Capturing Business Intelligence Required for Targeted Marketing, Demonstrating Value, and Driving Process Improvement

By bdixon | Published: April 19, 2012

Hi All

I thought I would post this article up which was written by our library department on how BI has helped reveal a very strong relationship between library usage and students academic performance.

Hopfully you find it an interesting read:

http://ro.uow.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1248&context=asdpapers

http://ro.uow.edu.au/asdpapers/242/

Regards
Brad

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IBM Business Analytics Forum 2012

By bdixon | Published: April 19, 2012

A number of staff from UOW attended the IBM Business Analytics Forum 2012 at Melbourne in March. We all had a great time at the conference and found it interesting, relevant and informative.

The main take aways from our perspective were
1) The new active report product in Cognos 10 and its application in the university environment (Although the import external data source functionality could muddy the one source of truth advocates )
2) The need for mobile integration for Business Intelligence.
3) The Big Data concept. How are we as universities harnessing this wealth of knowledge? UOW has started to investigate this but is not on the radar as a project for this year.
4) As usual data quality was a big issue I picked up on talking to the various delegates

A quick run down of how the conference played out:

Tuesday 13th March
CAB
UOW was lucky enough to attend the CAB (Cognos Advisor Board) where we got a sneak peek at the main topics to be cover in the conference
The CAB updated us on IBM’s latest product strategy, preview product enhancements under development in IBM’s labs, and provide a channel for us to feedback directly to Global BA Product Management.

Special Interest Group
Later that day we attended the Analytics in the Public sector special interest group where a number of case studies were presented on how IBM Cognos and Analytics are being used in the public sector

Drinks and the Exhibition opening was a great networking opportunity which allowed us to catch-up with other uni’s and discuss our past achievements and future plans

Wednesday 14th March
General Session
The conference was officially opened with a General Session highlighting new capabilities to empower everyone in our organisation to use fast, easy business analytics anytime, anywhere.
This gave us an overview of what we could expect to see in detail over the next 2 days

I attended the following breakout sessions and will give a quick overview on each of them:
Interactive reports presented by Ben Post
This session demonstrated a new type of interactive report which can be used both in a connected and disconnected way. This appears to be a great solution for delivering BI through ipads

Fremantle Ports gets on board with faster decision making presented by Collins Vuchocho
This session told the story of how the customer migrated from Cognos Series 7 to Cognos 10 allowing Fremantle Ports to have an up to date technology platform enabling provision of strategic Business Intelligence

Creating self-service dashboards with IBM Cognos Business Intelligence presented by Anna Sum
This session demonstrated how Cognos Business Insights allows BI users to become less dependent on IT and more self-reliant with simpler, customizable and collaberative end-user interfaces.

Designing Framework Manager models for maximum efficiency (University Western Sydney) presented by Brian Causley
This demonstration presented an interesting concept of segmenting and linking a framework model to the grain of an individual dimension. This allowed the individual reference components easy to edit, easy to track, easy to migrate and consistent in use, make collaborative model management easier

Thursday 15th March
Dashboards: eye candy or food for thought? (CQ University) presented by Ken Diefenbach
As always Ken provided an entertaining presentation of how they have taken some “Stephen Few” concepts to deliver a multitude of dashboards across the universities key result areas

Mapping the Future: Geographic Business Intelligence in Action (NRMA Ltd) presented by Walt Hui
NRMA Insurance BI team has enhanced the reporting capabilities of Cognos through the use of geographical information, challenging the status quo of traditional tabular and graphical reports

Migration Customer Panel presented by Mary-Jane Goddard IBM, Barnaby Cole IBM, Andrew McAllister Boral, Rick Gallagher Edith Cowan University
Provided some useful tips and tools on how to Upgrade from Cognos 8 to Cognos 10. This included:
- the upgrade style of big bang vs parallel upgrade
- the use of Lifecycle manager
It was great to hear that ECU completed their upgrade to Cognos 10.1.1 in 11 days considering UOW plans to start our upgrade project May 2012

New perspectives on student enrolments for Griffith University presented by Bron Kershaw and Ahn Nguyen
Griffith gave an interesting presentation of how they have rolled out a new reporting system based on IBM Cognos BI to provide senior staff with accurate and timely reports on Australian and international student applications, degree preferences, offers and historical enrolments, and enable staff to conduct predictive analysis on future enrolments.
As UOW has recently completed a similar project it was interesting to see how Griffith and UOW approaches aligned.

