Data Archives - Management Information Analysis

Data is No Longer a “Nice-to-Have”

April 25, 2016 by miawebadmin

Custom data is in our brains.

Why have we invested time and talent for the past 15 months to help you get your head, arms and budget around ETL Plus, custom apps development and analytics as a part of your daily breakfast? Well, those fun folks at Gartner are up to it again.

This time it’s the outpouring from their analytics thought partner summit in Texas last month.

In the opening keynote at the 2016 Business Intelligence Summit, Gartner analysts Rita Sallam and Frank Buytendijk shared an interesting stat in their presentation, Analytics Leadership – Empowerment without Anarchy, by 2017, 10% of businesses will have a separate business unit dedicated to productizing data.

The goal of these business units, headed up by Chief Analytics Officers (CAOs), Chief Data Officers (CDOs), and Chief Information Officers (CIOs), are to empower users throughout the organization with tools, instead of just provide static reports and dashboards. That leads us to our next observation: generating business value is a team activity.

With the evolution of analytics, there are many rapidly emerging roles along the entire data pipeline to ease the flow of data from raw sources to end business metrics.
The growth of self-service analytics is fueled by an increasing necessity among these emerging roles: business analysts, information activists, and citizen data scientists.
These roles need to collaborate with others in the pipeline, and the collaboration of all of these roles requires data governance, another theme at the show that emerged so that data that is being analyzed can be properly managed.
Data is no longer a nice-to-have. It is now a core part of businesses. The need to access all sources of data, big data included, that are now available and able to be accessed is critical to business growth. Every industry is becoming an analytics industry because of the inclusion of data-driven technology.
Traditional industries, such as healthcare and finance, are actually purchasing analytic technologies with the intent of becoming digital leaders in their industry.

Takeaways for the real world of your business data management and analytics ecosystem and so you can make it to Friday happy hour with a smile on your face:

ETL Plus is the fastest, most efficient way to get your data out of its old silos and into the mix of the internal and big data you must use to exceed your key performance objectives.
Outsourcing your custom applications development to an experienced team of analysts who are non-agenda high performers accelerates you to mastery of your custom data.
Engaging and challenging an analytics leader with deep experience across spaces from retail to healthcare gets you clear and comfortable with best choices and practices.

Bring us into your strategic conversations.

As an experienced analytics thought partner, we’ll give you new insights into your internal processes, buyer discovery trends, measure progress toward a set of quantitative goals, flag shifts in your markets or financial operations and even lift your customer experiences to a higher level of satisfaction.

Call us to start a neutral and friendly conversation: 512-478-3848.

We have some success stories to share that tell you we can help with latch on to a partner who can accelerate your data transformation, making your data visual and your planning analytics to the level of agile!

Outsourcing your ETL Projects Delivers Benefits

February 22, 2016 by miawebadmin

A lot of the dirty work in data science is ETL – the process of putting data through a meat grinder. Data may present itself in the form of a public or purchased dataset, and it almost never lines up with the way you want to query, index, or present it.

To frame the problem a bit more, most modern data transformation tools like Apache Spark or Python notebook tools are bred for interactive development. They’re meant to make it fast and easy to get started, simple to share. Never confuse these things with being production-ready.

Would your organization ever feel good about deploying some code to production that had no tests? Spark and notebooks should be considered prototyping unless proven otherwise. There is nothing wrong with prototyping, but you want some safety mechanisms before considering something production-ready. Outsourcing is a wise choice for your ETL Plus work.

Some of the benefits:

Speed of data transformation

Investment is clear and defined.

Results are shaped to where you are going, not where you were.

Accountability and transparency are integral parts of the process.

Your ETL partner needs to have the understanding and expertise to lead your organization down the right path. They should not only understand your requirements, they should be able to help you to better define them up front and adapt them over time.

ETL is not a one-off activity. It’s an on-going process that must be sustained indefinitely.

Your ETL partner needs to be just that—your partner. They must be well aligned with your business in order to maintain your marketing data over time and adapt your data structure to accommodate your ever-changing needs.

And did I mention that we are passionate about bringing health care informatics a couple decades forward?

We can handle your ETL Plus* and custom app development challenges smoothly and affordably. Our efforts will enhance your BI capabilities. Call us to start a neutral and friendly ETL Plus outsourcing conversation. 512-478-3848.

Demand for Data Analytics Increasing in Business World

September 10, 2014 by miawebadmin

Data usage is fast becoming an essential part of any company’s business strategy, with several studies predicting continued and accelerated growth over the next 10 to 15 years. Greater connectivity is leading to an abundance of available information which businesses, by their own admission, are not always qualified to analyze. Seventy-one percent of chief marketing officers surveyed by IBM said their companies are not ready to make the most all the data that is going to come their way.

But graduate schools are gearing up to make up for that lack of preparedness. A growing number of them are offering MBA programs in business intelligence analytics, training students to turn data analysis into sound and profitable business strategies. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2018 there will be 1.5 million jobs nationwide for data analysis experts in the business world.

This is the result of a number of trends that are coming together to exponentially increase data generation. Among these factors are the advancement of the Internet of Things, where a growing number of devices are being connected to the cloud, and the ever-increasing use of social media, which produces massive amounts of information: according to Business Insider, Facebook generates 500 times more data than the New York Stock Exchange on any given day.

Businesses are fast realizing the importance of data analysis, and ETL tools can give users a big leg up on the competition. ETL Plus* is a highly customizable set of skills that can be adjusted to fit the needs of each business. By extracting the relevant information from an outside source and applying it to a company’s database, it allows for easy observation and analysis, and eventually to greater productivity.

Streamlined Data Processing Can Give Organizations a Competitive Edge

May 5, 2014 by miawebadmin

In an increasingly rocky and uncertain economic landscape, organizations must find ways to gain a competitive edge by any means necessary. For many, this means finding new and innovative uses for their data.

This ultimately requires a solution designed to streamline the collection and distribution of information. The volume of data is only a small component of the equation. The manner in which it’s collected and processed is just as important, because organizations will obtain true value from their information if are able to build efficiency into their data management processes.

SimCorp, an investment solutions provider for the global finance industry, released a report that found data is an increasingly effective competitive tool. Investors who are able to leverage real-time data into making smarter investment decisions ultimately find more success than those who do not. But, as SimCorp assistant VP Jon Irgens explains, it’s more than just finding and having the data.

“High quality, accurate and up-to-the-minute data has become the lifeblood of investment management organizations, equipping them to make well-informed decisions and manage risk,” Irgens says. “Yet many firms lack an effective means of managing data and waste expenditure on maintaining complex and inefficient systems. Companies which take control of this by implementing an integrated modular platform will put themselves at a competitive advantage relative to their peers.”

This concept can be applied to just about any industry. Those in retail or health care will stand out in front of their competitors if they are able to process information efficiently and use it to drive smart decisions. This is one of the benefits of business intelligence. The ability to collect information from a variety of areas and stream it into one processing environment designed to produce the most recent and relevant data is crucial. Custom database development can provide firms with this ability.