Business Intelligence Technology and Career Options Paul Boal Director - Data Management Mercy (www.mercy.net) March 12, 2012

Opening Questions What kinds of jobs does someone do in the area of business intelligence? What does someone working in business intelligence do? What are common tools used in business intelligence? 2

What do you do in Business Intelligence? 3

What do you do in Business Intelligence? Data Governance Data Architecture, Analysis, and Design Database Management Data Security Data Quality Master Data Management Data Warehousing Reporting Metadata Management Business analyst Data analyst Data modeler Data scientist BI developer Data architect ETL developer Report writer 4

What do you do in Business Intelligence? Interview users Understand business problems Model the business Analyze data Integrate data Write reports and interfaces Drive data quality improvement Build dashboards Share insights Make the organization smarter… Solve Business Problems

The (sometimes) thankless part… Data management isn’t important… First priority is delivering services/products… Reporting is easy… 6

Mercy Data Warehousing / Mercy Insight Here’s how easy it is…

COMMON CHALLENGES Getting access to source data Working with application teams Data quality and data stewardship Master data management User Expectations 8

Challenge: Getting Access to Data Vendor Contract Obstacles Flexibility of vendor to allow access / support Cost of building extracts Technical Obstacles Legacy systems, programming/system skills Cloud solutions (the bad ones) Knowledge Gaps Knowledge of source system data Cultural Obstacles Application team controls access too tightly Development teams are timid about database access 9

Challenge: Application Teams Development Style You tell me exactly what you want and I'll build it. Give me the business logic and I'll build it. Analytical Hubris This is the way it works; come to find out the data doesn't match. I assumed that you wanted it like that other extract. Fear of a down-stream dependency e.g. Kronos PR530 The PICA code 10

Challenge: Data Quality & Master Data Management Not analyzing or profiling data contents Using terms rather than ideas Building in rules that are too strict Missing formal data governance policies Lack of clear data stewardship Data seen only as operational http://ocdqblog.com 11

Challenge: User Expectations Sometimes, users expect computers to be able to solve problems for them; Sometimes, users don't want the system to do anything for them. Rationalize data integration / data warehousing 80% gathering information together 20% analyzing and decision making Web 2.0 versus Enterprise Applications Enterprise solutions versus departmental control System Performance 12

Challenges in Getting Value from Data Data Usage Survey 195 data users across Mercy (of 380 surveyed) analysts, informaticists, statisticians, report writers Top Challenges Finding the data they need Performance of the systems they use to access data Integrity of the data they have access to Integrating data from multiple sources Target 80% using data and %20 getting data1 Current Efficiency Gap Note that this survey is currently being rerun and updated between 3/4 and 3/18. Key points in this are that data management is something that is felt on a daily basis by a large number of co-workers. This isn’t isolated to a small number of users or a group of IT people who write reports and send data to requestors. >75 FTE in the efficiency gap is a significant number, even for an organization of 35,000 co-workers. That’s more than $6M dollars in annual salary. 13

STAYING FIT Organizations / Conferences Blogs Twitter TDWI B-Eye-Network TDAN Analysts: Gartner, Forrester Blogs I'll email you my Google Reader list: paul.boal@gmail.com Twitter BI Twitter List Open Source and Developer Tools Talend, Pentaho, Jaspersoft, BIRT, Infobright Oracle, Teradata, IBM 14

Demonstrations 15

Business Objects Universe 16

Business Objects WebI 17

Dashboard Example 18

Tools / Resources Open Source BI Open Source Stats/Mining Databases Pentaho – reporting, analytics, integration, dashboards, mining Talend – integration, data quality, master data Jaspersoft – reporting, analytics, integration, dashboards Actuate BIRT – reporting Open Source Stats/Mining R – statistics Weka – machine learning ProM – process mining Databases MySQL, Oracle, Teradata, SQL Server, Infobright, Hadoop Teradata University Network Internships 19