BIAnalytix Tip Summary: Designing for Actionable Intelligence
Actionable Intelligence results from corporate business indicators being presented to executives in such a way that the correct business actions are clearly defined. When this concept is incorporated in the initial design of your Business Intelligence system, the end result is Actionable Intelligence which significantly improves management productivity and efficiency across the corporation. Continue reading
BIAnalytix Tip Summary: Paced Campaign Share as a performance measure
Pacing comparisons are very powerful to evaluate the current business performance against a corresponding date in the past. However, in a growing or shrinking market, the general market trend of overall advertising is the dominant factor in pacing comparisons of advertising revenue, and an individual’s relative performance can be obscured. Showing analysis regarding your business’s Paced Campaign Share is one of the best ways to see how your business performance is doing because it excludes the overall total advertising market trend and highlights individual relative performance. For example, the revenue achieved may be lower than last year but if you are achieving a higher market share, it obviously means an individual’s performance has improved. Continue reading
BIAnalytix TIP Summary:
Key Performance Indicators are the essential metrics that a corporation uses to measure the health and performance of their business. By providing, adopting and distributing KPIs to every relevant level of the corporation, they contribute powerfully to a media corporation’s success by ensuring that every member of staff adopts the same measures of goals and success. However, there are very specific KPI’s that are relevant to the Media Industry. Continue reading
BIAnalytix Tip Summary: Media Calculated Measure Performance
OLAP (On-Line Analytical Processing) technology is designed for very fast presentation of the accumulations of Measures such as revenue or avail capacity. But real world media reports have, alongside the usual Measures, columns with many Calculated Measures that have filters and conditions defining the inclusion of measure values such as revenue or capacity for selected dimension members such as promos or exceptions. These can be expressed as CASE or IIF statements to conditionally select and accumulate the filtered values. Understandably, these conditional calculations have the potential to be processing intensive resulting in the users experiencing analysis delays. Obviously, any delay in user analysis presentation is counterproductive in an efficient BI implementation. Continue reading
BIAnalytix Tip Summary: Data Mart vs. Data Warehouse
Data Mart Defined
A data mart is a decision support system that is designed to support a given department within a larger organization, the Human Resources business unit for example. Data marts are typical housed on hardware owned and supported by the business units for which they are intended; they have data that is stored only at a grain that the BU demands, and this data is often kept at some level of aggregation. The sources for data marts are sometimes the corporate data warehouse, and if the source is an originating transaction system, there are typically no more than one or two involved. Concisely, the data mart is a subject specific, tactical store that is of interest to few users outside of the owning BU.
Data Warehouse Defined
A data warehouse is a decision support system that is designed to support most if not all aspects of a corporate entity. Data warehouses are installed on hardware owned and supported by corporate IT. They contain data at an un-aggregated grain in order to cover any and all possible needs regarding drill down and data mining. A data warehouse will contain as much history as is available from the various source systems and will typically be populated from between five to dozens of transactional and operational systems. As one would expect, the combination of low grain, years of history, and enterprise spanning scope is a recipe for huge quantities of data. Continue reading
BIAnalytix Tip Summary: Using SSRS to Email Business Exceptions
Many BI solutions are so large, and have so many complex components, that keeping track of every aspect of the system becomes a daunting endeavor. With multiple source systems, delivering hundreds of millions of rows nightly, into a data warehouse consisting of billions of rows of data, a data warehouse management team needs tools to help them ensure that the system is running properly and delivering the correct information to end users. Exception reporting can be one of those management tools. Continue reading
BIAnalytix Tip Summary: Preserving Institutional Memory
When staff leave your corporation, critical Institutional Memory and knowledge on managing their responsibilities can walk out the door with them. To avoid this problem, you should promote your corporate Portal and the Business Intelligence data warehouse as the appropriate environment to hold all analysis. Continue reading
BIAnalytix Tip Summary: Transactional Security for SOX
Sarbanes Oxley (SOX) financial reporting requirements require, among other things, that any reported financial analysis is derived by documented and auditable processes that ensure accuracy in representing original business transactions. Designing a Business Intelligence system to securely capture original business transactions greatly simplifies these auditable processes and shields the repository of transactions from any user access. Continue reading
