Beyond | IT : business intelligence

Cool new spatial analysis for SharePoint users

john.mullinax — Tue, 05 May 2009 20:30:08 GMT

I’ve always been sort of a map nut. In fact, I love maps (there, I said it! :) ). Way back when I was Director of Elections for a county out in the State of Washington, I used to spend a lot of time with maps. In particular, we had a map of the county with transparent layers that folded down showing election precinct lines, school district lines, hospital district lines, and boundaries for all kinds of other districts. We even had a “Television Reception District” (really).

Working with the underlying maps and the transparent data sheets wasn’t always easy. Each transparency held data that was very precisely hand-drawn by a civil engineer (which meant we only had a couple map sets), and it was a challenge to get more than a few people gathered around the map and transparencies at any one time. Thinking back on this experience – only 15 years ago – it’s amazing how far we’ve come in our ability to make maps and spatial analysis accessible to people. And I’m happy to see that progress on this front continues!

The most recent advancement – IDV Solutions released Visual Fusion 4.0 today (thanks to Owen Allen for the tip). This solution integrates with SharePoint and uses Virtual Earth as the “base map” and plots data over the map onto transparent layers created with Silverlight. If you’ve spent much time on this blog, you already know I’m a fan of Silverlight and Virtual Earth, and Visual Fusion shows a great use of these technologies.

That said, what stands out to me is the SharePoint integration the solution offers. You can plot data from SharePoint lists – which makes it very easy for users to add their own ad hoc data. Also, you can plot data accessed via the Business Data Catalog – which makes it easy to add data from corporate data sources. And, you can even make Visual Fusion’s spatial analysis capability available to your SharePoint users as a web part! This should go a long way toward making spatial analysis available to a wider audience!

Here’s a a screenshot from IDV Solutions’ interactive demo that happens to show swine flu cases via an RSS feed. Click on the pic below for a larger version, or click here to play with demo yourself.

By the way, Visual Fusion 4.0 is a less common example of what Microsoft means by the term “Software-plus-services”. Software-plus-Services is about software from the cloud, on servers, and on devices all working together well… most examples tend to focus on either the cloud, or the device (phone, PC, etc) and cloud working together. In contrast, Visual Fusion shows software working together across server and cloud tiers, as well as composition of multiple services into a solution – a very useful solution profile!

Technorati Tags: Visual Fusion,IDV Solutions,Spatial Analysis,mapping,SharePoint,Silverlight,Virtual Earth,software-plus-services

Free Training - Creating Performance Dashboards!

john.mullinax — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 02:13:14 GMT

Just heard about a series of free training events on creating performance dashboards. Looks pretty interesting. Description, dates, locations, and links to register are below.

-John

Microsoft and BlueGranite present:

