BI Conference - Predictive Analytics World

Business Analytics is a subset of a Business Intelligence framework, even if some players like SAS, started changing their strategy killing Business Intelligence term and starting a new one: Business Analytics… Why companies like SAS with a flag of Innovations are always creating new concepts and creating more confusion on adding new buzzwords!? Are they creating new way to resolve problems? Are they creating new products!? Of course not… I’ll publish soon an article about this subject and about all the controversy this position has created on the web.

The main purpose of this post it’s to write about the Predictive analytic world conference. This conference will take place on February 16-17 at San Francisco and unfortunately, and again, I’ll not be present on the event because once again it’ll be held in USA and I’m little far in Portugal… maybe during this year I’ll go to other event for my PhD research.

“Predictive Analytics World is the business-focused event for predictive analytics professionals, managers and commercial practitioners. This conference delivers case studies, expertise and resources to achieve.

Predictive Analytics World focuses on concrete examples of deployed predictive analytics. Hear from the horse's mouth precisely how Fortune 500 analytics competitors and other top practitioners deploy predictive modelling, and what kind of business impact it delivers”

But never forget one thing… the future will never be like the past. Although of course it’s worth trying, and planning should be done based on facts and less on intuition. Read the Black Swan book, a good overview of how successful predictive models can be.

Use the following discount code to get 15% off a two day Conference pass:

Code: PEDRO010
(workshops are not included)

BI Books - My Suggestions...

Following the request of many families :-), today I’m writing about my favorite books. In particular those I have read, those I'm reading right now, and those I’ll read soon relating to Business Intelligence world.

I have dozens or even hundreds of scanned or digital books, but there is nothing better and more motivating, than reading a book in the traditional format. All the books I have scanned into my computer, I never read them even after the print... the motivation is not the same and for that reason I always preferred to buy. The prices in Amazon website are cheap and even more, if you choose Amazon partner's stores. (In the images below you have each respective price attached)

The following books relate to the concept of Business Intelligence in general and how it fits with all its subsystems. The strategy, the processes, the people/knowledge and also something about the technological component. For those who follow the world certification in BI (CBIP), these books are essential for the examination in "Business Analytics":

              

The following books show the way to implement a successful Data Warehousing project. They were written by one of the greatest evangelists of Data Warehousing... (Ralph Kimball). These books focus on the dimensional modeling applied to multiple business scenarios and a complete life cycle that DW projects should follow. For those who follow the global certification in BI (CBIP), these books are essential for the examination of "Data Warehouse":

              

I also suggest more technical books which are more focused on Microsoft BI tools. These WROX books are very well structured, very easy to read and very helpful to understand better and fast. I’ll highlight the following books:

              

The following books are books very too simple and clearly explaining more deeply on what is behind this fantastic world of Data Mining:

              

Future purchases...
              

Currently Reading...
I am currently reading a book that promises to be very interesting. Not only by the positive feedback it has received, but also the important contribution of the author in TDWI/CBIP resources, that I’m always followed with great interest.

Keep tuned to this post because I'll be updating it with all the books I'm reading and some that have not put here yet! I hope I’ve helped you selecting your next book.

Regards, Pedro

BI Guest Corner – Technology vs Information

Last week I was browsing for some contents on the web and I found a very interesting blog and post from Sofia Neto. I asked her permission to publish a very interesting and short post about technology and information… take a look:

“The technological revolution occurring in organizations since the mass use of Information Technology does not always achieved the expected results.

Several projects find themselves reduced to failure, since many managers and employees consider the systems complicated to implement and understand.

According to Davenport, the "fascination with technology has made us forget the main purpose of information: information." In fact, you don’t need sophisticated technological equipment, complete and powerful programs, if the user is not interested in information that these computers process and make it easier to access.

This brings us immediately to the urgency of the study of the users information behavior and understanding of their information needs. But also, for the struggle between "Technology and Information” for the podium of the importance.

