We’ve all heard that data has increased, mainly due to the advancement, availability and high usage of technology. Being able to access and understand as much of this data as possible, already indicates the value that someone, or a business, can get out of it. Nowadays, there are a lot of tools available to analyse data, most of which offer Artificial or Cognitive Intelligence to help even further by automating part of the data analysis.
A lot of people wonder why most Business Intelligence (BI) departments fall under the Finance and not Information Technology (IT) department. There was a time when I wondered too, especially when I was taught so during my studies.
Let’s start and try to explain this by looking at meetings. Don’t you get excited when you hear that you have a day full of meetings? Everyone would be eager for the moment when figures start appearing on presentations and not matching with each other’s reports. That is the ideal time to start playing Report Dungeons.
Don’t trust the numbers. This is a very common advice that most people know but ignore. How many polls and ‘breakthroughs’ do you read or hear about? How many of that do you actually doubt or care enough to verify? Most probably the answer is a big ‘NONE’. This could either be because you’re too lazy to do so, do not have the time, or you just like to think that it is true.
Many depict big data as a huge data creature which is difficult to understand and very hard to control. What many don’t know however is that this creature has a very long tail, and a Value(able) one as well!
The Gartner report has once again put Qlik as a market leader in data discovery within the 2015 Business Intelligence and Analytics Platform Magic Quadrant report. This designation marks the fifth consecutive year that Qlik has been positioned in the Leaders Quadrant based on completeness of vision and ability to execute.
Malta has started gaining momentum with regards to Business Intelligence (BI) investment. The Maltese market is quickly recognising how important this is and how much businesses such as financial services can gain with the implementation of BI solutions. It is therefore important that such companies exploit these solutions and try to get as much as they can from them. BI solutions must be used to help in daily decision making and not as a statistical tool at the end of each month or period.
Thomas Jefferson once said that “the man who stops advertising to save money is like the man who stops the clock to save time.” It is no secret that successful marketing is the lifeline of any business.
In order to analyse data, Business Intelligence (BI) developers usually include a lot of intelligent logic in the dashboards that they develop. This however could be restricting the freedom to get the answer to ANY question that the end-user might have. As once quoted by Marty Rubin, “a long leash is not freedom.”