BI

Gartner Research released its Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence Platforms last Friday.  The report was complied using data was collected from (897) user survey responses. For the first time, Tableau Software met all of the criteria for inclusion in the report.

Friday, Tableau posted some visualizations I created using data from the FDIC on banks and bank failures.  For those of you interested in exploring the data further I’ve attached a packaged workbook with more elaborate views.

In Parts I, II and III of this series, Building a High Value Low Cost BI Solution,  I addressed some of the practical matters of project definition, database terminology and the the evolutionary method for migrating your data to a data warehouse while also receiving the immediate benefit of a useful visual reporting system.  In this section I'll describe how you can organize data in Excel to create a Star Schema structure that will facilitate analysis with Tableau. &

I’ve been trolling the web for awhile searching for the best data visualization sites.  These are some of my favorites.  Many of them also contain links to other excellent resource sites.

www.perceptualedge.com

Typical business information vendors require you to invest a lot of money before you receive any actual benefit from your purchase.

InterWorks takes a different approach.  We believe that an incremental “evolutionary” model for building a business information system is more appropriate for the majority of entities with fewer than 250 employees.

Why?  Building a solution incrementally and using Tableau Software as the front end user interface provides the following benefits:

I was inspired to quit a job and an industry that I had worked in for over 20 years to work in the technology field and promote data visualization.

My experience at the first Tableau User Conference in July of 2008 really motivated me to make this career change.  While having a very interesting and fulfilling job before I realized that there was a common theme every job responsibility or project I had to manage.

I wanted the data first.

In part II of this series, Some Words You Need to Know,  I explained some of the basic terminology required to understand the concepts which will be discussed in later blog posts for this series.

Uncertainty about numbers is the source of a lot of arguments in business, government and in your personal life. 

The Big BI industry has tried to address this problem by pointing out the obvious benefits that a data warehouse can bring, that being:

NASA has terms to explain what comprises 95% of the universe.  These terms are dark matter and dark energy. 

What are dark matter and dark energy?  We don't really know yet.  At this point we only know if their existance. 

I think of data in the same way. 

Every business collects lots of data.  A surprising small amount of that information is effectively collected and analyzed. Only a small fraction of this data is effectively analyzed and understood.

This "Dark Data" represents a missed opportuntity in many companies.