How to mitigate key challenges in successful Business Intelligence implementations presented by Simon Crisp
This session presented the various ways we can engage IBM Lab Services (including consultancy and education). By establishing an engagement model we could gain accelerated time-to-results, project risk mitigation, and improving the return on your IBM BA software investment.

So in summary there was lots of information to take in during the conference and it was exciting to see so many universities presenting and sharing their ideas and experiences. I feel this demonstrates how passionate, motivated and innovative universities are in this area.

More information on the conference can be found at :
http://www-01.ibm.com/software/au/data/2012-conference/index.html

Finally I had a well deserved break by extending my stay in Melbourne to watch the Formula One GP

Brad

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Gartner Business Intelligence and Information Management summit 21-22 February

By acarrion | Published: March 5, 2012

Damien and I had the opportunity to attend the Gartner Business Intelligence and Information Management summit 21-22 February at the Sydney Convention and Exhibition centre. The conference consisted of two full days of presentations and discussion workshops with leading analysts and researchers in the BI industry.

 This conference confirmed our viewpoint in how advanced UOW is with our level of maturity in the BI space. I attended a session on the first day which discussed Gartner’s opinion on the 10 key points on maximising BI impact in an organisation. From this, I believe that the Performance Indicator Unit does well in all of the key points but extremely well with five points in particular.

  •  Cross Functional
  • Support Business Analyst
  • Create a Performance Measurement system
  • BI customer facing
  • Make BI consumer friendly

 PIU have a good set of cross functional  skills that provide a great team structure  and places us in a strong position to obtain excellent  knowledge of core business processes and managing information which sets the platform for creating a performance measurement system. PIU has strong buy-in from senior executive which is why our unit is so successful and through this it helps us obtain  the right performance metrics to drive behaviour and  assist in linking into business processes . PIU continue to work effortlessly with divisions across campus to integrate into standard processes such as curriculum review as an example. Gartner then described that in order to move into providing a conducive BI deployment of information delivery organisations need to move into a self-service reporting model of data discovery. This moves away from the traditional static reports,  adhoc queries and data dumps and reduces what  Gartner believes issues of bottlenecks, lack of governance and audibility. I agree with this viewpoint and  PIU endeavour to support the business and make BI customer facing  (training, usergroups, information sessions , regular meetings etc)  with a key focus of moving to a self- service model. Furthermore, PIU have established a suite of power users across campus which help cultivate an analytical environment where users are sourcing the reports themselves through the PIU tools available.

Most of the technological aspects of BI discussed during the conference were reassuringly familiar to us : during the last few months within PIU, we have been looking at possible solutions to these new challenges and Gartner’s analysts did provide some guidance and sometimes solutions, during the different presentations and discussions. Mobile technology and social networks’ data, for example, have been on our radar for a while and it was interesting to hear what the industry generally thinks about them. During a panel discussion, some of the industry leaders agreed that social network data will be included in decision making process by 2014 for 30% of organisations. They also thought that Mobile BI technology will come as standard with most BI implementations. The panel views on the importance of unstructured data differed but all agreed that not all unstructured data belongs to the data warehouse. Given the challenges that come with ‘big data’, it is crucial to stay focused to the business goal, not the technical goal, for the successful delivery of such projects.

 A number of presentations touched on technical trends relevant to the BI world. I thought that the following were of interest:  Text Analytics as an enterprise capacity, using the cloud for global data delivery, and ‘in-memory’ solutions.

 We also had the opportunity to have ‘one to one’ meetings with 2 of Gartner’s analysts. We asked them their views on how to reengage our users and keep promoting a analytical culture across the university, now that our unit has been supporting them for several years. They both thought that a constant marketing effort is required to keep users interested and suggested to use new technological innovations associated with added business value to achieve this.

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Data Warehousing: Kimball Vs Inmon

By stephenr | Published: February 22, 2012

 Which Data Warehousing Methodology is best? Which car is best? It depends!

I will briefly compare the main differences between Kimball and Inmon methodologies:

Feature Kimball Inmon
Operational Data Store (ODS) Yes Yes
ETL Yes Yes
Enterprise Data Model No Yes
Star Schema Datamarts Yes Yes[1]
Reconciliation No Yes
OLAP Yes Yes
Reporting Yes Yes
Agile Yes Yes

 [1] Inmon’s Corporate Information Factory advocates the user of star schema’s to build data marts.