In this battle, Davenport shows that only when the information (creation of users) they will leave information systems truly efficient. "Information and knowledge are essentially human creations, and will never be able to manage them if we do not take into account that people play in this scenario, a key role."
“
This post was kindly contributed by Sofia Neto, who is a Portuguese Information Manager and writes about Information Management and Information Management Systems at her blog

BI Recognition - Sharepoint MVP award

Dear friends,
Today I’ll dedicate this post to a friend that recently achieved a MVP Sharepoint Award. MVP is an award that Microsoft gives to all those special persons that help people that are constantly helping people on specific subjects. Maybe someday it’ll be my turn… but for now, I just want to congratulate André for his accomplishment. I deal very well with the success of all my friends, mainly those like André and Jorge Paulino, that are always sharing knowledge with communities. I truly believe that Portuguese guys have a lot of knowledge to share with the world, despite most portuguese people think the opposite (portuguese people in most cases think that what is being done in Portugal is always bad… but persons like me, André Lage (MVP), Jorge Paulino (MVP) and several hundreds of portuguese people are fighting against them)

Andre has a similar life history to mine… he took his IT degree on “Universidade Portucalense” some years ago (like me) and moved away from his city (from Oporto to Lisbon like me) looking for better challenges.

Andre in the first person after receiving this award:
“
First: Recognition
Second: never give up.
Third: To assist, in every sense of the word
Four: do not make the title as a goal, but a mission
Fifth: As Microsoft says "Your Potential. Our Passion"
“
Andre has 30 years old, born in Porto (Portugal) and took his Information Management degree on “Universidade Portucalense” between 1999 and 2004. He’s a System Architect, Technical Leader and Consultant on SharePoint Corporate Portals in Sybase, SBS Portugal, with international focus. Andre has an extensive curriculum where his major steps are the support to several Sharepoint communities, the Codeplex Community contributions, speaker on Sharepoint 2010 webcasts and the contribution to BI Resort community and this MVP award. Check is blog here.

I hope to refer several other friends in future posts!

Regards, Pedro.

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.

Merry Christmas

It is time to relax with the family and take care of those who truly love us and be forever on our side!
Merry christmas to you and to all your family.
Pedro

BI Tools - First Look to Excel 2010

Create Dashboards never been so easy ... the new version of Excel 2010 (Beta) is really amazing. Exploration of a multidimensional cube has never been so intuitive and simple like it is now. The image below shows a simple dashboard that I made in this new version in 20 minutes for the Northwind database sample...

There still are some features to improve in this version, anyway, the new features promise to make the life of the decision maker easier... and now, I sincerely believe that the democratization of business intelligence is beginning, and finally Business Intelligence will soon be available to all employees of an organization. And all because Excel is the best known tool in the world, where almost users who use a computer, know what Excel is and what Excel do. Many BI Vendors know it, and began to build few years ago, add-ins for Excel in order to take advantage of some previous limitations of Excel. And a question arises ... will these small businesses survive the constant improvement of Excel? Only time will tell whether they will be able to adapt or not with new solutions... I really hope so, becausee this small companies do a big important job… and Microsoft knows that!

As the most interesting features from Excel 2010, I highlight the slicers, the “sparklines”, and the possibility of creating Named Sets through Excel. The Slicers lets you visually filter the data in a PivotTable and quickly extract exactly the data you're looking for. Slicers can be moved and resized like charts and graphs. And each slicer could be connected to several pivot tables… for me it’s really amazing this feature. The “sparklines” is a copy of some products made before by XLCubed (check the SQL Bits session where XLCubed presented “Microcharts”) and it’s in a very early stage. And the last feature that I highlight today, is the possibility to create named sets from Excel, grouping a set of items and several other features like customize MDX statements of a pivot table.

I hope this post was helpfull to you.
regards, Pedro

BI Guest Corner - Prospecting Like a Prostitute

I like too much learning through analogies, and for that reason today I come with a very interesting and comic analogy, created by Erik Luhrs who deserves a reference in this corner. In business Intelligence, (the main subject of this blog), sometimes we forget that all the work that is done in a business intelligence system has a main purpose… get more money (value) through good decisions that came’s in actions focused in the customers. And in this video, you get a fundamental lesson that you should always follow, target your audiences!!! And target your audiences with analytics…a sub-system of Business Intelligence System.

“Sometimes the greatest lessons are in the places you’d never think to look. In this video Erik Luhrs will show how workers in “the world’s oldest profession” still have some sales lessons to teach even the most professional and polished salespeople of today”

BI StepByStep - SSIS Calling a WebService (Option 1)

Dear Friends,
There is lot of issues in the EE and MSDN communities relating to calling a webservice from SSIS. For that reason, I decided to write a new technical paper concerning to the subject.

