Posts by: JodieHeflin
iPhone4S
Like most of you, I recieve a lot of publications in my inbox each day. This morning, an interview in Intelligent Utility caught my attention. The interview, IT’s Workforce of the Future, is a very interesting observation by a CIO who has been in the workforce for less than 20 years. In the interview the CIO, Branndon Kelley reminds us that in 1999 our workplace had better, faster technology than we had at home. Today, for most, that simply isn’t the case. We have a new workforce emerging that has been immersed in technology since birth and want to bring that to their new post-college positions.
Branndon issued a challenge for those of us “old timers” in IT. Certainly our experience has taught us to be cautious and deliberate and to plan our project carefully. These new techies, however, are more likely to jump in with both feet and more optimism. Neither is certainly a perfect strategy but their is a lot to be learned from both. Business is changing faster and faster every day. When evaluating your projects here are some things you may want to consider:
- Is there truly a compelling business reason why I couldn’t move my data to the Cloud?
- How can I inspire my technical team to think more creatively and collaboratively?
- Why does my staff need a permanent desk at my site?
- Can I find the best resources in my town/headquarters? What if I was not limited by geography?
- What tools do I need to get in place now so that I can enable my teams to push the boundaries of location, work hours, and technology?
Food for thought indeed. How would you respond to the questions above?
- Jodie
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
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
I’m not sure if you’ve noticed, but I’ve not been blogging with the same gusto as of late. Ah the life of a Consultant. 
I have been working with a local financial institution creating financial models this summer. (It leaves me with little time for blogging.) I did happen to stop by our 7755 Montgomery Road office today and checked my mailbox. In it was this month’s Information Management mag. I was immediately drawn to this month’s Snapshot: Making Information Available. Here’s some stats for you to consider:
61% of respondents are less than satisfied with their current process of creating information applications and are only lukewarm about their current information application technology. Here are their complaints:
- It takes too long to assemble and deploy applications.
- It is too difficult to assemble and view information into a simple view.
- There are not enough capabilities to integreate and normalize information from disparate applications.
WOW! I ask all of you fellow BI folks out there…what are you doing to solve this problem??? Why is it with all of the tools available today, our users are finding it too difficult to use them!! What are WE doing wrong?
As I mentioned, I am working with a customer on Financial Models this summer. I am fortunate to work with some SUPER SMART people in this group. They have come up with the most ingenious ways of getting their data out of old clunky systems. They can create some of the most INSANE Excel formulas to manipulate data! Their Excel sheets are visually appealing and get data to their management in a timely manner. I’ve had some spreadsheets that have taken me days to figure out the Excel formulas (and I’m a guru!). They are awaiting IT to “build them a DW” to make their lives easier. Here’s to hoping that it can deliver on their expectations! Here’s what I would do to ensure that it does:
1. Use an iterative methodology to build the DW. Recreate existing Excel reports from the DW as you go.
2. Implement a user-friendly reporting tool that allows them to create their own reporting. Give ‘em lots of drag and drop functionality and make sure it can Export to Excel.
3. Create a request process that allows the DW to change with the Business. Creating a process that queues up the work for months and months does not help the business user to create the financial package that’s needed at the end of the month.
4. Keep the model flexible. Doing this will ensure that you can always add a new organziation, hierarchy or measurement.
5. Build cubes! These users are smart cookies and they aren’t afraid of a Pivot Table. Give them the flexibility and performance of a cube and let them start to uncover their data.
Hmmm…what’s missing from my list? What would you add?
Happy building!
- Jodie
“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!
View more presentations from Jodie Heflin.
- Jodie
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.
BI Roadmap
View more presentations from Jodie Heflin.
Enjoy!
- Jodie
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!
Simplicity and Transparency
View more presentations from Jodie Heflin.
– Jodie
We hope to see you tomorrow at our event. If you go and use Twitter, please use #BISymp2010 to mark the event in your posts.
Headed to our event? Click on the Marker below and enter your address to get directions.
3861 Olympic Boulevard
Erlanger, KY 41018
[mappress]
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.
Agenda:
7:30am – 8:00am Registration and Breakfast
8:00am – 9:00am - 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
For more information please call Sheila at (513) 241-5949 x.215
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
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
- LÛCRUM is an information, intelligence and analytics consulting firm comprised of business and technology professionals focused on making data meaningful.
