Dan English's BI Blog: Business Intelligence

Magenic National Webinar Recording - ‘Make Better Decisions with your Data’

Tue, 15 Jul 2008 02:21:59 GMT

Aaron and I did our webinar last month and it went fairly well. I don’t quite have the speaker phone deal worked out yet and talking to a monitor can be a little tough, but we did it. I would have much rather been able to see everyone face-to-face, but it was a chance to evangelize and spread the good word of the MS BI Platform and talk about the BI Maturity Model.

You can check out the recording of this webinar here and if you want to download the presentation you can pull it down from my SkyDrive account here.

Microsoft purchasing Zoomix

Tue, 15 Jul 2008 02:08:46 GMT

I read Jamie Thomson’s blog here this afternoon and read the article on Zoomix’s site and Microsoft is adding more to its MDM arsenal. Zoomix will add more MDM capabilities and add some great data quality portions. Is this more of a move for the MDM portion or SQL Server Platform or both? I hope that this gets incorporated into the BI Platform and adds some more to the already existing fuzzy logic and data profiling portions in SSIS. Data quality is extremely important and there never seems to be enough time allocated to it, so having tools to help streamline the process is very helpful.

Business Intelligence (BI) Webinar - Make Better Decisions with Your Data

Thu, 29 May 2008 09:34:49 GMT

DATE CHANGE - from June 3 to June 24

Tuesday, June 24 at 11:00 AM Pacific, 1:00 PM Central, 2:00 PM Eastern Aaron Lowe, one of Magenic's SQL Server Aces out of the Chicago office, and I will be presenting a webinar. This webinar is titled 'Make Better Decisions with Your Data' and is the first of two webinars we will be doing over the next couple of months. We are planning on another one towards the end of July that will be more technical in nature and focus on the new BI improvements in SQL Server 2008.

So what will you get by attending this webinar? Good question. You are going to walk away from this webinar with the following information:

The definition of BI
An understanding of the BI Maturity Model and where you are at
The difference between a spreadmart and a datamart
The definition of a BI Platform and an overview of Microsoft's BI offerings

UPDATED invite link (hyperlink below has been updated)

To find out more or to sign up for the webinar check out the following link here.

BI Blog Aggregator

Sat, 23 Feb 2008 19:37:23 GMT

Just did a search on BI blog sites on Google and came across this site - http://www.biblogs.com/. This site is currently aggregating over 60 BI blog related sites and is an excellent source of information and makes it much easier to manage. It easily replaced more than 20 of my pre-configured blog sites that I have setup in RSS Bandit and introduced me to another 30 or 40 that I was unaware of. I sent them an email to include my blog in their site.

Follow-up: I am not sure how far back this aggregator goes, so for the time being I am not removing any of my current feeds. Here is how the feed works for the BI aggregator:

...the feed provided by the BI Blogs site only contains the most recent 40 posts that have hit the site so you can only pull the most recent data into your aggregator...

If you want more than that you will have to visit the site.

Microsoft Enterprise Cube Video

Sat, 09 Feb 2008 13:18:06 GMT

Just got done watching the Revenue Management video outlining the the new turnkey solution from Microsoft. From watching the video and reviewing a presentation from the Australian BI Summit Conference in November in regards to the Microsoft Enterprise Cube (MEC) this is a pre-built solution that will sit on top of an existing data warehouse. I had first heard about the MEC in a blog posting by Dan Meyers last year and Chris Webb has talked about it as well.

It doesn't appear that this will be an available product, it will most likely be a service from Microsoft's consulting services. From reviewing the slides there will be four packaged solutions: Customer Segmentation, Revenue Management, Profitability Management, and Churn Analysis. It also states that this can be up-and-running in 16 weeks and that a mobile version of accessing the MEC will eventually be available.

I think this is a great idea to get some sort of a normalized data warehouse, if at all possible, for viewing the data. The only issue that I can see is that every customer has different data and different requirements, so there is always going to be some additional modifications needed. Plus this would produce a second data warehouse in the environment for reporting and analysis, so where did the 'single version of the truth' go now? Now the customer is going to have to be reporting from two different environments and hopefully the data is in synch.

The architecture for this solution is going to utilize an ETL process (SSIS) to extract the data from the existing data warehouse into the new pre-defined MEC and this will sit on top of PerformancePoint Server (not sure if this is a requirement, but assuming that it is). It sounds like there will be built-in workflows and dashboards that will be available to effectively analyze the data and make informed business decisions.

I tried to checkout the link to the MEC site, but it apparently does not exist yet.