BI Dissertation – Master degree done!

Finally I got my master degree on Decision Support Systems/ Business Intelligence. It was almost 2 years and half and finally I defended my dissertation yesterday. I want to thank all those people who always encouraged me to “fight” for this and special thanks to my supervised Dr. Orlando Belo (Universidade do Minho – Portugal), Steve Vanstone (Bonds University – Australia) and Dr. Chong (Chinese University of Hong Kong – China). (Check out the previous post I wrote about the dissertation here)

Check below the abstract of my dissertation that I’m thinking to translate to English for sending to all those people around the world that gave me feedback about their works and some support to my dissertation.

Abstract
"In the current economic environment, the value of information is increasingly important in the habits and customs of each citizen. Prices per barrel of oil, Euribor rates, equity indexes, inflation rate, among others, arrive everyday at our homes through the media. Their study is increasingly important, especially by the need to identify their impact on our daily quotidian.

The application of Data Mining (DM) techniques, in an attempt to predict the movement of the stock market, has never been a very well accepted, mainly by economists and the academic world. It is an area of high complexity, and the fact that it involves money, mean that their research, especially successful, is not made public. However, these techniques exist, and are increasingly used not only in financial markets, but also in practically all other activity sectors.

This dissertation begins by making an approach to the complex world of the stock market, in an attempt to demystify it a little. Subsequently, based on investment rules normally applied by practitioners, it’s presented a model of an artificial neural network, which provides in a daily basis, the decision to buy, hold or sell a particular asset, supported by a decision support system to monitor and analyze the evolution of the made decisions."

Keywords: Decision Support Systems, Data Mining, Knowledge Discovery in Data, Business Intelligence, ETL, Data Warehousing

I also added some screenshots of dissertation presentation I made yesterday… if you’ll be curious about the data mining model results, just tell me and I will translate all slides.


I hope you enjoy this. Regards,
Pedro.

BI Education - BI Graduations in Portugal

Today I will talk about two universities that marked me a lot and currently are betting strong in the Business Intelligence area... These two universities are located in two different cities and separated by 300 km between Porto (North) and Lisbon (South). The reason for this post is not only because they are the main universities in Portugal going in deep Business Intelligence area, but also the contribution they gave me all my life since 1995.

I have great affection towards these two institutions, both have a very important role in my personal and professional development. At “Universidade Portucalense” (UPT) I finished my degree in 2001 while in the “Instituto Universitario de Lisboa” (ISCTE-IUL) I am currently finishing my dissertation included in my master BI degree began in 2007.

UPT – Universidade Portucalense

The UPT prepared me for life with its entire rigor, exigency and the indescribable quality of the teachers. In this University nothing failed ... everything worked ... I dare to say that this university has the better organization and installations.
I was at the age of responses to WHY… Why I need to study? Why I need to learn some contents? Why…Why…?

ISCTE-IUL – Instituto Universitário de Lisboa

The ISCTE-IUL helped me to improve my skills and to be more organized, more focused on the benefits and objectives to be achieved. Also helped me to understand the others and myself.

I was at the age of responses to HOW… How can I be a better Professional? How can I do the things more efficiently? How…? How…?

In UPT time the contact to the teachers was very difficult… otherwise today you can catch them by email or by mobile… It’s the evolution… The old and current students should be proud of these two universities that after so many years are still here helping us to be better professionals.

If you want to improve your competencies or start a new path, the registrations for business intelligence graduations are open. Visit the universities websites:

MSIAD - Stock Market with Data Mining (BI Thesis)

I was a little absent this month in preparation for my thesis ... I promise to write more often now! Yesterday was my first battle on my dissertation, which I think it was well reached. Naturally, any research in this complex world of stock markets, in this case of applying data mining techniques, requires first understanding the financial world... I tried to demystify the complex stock market world... His movement, the factors that influence decision making, forecasting and the investor that feeds this whole game markets... and it was presented yesterday