Inmon’s main tenet is that an Enterprise Data Model is required to underpin a Corporate Data Warehouse and Kimball makes no such claim.  In reality, most large corporates replicate operational table structures and data regularly into an Operational Data Store (ODS) which is an approximate union of the data models from each operational system.  So in a Kimball shop the ODS approximates a rough Enterprise Data Model, thereby closing the gap on the perceived difference.  However, Inmon does stress the importance of reconciling the Data Warehouse back to source, whereas Kimball provides no such emphasis.

Both propose Star Schema Datamarts, business driven incremental development involving prototyping iterations (Agile) and report/query delivery from relational databases directly or via OLAP data repositories such as n-dimensional cubes.

Here at UOW, we utilise our ODS as a rough Enterprise Data Model, we reconcile our Kimball fact and conformed dimensions as required, and build data marts using star schemas and n-dimensional cubes, from which data is extracted using Cognos Bi tools and native SQL.

 
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Excellence in Business Intelligence Award for PIU

By bdixon | Published: November 10, 2011

The Performance Indicators Unit has again succeeded in becoming a finalists in yet another Australian Business Intelligence Excellence Award. This time, it was for the BusinessMINDS Excellence in Business Intelligence (BI) Awards 2011.

BusinessMINDS are a national technology research and advisory firm. Their award recognises organisations throughout Australia that have demonstrated excellence in Business Intelligence initiatives . The University of Wollongong was listed amongst Telstra, IAG, Macquarie University, Commonwealth Bank and Deloittes.

The award recognises that successful BI implementations entail a strong balance of people, processes and technologies. PIU’s mature project methodology incorporates a balanced approach to project management, leadership management, change management and user engagement strategies. This approach has proven to be a successful approach to BI Excellence and has been recognised for this in yet another BI excellence award this year.

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2011 UAC Training

By bdixon | Published: November 2, 2011

Last week I had the opportunity with another colleague Brad Dixon to visit University Admission Centre (UAC) head office at Sydney Olympic Park and undergo training to understand the UAC business processes in more detail. The day was filled with a number of topics and speakers which covered the opportunity to navigate through the system, understand how preference allocation and processing tasks, offers and allocation and finishing with assessing reports and statistics.

One of the items I found extremely interesting was the art of assessing the merits of individual applicants- comparing academic track record with employment history and other vocational skills- is a complex process. It gave me an appreciation around the complexity in the application process and how offers are made to university applicants. In particular, the characteristics of an applicant are considered and how these are weighted during the allocation process. Some institutions have created relatively simple sets of selection criteria, termed course rank sets, while others are more complex set of factors to determine the merit of applicants.

Another item I found appealing was the phenomenal amount of data the UAC data warehouse deals with processing. If I am to put my statistical hat on, on the 23rd of October 2011 there were 28,207 applications from non year 12 and 47,584 for year 12 making an overall total of 71,707? Interestingly, 20% of all applications generally occur the last day to apply without financial penalty with a total approximately of 6000 applications.

Overall, it was an excellent training session to attend and if I am to relate it back to the performance indicator dataset we hold for our users this day emphasised the importance of always keeping our end –user well informed of the critical times to access the UAC dataset.

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Analytics in the Public Sector

By rsim | Published: October 19, 2011

Last week I had the opportunity to host the SAP Analytics Interactive Discussion Table at the FutureGov conference in Putrajaya Malaysia (http://www.futuregov.asia/events/futuregov-summit-2011/).

This role gave me the opportunity to talk to all 200 or so delegates from across Asia Pacific and the Middle East on what they are doing with analytics in their organisations and I was genuinely amazed at the ingenuity and value which is being executed from BI and Analytics.

One of the key take aways for me is the problem of volume. The challenges some of our neighbours are facing by “Big Data” in analytics and the scale of data some of the government departments in India and China need to handle makes all the data we handle in Australia look like a trial run, no wonder they have found such innovative solutions and it has encouraged out of the box thinking. I think if I had to some up the general feel it would be Plato’s comment “Necessity, the mother of invention”.

