John Brookmyre's Blog : BI

Tourism and Technology - Virtual Tour of London and South Africa 2010

john.brookmyre — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 03:56:00 GMT

Living away from home makes you miss friends, family… and, perhaps oddly, the place. VR Web Design offer a service which gives a Virtual Tour of London and other cities which is very innovative and cool.

Note: the spheres are areas of focus / interest which can be clicked on to shift the focus to another part of the city.

This was another Matthew Harris find (thanks for the gems big show). It is especially relevant as I recently was interviewed for an article in the South African media regarding the impact of the Internet and how information can help the leisure and hotel industry in the South Africa in the lead up to the World Cup 2010 and beyond. Below are some of the thoughts I had on this and I would be really interested to know your thoughts:

The opportunities offered to hotel and leisure organisations by the internet and Web 2.0.

The routes to market for the hotel and leisure industry have dramatically changed over the last decade as well as the behavioural patterns of users – this is thanks to the Internet’s evolution (in terms of technology, the Internet’s reach and bandwidth improvements – the above is a perfect example) and revolution (with the dawning of social network sites) both contributing to the explosion of Internet users making the internet the norm for information gathering and importantly, sharing. No longer do people visit travel agents as their main research point for holiday travel or a simple website but rather they use a myriad of sources such as interactive maps – where a potential visitor can explore the services of the facility / area, or user generated content (previous visitors have shared comments along with pictures and movies) which gives the customer a much better appreciation of the experience of people with the same make up – the reputation of companies is now totally in the public domain.

CRM, ERP, BI and other operational systems – are they worth implementing?

IT is an enabler and can be used to give a competitive advantage in any industry; this is true of the hotel and leisure industry. Information and data which is held by a company is an asset and like all assets this should be fully utilised. The data held on customers (nationality, number of guests in the party, stay, frequency of stay, questionnaire responses, activities) should contribute to building up the picture of the types of people who should be targeted – this can assist with marketing campaigns, it can ensure continuous improvements to cater for the guests and also potentially show opportunities to highlight potential weaknesses or opportunities to partner. Planning for events should use the benefit of hindsight and therefore historic data so that effective planning can occur. The information you have should also be enriched with other data which is in the public domain – dates of games, weather, scheduled trips etc so that an effective looking glass is available to use what if analysis. The other facet of technology which may be utilised is collaboration – find out what your staff think, find out what your guests think while they are there, share ideas and thoughts with partner operators or even competitors.

Gearing up for 2010 – how IT can help.

Whether you are a small or large firm we are approaching a fantastically exciting time with 2010 for the hotel and leisure industry in South Africa - technology is here as an enabler and an accelerator - failure to use it is not asking to fail but it increases the risk of missing out on making the most of this opportunity – 2010 can be a spring board to an exciting future and technology will give a competitive advantage – the customers are using it shouldn’t you? As the old adage goes the customer is always right - with the explosion of user generated content the customer is now always right and if he is not happy he will tell the world and they are listening.

On this subject, I am in Seattle this week for a conference and have noticed that in the hotel lobby there are Surface devices to explore the local area and facilities which is quite cool although the people who were on them earlier where playing draughts / checkers – still collaboration, right?…

Would love to hear your thoughts,

John

Technorati Tags: Data Visualisation,Data Visualization,South Africa 2010,Knowlege Management,Information Visualisation,Innovation

Data Visualization in a 3D World

john.brookmyre — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 13:26:00 GMT

When Alexander of Macedonia [link] was 33 he cried salt tears because there were no more worlds to conquer, its a shame he wasn't around in today's world as there would be plenty of battles for him to get his teeth into - especially with visualizing reams of information in a ever flowing and tempestuous sea of data which can be visualized in a 3D virtual world...

Recently I have been looking into different visualization techniques and I have been reading up on the opinions / thoughts of various leaders on the subject, my findings have distilled what I already knew - data visualisation is not just the icing on the cake it is the key part of the cake. It is at least as important as the data effort and is critical to the success of any data related work - I have a bunch of posts in the pipeline where I hope to share some of the tools and techniques that I have been looking at (including the offerings from Tableau [link], Panopticon [link] and others).