After understanding the stock market as I did, I‘ll now focus on the application of Data Mining techniques (initially only with neural networks) and the implementation of a strategy that will be based from all rules made public by some researchers. That is, I will create a decision support system that in addition to track my portfolio of shares, it’ll generate the final output of the day that will be a buy, sell or hold signal.My strategy will assume the loss and also fix a limit on earnings. I do not need to be monitoring the stock market during the day, because I will use Stop Loss functionality in all investments that fire automatically an order of sale if the price of some share will excess my defined limit (applied only if I’m on the market)

In this matter, I'll then begin to examine in more detail the research of Dr. Chong from Chinese University of Hong Kong, that he’s the only economist, investor and researcher I know at the moment and who kindly offered me help and sent me all Articles that he has done. Dr. Chong is in the photo at right. Check his website at :

http://www.cuhk.edu.hk/eco/staff/tlchong/tlchong3.htm

I already have done ETL processes to import historical data from a group of stock in my folder and a Datamart that stores the data in the form of information. It’s time to deepen into practice and return in May for a short presentation to be evaluated again. I assume the risk of this project that it’s very ambitious and attractive to me.

With nothing to lose! Regards!

Pedro

BI Education - Master's Degree Business Intelligence

I was contacted by dozens of people about information’s on Master's Degree in Business Intelligence and for that reason I share with you a research in this area. The world is currently in recession and nothing is more important to be on the top and improve each day your skills and keep in touch with new technologies and new concepts.

In my case, the master degree on BI started on September/07 changed my life and created a rhythm of work that I was not prepared before it. I’m now prepared to attack on several fronts: on my daily work and several projects in my free time (experts-Exchange, MSDN, my blog, and 2 other projects that I will share with you later)

Many of us are tools oriented but there’s nothing more important than understanding the theory and the work which is already done by others (because we don’t want to invent the wheel again). Everything that arises, arises from something and is where I focus my goals.

Samuel Quintanilla Galvez is from Peru, and he did a research about masters in Business Intelligence and decided to share it with us. We hope this information could be usefully for all who loves BI like me and Samuel.

Samuel on first person: “I did a research about BI and DWH courses too (courses not related to any particular tool or provider), courses that I could take from here, Peru. Some of them are in-classroom, but others are online, and could be very useful for you or maybe your friends. Attach the result of my research. I'll probably take the "Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing Specialized Studies Program" in the University of California, Irvine

(http://unex.uci.edu/certificates/it/data_warehousing).

The program can be taken online or on campus, and cost $2,270. I think it's a very attractive program, but I might be wrong, that is why I'm looking for opinions from experts or from people with much more experience than me, before enroll to the program..."

Alex Whittles is currently attending the master BI degree at Sheffield Hallam University (UK), and I hope he could give us some feedback about. No Alex?! ehehe
For whom that wants to see the excel file (I don’t know how to attach here) please send me an email.
Regards,

Pedro

BI Certification – Microsoft MCTS 70-445 Exam Passed

Yes!!!
One of the goals that I’ve proposed to achieve this year is almost accomplished! Today I made the Microsoft exam 70-445 (MCTS), and next week I will do the exam 70-446 (MCITP).

The exam 70-445 that I done today includes 3 courses:
Course 2791: Implementing and Maintaining SQL 2005 Analysis Services (3 days)
Course 2792: Implementing and Maintaining SQL 2005 Integration Services (3 days)
Course 2793: Implementing and Maintaining SQL 2005 Reporting Services (3 days)
http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/exams/70-445.mspx

The following list includes the topic areas covered on this exam. The percentage indicates the portion of the exam that addresses a particular skill.

Managing SSAS (12 percent)
Developing SSAS Solutions by Using BIDS (18 percent)
Implementing data mining by Using BIDs (12 percent)
Managing SSRS (13 percent)Developing Reporting Solutions by Using SSRS (19 percent)
Developing Business Intelligence Solutions by Using SSIS (16 percent)
Administering SSIS Packages (11 percent)

The exam wasn’t easy, and I confess that during the exam I was a little afraid, because the questions were very specific and it required a lot of attention! Happily I passed with 842 (84,2%) (minimum is 700)
I have some experience in these subjects for that reason I only studied with MCTS Training Kit. This kit has a book, several labs and about 200 exams to train.

