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!

OFF-TOPIC - Help someone in the right moment

Something like Business Intelligence...

"LEIA O TEXTO ABAIXO ANTES DE VER O V Í D E O :
A menina, 13 anos, ganhou um prêmio e foi cantar o Star Spangled Banner,hino dos EUA, no jogo da NBA.Vinte mil pessoas no estádio, ela afinada e compenetrada.
De repente o braço tremeu, ela engasgou, esqueceu a letra... DEU BRANCO!!!Treze anos. Sozinha, ali no meio...O PÚBLICO ESTUPEFATO ameaça uma VAIA...
Num repente, Mo Cheeks, técnico dos Portland Trail Blazers, aparece ao seu lado e começa a cantar, incentivando-a, e trazendo o público junto.Bonita CENA e - o que é mais incrível - ... Só o técnico tomou a iniciativade ir até lá para ajudar, enquanto os demais à volta dela só observavam estupefatos...
Mostre como uma atitude de liderança e solidariedade, NA HORA CERTA, pode fazer uma grande diferença, para ajudarmos um ser humano e mudar a história do JOGO da vida .Será que isso já não aconteceu nas nossas vidas? E a nossa atitude foi a do técnico Mo Cheeks ou da de todos que estavam ao redor, comum e de descaso? TEM GENTE QUE ESTÁ NO MUNDO PARA AJUDAR... OUTROS PARA VAIAR. PENSE NISSO. AGORA VEJA O FILME..."



Received by e-mail

OFF-TOPIC - Google ADSense (1 Month Analysis)

Dear Friends,
In this post you can see where visitors of this blog come from and how many they are in the last month. And the main reason for write this blog in English is to describe my master degree experiences and my current job as BI developer (problems and solutions) for the maximum people. (I’m receiving visits from 36 different countries)
I think writing the blog in english could be a better way to achieve one of my life objectives: back to work in England (and this time not for study but for work as BI Analyst/Developer), maybe back to work in Italy or work in Spain (Barcelona).

"Life is too short to spend time in routine tasks!" :-) Made by me!





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........