I digress, in this post I wanted to write about a really fascinating idea I stumbled across this morning - a 3D virtual world to display complex data sets and that is what made me think of the quote above. Green Phosphor [link] aim to help businesses obtain insight by integrating complex data sets within 3D virtual world platforms. It opens a myriad of opportunities - freedom to fly around worlds rather than slicing and dicing / drill down, an interactive, submerged environment along with the staggering collaboration prospects too...

The above screen shots come from the public demo, called Second Life Glasshouse [link]. At time of writing, this is currently available for free online perusal. Very scientific / research focused but the potential for the BI space is pretty obvious - go to the Glasshouse site [link], enter a username with no password and start to walk around. Press w to get rid of gravity with Page Up and Page Down enabling you to fly. It is worth hitting = a few times to speed up walking. You can change to a first person perspective too. Alternatively check out the video below (demo starts at 39 seconds):

I am one for advocating that visualizations should provide actionable insight before anything else and I would recommend you having a quick look through these slides [link] by Ben Lindquist, CEO, Green Phosphor to see some other cool views as well as other benefits in terms of data sources and analytical functionality.

As always comments and feedback are welcome, thanks,

John

twitter.com/brookmyre

Technorati Tags: Data Visualisation,Data Visualization,Information Visualisation,Information Visualization,Business Intelligence,John Brookmyre

PerformancePoint - Pricing

john.brookmyre — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 17:03:57 GMT

With the recent changes to PerformancePoint Server the way it is procured and licensed is changing. If like me, you still want to offer clients a BI solution which uses PerformancePoint the following may be of interest - good news, it is getting cheaper (thanks to the guys at Microsoft who gave me the information):

· Until April 1st, the only way to acquire PPS is to buy it at the product list price. It is not “free” until April 1st.

· From April 1st until the day before Office 14 launch, the only way to acquire PPS is via MOSS (Standard+Enterprise) CAL + SA. They call it an “SA entitlement”. PPS will not be an additional license cost.

· With Office 14, PPS 2007 will become part of SharePoint. This means that you will need MOSS (Standard+Enterprise) CAL. No SA will be required.

To see some examples of PPS in action check out the following links Geo, Retail. As always comments and feedback are welcome!

John

twitter.com/brookmyre

Technorati Tags: Information Visulaization,Information Visulaisation,Data Visulaization,Data Visualisation,BI,Business Intelligence

The future according to Microsoft - Data Visualization and Information Visualization

john.brookmyre — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 20:16:53 GMT

I don't want to wish my life away, but I cannot wait for 2019 if this is what we are going to be working, playing and living with.

Predicting the future is tough - we still don't have flying cars, my jet pack is yet to materialise and summer holidays aren't on the moon... but some of Microsoft's Business Division have come up with these pretty awesome looking video montages of how technology could be in 2019. This was presented by Stephen Elop (Microsoft's Business Division President) at the Wharton Business Technology Conference. You can also check out the companion slides which are awesome - not a bullet point in site.

Health

Retail

Finance

Here is the full video of Stephen Elop in action - worth seeing it all joined up if you have 30 mins (manuscript):

Any other links to similar would be appreciated as I love this sort of thing,

John

twitter.com/brookmyre

Technorati Tags: Future,Data Visualisation,Data Visualization,Information Visualisation,Information Visualization,Microsoft 2019

Tell a stroy, because sometimes less isn't more... it is less

john.brookmyre — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 08:27:00 GMT

Building on from a previous post Business Intelligence Data Visualisation - How to Confuse... I look into more detail about adding context to BI with a quick win - add textual descriptions to reports to tell a story.

I have all too often seen and indeed been involved in projects where wonderful reports have been created; agonising over how to make sure the visualization that is being shown is as simple as it can be and then marveling at its beauty... But could the proverbial "man off the street" understand it - almost certainly not, they have no understanding of the business or the context... however (the damning bit) could the "man off the department" it was designed for understand it? I think we need to be telling more of a story when doing BI.