My exam had 44 questions and I felt that almost questions were focused on Reporting Services and Data Mining. I suggest that you get this training book and go inside into the properties of each module. (SSIS, SSAS, SSRS and Data Mining) And some subjects that you must study hard:

Report Model and Report Builder
Data mining algorithms and parameters
Data Mining lift and profit chart (Check the accuracy of your DM Model)
SSIS Transactions
SSAS Security issues
SSAS Performance (Usage based optimization / design aggregations)
SSAS MOLAP (automatic and schedule), ROLAP and HOLAP
DMX Syntax (for data mining models)
SSRS Subreports

If you follow the training kit and focus on the tips above, and are familiar with Microsoft tools I think is sufficient to pass. But some visitors will ask... why SQL 2005 and not SQL 2008? Because SQL Exams is not available yet, and it’s a way to prepare to SQL 2008 and learn more about Microsoft tools. Following this, I already made my registration for the new exams that will be available this month.

(If you register now, you will have 40% discount in the exam price)

Register for the "First to Know" Visual Studio 2008 and SQL Server 2008 Exam Offer
Be Among the First to Certify
http://www.microsoft.com/learning/mcp/sqlvs/offer/default.mspx

Regards!!

Pedro

BI Conferences - SQLBits and SSWUG

You may already felt that I’m very fanatic for learn, mainly if we are talking about Business Intelligence and Microsoft tools. For this reason, I’m writing today about two big conferences that will take place next September. One is the SQLBits, organized by www.sqlbits.com that I already refered in a previous post http://pedrocgd.blogspot.com/2008/07/sql-bits-iii-uk-event.html and the second is a very innovative virtual conference with the top speakers of the world organized by www.sswug.org. Almost the authors of my preferred books from wrox and wiley, will be in SQL Bits or in the SSWUG conferences.

SQLBits

For this reason I already have my flight and hotel booked for the next SQLBits (www.sqlbits.com) trainingday (150£) and conference (Free) in London next 12/13 September 2008.
Some topics could be basic for me, but it’s important to follow the new BI improvements and mainly the details that in most cases make the difference! And is good to train my English and meet some people to dinner and spend some time sharing experiences. For now I have the confirmation of my friend Bruno Ferreira that is working on Ireland, Alex from UK (http://www.purplefrogsystems.com), some friends from ExpertsExchange, and other people from BI comuninity

Sessions
http://www.sqlbits.com/information/MainAgenda.aspx

SSWUG

If you cannot be on the SQLBits, dont be ungry... you can follow other events like SSWUG conferences from home. There will be four conferences for a simbolic price of $100 (in Euros is less than 100€) and all the conferences are for 3 days and I’m sure it will be fantastic. It’s not difficult to imagine that my preferred conference will be the Business Intelligence conference on September 24-26... but I’m confess that I dont know If I will attend or not... it’s not the same thing a conference from a laptop or a conference on site as I will do in UK on SQL Bits... but I’ will try to attend!!!

Business Intelligence : September 24-26

SQL Server: 01-03

SharePoint Technologies : October 15-17

.NET Developer : October 28-30

Sessions
http://www.vconferenceonline.com/business-intelligence/sessions.asp?offset=-1

If you are thinking to attend one of the conferences, please tell me and join me on that!
Regards!

Data Mining - Rafal Event

In April 2008 Rafal Lukawiecki came to Portugal and unfortunately I didn’t attend it. I confess, that I’ve never heard about Rafal, but today, and after seeing the four webcats, I feel that I lost a fantastic event. So... do you know what I did? I link my laptop to my LCD television and see all the Rafal webcasts!! It was really fantastic... now I understand my friend Subhash!

But who is Rafal? See this YouTube video...
http://fr.youtube.com/watch?v=Vs46QZwnEcc

After my Data Mining class in my master BI degree, I’ve started to look to data mining with new eyes, and data mining is the main intelligence that a BI project could have... you could have an ETL, DW or Reporting module perfect, but the intelligence in BI is in the capability to predict the future, to analyse past and present behaviours and make the difference predicting on what it’ll happen next!

