Posts Tagged ‘BI’

Microsoft recently released a free Excel 2010 add-in which uses PowerPivot to analyze your schedule from your Outlook calendar. The add in, named Calendar Analytics Tool, has two main benefits. The first is that it is extremely useful (and cool). By using the familiar Excel pivot table functionality, including Slicers, you have the ability to […]

A client found a cool add-in for Excel the other day that allows users to view the underlying MDX associated with Pivot tables called PTPower. This is great because beginning MDX developers can use it to quickly view the underlying MDX for a Pivot table and use it to build elements within the SSAS cube, […]

From time to time, we have customers who want to offer Microsoft’s Business Intelligence visualization tools like PerformancePoint dashboards as a service to users connecting to SharePoint from the Internet. Typically this represents a pretty big challenge, especially if there’s any requirement that access to the data be granularly filtered at the data tier (Analysis […]

This method has been blogged about in various places on the web. Below is my take on a recent implementation of this method with some screen shots, helpful hints and some things to lookout for. One approach to dynamically allowing / denying access to the data contained within an Analysis Services Cube via PerformancePoint is […]

Mobile BI is gaining a lot of attention with the huge increase in the demand for mobile devices. This topic routinely comes up in conversations with our customers as they (along with everyone else) want to be able to receive the same analytics and user experience they interact with on their desktop/laptop on their smart […]

It’s always heart-warming when we can see the results of our work and the human impact – when healthcare analytics and reported outcomes drive to a better patient experience and positive outcomes. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer recently referenced good systems being able to generate outcomes information at Texas Children’s Hospital in a speech he gave […]

Recently, I was tasked with creating an internal Dashboard which allowed for Practice Leadership to track metrics related to sales pipeline change. The first thing that came to mind was a demo I had previously seen from someone at Microsoft. The functionality consisted of selecting a KPI in a Scorecard and having a Trend Chart […]

I was reading “2011 Predictions: MU Goes Tactical, ACO Strategic” where John Moore, Chilmark Research, lists 2011 key IT healthcare trends. I have a payer background so my view of ACOs is slanted to the systems and processes that have been put in place over the years at Payers (DM, CM, UM, Wellness, Pharmacy Benefit […]

Storing documents on a file server and connecting to them with metadata stored in a database is rather common. Let’s talk about the situations in which you’d like to surface the metadata attached to the file in Business Connectivity Services (BCS) and elsewhere using a single Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) service. To return a file […]

So you’ve spent an extraordinary amount of time and resources implementing a top notch BI solution at your organization and no one is using it, or at least they say they are not. So what now? Well, chances are people are using it without even knowing. Many organizations face this dilemma going live with their […]

Typical to most BI projects, the biggest challenge as a consultant is to quickly gain an understanding of the client’s data. Oftentimes I get placed in a room with all IT personnel, and I am expected to get up to speed with all the systems and data as I gather requirements to build out some […]

It is very easy for SSIS packages to get messy if you don’t adhere to some strict naming conventions. As a consultant, my job is to try to make the SSIS packages as easy to understand as possible. One way to do this is to make sure to use naming conventions for all your tasks […]