Open Source Analytics

You can trust the guys at Juice to put together great lists of resources. Their recent Essential Excel Skills blog post and the Excel Core Knowledge Wiki are excellent examples showcasing fundamental skills no analyst can do without.

Top Resources for Analysts: Excel, Data Analysis, and Business Intelligence is another list you shouldn’t miss.

If you work with data for a living, the following sites are worth a visit (or a subscription) to learn from some of the best, most passionate practitioners.

I recently got an email from James Gardner about Tom Davenport’s Free Webinar being organized today by Aquent in association with the American Marketing Association. Tom Davenport is a consultant and prolific writer (and speaker) on topics related to technology, analytics and data driven strategies.

Tom’s HBR article titled “Competing on Analytics” is based on his profiling of early adopters of Analytics that compete today based on data driven strategies. The research is also expected to be published in a book format in spring 2007.
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Most Data Warehousing projects fail. As many as 70-80% as per some claims. Still, no one talks about them.

Data Mining, Analytics and BI roll-outs are unlike any other project your organization may have undertaken. Political and non-technical issues can derail the fragile project which is anyway struggling to handle ambiguous and constantly changing requirements.
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A simple point that most BI vendors and consultants seem to miss is that for BI to deliver upon its promise, it first has to be adopted by the end users. BI has to become simple and usable for the broad based adoption that is needed in today’s hypercompetitive world. It is the hidden Cost of Complexity that turns off end users and results in the fact that most BI projects fail.
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We’ve long held that Analytics and BI cannot (and should not) be viewed as yet another technology/tool for the traditional business. It IS NOT yet another IT project.

The true value of BI is in viewing (and nurturing) it as the cognitive base and a response model for an organization in dialog with the ‘external reality’. In that sense BI is a truly disruptive phenomenon, even though it is the logical next step for the all-round ‘digitization’ that has been taking place for the last few years.

Yet, most managers appear to be struggling to fit Analytics into their traditional repertoire instead of looking at it afresh and leveraging it like any disruptive technology should.

An interesting HBS Working Knowledge article about Disruptive Innovation that may give you some ideas: Six Keys to Building New Markets by Unleashing Disruptive Innovation : HBS Working Knowledge

Here’s an interesting article that applies Systems Theory concepts to BI and views it in the context of the organizational environment it operates in. If organizations are viewed as cognitive systems in dialog with their environment, then BI is a ‘technical artifact that encodes a description of the business environment (i.e., the data model).’ (more…)

Yesterday I was at a CTO Summit for Banking & Financial services in Mumbai where a paper of mine has been published. Met quite a few interesting people out there.

The paper is targeted at financial services that are not doing analytics yet (there are quite a few of them around actually!). It sets out a road map for doing analytics by starting small to quickly start delivering business value, and then gradually taking on more complex projects.

Click here to read Delivering on the BI Promise: A Financial Services Road Map

Thanks to Dratz for letting me lift a graphic from his paper on BI as an Abstraction Architecture.

And here’s an excellent presentation on calculating ROI for BI projects.

BetterManagement.com: Calculating ROI for BI Projects

Here is a link to a CIO Magazine editorial outlining some successful BI implementations. Do note that for BI to be really successful, it has to be made available to a wide range of people within the organization and not just to a privileged few. Widespread information dissemnitation within the organization through adoption of BI is what “Information Democracy” is all about.

Business Intelligence: Not Just for Bosses Anymore - Editorial - CIO

The OLAP Report is one of the oldest and most authoritative independent research resources for organizations buying and implementing OLAP applications. It was started by Nigel Pendse in October 1994, as an authoritative and independent voice seeking to clear the hype and misinformation flooding the field. (more…)