For those who really like to learn Data Mining, independently about the tools that usually use my suggestion is to start from here... from starting to see these four Rafal webcasts. Fortunately, in my master BI degree I had one of the most gurus of Data Mining here in Portugal... the teacher Dr. Duarte Trigueiros... He’s also fantastic and very comunicative as Rafal. From one hand Rafal speak more near the business logic and sometimes more intuitive and for other hand the teacher Dr. Duarte Trigueiros is more statistical. The conjuction of both approches is fantastic, and it was a privilege and a proud for me...

Introduction to Data Mining
Working with Data Mining
Using Data Mining in Your IT Systems (Part 1)
Using Data Mining in Your IT Systems (Part 2)
http://www.microsoft.com/emea/spotlight/event.aspx?id=99

After the Rafal webcasts, I dont have nothing more to write about it! But I’m currently doing a work for my master BI degree to predict the stock market behaviours... could be a good way to became rich fast!! I’ll tell about it in a next post...

Business Intelligence Architecture

Dear Friends,
Once again, I’m writing a post with a long delay… Sorry… Today, I will follow the sugestion of several blog visitors, which is to describe and write more about what I’m doing in my master BI degree and my point of view of BI.

After nine months of master classes I’m able to describe my definition and my opinion of BI. My purposes with this post, and based not only in the classes but also in the several books I read and work experience as BI Developer, is to launch the discussion about what is BI and mainly how is BI structered.

Business words

The image shows the four pilars but also in which context the several business words related could apply in BI. Here in Portugal, and I thinks is the same in rest of the world, IT Consulting Companies usually create some confusion into the market, invented new business words, and curiously, almost times only these business words are new!

For me, BI is based in four main pilars:

Strategy

This pilar is where the top management defines the strategy and the path that must be followed to achieve the organization goals! The typical metodology to structure this strategy is the Balanced Scorecard (BSC) created by Kaplan and Norton. They recommend that managers gather information from four important perspectives:

Customer's perspective. How do customers see us?

Internal business perspective. What must we excel at?

Innovation and learning perspective. Can we continue to improve and create value for our services?

Financial perspective. How do we look to shareholders?

Processes

This pilar is not yet very evolved, and only few years ago, organizations start looking to processes in other perspective. Following Paul Harmon, in the article he wrote in http://www.bptrends.com/ about maturity level of organization processes, he realized that almost organizations are in a low level (2,5 in a range of 1 to 5) and still worst here in Portugal... And in my opinion, processes is the better way that an organization has to improve performance, reduce costs, and unfortunately in some organizations a better way to implement downsizing, because automating and improve a process may cause that a person could be moved to another unit or to be fired reducing costs for organization. It’s cruel, but almost organizations in the world focus on reducing costs finding a solution to fire people… but this is another discussion point! Business Process Management (BPM) is based in other past investigations like Business Process Reeigineering (BPR) and Total Quality Management (TQM). BPM or processes, could be monitorized by a Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) that is nothing more that a solution with KPI to monitor the performance of each process, and could be implemented a Business Process Management System (BPMS) that is responsible to follow the life cycle of each process (business object)

People

This pilar has the organizational hierarchy which shows who commands who, but not what each people do in organization. A good BI implementation must focus on people, not only to better manage the change of a new system, but also to gathering implicit knowledge that exists in each people of the organization transforming it in explicit knowledge.

Technology

This pilar as the other pilars it’s very important and requires a big understand not about the tools but about the concepts. There is a lot of people is this subject that are tools oriented in spite of be concept oriented. What I’m trying to describe, and mainly after my master degree, is that the tool is not the most important thing in this pilar. What’s important is the concepts and the understanding of what you can do with the tools. For example, to create a BSC you don’t need to be worried about the tool you do that, but in the concepts required to create a sucessful BSC. You can use a tool from SAS or you can simple create it for example in Excel… maybe you don’t know, but excel is the most powerfull and more used tool in the perspective of end user… and in my opinion, with new version 2007, Excel will be even better!!! Tecnology and mainly data mining algorithms could answer important questions to the organization that could change the strategy of the Organization.

These pilares are all important and dependent of each other, but in my opinion, people is the higher important pilar, and not only the people that implement the new system, but also the people in organization that accept this system, because there is a tremendous resistance by people to a change and there is a lot of implicit knowledge in organization that must be converted in explicit knowledge.

