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Are you getting value from your reporting tool?

  Reporting/visualization tools have come a long way in the last decade. This is also reflected in their costs. Unlike a lot of specific use tools, the value of reporting tools is variable, dependent entirely upon the value the organization can extract. In a lot of organisations the attitudes of Visualizations tools have not kept pace with the capabilities. These tools have made genuine strides towards becoming complete analytical suites. Some of the new capabilities that have been added are- Massive data processing capabilities. The massive drop in cost of computing has aided these tools to add data processing capabilities. While a decade ago, one would be expected to preprocess the data before loading, nowadays you can easily load millions or even billions of rows of data into a reporting tool (like Tableau) and still do analysis without delay. Each of the major players have been developing proprietary cube like technologies to enable this.  This expands the horizon of analy...
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Crisis of Sponsorship for BI teams.

  Crisis of Sponsorship for BI teams. There is an accelerated explosion in the domain of data. While, a decade ago, BI was central to the data strategy of an organisation, there has been a mushrooming of data teams with their own mandates. We have seen the rise of Big data teams, Analytics teams, data science teams, data platform teams and many other flavours of data teams. While earlier one could easily call oneself a data generalist, that is not true any more.  While there are decentralising forces there are also centralising forces where many organisations have moved to calling all data professionals as data scientists.  This has created a fog of war providing many opportunities and pitfalls. Many professionals have moved to largely similar positions with different designations, while a number of skills have lost their currency. These clashes are visible in data warehouse vs data lakes or RDBMS vs python libraries, where concepts that were considered essential skills n...
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Evaluation of Organisational data culture

  Data Culture: A culture is a set of shared ideals that promotes certain behaviours and discourages certain other behaviours. It defines what is acceptable behaviour as a whole for a group of people. In data culture, this then defines how data is produced, stored, processed and consumed.  The three major stakeholders of any data culture then are the producers, consumers and the regulators. If this sounds similar to a marketplace it is because this is in many ways similar and the forces that act here are not too different from those that apply in a marketplace. The producers in a data culture are the IT team, the consumers are the business team and the regulators here are the executives.  Taking the example of market further and focussing on farming as a focus areas, we see that the executives play the role of regulators by providing right incentives and sponsoring long gestation projects, the producers (business team) create the demand through their tastes and preference...
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Generic framework for Self service BI (part 1)

  Generic framework for Self service BI (part 1) Requirement: Like any web based companies, ours too is an organisation that needs to analyse a lot of user behaviour. What are the users doing on our platform and how are they interacting with it, are of immense interest to us. These analyses can be based on different phases of user journey- when they are visiting our web pages, when they download our application and explore it, when they register with us and when they turn into paid customers. We used to consider these analyses separate from each other and maintain different systems to analyse them. This required a large number of resources and a directory full of reports and dashboards. This is the case in a large number of organisations it seems.  We wanted to create a system which would simplify the process so much, as to turn the system into a self service framework. The business teams should not have to go through the loops of raising tickets and wait for resource allocati...
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