Posts Tagged ‘Business Intelligence’

I recently read that 78% of patients believe EHRs boost care. What was my reaction to this news? I immediately thought, “Just wait until patients see what all of the technologies that EHRs enable can do.” Business intelligence is a perfect example. Data warehouses and data analytics provide physicians with the tools and technologies they […]

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 […]

Looking through the sessions at HIMSS 2011, one can see a wide range of topics related to business intelligence and analytics. From different uses for BI to different types of presentation vehicles to the potential of use predictive analytics, one will not be at a loss for finding something analytics related to sink their teeth […]

As I look over the various sessions and presentations for the 2011 HIMSS conference, I’m excited to see an increased focus on data governance as a topic. At the same time, I ask myself “is it enough?” Data governance in healthcare (especially in the provider space), has often been a neglected and forgotten critical component […]

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 […]

The cube synchronization in SQL 2008 is vastly improved compared to SQL 2005 (much faster). On the target (or production) server you have the option to run the Synchronization Wizard within SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) to pull data from a source (or staging) server, but what if you want to run the ETL and […]

Problem Within most BI projects you need to in some way handle slowly changing dimensions in your ETL solution. Be it Type 1, Type 2, they are unavoidable because truncating the dimension and fact tables and reloading from scratch is not an option unless the data warehouse is very small. On most of my projects […]

Overview One issue that I have run into in every BI project is data quality and data cleansing. Oftentimes data cleansing can be excluded from the scope of a BI project since the client is often afraid to even tackle the problem. On top of that, data cleansing can often be a project all by […]

Here’s the scenario: you’ve got two Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) services that return related data. For instance, let one of them be a service that returns People and let the other be a service that returns Documents. Every Document was authored by one or more Person. Since these services are separate Line of Business (LOB) […]