There is a lot of things to write and explain in each pilar, but I will try to do that if you think that itcould be usefull for you!!!

Cheers!!!

Operational Risk - Societe General Fraud!

Dear Friends,
I was planning to write this post last week, but today It’s the right time to do that! And the reason is the Societe General… do you know what these two words mean? I confess that I didn’t know it, but it’s only the second bigger French bank, and today it’s notice in all newspapers of the world.

The Societe General Bank was victim of a “massive” fraud from an employee. The bank said the fraud was based on simple transactions, but concealed by "sophisticated and varied techniques". The losses are estimated around 5 billion Euros!! Too much zeros, but I will try: 5.000.000.000€…uuuauuuuu… see all the news in the following link:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/7206270.stm

How can be possible that only one employee makes several trades and no one else knows?! This men control the entire bank?! It’s very strange… but as Gilles Glicenstein BNP Paribas chief executive told in the above link, "there is still some information missing to understand what happened” and "the scale of the fraud is so large, there must be a complex explanation”
I initiate this post with this amazing, but real history, to write something about operational risk that I’m learning in my master BI degree. So, how these things could be possible? This Bank doesn’t have a Risk Management Unit?!

Operational risks are not only in a bank sector but in all activities, the risk is everywhere every time!! You have the risk to get fired! You have the risk of a car accident… Normally, and mainly in financial sector, all this operational losses, caused by people, systems, external factors or processes were hidden! And they were hidden because critical information could be dangerous for the health of a company. But I think that nowadays, this kind of information is not so dangerous for a company than the past, because the shareholders want TRANSPARENCY, and only with it, the shareholders put their money in the companies! And don’t forget that we are in a globalization, bad news in china can affect Europe, and bad news in Europe can affect China…
So, what is Operation Risk?!

“Operational Risk is defined as the risk of loss resulting from inadequate or failed internal processes, people and systems or from external events. This definition includes legal risk, but excludes strategic and reputational risk.” In http://www.bis.org/

Operational Risk nowadays it’s so important as credit risk and market risk, and for today I leave you with the picture below that I will describe with more detail in a next post:

So, This was the first post about RISK, I promise that I will be back tomorrow not only to write about RISK and write about my fantastic classes with the teacher Rui Gonçalves (SAS Portugal).
Cheers!!

BI Master - BI Architecture

Dear friends,
Today, I will show you the BI Architecture defined to my master degree (data warehouse class) that it’s also based in the project that I’m developing to my company. The objective is not explain in detail each module definition, but describe how I apply the BI architecture to my project. I suppose you already read a lot about this subjects like ETL, ODS, DW, Cube, BSC … I want to show you what I’m doing and I want to receive feedback from you to improve my work and to share knowledge between us.

The architecture defined for the project follow the Inmon approach, the 3 tier-architecture.
It was necessary to customize the ODS in order to satisfy one of the business requirements that is to keep the data imported dynamic. Keep data dynamic means that the business user administrator could change the data (from last year) directly to ODS when he needs. The reason is because some data from operational system must be corrected or because it has bad quality or there is an error. The data inside ODS is stored for one year.

The following image shows the relation between all modules and how they are integrated between itself.

1. Operational Systems (OS)
Operational Systems record details of business transactions in real time. It’s here where data is stored and will support data warehouse. These operational systems include data from external data sources like interest rates and exchange rates, and others…

2. Extract Transform and Load (ETL)
The ETL, Extract, Transform and Load data from Operational System into OLAP database.
There are two ETL processes in this architecture:
2.1 Makes the extraction of the data from OS, transform and integrate into the ODS.
a. Initial ETL
b. Daily process ETL
2.2. Makes the processing update of the cube.

3. Operational Data Store (ODS)
After the extraction, cleanness and integration of the data from the operational systems into ODS, it is necessary to include additionally calculations and aggregations to allow indicators to be generated dynamically to our OLAP cube in spite of create it static inside an ETL. Normally, all the calculations are made inside an ETL, but in this case the business requirements imply a customization. And these requirements are:

· Problems in financial instruments evaluation.
· Requests from managing entities to change positions
· Positions corrections
· Data in operational systems could be incorrect

4. Data Warehouse – OLAP Cube
In this module, is implemented the multi dimensional view of the new system. It will be created the famous cube that will enable the users to visualize business indicators from different perspectives. This cube is supported by an OLAP database and an OLTP database that will process the cube and update periodically the OLAP database, MOLAP.