The second thing that was outstanding was the growth of mobile communication channels. Not just social media or the use of smart phone’s but traditional mobile voice and SMS, particularly picture SMS too. Some of these countries have 200% mobile phone penetration so this is by far the most convenient way to commence a dialog with their constituents.

However this provides a whole lot of challenges for Analytics delivery. Unstructured data sources are important in a way they never were before. Social Media, Email, Voice, Photo and Video data all have analytic value and integrity and need to be categorised and aggregated to inform policy making.

In fact the reporting comment of the conference I thought came from the Rt Hon. Major of Wellington who providing me with the best working example of the strategic value of all organisational data I have seen in a while.

She said before she goes and engages with her community she wants to know everything that community have raised with their council in the past including:

  • The emails they have sent
  • The suggestions they have made
  • Reports from previous engagement activities

In other words rather than asking them again what they want she wants to start a conversation – this is what we have heard you say over the past 3 years, does that still ring true, are these still your issues? Now doesn’t that sound like an engaged government, one you only have to tell something to once.

And what a fantastic opportunity for reporting and analytics unstructured data is.

Their were so many wonderful ideas which came from the conference and such an interesting dialogue but I would love to continue the conversation:

Question 1: If memory is getting cheaper and our toolsets can handle large data volumes and unstructured data like never before and there is a genuine business case for returning the value from unstructured data assets in our organisations why are so few of us devoting resources to unstructured data projects?

Question 2: Is the above a false assumption, are you already devoting considerable resources to unstructured data projects and do you have any examples of the value of unstructured data from your own organisations?

Posted in Analytics, Business Intelligence, FutureGov, PIU News, Public Sector | Leave a comment

Finalist 2011 Gartner Business Intelligence (BI) Excellence Award

By bdixon | Published: October 19, 2011

The Performance Indicator Unit would like to extend our thanks and congratulations to our extended user base.

In March 2011 the Performance Indicators approach at UOW was voted a finalist in the 2011 Gartner Business Intelligence (BI) Excellence Award for Asia Pacific.

Gartner is a world wide global technology research and advisory firm (http://www.gartner.com/), founded in 1979, Gartner is headquartered in the U.S.A., and has 1,200 research analysts and consultants in 85 countries and has 11,000 organisations as clients. The Business Intelligence Excellence Award recognises and rewards the most successful recent BI implementations by end-user organizations.

UOW’s implementation was shortlisted in the top 3 from the Asia Pacific region and only narrowly missed out on the top prize by a mere 10 votes.

The award criteria recognises that people, processes and technologies need to be integrated and aligned to take a more strategic approach to business intelligence (BI). In discussions with the judges it was UOW’s engagement of their user base in projects and on an ongoing basis that was one of the key differentiating factors of our application.

We rely heavily on all of you to help us set priorities, define requirements, test developments, promote new projects and help us with continuous improvement initiatives and therefore our success in this award is largely attributable to the generosity of all of you, our users, in giving us considerable amounts of your time and effort in helping us deliver decision making information for the University.

More information on the project approach and philosophy can be found at http://www.uow.edu.au/services/pi/index.html

Please accept the team’s thanks for your continued support of our projects and we want to encourage you in sharing in our delight in the acknowledgement through this award of our successful project collaborations.

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About this Blog

By rsim | Published: August 11, 2011

The obvious question you would all be asking is why a blog and what could we possibly have to say.

The why cannot be explained without first tipping our hat to our colleague Rob Hale from UNE who started this journey.

Rob has sadly left the higher education sector (and we are worse for it) but before he did Rob started a blog which is available here: http://blog.une.edu.au/robbi/

Rob’s blog featured innovative ideas and technology, guest articles, and a means of communicating ideas about the higher education BI space. Rob’s articles were interesting, engaging and thought provoking.

While I don’t think we can live up to Rob’s creativity since his farewell post the PIP team have sorely missed his voice and this has sparked us to decide to start a new blog.

So please join us in starting a new conversation.

Posted in Awards, Business Intelligence, Cognos, Dashboards, Data Warehouse, Dimension Modelling, Higher Education, Perspectives, PIU News, Projects, Uncategorized | Tagged | Leave a comment

  • About

    • A Business intelligence competency centre known as the Performance Indicators Unit was established in 2006 with the goal of developing an analytic culture throughout the organisation. This culture is designed to make data driven decision making and information analysis and embedded or business as usual activity for the University.

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