the data is most meaningful to use. 

Chinese “Business Intelligence” Proverb:  If you plan for one year, plant rice.  If you plan for 10 years, plant trees.  If you plan for 100 years, educate mankind.

1.  The Ostrich (think Exec)

2.  The Penny Pincher (think CFO)

3.  The Power User (think…power user)

4.  The Politico (think CIO)

5.  The Freeloader (think Uncle Stew)

6.  You/Me/Us (duh!)

There’s even an opportunity to discover your own IT personality (there’s 8 of those…not to be confused with the 6 enemies above).  My results? 

“Holy split personality! The Empty Suit, The Human Roadblock, The Promiser — make up your mind already!”

http://ow.ly/12Iog

Happy reading!
- Jodie

That’s the last Tweet from Jonathan Schwartz, Sun’s former CEO.  It was preceeded by his final blog just 1 week earlier.  http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/where_life_takes_me_next

In the time of Social Media, how we get the news is not nearly as riveting as how FAST we get news.  Via Facebook you get birth announcements, wedding invitations, divorce annoucements…via LinkedIn yo usee job changes and now via Twitter – resignations.  All real time.  Faster than you can spill the announcement to your immediate family, you can notify hundreds/thousands (or in Jonathan Schwartz’s 9107 people).

If you are a company, how do you manage this flow of communication?  More importantly how do you exploit this communication and how do you track the effectiveness?  I think that the next generation of BI will track social media impact to financial results and/or to customer satisfaction.  Imagine if you could track the ROI of your marketing efforts!  If a Marketer’s MBO could include # of tweets per day and % increase of profit and truly be tied together!!  Ah…dreamy

CEO Dashboard of the future

Good luck Jonathan!

- Jodie

 - Writers note:  when I started writing this at 4:51PM, @openJonathan had 9107 followers.  22 minutes later (5:13PM, he now has 9,151).  A quirky, unexpected message gets a following…quickly!

So sure, I could find what I was looking for…”what’s the temp at 9AM?”  It takes a pair of readers a few seconds, but it’s there.  There are so many other data points, however.  Is it getting warmer or colder?  Is it going to rain today?  Certainly the other data points are there that would help me to make the decision – relative humidity, cloud cover, wind speed – but I may need to consult the company metadata to understand what it all means and if those numbers mean it will be getting hotter or colder.  THIS IS DATA.  Your org has it…you’ve got to make sense of it. 

What LÛCRUM does, is make this DATA meaningful.  We like to call it Business Intelligence or Data Visualization.  Simply stated, we take all of those data points and help you to make better business decisions (or in this case, help you to decide if you should wear a coat or bring your umbrella). 

THIS IS BI!

THIS 

IS 

BUSINESS 

INTELLIGENCE!! 

Taking lots of data and making it meaningful…yeah, that’ s what LÛCRUM does. 

- Jodie

January 2010 Cover

Have you heard of Technology First?  Technology First is a Dayton, Ohio  based industry-led, industry-driven trade association dedicated to:

• Proactively Representing IT in the Region
• Increasing understanding of Technology First and its value
• Recognizing and promoting our membership
• Highlighting niche technology companies

Technology First looks to strengthen technology thought leadership by inspiring innovation, focusing on new ideas and best practices, presenting leading edge industry information that is both strategic to business and technical folks.  They also look to inspire volunteer leadership by encouraging stronger member participation which involves more working committees and develops programming to best meet industry needs.  Additionally, they look to engage in conversations with technology community by leveraging interactive social media.

I was asked to prepare an article on the Future of Business Intelligence.  Imagine my surprise when that article was selected as their cover story this month!  Click here to read.  I’d love to get your thoughts.

Have a great week!

- Jodie

No not the song… There is a story that the IT people like to tell, not sure if it is true but I love it so well…sorry Jimmy B.  It goes something like this.

