The problem with dashboards, and business intelligence segmented
It is becoming ever clearer that dashboards aren’t working out too well, any more than predecessor technologies like EIS (Executive Information Systems) did. The recurring problem with these technologies is that if they’re mind-numbingly simple, people don’t find them very useful; but if they’re not, people are overwhelmed and still don’t find them useful. This column by Sandra Gittlen does a good job of spelling the problem out.
I think there are lots of problems like that in BI, and what we need to do is step back and consider all the different kinds of BI that enterprises value and need. More precisely, let’s consider the major kinds of use of BI, because it seems that each calls for different kinds of technological support. Here’s one possible list:
- Early warning of situations that require action.
- Communication of company results.
- Deep analysis and decision support.
- Operational analytics.
Here’s what I mean by each category.
KXEN and Verix try to disrupt the data mining market
Data mining is hugely important, but it does have issues with accessibility. The traditional model of data mining goes something like this:
- Data is assembled in a data warehouse from transactional information, with all the effort and expense that requires. Maybe more data is even deliberately gathered. Or maybe the data is in large part acquired, at moderate cost, from third-party providers like credit bureaus.
- The database experts fire up long-running, expensive data extraction processes to select data for analysis. Often, special data warehousing technology is used just for that purpose.
- The statistical experts pound away at the data in their dungeons, torturing it until it reveals its secrets.
- The results are made available to business operating units, both as reports and in the form of executable models.
Each in its own way, KXEN and Verix (the imminent new name of the company now called Business Events) want to change all that.
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Data mining, Software as a service, Usability and UI, Verix | 5 Comments |
Data mining requires data
Data mining requires and justifies huge investments. The smallest part is the data mining software itself. A much bigger part is the investment in data warehouse technology, a subject about which I’ve been posting extensively recently on DBMS2.com. But there’s yet another part to the picture, namely investing in actually gathering data for analysis, that I’ve written about, most recently in a blog I posted elsewhere and am now copying below.
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| Categories: Analytic technologies, Data mining | 2 Comments |