And as I told before, technical papers and discussions, will be posted on the BI Community (http://www.biresort.net/)

And you can also directly download each paper from here:

SSIS Area

StepByStep - SSIS Moving huge amount of files

StepByStep - SSIS Using Package Configurations

StepByStep - SSIS Extract data from multiple Excel worksheets

StepByStep - SSIS Calling a WebService with Web Service Task (Added 30-11-2009)

I hope It can help you!

Regards.

BI Certifications - CBIP/TDWI Certifications done!

I started writing this post on the return trip to Portugal. It was a very enriching and experience trip, which I reached one more objective I had in mind for more than two years. I passed the four exams and got the specialization in Business Analytics and Data Management provided by The Data Warehouse Institute (TDWI - www.TDWI.org)

To whom I dedicate this achievement...I'd like to dedicate the achievement of this goal, besides of course my family and girlfriend who accompanied me on this trip to Germany, two very special persons. Firstly, to Mrs. Maria José Trigueiros for all messages and follow that gave me along the master. Secondly, to my master adviser Mr. Orlando Belo, who accompanied me on a daily basis during the dissertation. These two persons, directly and indirectly supported me in the last two years, and for sure without them, it would be difficult to maintain my motivation and strength to deepen my knowledge in this amazing world of Business Intelligence.

The exams…Relating to the exams, what I felt was that in fact, the level of difficulty is high and mainly because there is less than a minute to answer to each question. There are 110 questions to be answered in 90 minutes ... Each question has 4 possible answers, where two of them are usually very similar and can be confusing ... When the "mother" language is not English, is even more complicated because some questions and their answers are long.

Fortunately, I was lucky to begin with the apparently the less complicated exam to make, and it allowed me to understand the time management that should be looked at, in order to do other exams. To get an idea, in the first exam when I had only 5 minutes to finish, I had 20 questions to answer... it was an authentic stress and the last question was answered over the last second ... There's no time to think and go back to review the answers ... that is, or you known the answer and quickly respond to a question, or it will be better to go ahead to next question!

It is difficult to describe the best way to prepare for the exams ... Normally the scope of a normal exam it’s a well-defined scope and the issues are related to the context and usually reading a book or two is enough. But in CBIP/TDWI exams it is quite different... you need to have a real-world experience and read several (many) books. But for the preparation and bibliography to make the CBIP exams, I’ll prepare/describe in a future post.

I made and passed in four exams: Information Systems (core), Data Warehouse (core), Business Analytics and Data Management that turns me a specialized professional in Business Analytics and Data Management. The more complicated exam was the Information Systems which is too much technical and detailed.

TDWI Germany Centre...It all started at 8:00 in the morning of last Friday (06-Nov-2009)... in the TDWI Germany centre, located about 30 km’s from Cologne (Germany) where I was accommodated with my girlfriend Joana. The facilities of the centre are very good and the staff really fantastic, especially Simmone and Mr. Guenter Fuhrmeister, CEO of SIGS DATACOM (TDWI Partner) ... They both received me very well and they greatly reduced my stress caused by so many tests on the same day. In addition to all the sympathy and coffees, snacks, drinks, and others... they offered me an amazing book that I will start reading during this week, wrote by Frank Buytendijk. (Click on the book image to preview the book)



The Cologne city...Cologne (German: Köln) is Germany's fourth-largest city after Berlin, Hamburg and Munich, and is the largest city both in the German Federal State of North Rhine-Westphalia and within the Rhine-Ruhr Metropolitan Area, one of the major European metropolitan areas with more than 10 million habitants. It is one of the oldest cities in Germany, having been founded by the Romans in the year 30 BC.
Cologne lies on the Rhine. The city's world famous Cologne Cathedral (Kölner Dom) is the seat of the Roman Catholic Archbishopric of Cologne. The University of Cologne (Universität zu Köln) is one of Europe's oldest universities and internationally renowned for its economics department.

(reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cologne)

The party...At the end it was the party where my princess Joana was waiting for me at the in Cologne... we started enjoy this fabulous city with some of the advices given by Simone. We were focused mainly in the shopping area and near the Rhine river. It is a beautiful city with an intense movement of people not only in the shopping area, but also in the restaurants and bars area. We attend, almost every day, to a Cuban bar where we drank exotic drinks as capiroska, mojito and others!


My sensation is that I’ll return to Germany to take the other CBIP specializations very soon... I hope this post was helpful to you.

Regards,

Pedro