A manufacturing company with a complex assembly line had a machine break down on them.  The machine was critical in the production of their products, yet try as they might to fix it themselves, they just could not keep it running 24×7.  Pridefully, the plant manager didn’t want to admit that his team couldn’t solve the problem, but he knew that soon enough the company’s product yield would be impacted and someone way above his pay grade would notice.  Time to call an expert.

The following week, the expert arrives at the plant.  The plant manager escorted him to the offending machine.  The expert set down his briefcase and began to ask a few questions of the plant manager and the line supervisor.  He then walked around the machine, climbed up the maintenance ladder looking around.  Climbing back down the ladder, he asked the line supervisor if he had a hammer.  The supervisor looked at him sideways and said, “well, uh, yea, I got one.”  So the supervisor went to his toolbox, retrieved a well worn ball-peen hammer and handed it to the expert.  The expert climbed back up the maintenance ladder and leaned over the side of the ladder to reach the broken machine.  He swing the hammer down sharply with a loud “bang”.  Instantly, the machine began to whir, the indicator panel on the side of the machine lit up with all green lights and production was running again!

The plant manager and line supervisor thanked the expert for his help to which the expert replied that he’d send his invoice for services later that week.

The invoice arrived on the plant manager’s desk and when he opened it the invoice contained a single line item for services.

1. Repair of Machine…………………………………………………………………………………………………….$10,000.00

The plant manager was not happy.  He thought to himself, “How in the world can that guy charge me ten grand for swinging a hammer?”  He immediately called the expert and asked him for a detailed invoice.  The expert told him he’d send out another invoice immediately.  Two days later the invoice arrived.  The plant manager tore open the envelope.  The invoice read:

1. Use of Hammer………………………………………………………………………………………………………..……….$1.00
2. Knowing where to strike hammer………………………………………………………………………………$9,999.00

Isn’t this story much like business today when it comes to knowledge? Many companies are now measuring their enterprise data storage in petabytes.   Yet with all that data, they still struggle to answer questions such as—Who’s my most profitable customer? Or, Who’s my most in-need customer? Or, which customer is likely to leave for my competition?  How can I increase my business?  Where should I focus my efforts?  The answers are very likely embedded deep in the data stores of the company but the decision makers can’t get the answers they need, when they need them, how they need them, and how to apply the answers.  And therefore they aren’t getting the knowledge they need.   They have the “hammers” but they aren’t helping.  Enter Business Intelligence.  Sure, BI has been around for a long time, but it’s evolving just as today’s businesses are.   In today’s world, you need more than data.  You need more than information.  What you need is knowledge.  The fluid, meaningful, applicable evolution of data that allows you to “fix your broken machine”.   BI is your answer to unlocking the knowledge you need.

If you’re asking yourself important questions to which you have no answers, might be time to call the expert.

Not so.   Dilbert is alive, healthy, and very much well fortified in the “partnership” between IT and Business.

Here’s 10 Telltales from a person that has both a IT and Business professional’s perspective that you really do have a Business Intelligence partnership.