Dashboard in a Day Seminars
Learn best practices and methodologies on how to quickly build and deploy dashboard solutions leveraging Microsoft Business Intelligence (BI) technologies to monitor, analyze, and plan key business activities.
___________________________________________________
Greetings!
Microsoft and BlueGranite are hosting our popular Dashboard in a Day Seminars in Michigan, Ohio, and Tennessee in late January and February 2008. These are half-day events for business and technical leaders interested in implementing dashboard solutions to provide better monitoring, analysis, and planning capabilities for teams in sales, finance, and operations. Learn best practices, witness examples, and discuss your questions with experienced BlueGranite and Microsoft team members.
___________________________________________________
Today's Challenge
We often hear IT and business leaders question their organization's ability to access data and information from their primary business systems. Typically, information is manually extracted from these business systems and saved into disconnected Excel files for use by executives, managers, and general business users. This manual approach can prevent valuable, relevant data from reaching the right people at the right time and can force decisions to be made based on outdated information.
Doing More with Less
Business leaders today want better, faster insight into their organization's performance. At our Dashboard in a Day Seminar you will learn how to monitor, analyze, and plan around key business activities using automated metrics. The easy-to-use yet powerful analytical tools provide staff at different levels the ability to make faster, better informed decisions. As business and technology leaders, you will learn how dashboards and analysis capabilities can dramatically improve team performance and propel your organization to success.
· Make better, more effective business decisions with up-to-date information
· Implement metrics to show historic trends and progress toward goals
· Share metrics with your team to provide focus on strategy and execution
Performance Dashboard Solutions
Performance Dashboards are the new face of Business Intelligence. Contextual business insight combined with collaborative workspaces empower the people in your organization to make better, faster decisions, leading to improved business performance.
Our performance dashboard platform from Microsoft including SharePoint, PerformancePoint and SQL Server provides high-performance analytical database components and leading-edge monitoring, analytical, and planning capabilities. These components are well integrated and are delivered in a user-friendly, web-based environment that's simple to use by staff at all levels of the organization.
Seminar Overview
This Dashboard in a Day Seminar provides an overview of these best practices and project approaches from both business and technical perspectives. You will see case studies and demonstrations for sales, marketing, and finance activities that demonstrate first-hand how these tools have helped other organizations. You will also see working examples of how these dashboards were built using the Microsoft BI platform.
We look forward to meeting you at this upcoming event. Event seating is limited, so please register as soon as possible.
Agenda
8:00 AM - Continental Breakfast
8:30 AM - Welcome and Overview of Using Automated Metrics
9:30 AM - Best Practices for Dashboard Planning and Implementation
10:30 AM - Solution Examples, Case Studies and Dashboard Components
11:30 AM - Wrap-up and Closing Remarks
Registration Links
Cincinnati, OH
4605 Duke Drive Suite 800
Mason, Ohio 45040
January 30, 2007
8:30am to 11:30am
Register Today!

Columbus, OH
Polaris Center-Fourth Floor
8800 Lyra Drive
Columbus, Ohio 43240
January 31, 2007
8:30am to 11:30am
Register Today!
Grand Rapids, MI
2525 East Paris Ave. SE Suite 100
Grand Rapid, MI 49546
February 5, 2007
8:30am to 11:30am
Register Today!
Southfield, MI
Fifth Third Bank
1000 Town Center Suite 2000
Southfield, MI 48075
February 6, 2007
8:30am to 11:30am
Register Today!
Nashville, TN
2555 Meridian Blvd. Suite 300
Franklin, TN 37067
February 12, 2007
8:30am to 11:30am
Register Today!
Memphis, TN
ICBC Global
6465 N. Quail Suite 200
Memphis, TN 38120
Feburary 13, 2007
8:30am to 11:30am
Register Today!
Independence, OH
Park Center III
6050 Oak Tree Blvd.
Independence, Ohio 44131
February 19, 2007
8:30am to 11:30am
Register Today!

Technorati tags: Training, Dashboards

The Best Payback in Technology History... Think you know what it is???

john.mullinax — Fri, 16 Feb 2007 07:38:44 GMT

Hmmm.... How about a giant ERP system? :-) Nope. Internet Explorer? Windows Mobile? Getting closer, but those are only "honorable mention" in my book. If you're a company with a large investments in ERP and Line of Business (LOB) applications, my vote...(read more)

Why bother with lean? Because it Rocks!!

john.mullinax — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 03:13:00 GMT

My last post left off with the following set of questions:

Why bother with lean? Really, why would we want to imitate an old and slow industry like manufacturing? Especially given it's long and steady decline in the United States. With the acceleating pace of change in the world, we need new ideas that can help us be agile and adaptive, don't we?

While it's not always an easy journey, I find it does have it's rewards. In the manufacturing industry, few if any seriously debate the value of being lean. Basically, everyone wants to be lean and the debates today are around how to best do it. Lean thinking has literally transformed manufacturing around the world. Moreover, other industries support lean as well. For example, retail establishments like Walmart support manufacturers in continuously improving their lean-ness by providing them demand chain visibility. REI uses the principles of "flow" and "evenness" to make optimize their checkout lines, as have most retail financial service operations (i.e., bank branches) -- though lean adopters are not always consciously thinking about lean when they take these actions. In many cases, people are simply copying what has worked elsewhere.

