MBA504 Workshop Eight Introduction to Modern BI Tools Data Analysis, Problem Solving and Digital Operations2 WHAT IS BI? Business Intelligence (BI) is a set of theories, methodologies, architectures, and technologies that transform raw data into meaningful and useful information for business purposes. Data Visualisation Processing & Aggregation Lots and lots of dataBUSINESS INTELLIGENCE IN ACTION DIFFERENT SYSTEMS DATA REPOSITORY BI OUTPUTSHUMANS IN THE LOOP Source: Gartner • Descriptive, Diagnostic and Predictive analyses require human input for decision-making. • The input needs to be as seamless and efficient as possible. • This is where BI tools help.ACTIVITY • Let’s bring the model to life by applying it to a specific context. • Imagine you are executives in an organisation that has just recorded an operating loss of $100 million. • In groups, identify: • The descriptive data that could tell you what happened. • The diagnostic data that could tell you why that happened. • The predictive data that could tell you what might happen next. • The prescriptive data that could help you determine the solution.BI TOOL REQUIREMENTS – INFRASTRUCTURE • BI Platform Administration, Security and Architecture: – Capabilities that enable platform security, administering users, auditing platform access and utilisation, optimising performance and ensuring high availability and disaster recovery • Cloud BI: – Platform-as-a-service and analytic-application-as-a-service capabilities for building, deploying and managing analytics and analytic applications in the cloud, based on data both in the cloud and on-premises • Data Source Connectivity and Ingestion: – Capabilities that allow users to connect to structured and unstructured data contained within various types of storage platforms, both on-premises and in the cloudANALYSIS AND CONTENT CREATION • Embedded Advanced Analytics: – Enables users to easily access advanced analytics capabilities that are self-contained within the platform itself or through the import and integration of externally developed models. • Analytic Dashboards: – The ability to create highly interactive dashboards and content with visual exploration and embedded advanced and geospatial analytics to be consumed by others. • Interactive Visual Exploration: – Enables the exploration of data via an array of visualisation options that go beyond those of basic pie, bar and line charts to include heat and tree maps, geographic maps, scatter plots and other special-purpose visuals. – These tools enable users to analyse and manipulate the data by interacting directly with a visual representation of it to display as percentages, bins and groups.DISCOVERY AND EXPLORATION • Smart Data Discovery: – Automatically finds, visualises and narrates important findings such as correlations, exceptions, clusters, links and predictions in data that are relevant to users without requiring them to build models or write algorithms. – Users explore data via visualisations, natural-language-generated narration, search and NLQ technologies. • Mobile Exploration and Authoring: – Enables organisations to develop and deliver content to mobile devices in a publishing and/or interactive mode, and takes advantage of mobile devices’ native capabilities, such as touchscreen, camera and location awareness.SHARING OF FINDINGS • Embedding Analytic Content: – APIs and support for open standards for creating and modifying analytic content, visualisations and applications, embedding them into a business process and/or an application or portal • These capabilities can reside outside the application, reusing the analytic infrastructure, but must be easily and seamlessly accessible from inside the application without forcing users to switch between systems. • Capabilities for integrating BI and analytics with the application architecture will enable users to choose where in the business process the analytics should be embedded. • Publish, Share and Collaborate on Analytic Content: – Allow users to publish, deploy and operationalise analytic content through various output types and distribution methods, with support for content search, scheduling and alerts. • Enables users to share, discuss and track information, analysis, analytic content and decisions via discussion threads, chat and annotations.ACTIVITY • The previous four slides covered four main areas of BI. Each group will now be allocated one of those areas. • Your task is to use your smartphone device to learn more about your allocated area. Use a flipchart to illustrate what you’ve learned. • Then deliver a mini-presentation to the rest of the class so that they, too, can learn what you’ve discovered. Infrastructure Analysis and Content Creation Discovery and Exploration Sharing of Findings• Now we’re going to put into practice the process illustrated on the previous slide. • Each group will be allocated one of the following incidents: – An IT security breach – A sudden spike in staff turnover – A big increase in product defaults – Higher than average rates of workers’ compensation claims – Unexpected cost blowouts – Media scrutiny regarding offshore tax havens • Work through the process on the previous slide in the context of your allocated incident. Share your conclusions with the class. ACTIVITYDESKTOP SOFTWARE Microsoft Excel • Excel supports various charts, graphs, or histograms generated from specified groups of cells. Microsoft Power BI • Business analytics service that provides interactive visualisations with self-service business intelligence capabilities, where end users can create reports and dashboards. Integrates with Excel and Office 365. 