1. Lunch. OK, I’m writing this waiting for one of my manager’s to bring me a “sack lunch” turkey sandwich.   But I’m serious.   Lunch.   When’s the last time you have been to lunch with your business user?   When has he or she picked up the tab for that lunch?  Communications is the key to any Business Intelligence initiative since the information requirements are dependent on the external business environment most of the time and, in today’s marketplace, the environment is constantly changing.   Frequency and intimacy of conversation not only about last weekend’s loss of your favorite playoff team but more so what’s going on in business last week that is going to affect the kind of questions you are looking to “ask your data?”
2. Mea Culpa. Saying that you made a mistake…Rework, reloads, unsuccessful night refreshes…operating a business intelligence environment is not easy work.   There’s a lot of moving parts to a mature BI platform along with updates, patches, network traffic and internet dependencies and the like.   There’s got to be daily production huddle sessions, weekly project enhancement meetings, quarterly capital, budget and funding meetings, and annual business strategy alignment sessions.   All of these meetings have to be tightly integrated between IT and the Business in order for the Business Intelligence platform to prosper.
3. Monitoring & measuring. “What doesn’t get measured doesn’t get managed” as the modified saying goes.   A mutually-agreed measurement and operational reporting system needs to be applied to any Business Intelligence initiative.  At least, the successful ones.   The partnership has proactively agreed to “what constitutes acceptable” in advance so that both parties can provide a seamless report card.
4. Social measurements, too. Not only do we want to measure “system performance” and other traditional IT operational metrics, one also wants to consider the social aspects of the platform.  Is everyone timely and present at the respective meetings?   Was everyone prepared with their part for the meeting?   Are the “partnership duties” getting deprioritized (this especially happens in the business side since the business operationally will pull the business people directly into business problems and not IT problems.
5. Cradle-to-grave Documentation. Documentation doesn’t mean to just put the information into a project plan when building the BI platform and then shove it into a drawer.  Rather, documentation of the business questions that are asked every day, week, month, quarter depending on the business problems involved.  The business is changing, thus, driving heuristic questioning.   Having an active collaborative environment to document these is extremely important to sustain the platform.
6. Executive sponsorship by both IT and the Business. Even though most of the activity is well beneath the executive offices, the business questions being analyzed and solved are most likely directly related to the profitability and the overall strategy and performance of the business.   So, do they go to lunch?   Do they understand that there’s a Business Intelligence Partnership?  Smile.
7. Show me the money!   Funding. How budgets get spread between IT and the Business can actually be the fundamental reason why a Business Intelligence initiative succeeds or fails!!!   There’s a lot to be said about the CIO that can navigate through today’s budget world.  How a CIO leverages both capital appropriations and current expense for Business Intelligence requires the involvement of the Business.  You see, building the environment with hardware and software and consulting services can all follow GAAP principles for accounting.   Where the difficulty lies is how to separate the operational overhead of running the BI platform along with the constant stream of enhancements.   If one doesn’t budget for the enhancements, the platform ends up slowly (or quickly in today’s economy) becoming antiquated.
8. A partnership of Innovation. Most of what IT does is not innovation itself.  They use innovative technology; although once deployed, it is an operational system that is supposed to run and run and run.  IT professionals are paid to execute, operate, and make budget….and most of the time at the lowest common denominator when it comes to operational availability and budget.    BI platforms are rich with innovation through new technology, of course, but more so through Heuristic Questioning about the business problems at hand that day.  Innovation comes through leveraging data and asking “Why?” and “What if?”   The BI partnership must have an innovation DNA in order to truly leverage the data to its greatest value.
9. Survived a reorganization or three? When, not if, the company/organization reorganizes, the Business and IT organization can change slightly or dramatically.  I have seen many a healthy BI partnership get destroyed over new org charts.   When you reorganize, the IT and Business leadership must have a Partner Summit of sorts in order to protect the operational care, feeding and ongoing plans of the Business Intelligence environment.
10. Internal public relations. I was with the famous Peter Drucker at the 1996 Cognos Convention out in San Diego and had a chance to ask him some questions.   Why can’t we get everyone to want to have their data in one location so we can get rid of all of these disparate spreadsheets?   “In the old days, man fought with swords, daggers, clubs, and ultimately, guns.   We are carnivores and that will remain.  Today, we fight with information.  We hide it, disguise it, hoard it, and mislead with it.   It’s our contemporary personal weapon of force.”  Based on some of the latest stories coming off of Wall Street, the CDO crisis, the Mortgage lending crisis, and the insider trader diabolical, and certainly the many Ponzi schemes that have ruined many a retirement savings plan, I have to agree with what Dr. Drucker said.  At the same time, I truly believe in the good of mankind, if the IT and Business groups have strong leadership, an active business strategy, and a general knowledge that if the team is rowing all at once you can accomplish more than if you are not, then the general support of a Business Intelligence platform will be a positive enabler for the company’s well-being.

There are probably 10 more ideas supporting a Business Intelligence Partnership with IT and the Business.  I hope that these Telltales stimulate you to advance your partnership!  Good Luck!