1. Business Intelligence
Technology and Career Options
Paul Boal
Director - Data Management
Mercy (
March 12, 2012

2. 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

3. What do you do in Business Intelligence?3

4. 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

5. 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

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

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

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

9. 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

10. 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

11. 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 11

12. 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

13. 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

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

15. Demonstrations 15

16. Business Objects Universe16

17. Business Objects WebI 17

18. Dashboard Example 18

19. 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