Last week, I attended 2 days of Fast Track Data Warehouse and 3 days of Parallel Data Warehouse training at the Chicago Microsoft Technology Center presented by Jim Carroll, Ross LoForte and John Plummer. It was an intense, thought provoking week, to say the least, with so much information I could not possibly touch on […]
Posts Tagged ‘Business Intelligence’
Take Your Day Back With PowerPivot
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 […]
Data Driven Scorecard Could Cure Health Plan Cost Concerns
A recent HIMSS Analytics white paper showed that using clinical data to decrease costs was a top concern for health plans. Respondents emphasized the importance of becoming more strategic with regard to both individual patient data and data that relates to groups of patients in identified geographies. In comparison to health providers, health plans are […]
Using Core Measures to Jump-Start Enterprise Analytics
Today I spoke in a webinar entitled “Using Core Measures to Jump-Start Enterprise Analytics”. During this presentation I covered a number of topics around business intelligence in healthcare and specifically around an approach called targeted analytics. I reviewed some of the options available today to healthcare organizations and provided an example of building an enterprise […]
Caring for Patients Means Caring for their Master Data
The complexity of medicine and the lack of common standards, practices and clinical vocabularies across the healthcare system makes getting clean clinical data a dirty task. There are many applications across a healthcare system that rely on master data, and a single error can have a far-reaching impact. In many businesses, errors in master data […]
What’s the Best Approach to Healthcare Business Intelligence?
Business Intelligence for healthcare is a hot topic right now. Just about every list of top priorities for healthcare organizations includes business intelligence or analytics. This was evident during the recent HIMSS Conference, where the number of options presented by vendors was impressive. So this begs the question: “What is the best approach for implementing […]
Business Intelligence Requirements Under Meaningful Use
While other industries have been taking advantage of the power of Business Intelligence for the past two decades, healthcare has largely lagged behind. Recent KLAS research estimates that fewer than 100 U.S. hospital systems have enterprise data warehouses and sophisticated reporting tools at their disposal for use in clinical systems. Trending of public sentiment within […]
Excel Add-in to help beginners (and experts) write MDX
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, […]
Leveraging PowerPivot functionality in Excel
Introduction PowerPivot builds on existing Excel features and extends their functionality. Those familiar with Excel are aware of Pivot tables. Excel typically involves creating a pivot chart with one single data source. PowerPivot allows users to extract data from various sources. These data sources can also be linked to one another with in a PowerPivot […]
PerformancePoint Identity Delegation with SAML Claims Providers
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 […]
Using Custom Data to Securely Access Analysis Services Data via PerformancePoint
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 It Realistic?
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 […]