Martin's Insights

In the cut-throat world of retail, BI has become the key competitive differentiator, especially considering continuously changing consumer demographics and the fact that the consumer is indeed king, now more than ever before.

A lot has been written about the skills and tasks of the data scientist, but what is also very important to consider is the impact of the role on the organisation, and vice versa.

Today’s managers, decision makers and executives spend a majority of their time away from their desks, and it is these mobile workers who often need the most up-to-date information. Numerous enterprises are leveraging smartphone and tablet devices in line with BI practices to retrieve data to better support on-the-spot decision making, monitor operational processes and …

Social media is fast becoming a mechanism of choice for the dissemination of and collaboration around the information delivered by BI – to the extent that it is fast becoming a key input channel of behavioural data as well.

Report Analytics scrapes data from existing reports into integrated reports for decision-makers. It is positioned as self-service business intelligence that eliminates the delays and costs of traditional data warehousing. However, I have a concern with the trustworthiness of the existing report data.

Comics are a combined medium of written text and pictorial images used to convey stories, typically in a social context. Initially comics were mostly humorous, but since then have communicated many other sentiments, and even instructive information. Contextual storytelling is analogously important in data science.

Last week I attended the Melbourne DAMA event, where Richard Kevan of Oakton presented a framework for representing and reporting data quality metrics, which they developed and implemented for the Australian Postal Services’ IT division. Other organisations also use similar frameworks. Such a framework can be used to represent, report on and analyse the measures …

Changing BI Architectures and Approaches  In today’s fast paced society everything is trying to be bigger and better. We have grown accustomed to a society where everything needs to be more advanced and developed.  This has resulted in an insatiable thirst for instant information. It is certainly no different in the business world and when …

One of my colleagues, David Logan, recently published an article on Behavioural Intelligence on ITweb. It grabbed my attention and reminded me how often organisations forget that there are other and  more important  ways to look at BI than the traditional approach of defining, implementing and reporting on KPIs. We should contemplate how BI affects …

The increasing need for wider communication and growth in prevalence of analytical decision support are driving collaborative BI, and there is certainly going to be more of this trend in the year to come – ultimately allowing for greater visibility, user interaction and greater value.

There is an enormous amount of data around, and much of it in data warehouses. We question the realities and discuss the approaches to keep the data warehouse to a handleable size, without reducing the availability of any historic data and without suffering any loss of data and information.

We live in a digital world where our access to information is unprecedented and our ability to shape or mould opinion is as easy as clicking a ‘like’ button. Imagine the  power inherent in that kind of online presence. Now imagine being able to harness that power…