Copying others is definately a low-effort way to make changes. It can work well in the short run, and can be genuinely helpful to long-term learning and oganizational growth. That said, I suspect the consciously early-adopters of lean in a new industry do so because they want to lead their industry. As their successes are copied, competitors may gain as well. But in the long-run, an understanding of the lean principles and a commitment to continuous improvement in a rapidly changing world allow lean thinking companies to generally increase their performance leads over time versus those who blindly copy yesterday’s (or this morning’s) actions without understanding why. I suspect that near the end of the lean adoption cycle in an industry -- for example, where we are now in the Manufacturing industry -- lean adoption and lean thinking get taken up by the last of the "hold outs" as a matter of survival more than a matter of leadership.

The funny thing is that people often view the manufacturing industry as old and slow. In today's vernacular, people want their organizations to be adaptive so they can cope with the ever accelerating pace of change. Fortunately for all of us, a framework for being adaptive already exists -- in fact, it's fundamentally built into lean thinking: understand your environment, experiment, apply improvements, and repeat.

It's worth noting that this core nugget of lean is also the fundamental idea behind the Deming Cycle (Plan-Do-Check-Act), as well as Six Sigma (Define-Measure-Analyze-Improve-Control). Thanks to John Boyd, US Army teaches it's soldiers the OODA Loop (Observe-Orient-Decide-Act) -- essentially the same idea, which Boyd built from Godel's Incompleteness Theorem, Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, and the Second Law of Thermodynamics- the entropy of a closed system increases. Not the first to do so, Boyd extended the idea to social evolution, and believed that the decision cycle is the central mechanism of adaptation. Jack Welch said (paraphrasing) that if change on the outside of your organization is faster than change on the inside, you're in trouble.

Though I certainly don't put myself in the same category as the giants above, I've also written about this in a different forum as Respond-Sense-Learn, based onthe ideas of Philosopher Karl Popper, as well as Peter Senge (minimizing Deming's "plan" component as a step toward greater agility).

Finally, what does any of this have to do with Microsoft? Well, quite a bit, actually. Taken together, Microsoft technologies provide an outstanding platform to help you build an adaptive organization. For example:

Bringing business intelligence to all parts of the enterprise so that workers up, down, and throughout the organization can make faster, more insightful decisions with higher success rates at each of the multiple decision events they face during a typical day.
Sharing that information with people in the flow and context of their business processes, be they structured or semi-structured/unstructured -- as so many business processes actually are.
Sharing information with visualizations that actually inspire insights, and within tools people already know and that enable immediate actions to be taken.
Rapid and easy business process composition, prototyping, experimentation, and implementation, including tools to monitor and assess the performance and "fitness" of specific business process variations against measures that matter to you.
The capability to use that same data about business process "trials" -- and potentially every prototype and production implementation is also a trial -- to build and execute simulation models that create even greater insight about your business so you can understand what truly drives the results you care about.
Ironically, the deep understanding of what drives your results that can come from enabling business intelligence throughout your organization, business process experimentation, and business simulation is actually the key to reducing information overload and controlling the flood of data that threatens to drown people's ability to do productive work. By understanding the things that really drive results, we can target our activities and only report, share, and analyze the things that actually matter.
And if you find yourself in an environment of ontological uncertainty, the collaboration and communication platform provides a wide variety of communication channels to ensure folks understand the organizational principles that will enable them, as individuals and team members, to drive in a common direction toward an uncertain future.

I believe in Boyd's idea that decision making is the primary mechanism for adaptation. The reality is that, whether we realize it or not, we all live in a world where the ability to make better decisions faster about the things that truly matter will ultimately determine our success. Many folks will make speedy, apparently "effective" decisions about things that appear to matter -- but really don't drive desired results because they are themselves driven by other "confounding" variables. Perhaps even more people will make slow, ponderous decisions on topics that may or may not drive results -- but cause opportunity and value to slip through their fingers. And a comparatively small group of people will make rapid, insightful decisions about things that truly do drive results. Over time, these people will work for the leading companies in their respective fields, because they will have created that success.

Whatever the labels you decide to use, I invite you to join me on the journey!