5. Reports and Data Analysis
In this module will be available all the value, measurable and complete information that will be important to decision makers. Will be created static reports (pre-defined) and dynamic reports (Adhoc-reports) that allows the business users to create their own questions to the cube.

Feel free to make questions!
Regards!
Pedro.

BI Master - MSc UK Universities

Dear Friends,
As I told you lot of times in this blog, I’m currently attending a master BI degree here in Portugal. But I also was seeking for BI masters not only in Portugal, but also in UK. Following a request of my friend Amin, I’m writing today about the research I made before start my master degree.

In Portugal, ISCTE University is the winner for BI master degrees, perhaps in UK there are several candidates, and probably will be someone that disagree with me, but I hope to receive some feedback from you.
First of all you have a website that could be your first step to begin your research! The website is www.findamasters.com and has thousands of masters to see. Second, you must visit the website of British Council, http://www.britishcouncil.org/learning-study-in-the-uk.htm?mtklink=corpo

I’m very impressed with the organization of some universities in UK. It was a surprised for me the possibility of take the master degree by distance and to visit the University in the open days!

If you are outside UK and cannot stay much time there, you can take the master on your country by a specific web platform and with an instructor exclusive for you. The main disadvantages are the price, that is higher, and the time to take the master is the double of the normal one!!! But you could conciliate the master with a part-time job!

I selected the universities that you should take a look and see the master contents and the respective prospectus.


http://www.soi.city.ac.uk/pgcourses/index.html


http://www.wmin.ac.uk/cscs/page-1578


http://www.gre.ac.uk/courses/pg/com/dwdm

My friend subhash, we know that you attended your master degree in Greenwich University, so please give us some feedback about it, ok? eheheh...

And a curiosity, if someone are interested, it was here http://www.newman.ac.uk that I finished my degree some years ago in Birmingham (UK), at NewMan College on Socrates European Program!
If someone could send some feedback I will appreciate, because maybe I will return to UK soon…
Regards!!

BI Conference - Andy Neely in Portugal (ISCTE University)

Dear Friends,
As I told you before my University ISCTE, where I'm current attending my BI master degree, is the best Portugal University in this subject, and not only for the master contents but also the excellent knowledge and experience of the teachers.

And to comprove it, next 22 January 2008, the ISCTE will organize a conference inviting Mr. Andy Neely. He is Deputy Director of the ESRC/EPSRC AIM Research Initiative, Professor of Operations Strategy and Performance at Cranfield School of Management, and Visiting Professor of Operations Management at London Business School.

He's the author of these books:
Business Performance Measurement
(March 2002)
http://www.amazon.com/Business-Performance-Measurement-Andy-Neely/dp/052180342X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1199744561&sr=1-1

Getting the Measure of Your Business
(July 2002)
http://www.amazon.com/Strategy-Performance-Getting-Measure-Business/dp/0521750318

Automating Your Scorecard: The Balanced Scorecard Software Report
(October 2003)
http://www.amazon.com/Automating-Your-Scorecard-Balanced-Software/dp/1891234102/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1199745056&sr=1-4

Business Performance Measurement: Unifying Theory and Integrating Practice
(Only available next February 2008)
http://www.amazon.com/Business-Performance-Measurement-Unifying-Integrating/dp/052185511X/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1199744561&sr=1-3


For these and other reasons the conference promises! If you are in Portugal or close, the registrations are opened! Come here and enjoin it!!
Regards!

NEW YEAR 2008

Dear friends,
First of all, I want to desire you a happy new year and I hope all your dreams come true.
I have much ambition for the year of 2008 and I will try to achieve all or almost all the following objectives:

· Finish my BI master degree classes
(http://www.mestradosiad.blogspot.com/)
· Take Microsoft BI tools certification
(http://www.microsoft.com/sql/solutions/bi/default.mspx )
· Take IETLS English Exam
(http://www.britishcouncil.org/portugal-exames-ingles-ielts.htm )
· Take TDWI certification directly in Amsterdam or Munique conferences
(http://www.sigs-datacom.de/sd/tdwi/conferences/2008/index.htm )

The main purpose of these objectives is preparing my bags to start a new adventure outside Portugal. Currently I have some good offers to leave Portugal but I decided to wait a few more time, because I’m enjoying my current job and my master BI degree.

