SmartAnalytics

Big Data Analytics is now moving beyond the realm of intellectual curiosity to having a tangible impact on business. At this stage of adoption of a new technology, it becomes important to discuss how a Big Data project can move from concept to execution inside an enterprise context. Questions being asked by early adopters of Big Data include: How do I execute a SAP HANA project? How do I execute a GreenPlum data applicance project? How do I extend my legacy application to incorporate Hadoop? How do we implement Oracle Exalytics, Exalogic or Exadata? How do I upgrade my data centers to handle Big Data? 

Just attended a whole day training about Pharmaceutical sales data by Kosta Tzavaras, the renowned author of books like ‘Pharmaceutical Sales Data 101’ and ‘Patient Data 101’. The information was quite insightful and definitely helped me better understand how different sets of data available from different sources are analyzed to serve the Pharmaceutical sales force.

By 2015, nearly 3 billion people will be online, pushing the data created and shared to nearly 8 zettabytes.  Centurylink created this cool infographic to highlight the data deluge and big data issues.  

It is way past mid night and I am reading an interesting article on Mashable about Umami (umami.tv) launching a mobile app that uses the ‘hearing’ sense of a mobile device such as iPhone or iPad to deliver content on second screens.  There are several second screen apps in the market but this one takes the top spot by integrating the ‘hearing’ sense component to make relevant viewing decisions. The possibility of its integration with social checkin platforms like GetGlue (getglue.com) also looked quite tempting.

What has this got to do with BI? Well…not much right now. Mobile BI is still in its infancy and most BI apps on mobile are just a pretty presentation of the same old corporate data that need some pre-design work to fit within the form factor and the real estate available. Not sure if the mobile BI apps are really utilizing any sensing aspect of a mobile device like ‘hearing’, ‘vision’ and ‘geo-location’  at all.

Let us look at how other non-BI mobile apps use the sensing features of a mobile device.

1. Vision: Google Goggles can use a mobile devices’ camera to scan any object and provide you with relevant information about the object like price, stores a product is sold in, etc.
2. Hearing: iPhone’s SIRI can listen to your voice commands and respond to you. Similarly, build-in GPS also understands your voice commands and provides you with directions. Umami is another example of the use of the sense of hearing to deliver the relevant media content.
3. Geo-location:  Yelp, Google maps and many other apps deliver content/information relevant to your geo location.

In my 14 years of career in Business Intelligence (BI) and after executing several end-to-end BI projects, I have barely come across a handful of ‘good’ BI Business Analysts (BI BA).   Aren’t there enough in the industry?  I am not sure. What makes them so scarce? ‘BI Business Analyst’ to me looks like a commonly found role in most of the end-to-end BI projects. If this role is an absolute must on BI projects and I haven’t found many ‘good’ ones, what does that mean? Haven’t these projects been ‘successfully’ implemented? Well…they have been implemented….but whether they were ‘successful’ is the real question.

Keep hearing about Big Data and Hadoop? Having a hard time understanding what is behind the curtain?

Every BI Manager must know that the 3 key expectations that any business group has from their BI infrastructure are data availability, data reliability and data completeness. Even if one of these is not fulfilled, the business will not be able to make the right decisions.