Business Intelligence Posts

A friend once asked me this. What does it take to implement a business intelligence solution with dashboard capabilities in an organization? photo credit: edrugsearch.com

He also mentioned that the ultimate objective of the solution is for key decision makers such as senior management and board members to look at statistical data, trends and forecasts so they could make better decisions.

My immediate response to him would be, it all depends on what sort of data an organization has.

Some bosses request the IT team to develop reports such as:

• Pipeline by stages report
• Sales person’s performance report
• Open potential report

But the bosses may not be aware that they do not have the required data in place for the reports to be developed upon.

In order to build the reports, the organization probably needs a CRM and SFA software in place to capture all relevant sales data.

Without the right data in place, it’s impossible to build reports and dashboards.

So before a BI solution can be implemented, key systems must be in place such as:

• CRM system
• SFA system
• HRMS system
• Intranet system
• Accounting system
• etc

Let’s say an organization has all the above systems but each system resides on it’s own platform. Continue Reading »
Best open source data integration tools for enterprises

If you have a website, I’m sure you have some site statistics tracking software installed to gather some important information such as website traffic and where your visitors are coming from. photo credit: Astig!!

On Wareprise.com, I use Sitemeter as well as Google Analytics to help me track site traffic and check common search terms.

With Sitemeter, it gives me a quick overview of my site traffic such as:

• The number of unique visitors in the last hour
• The number of average page views a day
• A list of recent referring URLs

Here are the stats for Wareprise.com’s Sitemeter.

Google Analytics on the other hand provides a lot more insightful information such as:

• The percentage of bounce rate and new visits
• Top content and which post gets the most page views
• The percentage of traffic from direct traffic, referring sites and search engines

Every time I log into my Analytics, I would check out my traffic sources. One very useful information is the keywords that users search in order to reach my site.

I look through the list of keywords all the time to study which keywords my site gets ranked for. Continue Reading »
How Google Analytics helped me rank high for a search term

Whenever we read about enterprise reporting solutions, the common ones would include Crystal Reports, SQL Server Reporting Services and Cognos 8 Business Intelligence.

photo credit: edrugsearch.com

Today, I would like to highlight one more enterprise reporting solution called Stonefield Query.

Just like most reporting solutions, Stonefield Query is capable to:

• Generate reports with charts and graphs
• Export report to other formats like Word and PDF
• Create mailing, barcode, or product labels
• Schedule reports to run at certain time
• Drilldown into details
• Analyze data using cross tab reports

Continue Reading »
An alternative to Crystal Report & SQL Server Reporting Services

So now the company has made a considerable investment implementing a powerful data warehouse and a sophisticated front-end Business Intelligence tool, in line with the requirements specified by users during the requirements analyses stage of the process…but what now?

One would assume that once a user has his wish list of data available at the press of a button that everything would change instantly, but surprisingly it is not necessarily so! Photo by Argonne National Laboratory.

Firstly there is the resistance to change that needs to be accounted for. A manager that used to get information through manual processes and excel spreadsheets prepared by sub-ordinates doesn’t necessarily have the time to invest learning how to work on a new tool, even when he is offered to be trained after the implementation.

And even if he goes for some quick training, it would normally be within a busy schedule with many other pressing and urgent matters to attend to. He would typically play around for a short time, think he understands, but back at his desk it would be so much more convenient to just go back to the old way of doing.

Secondly, one needs to know what to do with data and how to interpret it, before it becomes helpful. If the Business Intelligence solution simply produces for him the same information in almost similar format he used to get it before, by means of straight forward reports, it may be simpler for him to adapt. Continue Reading »
Analyzing data in a data driven organization