We cannot waste the chances the life give us, and in my case I accepted the offer to go to England to finish my degree and the offer to work in a European Commission (Milan-Italy), because I felt that if I not accepted that offers the life wouldn’t grant me others.
So… we must dream, help the others and have much ambition!!
ALL GOOD FOR YOU!

BI Master - Good or Bad Decision?!

Dear Friends,
I finished my first trimester of lessons… I still have one year more... and maybe you are curious to know if was a good or bad decision... and I sincerely say you that yes... it was the best decision I made in the last times. I feel that it was a good decision because I love business intelligence (as a set of small parts) and I found excellent colleagues and excellent teachers.



I am curious to know if the quality of the teachers will be the same in the next trimesters, but I will keep you informed! :-)

As I told you before, in this first trimester I had three classes:

1. Decision Suport Systems
2. Data Warehouse Projects
3. Data Analysis (Statistics)

Sincerely I like the three classes but my main preference goes to the first two! Data analysis I think is not difficult but you need to spend some time to study hard… in contrast, the other two classes you also need to study hard but in my case, is a way to improve my current daily job at my company as BI developer. So, I’m very motivated!

BI Master - DSS Management tasks vs levels

Dear Friends,
I’m here today to update an old post about management tasks and levels. And I’m doing that, because at this moment I have a better perspective of what is Business Intelligence and what is the relation with management different tasks on different levels inside a company.
http://pedrocgd.blogspot.com/2007/11/bi-master-management-tasks-and-sub.html
So, Plan and Control are very important but doesn’t make sense without other tasks like Leadership, Organize and Act.

A plan is a process that helps to decide! To decide what it must be done, for who and when it must be done. To plan we have to determine well the objectives that must be realistic, measurable and complete. Having the objectives well tracings, the planning goes to guide us into the final objective, exceeding intermediate obstacles, making to expend us little time, energy and resources to reach the same final.

A great DSS has to be 100% under the control of the manager who is the main responsible for taking a decision, he is the decision maker, and the same time he’s the lead and he must put all the plans in action.

BI Master - News

Dear Friends,
It has much time that I did not write in my blog… sorry for that, but last weeks was terrible for me with lot of work not only in my current job but also with my fantastic master BI degree.
I have a lot of things to write and to share with you… after next Thursday I will be more available to write here and to share you with some interesting subjects.
Kind regards!

BI Master - Management Tasks and Sub-Tasks

Few managers realize that a company plan must provide the framework for the company control system. If missions, goals, strategies, objectives, and plans change, then controls should change. Although this error occurs at the top, repercussions are felt at all levels.

The picture below show how management level are related with management tasks, a cross join between planning and control and the different levels of management.

Planning and control are the two most closely interrelated management functions as our teacher told us in the last class.
The planning function entails deciding today what to do tomorrow. The planning horizon could be several years, one year, few weeks or a day (example is my current project that gives trader information like bonds, equities, cash flows and other instruments)

Once the plan is implemented, the control function takes over for assuring the accomplishment of the plan’s objectives. This requires actual outcomes to be monitored and evaluated, and corrective action must be taken when the plan deviate from planned objectives. The corrective action will be taken by tactical level and a revision in the original objectives could be done.

BI Master - Attributes of Decision Process

The attributes of a decision process is represented in the decision-data pyramid, which shows the transformation of ‘Data’ to ‘Infor­mation’ to ‘Knowledge’ to ‘Decision’ with rapidly increasing ‘value or worth’ as we move from the bottom of a decision pyramid to the top. Data by themselves have little value or worth; once they are processed, analyzed, and organized, they become information. Once the information is processed by the user to develop and enhance understanding of a situation or a problem, it turns into knowledge. It is this knowledge that can reduce the risk of undesir­able consequences of a decision.