Have we emphasised too heavily on keeping reports clean, and uncluttered that we have neglected to include the context for the user to understand what they are looking at? Is it time for us to tell a story jack a nory when presenting information?

Would you see a newspaper article which only showed a headline and a figure? Well you might if you read some daily newspapers, but would you want to?
Would you ever send an email to someone with just a value in it or a graph?
Would you write a report with just a series of charts?

I doubt anyone would answer yes to these but in BI this is done all the time. Remember at school being drilled to cover the who, what, where, when, how (or similar) and to structure write ups to explain what you were trying to do, what you did, what you found? To often in reports this is forgotten, there is no context background or story to explain the information - we are expecting the user to interpret what is being shown - maybe fair enough but wasting their time having to understand where a few succinct lines could really help is more valuable inn my eyes.

So the following structure would be better - explaining what the report is (what information it delivers, description of the filters and where / when the data came from etc), then showing the report and highlighting some of the pertinent points (nothing ground breaking - top 10's, trends, other interesting reports). Dashboards definitely come into their own here (lots of different views, links to people, docs, etc) but again, all too often there is no story for the user to follow. In our struggle to wrestle the most out of screen real estate, having an intro to the report/section must be justified. Need to be careful that this is not just lip service and just having drivel for the sake of it but actual real business meaning and justification for the report - i.e. what it shows and the benefits of the information as a simple example. This then means if you are a frequent user you can still get the benefits but if you are a new or infrequent user you can get up to speed quickly (and if you review printouts in a months / year time you know what it is. This feeds back into other previous posts about Social BI and BI Geo Mashups - it is all about the context, the story behind the information to reduce the time to interpret results to get at the actionable insight.

As always I would love to know your thoughts,

John

BI Mashups - Let's go Geo

john.brookmyre — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 10:27:00 GMT

Gartner have highlighted mashups as a growth area for 2009 and predict that "by 2012, one-third of analytic applications applied to business processes will be delivered through coarse-grained application mashups" in the Five Predictions report. I have been looking at harnessing the power of mixing geographic visualisation techniques with Business Intelligence. Below is a video of a mashup I put together using MOSS, PerformancePoint, Windows Live Earth and Google Earth (or you can access the video directly from here):

Time	Interest point
00:00	MOSS Report Centre
00:22	Oil and Gas Report
00:48	Report and Windows Live Earth
03:18	Google Earth

Thanks to Howard Van Rooijen's patience, I have also been coming out of my comfort zone and looking at some ADO / .Net point clustering code which Howard and Steve Wright put together:

This means that you can cluster multiple points for the same location together, i.e. we can have a size weighting as well as using the visual icon to display information- I'm thinking heat maps on maps! Drop me a line if you are interested to see how this was done. Howard has also been working on an Open Source project called StyleCop for reSharper which ensures QA on code and much more, check it out here.

As always feedback would be welcome,

John

Technorati Tags: Business Intelligence,BI,Data Analysis,Data Visualisation,Data Visualization,Geo Spatial,BI Geo Mashups,MOSS,PPS,Google Earth,Maps

Social BI - there is not a monopoly on good ideas

john.brookmyre — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 11:36:00 GMT

I don't mean Social BI as in a Social Smoker or Social Drinker - someone who only does it on weekends, in a crowd or once in a while....

I am coming from the collaboration, decision making dialogue, tagging perspective. Where users have a greater ability to collaborate informally as people do with other social sites (LinkedIn, Facebook etc) - harnessing the knowledge held by individuals and supporting users to create communities to encourage adoption and collaboration across the organisation. For example the ability to share photos of safety risks from their camera phone and add tags to enable other users to find them or rating reports based on the number of people who have viewed them or a user rating system so that users can quickly see the high value reports - this information could then be used for future requirements / investment priorities and to avoid reinventing the wheel by discovering the valuable reports. Organisations have a lot of great resources and by empowering the individuals to drive, share, comment, rate their BI / areas of interest will contribute to an exiting, dynamic, and transparent environment. Gartner have highlighted this in their Five Predictions report - "exploit[ing] the groundswell of interest in informal collaboration. Instead of promoting a formal, top-down decision-making initiative, these IT leaders will tap people's natural inclination to use social software to collaborate and make decisions". One leader in this field is Antivia, whilst I prefer to be technology agnostic, some of the things that they are doing are very impressive. A short intro video can be found here.

