BI & Analytics

David McCandless turns complex data sets (like worldwide military spending, media buzz, Facebook status updates) into beautiful, simple diagrams that tease out unseen patterns and connections. Good design, he suggests, is the best way to navigate information glut — and it may just change the way we see the world.

The election result this week in Alberta, Canada confounded a lot of people and cast the art of polling in a bad light.   The polls  predicted  that the Wildrose Party would win, but they were trounced by the PC Party.  Two days before the election, one poll gave the Wildrose 38% versus the PCs 36%. For the previous week the polls averaged 41% for the Wildrose and 33% for the PCs, a lead of 8%.  In the actual election results the winning Progressive Conservative Party had 44% to the Wildrose’s 34%, a loss for Wildrose by about 10%

Here is a vision statement to help sell your performance management initiative to your executives:
“Within 12 months, every employee will be able to check their email, calendar and their personal top 10 KPIs at the breakfast table using their smartphone or tablet.”

Success of companies – big or small – will increasingly depend on their ability to capture, analyse and gain insights from data. While Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) has always been about collecting, analysing and reporting of data to support management decision making, the emergence ‘Big Data Analytics’ is going to change EPM as we know it. ‘Big Data Analytics’ is one of the biggest business buzz words of 2012, so let me outline some of my thoughts on how this will change EPM in most companies.

How does an organization create a culture of metrics? One example is the community of baseball, including its managers, team owners, scouts, players and fans. With better information and analysis of that information, baseball teams perform better – they win!

Good news for all business managers that would love to have their business metrics — for which the data reside in databases behind the firewall (on-premise) — available on their smart-phone. We have made the integration of on-premise data into KPI Dashboard much easier with our Data Collector.