16TIBCO Spotfire • Integrated data analytics and visualisation platform which can visualise various types of charts • Sharing and embedding dashboards capability Tableau • Capable of relational databases, cubes, cloud databases, and spreadsheets and then generates a number of graph types that can be combined into dashboards and shared over a computer network or the internet 17 DESKTOP SOFTWARETABLEAU • Tableau offers an interactive visual-based exploration tool for business users to easily access, prepare and analyse their data. • Tableau has made the analytic workflow experience for users easier as well as giving them greater power to explore and find insights in data. • Tableau has recently achieved extraordinary growth by appealing to business buyers propelled by its “land-andexpand” strategy.TABLEAU – STRENGTHS • Intuitive interactive visualisation and exploration and analytic dash boarding capabilities for almost any data source — leveraging an extensive set of data connectors with both in-memory and direct query access for larger datasets – popular with business users. • Customer Education: Tableau offers a vast array of learning options – including online tutorials, webinars and hands-on classroom-based training – to educate and empower its users, which has increased the number of skilled Tableau resources available in the market along with Tableau Public, its online community and its extensive network of Alliance Partners. • Flexible deployment options: Tableau can be deployed in the cloud, with Tableau Online, or on-premises. – Tableau has evolved its cloud deployment options to also provide prepackaged virtual machines for: • AWS and Microsoft Azure in order to simplify deployment and support for the Google Cloud platform (although hybrid support for on-premises data is on the near-term roadmap). • Tableau Server is available as bring your own license (BYOL) on the Azure and AWS Marketplaces; it is also available in pay-by-the-hour on AWS Marketplace.TIBCO SPOTFIRE • Through its acquisition of
Spotfire in 2007, TIBCO Software became one of the data discovery disruptors that helped drive the BI market shift from traditional reporting to modern BI and analytics. • The platform offers extensive capabilities for analytics dashboards, interactive visualisation and data preparation in a single design tool, while offering flexible processing options either in-memory or in-database. • TIBCO has considerable investment in automating and recommending insights for smart data discovery, streaming and location analytics.TIBCO SPOTFIRE STRENGTHS • Advanced data exploration: – Although Spotfire can be used for a range of use cases, customers select and use Spotfire for its ease of use in conducting advanced and complex analysis. – Integrated self-service data preparation tool for building complex data models and a single highly-rated design environment for interactive visualisation and building of analytic dashboards – Access to an extensive library of embedded advanced analytic functions, with many drag-and-drop capabilities: • geospatial algorithms and data • integrated access to TIBCO’s optional data science runtime engine for the R analytic language, TIBCO Enterprise Runtime for R (TERR)• Microsoft offers a broad range of BI and analytics capabilities with its Power BI suite, delivered via the Azure cloud. • Power BI Desktop can be used as a stand-alone, onpremises option for individual users, or when power users are authoring complex data mashups involving onpremises data sources. – Offers data preparation, data discovery and interactive dashboards via a single design tool. • Microsoft substantially lowered the price of Power BI in 1Q15 (to $9.99 per user per month), making it one of the lowest-priced solutions on the market today. MICROSOFT POWER BIONLINE SERVICES • Mapbox (https://www.mapbox.com/) – An open source mapping platform for custom-designed maps, it provides APIs and SDKs to integrate location into any mobile or web app. • Wordle (http://www.wordle.net/) – A specialised tool to generate word clouds from text • Also an Australian company, Kapiche (www.kapiche.com) • Datawrapper (https://datawrapper.de/) – Open source tool helping user to quickly create simple, correct and embeddable data visualisation 2426 Each group will be allocated one of the six online services profiled on the previous two slides. Set up a dummy account and spend 10 minutes playing with your allocated online service. Present your findings to the class. In particular: • What are your initial impressions? • Was the online service easy to use? • For what types of organisational imperatives could the service be most useful? ACTIVITY