Congratulations to Microsoft for being named 2012 Channel Champion for Business Intelligence Software by CRN. CRN provides news, analysis and perspective for VARs and Technology Integrators. Both SharePoint and SQL Server are Gartner Magic Quadrant technologies. From the article by Rick Whiting Microsoft (NSDQ:MSFT) was tops in this year’s Business Intelligence Software category, besting competitors SAP (NYSE:SAP), […]
Posts Tagged ‘BI’
Iterative BI – What’s the Difference?
Recently I was in a conversation where a PM declared “Agile’s just waterfall really fast – we can do that no problem!” Uh oh. Like (most) everything, delivery methodologies are subject to fashion and trend, and Agile/Scrum/Kanban and the like are en vouge. Collective, I’ll refer to these highly cyclic methodologies as “iterative” or (little […]
Chi-Squared Challenging using SPSS
Chi-Squared Challenging using SPSS A Chi-Square Challenge (or Test) procedure organizes your data pond variables into groups and computes a chi-square statistic. Here is the specific definition: “The chi-square (chi, the Greek letter pronounced “kye”) statistic is a statistical technique used to determine if a “distribution of observed frequencies” differs from the “theoretical expected […]
Canonical Data Modeling-Marriage of SOA & Enterprise Data Model
A Canonical Model is the marriage of your data’s business semantics and the related business rules governing your enterprise asset. Your data assets can be represented by structure (Relational Data) or non- structure (Big Data) in multiple ontological frameworks. Your business semantic is composed of the natural business language used for conducting its affairs stored […]
BI Tools – Scheduling and System Automation
Way back at my first full time job, maintaining the system automation program was one of my primary duties. It was written in C, could launch one thing at a time, and documented dependencies in a cryptic text format. And I loved it because the alternates were way worse. Fast forward to today where system […]
BI Tools – Continuous Integration
Automate everything! The mantra of the real developer – I’d rather spend 2 hours automating a task than 30 minutes of repetitive typing! Continuous integration finally legitimizes that innate desire to automate during the development process. Continuous Integration (CI) tools automate the application build process and automated tests on a regular interval (or on demand […]
Healthcare data – can you dig it?
I started my career building training systems for the US Navy. Since then I have worked in Aviation, Finance, Logistics, Education, Telecommunications and Healthcare. I can honestly say the healthcare industry is the thriftiest group of people from this list. Healthcare is a market with so much money pouring through, this seems like it cannot […]
Big Data – Data Management Challenges
Big Data presents a lot of new opportunities – from analytics on petabytes of data to Complex Event Processing (CEP) of many large streams of data in real time. However, Big Data also presents big challenges for Data Management. These challenges include security/privacy, governance, data modeling, and backups. Security – security for many NoSQL-based Big […]
Is it time for Open Source in Healthcare?
From time to time, it is a good idea to re-evaluate potential IT architectures especially with the cost reduction pressures in healthcare IT. The growth in maturity of several key players in the open source software arena is gaining the attention and respect of healthcare IT decision-makers and worth evaluation as a lower cost alternative. […]
What does the Future of Healthcare Data Look Like?
Industry Today Healthcare ranks as the largest industry in the world and is responsible for generating over $4.5 billion in revenue. While the United States is home to only 5% of the total world population, US residences are responsible for nearly half ($2.2 billion) of annual healthcare expenditures. The industry provides employment to over 15 […]
BI Tools – Test Fixtures
In order to know the expected “after” of a test, you need to know the “before” (usually!). Testing in BI requires test fixtures, a defined state of the system in the “before” state. In BI, this is almost the same as a test data set, but we add in non-data system configurations, user sets, and […]
BI Tools – Test Data
BI is built on a foundation of data. Therefore, testing in BI requires test data, and that means we’ve got to get it from somewhere! I’ve seen two general strategies here: Load the test system directly with production data, meaning that the contents of the test system change with each “refresh”. Generate test data sets […]