Beautiful Business Intelligence

Susan AndreArticles, News

( ( BD / AWLN ) +  IoT )  / ( ML +AI ) = MD → (( “Big Data“ divided by  “A Whole Lot of Noise”) plus “Internet of Things“) divided by (“Machine Learning” plus “Artificial Intelligence”) equals “More Data” ! 

Does not really look or sound beautiful does it?

More data should mean greater capacity for leveraging analytics to bring new insights to operational and strategic business cases.  Fundamentally changing how businesses are able to effectively utilise their data. To create value and institute a positive impact on the bottom line is essential.

Data as a separate entity gained importance during the last couple of years, deserving its own corporate plan. An information centered business forges close companionship between their Business Intelligence Strategy and the overall Enterprise Data Strategy.

To beautify Business Intelligence requires crafty optimisation of several information related aspects.

How to optimise for Business Intelligence Success

Optimisation simply means that you take a bunch of little things that don’t seem to be very difficult to change and all of those little changes have a multiplying effect and you get a giant change from all of those tiny changes.” – Tony Robbins (American author, entrepreneur, philanthropist and life coach)

Business Intelligence optimisation is the process of refining the collection and interpretation of measures which gage the efficiency, productivity and performance of a business and to uncover various ways for improving how business is conducted. 

Methods of collecting these measures have grown in complexity:  the concept of a single data inflow has made way for multiple data pipelines resulting in having to handle more data sources and targets than ever before.  This is a multifaceted process that includes management of a wide range of technologies, requiring skilled staff.

More and different kinds of data fuel the propensity for using data to drive the competitive edge and the aspirations of releasing analytics into the hands of as many teams as possible.

Fortunately lower cost and more potent computing systems enable storage, processing and management of the full range of organizational data.  Another upswing which makes Business Intelligence sough after is the growth in market value of data for targeted marketing, customer experience management, higher efficiency operations, and many other information driven use cases.

Tools offer advanced graphical presentation for easy interpretation and sharing of results. Information Analysts can now find the hidden details through visualizing trends and clusters, using intuitive graphical interfaces including multiple interactive charts that are suitable to cater for both birds-eye view and more detailed inspection of information across locations, products and time.

Detecting problems in complex, distributed systems with many integrated components, tracing through log files and thousands of non-correlated messages when faced with the arduous job of determining the root cause of an application failure forms part of managing modern data pipelines (aka sources of BI systems), best left to those with expert knowledge. 

Despite increased complexity in identifying the cause and finding and fixing data related issues, which might be challenging and time-consuming due to the sheer volumes, the net result makes it worth the effort.

Vanguards of BI agree that sophisticated aids exist to analyze information, detect variations, and identify critical parameters which help to predict final product quality or success of a product launch.  With a few clicks and by exploiting recently added features of embedded analytics (now often top of the list to be included in BI applications) the information exploration and analytics experience could work like a dream.

The growing quest for powerful, quick and easy to use BI solutions resulted in creative and user friendly solutions.

Why is Business Intelligence beautiful? Because finding nuggets of gold in your information and figuring out how best to serve your customers by offering the most relevant products while growing the business is a striking and rewarding process. Being able to respond rapidly to noisy shrieks from the business communities requiring a variety of trust worthy data to be available at all times; which will drive change and stimulate business growth, propels Data Scientists to dig and mine for these scares nuggets of exceptional worth, providing a huge sense of achievement once found. This is the beauty of BI. 

The total Business Intelligence process including sketching pretty pictures of insights gleaned is an art as much as a science.  Distributed and un-organised data hinders beautiful analytics; Integrated and organised data, presented fittingly – makes Beautiful Business Intelligence!

Written by Susan Andrè

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Concepts, Design and Modelling for Extended Data Warehousing   teaches sound principles to be applied no matter what technology is used. Register HERE