Business Intelligence

Technology and Career Options

Paul Boal
Director - Data Management
Mercy (www.mercy.net)
March 12, 2012
Opening Questions

 Whatkinds of jobs does someone do in the area of

business intelligence?

 What does someone working in business intelligence

do?

 What are common tools used in business intelligence?

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What do you do in Business Intelligence?

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What do you do in Business Intelligence?

 Data Governance
 Data Architecture, Analysis, and Design
 Database Management
 Data Security
 Data Quality
 Master Data Management
 Data Warehousing
 Reporting
 Metadata Management

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What do you do in Business Intelligence?

 Interview users
 Understand business problems
 Model the business
 Analyze data
 Integrate data
 Write reports and interfaces
 Drive data quality improvement
 Build dashboards
 Share insights
 Make the organization smarter…
The (sometimes) thankless part…

 Data management isn’t important…

 First priority is delivering services/products…

 Reporting is easy…

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Mercy Data Warehousing / Mercy Insight

Here’s how easy it is…

COMMON CHALLENGES

 Getting access to source data

 Working with application teams
 Data quality and data stewardship
 Master data management
 User Expectations

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Challenge: Getting Access to Data

 Vendor Contract Obstacles

 Flexibility of vendor to allow access / support
 Cost of building extracts
 Technical Obstacles
 Legacy systems, programming/system skills
 Cloud solutions (the bad ones)
 Knowledge Gaps
 Knowledge of source system data
 Cultural Obstacles
 Application team controls access too tightly
 Development teams are timid about database
access

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Challenge: Application Teams

 Development Style
 You tell me exactly what you want and I'll build it.
 Give me the business logic and I'll build it.
 Analytical Hubris
 This is the way it works; come to find out the data doesn't match.
 I assumed that you wanted it like that other extract.
 Fear of a down-stream dependency

 e.g.
 Kronos PR530
 The PICA code

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Challenge: Data Quality &
Master Data Management

 Not analyzing or profiling data contents

 Using terms rather than ideas
 Building in rules that are too strict
 Missing formal data governance policies
 Lack of clear data stewardship
 Data seen only as operational

http://ocdqblog.com
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Challenge: User Expectations

 Sometimes, users expect computers to be able to

solve problems for them;
 Sometimes, users don't want the system to do
anything for them.

 Rationalize data integration / data warehousing

 80% gathering information together
 20% analyzing and decision making
 Web 2.0 versus Enterprise Applications
 Enterprise solutions versus departmental control
 System Performance

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Challenges in Getting Value from Data

 Data Usage Survey

 195 data users across Mercy (of 380 surveyed)
analysts, informaticists, statisticians, report writers
 Top Challenges
 Finding the data they need
 Performance of the systems they use to access data
 Integrity of the data they have access to
 Integrating data from multiple sources

 Target
 80% using data and %20 getting data1
 Current Efficiency Gap

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STAYING FIT

 Organizations / Conferences
 TDWI
 B-Eye-Network
 TDAN
 Analysts: Gartner, Forrester
 Blogs
 I'll email you my Google Reader list: paul.boal@gmail.com
 Twitter
 BI Twitter List
 Open Source and Developer Tools
 Talend, Pentaho, Jaspersoft, BIRT, Infobright
 Oracle, Teradata, IBM

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Demonstrations

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Business Objects Universe

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Business Objects WebI

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Dashboard Example

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Tools / Resources

 Open Source BI
 Pentaho – reporting, analytics, integration, dashboards, mining
 Talend – integration, data quality, master data
 Jaspersoft – reporting, analytics, integration, dashboards
 Actuate BIRT – reporting
 Open Source Stats/Mining
 R – statistics
 Weka – machine learning
 ProM – process mining
 Databases
 MySQL, Oracle, Teradata, SQL Server, Infobright, Hadoop
 Teradata University Network
 Internships

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