Looking at some similar examples which are used now - Facebook allows photos, status messages to be commented on and photos can be tagged by other users so a dialogue can be created. Flickr allows photos and videos to be tagged so that users can find similar items of interest or geo. Amazon show you products which are frequently bought with what you are looking at and what other users who bought this have bought (see above). And I haven't even touched Twitter yet:

As always feedback and thoughts would be really appreciated,

John

twitter.com/brookmyre

Technorati Tags: Social BI,Antivia,Conchango,Cosultants,Data Analysis,Data Visualisation,Data Visualization,Gartner,Geo Spatial,John Brookmyre,User Centric

Associative data modelling - a brief intro

john.brookmyre — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 23:29:00 GMT

Associative data modeling is something that I have used a lot in the past for dynamic entity centric Data Warehouses. Associative data models can offer a more flexible platform than relational models and can be used for iterative data development (although performance can be an issue). From playing with AWS and seeing some of the Azure and SDS work from Jamie Thomson and James Saull I can see a lot of parallels between the new cloud world and this technique. Note - all schemas below are included for illustartive purposes and have been simplified to illustrate the message.

A problem domain?

You need to have a store the following scenario:

Aren't relational models perfect for this?

Hopefully I can make the assumption that everyone reading this knows what a relational data model is? If not, check out this entry in Wikipedia. Relational models as we all know, have data stored in separate tables depending on the type of data or entity, simple example - Customers, Addresses, Orders and products might look like this:

These entities are then structured into tables to keep the necessary information for that entity and relationships / links exist between the different entities for example, continuing the example we might have a schema like this:

If you are gathering information about customers and orders this is great. If you need to add a new attribute onto the Customer - maybe National Insurance number, Car Registration or Active flag - easy right? If you want to delete the column Registration Number as that field is now defunct - still no problem. New entities can be added too with relative ease. However one thing that this is doing is hard coding everything behind (i.e. ETL, data capture interfaces) and in front (i.e. reporting or applications). So each time we change the database we need to change the ETL and the reports or applications (+ test) so potentially expensive... this is a really basic scenario but changes to the warehouse or schema could be huge and far reaching... So what is the alternative - an associative model.

What is an associative data model?

All different types of data - entities, attributes and relationships are stored together in a single, consistent structure that never changes - for example all the information above could be stored in these tables:

Which would look like this in the tables:

This is only an example (i.e. might have a seperate table for types and the data type wouldn't be repeated) but hopefully this gives an idea of how it works. The ETL can pour all of the data into this table strucutre without having to worry. As all the meta data exists the entites, attributes and relationships can be created on the fly - so the apps / reports etc can be run on the file or can be based on views. For more details a complete overview by Simon Williams can be found here - The Associative Data Model.

As always sugesstions and comments are appreciated,

John

Follow me, follow you... Welcome to Google Latitude!

john.brookmyre — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 12:33:12 GMT

Google Latitude is a new service that will allow you to track the location of friends and family via your phone or PC.

Latitude is an add-on to Google Maps mobile software - you'll need to update to the latest version (3.0.0 at time of writing, no iPhone or Android (weird) support yet but I am up and running on my Blackberry Pearl - not sure how devastating it will be to battery life). The service automatically detects my location using cell triangulation or GPS (if it is available) - and broadcasts my position to people I choose from my Google contacts list. Interestingly you can set your location manually too - "I am at work boss, honest check on Google Latitude...". If you have limited GPS coverage i.e. are inside or just don't have coverage then you might be able to use Sky Hook, haven't had a play myself, but it looks like a neat software solution to get accurate positional data using the information available (Wi-Fi access points, GPS satellites, cellular towers ...).

