Chances are, your role in IT has been changing as the needs of the business have changed. But the forces outside your company are now driving that change at an ever increasing pace. This environment means that you have a great opportunity to partner with your business colleagues to truly innovate rather than just do "break/fix". Understanding what business intelligence is and how it can help your business is a great place to start.
The world of business intelligence (BI) goes beyond what most think of as just "reporting". It has nuances and complexities that require a combination of skills and people. For example, are you ready to help your company understand the difference between analytical reporting and prescriptive reporting? What about "Big Data" and Data Mining? As a SharePoint Professional, you want to be aware of what is possible.
5. IT Commoditization
Better understanding breeds greater repeatability
Greater repeatability requires less skill
Outsourcing > co-location > VM Hosting > IAAS/PAAS/SAAS
Cloud Computing
6.
7. Growth in the cloud market is outrunning prior forecasts, according to Forrester
Research Inc. (FORR), which projects a rise from $58 billion last year to $72 billion this
year. The market is on course to be about 20 percent bigger by 2020 than estimated
earlier, Forrester said in a report to be published today.
Cloud computing has reached “hypergrowth” as businesses replace standard licensed
software from companies such as Oracle Corp., SAP AG and Microsoft Corp.
Bloomberg, April 2014
8. "We estimate that for every dollar spent on [Amazon Web Services], there is at least $3
to $4 not spent on traditional IT, and this ratio will likely expand further. In other words,
AWS reaching $10 billion in revenues by 2016 translates into at least $30 to $40 billion
lost from the traditional IT market."
Baird Equity Research Technology, April 2013
9. BI can’t be commoditized
BI technologies are the tools
Data is the raw material
Insight is the product
Many have tried
11. What is BI?
Reporting?
Cubes?
Big Data?
Data Science
Business intelligence (BI) is the transformation of raw data into meaningful and useful information for
business analysis purposes. ….BI technologies provide historical, current and predictive views of business
operations. Common functions of business intelligence technologies are reporting, online analytical
processing, analytics, data mining, process mining, complex event processing, business performance
management, benchmarking, text mining, predictive analytics and prescriptive analytics.
-Wikipedia
12. A Series of fundamentals
Useful data extraction
Temporal Context
Data description (knowledge extraction)
Correct tooling
13. Useful data extraction
In Place reporting
Real Time vs Real Enough time
Data Warehousing and ETL
CRISP - Cross Industry standard for data mining
18. Know the business
Business knows the data
You know the technology (and some data)
Business user data tool of choice – Excel
IT user tool of choice – SQL Server
Business gets frustrated, leads to governance violations
Need to come together for value
PowerPivot a middle ground
19. Moving ahead
Gather your data
Work with familiar tools
Go for quick wins and build on them
Excel/PowerPivot is a great place to start
Keep the goals clear
23. Other “BI” data driven systems
SharePoint search driven content
Credit card fraud
Google placed ads
Cortana
24. Example – Document Relevance
The Challenge
Production relevant documents
The Solution
Explicit relevance
Warehouse document metadata with SSIS
Mashup with SQL Server
Surface in SharePoint with SSRS
25. Example – Yammer analytics
Social data is out there
Social networking has value, but how much?
Existing tools focus on vanity metrics
Easy to grab
False sense of progress
i.e. 30,000 new signups this month!
Nothing answered the real burning questions
For over 20 years, the IT industry has been focused on keeping its systems running
These systems have matured now to a point where they can be kept running at scale
First started seeing this with Co-Location, and VM technology further accelerated this trend
No different than electricity generation originally
Having the data, and the capability to extract useful knowledge is a key strategic asset
If you don’t see the asset, not much else that I have to say today will matter to you.
Past – Economics is the art of predicting the past. Useful, but like driving while looking in the rear view mirror
Present – KPI, real time vs real enough time
Future – Target story about father that used Visa card and got a coupon for baby formula because his daughter had bought a pregnancy test kit with his credit card…
Past – Economics is the art of predicting the past. Useful, but like driving while looking in the rear view mirror
Present – KPI, real time vs real enough time
Future – Target story about father that used Visa card and got a coupon for baby formula because his daughter had bought a pregnancy test kit with his credit card…
As an example – what documents are relevant to a manufacturing operation?
We generally focus on search, and attempt to derive relevance from usage, term matching etc, but why not be explicit as at our customer?
Mashup production ERP data with document data to present a report in context of what is important on a particular day
When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail
Business knows the data – they have questions and need help
You know the technology – you understand all of the reasons that things shouldn’t be done, and security, but the business just needs answers – they don’t care if you’re busy keeping things running
You need to integrate yourself with the business and your value to the business is being well versed in BI fundamentals
Excel is something that the business understands and it will help you communicate and even offload work.
Effort expended here can be upgraded to SharePoint and even to Analysis Services.
I would encourage those of you so inclined to look at the Lean methodology. The central tenet of Lean is to start small, and build on successes. Don’t do anything that doesn’t bring tangible value of some sort.
The idea is MVP – Minimum Viable Product. In essence, how little can we do to have something worthwhile? Then build on it.
Our company has built BIT….
Everything you need for Personal and Team BI staged on a tablet
It helps facilitate:
Rapid Prototyping
Rapid Data Discovery
Modeling Tool
Rapid Insights
Which leads to better requirements gathering – shortens the feedback loop
You may not have all of the data that you need. So buy some!
Lots are free – Time intelligence tables
This wouldn’t be possible with pure search. Maybe some automated tagging system on an hourly basis, but how difficult?
30,000 – great! But so what! Not meaningful
What value does social give us that we don’t get from email? Isn’t it just another place to go check?
Applying BI design principles and listening to the business users brought us to TyGraph.
- No more in place reporting, we build a proper data warehouse, and gather the data using the appropriate sources.
- One stat – replied but not mentioned- on average about 50% shows the value of social over email. It’s the water cooler.
Within 2 months of inception we are either talking to or installing at 30 of the largest Yammer networks out there