Feds Add Education Community To Data.gov Site

Jan. 27, 2012

The [US] federal government continues its efforts to help users more easily locate information through its open-data repository Data.gov with a new community for government education data.

Analyzing Facebook Data with MicroStrategy’s Wisdom

Jan. 26, 2012

I’m currently at the MicroStrategy World Conference in Miami. I’m impressed with Miami’s weather (a staggering 25 Celsius average over the last 3 days) and MicroStrategy's offering called Wisdom.

Wisdom is a free application that blew me away. It visualizes data that many marketers would kill for including age, gender, and location. The visualizations could use much improvement, but the data represented was quite interesting.

With Big Data (and Self-Service) Comes Big Responsibility

Jan. 25, 2012

I recently moderated a BI discussion group here in Toronto. The topics centered around Big Data, Mobile BI, Cloud BI, and Self-Service BI. One individual made an excellent point about a very real risk with Big Data. In fact, this point is valid with any volume of data.

Cloud BI has benefits, but no strong biz case yet

Jan. 25, 2012

...cloud BI adoption is "incredibly low" today, accounting for less than 1 percent of the overall global BI market. And while the figure will increase, Gartner does not expect this to be more than 3 percent even by 2014...

Big Data approach pinpoints malware that other solutions miss

Jan. 24, 2012

Last month, in preparation for a panel, [Zulfikar Ramzan] was asked to put together a list of pros and cons with respect to using Big Data techniques in the context of information security technologies.

Amazon Launches Big Data Service

Jan. 23, 2012

Amazon Web Services has introduced the beta version of DynamoDB, a fully managed, cloud-based NoSQL database with high availability and scalability across any number of hosted servers.

Business Analyst, IT Must Be Buddies for Effective Business Intelligence

Jan. 20, 2012

Today business analysts are rapidly implementing and incrementally refining new analytics capabilities that yield useful new insights, based on incessant interactions with other business folks who are the end users of their solutions. In fact, the process of business analytics implementation resembles nothing so much as that of agile software development.

Microsoft Improves Mobile BI Reporting for the iPad

Jan. 19, 2012

Microsoft's mobile business intelligence (BI) support strategy for the Apple iPad inched forward slightly for those using SharePoint 2010.

Building Your Own Dashboards?

Dashboard Reformation: Government Finance External Department Dashboard

I am revisiting the post on Government Finance Department Dashboards that was showcased on Dashboard Insight in May, 2007. In this post I will highlight the challenges of one of these dashboards and ways to improve it.

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Heather Smith

Your dashboard needs more dash and less bored. View this on-demand webinar from arcplan to find out how to make your dashboards interactive, go-to sources for actionable, timely, and relevant information.

Michael Morrison

There’s no doubt that dashboards are a valuable tool in an organization’s technology arsenal, but many continue to grapple with challenges, such as the types of data to include, where that data resides and how to incorporate data in different formats.  In an effort to make more informed business decisions, many departments and individual line-of-business users have turned to Business Intelligence (BI) dashboards as a way to present data for both reporting and forecasting purposes and to address increasing business issues. 

Alexander 'Sandy' Chiang
It was difficult to choose the Best Dashboard of 2011. There were three strong candidates, but Mike Moore of West Notifications Group beat them out using Tableau. Mike chose Tableau because he believes he can build beautiful dashboards fast with it! Although Mike used Tableau to build the winning entry, he won because of his data visualization and dashboard design skills.
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