My friend in Dubai (I doff my hat to you Mr. Harris) showed me this and he is sharing his location so I can see this view in Google (iGoogle Gadget) and something similar on my phone:

This could enable quite a lot of neat collaboration applications and some scary ones too. Could be useful to share your interests / ideas with people in the vicinity or if someone is a doctor / first-aider / plumber etc to let others know. Your location could be picked up by digital advertising to offer the right ad to cover the majority people or as you walk past a shop you could be invited in and have a tailored experience based on your profile/ shopping list / state of the fridge etc - never have to route around or be short of milk again. Like Brightkite (Facebook with geo), enriched with info from LinkedIn, Twitter or Facebook it would allow people near by to check out your details - interests, position etc. So why are Google doing this? The picture that they can build up of our habits will be pretty compelling and probably fairly lucrative for the ads. From a BI perspective, another step for the brave Generation-V mentioned in an earlier post, BI Personas - A Pyramid of Need.

As always comments and feedback would be appreciated and feel free to add me on LinkedIn / Twitter from the above links,

John

----------------------------

Update - 05/04/2009:

----------------------------

Just where I want to be, one step ahead of the Metro. A free morning paper in London puts across its take on Latitude...

Technorati Tags: BI,Business Intelligence,Data Visualisation,Data Visualization,Google Latitude,Geo Spatial,Maps,Generation V

I know I am me...

john.brookmyre — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 21:35:00 GMT

Moving into the multiple factor authentication World (crypto calculators, tags etc) it looks like we may all have a lot of these different devices to authenticate our selves, here are my ramblings on the subject...

Does anyone else have a bank account which uses crypto calculators, tags or mobile phone codes to validate a transaction? Two factor authentication is fast becoming the norm in the fight to reduce fraud, which cannot be argued against, but what about me as a user? How many times have you needed to do an online transaction and realised that you have left your calculator at work for the weekend or you can only find the one for you other account(s)... Or you are at home trying to check your work emails only to find that you have left your tag somewhere else? These scenarios happen to me quite a lot and I have two tags and two crypto calculators... If we look at the natural progression with fraudsters getting better and more and more information been stored on us, it wouldn't be a massive leap of faith to imagine that we are going to get a lot of these calculators and tags - perhaps Tesco, Amazon and EBay will start to require this level of authentication and maybe this will balloon to all web-sites which require any form of authentication... Live Mesh / Cloud too - this may sound a little far fetched, but look at the explosion of store cards for similarities where some people have upwards of 10 cards. This could also be used for the authentication for cloud computing too which will need some stringent security to gain widespread adoption.

I was impressed recently when I could use my Google Account to access other sites using OpenID and equally impressed when I was able to use Map My Run with my Facebook credentials. From Wikipedia:

OpenID is an open, decentralized user identification standard, allowing users to log onto many services with the same digital identity.

Can we have a consolidation?Is it possible for the banks (maybe not a time where they are looking to invest, but they could take a fee to sign web-sites up) or Google, OpenID, MS Passport, et al to use this concept to come together to offer users the single tag or device to provide the two factor sign on mechanism? There would surely be a lot of benefits to this approach in the fight against crime too, having one confederated repository for the use of authentication would enable analytical techniques to clearly spot potential fraud patterns or none normal behaviours which could be visualised in any number of ways or have advanced algorithms to highlight risks.

Social network visualisation techniques could be used to show the interactions of users / access points / accounts over time or a tool like Net Reveal from Detica could be used to power the investigation.

This could be enriched by including other facets to fight the fraud, why can't banks be on Facebook, Twitter (and other social tools which have widespread adoption) keeping an eye on my status so it knows where I am or where I am planning to go or share the data which the Government has (owning chunks of the banks may offer some positives) on us or the data which my phone provider has on my location? On these issues the question of big brother, risk of data loss and where to stop always comes into play - but I would happily allow my bank to follow my Twitter, Facebook status and movements to purely ensure the safety of my hard earned. Would you?

As always, any comments and thoughts would be really welcome. Thanks to everyone who has linked to me so far and left comments - much appreciated! Especially Pete Hanlon and Chris Webb.

John

Technorati Tags: Business Intelligence,Data Visualisation,Data Visualization,Cloud,Analytics,OpenID,Confederated Data,Statistics,John Brookmyre,Conchango,EMC Consulting,security,multiple factor authentication