Posts Tagged ‘BI’

A Data Warehouse (DW), among other things, can be an important step in establishing a holistic Business Intelligence program.  But, even by itself, there are some very good reasons to implement a DW, as cited below. Due to unacceptable transaction processing times in server/disk bound tasks, many firms find that processing their reports and queries […]

“Our BI system needs better testing.  How?” always piques my interest.  The breadth of the BI ecosystem means that testing the system end-to-end involves crossing many technologies, areas of responsibility (functional competencies), and physical systems.  This covers most (all) the tool classes in this series, at very least: Data extracts/data acquisition – wide variety of […]

In my February blog, I wrote about basic BI categories so we could assess our BI environment. If you recall our BI categories were as follows: Type I – Reporting and Query tool sets Type II – Analytic tool sets Type III – Predictive Modeling tool sets Now, we can gather some facts to measure […]

Perficient was recently recognized as a Computerworld Honors Laureate recipient for work done with the Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston, Tx. Texas Children’s, an internationally recognized pediatric hospital, is utilizing business intelligence technology to understand outcomes. At Texas Children’s, the heart center team were creating over 450 spreadsheets in order to assist in the management […]

Cindy O’Neill from Microsoft interviewed Perficient’s Martin Sizemore at HIMSS 2012 on accountable care, meaningful use, mobility, social media, cloud, portals and business intelligence solutions.

Documentation management (not document management!) is the rather narrow topic of how a development team manages the system specifications that are used throughout the life of a system.  In most teams, this is a huge blind spot with some teams simply not documenting much of anything and others spending an enormous amount of time (money) […]

As a data architect, iterative development scared the stuffing out of me at first.  I was accustomed to having the data model pretty well set up front and working hard to minimize or at least localize changes to the overall database structure.  Iterative development make change normal, so no more “holding the line!” Luckily, database […]

There is a lot of interest in Big Data these days. The common definition for Big Data is often considered to be data sets which are too large (e.g., hundreds of terabytes or into petabytes) to be handled by traditional means. Leveraging Big Data requires an extensive degree of parallelism of both data and computing, […]

Ah – my favorite topic in BI tools – data modeling and the modeling tool.  An effective data modeling tool is the primary design tool for the database tier of the BI stack and may be extended to capture the design of nearly any system component.  It’s an essential tool in the belt of all […]

This one’s easy. Every team needs source control. Period. No exceptions. A team of one needs source control. Source control tools serve two primary purposes in BI development groups: Version control during development including playing a part in code reviews and ensuring the security (backup) of the code base. Deployment support as a controlled repository […]

At HIMSS 2012 we talked with patient advocate Regina Holliday (@ReginaHolliday) on the importance of patient engagement in reducing costs and increasing quality in Healthcare.

It’s been nearly 15 years since the Joint Commission launched their first national hospital quality program, which required hospitals report on performance measures. The initial result of the performance measures was a hodgepodge of data gathered non-systematically and was rarely used to improve the quality of care. Today’s landscape of quality measures looks much different. […]