Operational decisions involve day to day operations, dealing with problems that often become well known, such as how many units of a product to stock, or what employee to assign to what task. These decisions usually are repeated quite often.

At the other extreme, strategic decisions involve the long-range plan of the organization. Strategic decisions occur much less often then operational decisions, but affect the entire firm, may involve large sums of money, and there is inherently more risk involved in making them.

Tactical decisions are usually required more often than strategic decisions, but not as often as operational decisions. Middle level managers usually have more discretion than operational decision makers, but are constrained by strategic plans.

Strategic Level
Organizational vision and mission
Organizational policies
Target markets
Long-range goals
Future-oriented

Tactical Level
Middle management
Mid-range goals
Effective resource allocation
Budgeting, for example.

Operational Level
First line management
Short-range goals
Day to day activities (efficiency)

There are persons that are so focused in the goals and gives so high importance to the methodologies that a problem leaves of being a problem.
The classic decision-data pyramid will be transformed in a losangle, because the solution to resolve a problem will be repeated and is converted in an automated process, as you can see in the following picture:

Following Gorry and Scott Morton approach, the degree of structure for a problem changes as decision makers learn more about problems.

And each problem could be classified from different levels:

This picture demonstrates well the problem decision, and following my teacher homewrok request I will describe in the next post, the most important level - management level, tasks and sub-tasks.

BI Master - DSS Concept and Components

Dear Friends,
Last week was very hard for me. I was dealing with a big problem with my data warehouse design that I was described in the previous post, and consequently I was sick for two days. With the support of my data warehouse teacher, Patricia Narciso, the problem is currently resolved and I will give you all the explanation in the next post.

Now that I already excused myself, I will start write a little more about the concepts that I have been collecting with my BI master degree and some books that I was reading and indicated by my SIAD teacher, Maria José Trigueiros.

The subject is Decision Support Systems, DSS. Do you know what it is?! If not, don’t worry, I only heard these words few weeks ago… Everything has a begin date!

The study of DSS is really about people, about how people think and make decisions, as well as how they act on and react to those decisions. There isn’t an universal definition about DSS, but there are several investigators in this subject that I’m agree with.

“DSS is an interactive computer-based systems, which help decision makers, utilize data and models to solve constructed problems” (Scott Morton, 1971)

The DSS investigators better knowned in my master degree classes and the authors of some decision making best seller books are Herbert Simon, George Marakas, Samuel Bodily and Covey. I know there will be more experts in this subject but in this post I will focus on the Simon three phases decision making process and in the DSS components.

DSS components



Decision Making
A process of choosing among alternatives courses of action for the purpose of attaining a goal or goals.

The DSS Goal
Increase the effectiveness of decision making.

Will continue........

TPC02-SIAD - BI and decision-make definitions

As my teacher told us in the last class, business intelligence is putting intelligence in the business of an organization.

For me, the main purpose of BI is to provide information that support decisions and provide all the indicators that allows me to know If I took the best decision or not. BI filter out irrelevant information and focus only in the information that user needs.

I don’t need to be a decision-maker to know that for take a decision I must have value data and intelligence to decide. This intelligence to decide could be for example when you have value information and understand some information like market changes, risk assessment, poor employees performance… and can take preventive decisions in order to reach the organization strategy.

Giving some time to “gurus” of business intelligence I found an article that refers some relevant comments from Herbert Simon relating to decision-making.

“It is work of choosing issues that require attention, setting goals, finding or designing suitable courses of action, and evaluating and choosing among alternative actions. The first three of these activities (fixing agendas, setting goals and designing actions) are usually called problem solving; the last, evaluating and choosing, is usually called decision-making.” in TDWI website



“All four steps of the decision process elaborated by Herbert Simon and many others can be satisfied with analytics software that allows people at any skill level to perform the required operations. Super users will always have a role, and most people in an organization will never develop skills or interest in pursuits such as stochastic processes or simulation, but framing a problem and building a model can be a very simple process. Today, most BI efforts are driven by data, not by models, and the user interfaces, best practices and training are aligned with this approach. Toppling the pyramid means breaking through the data-only model and finding ways to distribute models and applications that can be used and shared by everyone.” in TDWI website

Tomorrow I will try to add additional comments.
regards