Archive for the ‘Business Intelligence’ category

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Is the Cart Still Before the Horse?

October 29th, 2009

I’m quite excited because we are currently reviewing some designs for an executive dashboard.  Now that we finally have lots of beautiful dimensionally modelled data in our warehouse with periodic snapshots going back almost 3 years, we are actually at a point where we can present some of it together in a highly aggregated manner to hopefully inform, influence and improve strategic decision making at our institution.

cart_before_horse

I first used the above slide back in 2007 at the Cognos Asia-Pacific Forum to remind people that dashboards are the veneer of a BI/DW platform.  You simply cannot sustain an integrated dashboard without the underlying atomic data and that data takes a long time to get.  The quote I read at the time still stands:

“…the worst case theme is often called a scorecard or executive dashboard. This deceptively simple application draws on data from almost all business processes in the organisation. You can’t create the entire dashboard until you’ve built the whole warehouse foundation. Or worse you end up building the dashboard by hand every day, manually extracting, copying, and pasting data from all those sources to make it work. It can be difficult to get business folks to understand the magnitude of the effort involved in creating this ’simple’ report.” Ralph Kimball

So now that we have the data, you might think it relatively easy to create that dashboard, the one that people have been clamoring for since we started this wonderful process…

There are, it seems, an endless stream of people proclaiming what wonderful dashboards they have in their organisations but yet when you look a little more closely they often appear to be a disjointed jumble of content thrown together like one of those fuzzy felt pictures you used to play with at pre-school - lots of bright distracting pictures pointing all over the place, sort of related and sort of telling you an overall story, but then again not really.  They catch the attention for a few seconds and then, purpose served, their time is done.

It seems odd that this situation prevails, I wonder why that might be.  It certainly isn’t helped by the major vendors in the BI space who seem to believe that their purpose is to appeal to the fuzzy felt designers.

Working in BI/DW in higher education clearly means we all like a challenge and this is up there with the best I’ve had cause to think about recently.  How to effectively map the major processes of a university on a single screen, in an enduring manner, and in a way that simply and rapidly communicates an overall situation.  I’ll keep you posted…

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Posted in Business Intelligence, Dashboards, Higher Education, Visualisation

Less is More

October 23rd, 2009

I saw a link to this on Flowing Data just now. Jessica Hagy is the illustrator and author and she’s been doing similar wonderful work for over 3 years and won countless awards for it.

I think it is a great reminder to those of us working in BI/DW that sometimes we can overwhelm our audiences with information and that there is a trick to finding the right balance.

card2282

The temptation is to give lots and lots and lots of information and let the audience worry about interpreting and acting on it.  I think I’m guilty of that at times.  We’re working on our Exec Dashboard delivery right now and guidance from visualisation experts like Stephen Few points to the same thing - keeping it simple can actually be quite difficult but makes the consumption so much easier.

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Posted in Business Intelligence, Fun

100 and counting…

October 14th, 2009

I must admit just over a year ago when I started this blog, I didn’t expect the experience would be quite so rewarding and enjoyable and I certainly didn’t expect to still be going over a year later.  This is the 100th post since that date and I therefore thought it fitting to celebrate the maiden century with The Times Top 100 University Rankings.

The Times Higher Education – QS World University Rankings exist to give students, academics, funders, politicians and policymakers, a broad view of the top institutions in world higher education.

This graphic from Brent Eades illustrates the rather limited geographical spread of those top 100 universities rather nicely.  I can see another version of this, weighted by population coming soon…

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Rankings are an emotive mechanism, as Times Higher Education Deputy Editor Phil Baty would no doubt be acutely aware.  I’ve come to realise this also just of late with some quite strong reaction to simple measurements that we are producing with our BI/DW platform.

You can find out more and download all the University Rankings for the last 6 years here.

You only have to review the comments on Baty’s Talking Points post to see that everyone has a view on this.  There is also a very interesting article from Jamil Salmi and Roberta Malee Bassett called Measures Matter that eloquently raises some great points and in summary, notes

As acceptance - begrudging or otherwise - of rankings has settled into the tertiary education environment, the debate has moved on to how to improve their methodology to provide more useful and legitimate data on which to base well-informed decisions.

That pretty much sums up my stance on the use of measurement in Higher Education.  We’re still finding our way and discovering how best to combine the discipline of statistics with the powerful number crunching and visualisation capabilities of BI/DW platforms to serve both business and academic imperatives.  Yes, we have a long way to go and we can refine and improve what we do, but right now we operate in an era where we can enjoy timely access to information previously only dreamed of.  Surely we all have a responsibility to embrace that opportunity and collectively pursue the information-led transformation of our organisations.

Do you use measurement in your organisation?  Does your organisation appear in the one of the world rankings?  What is the general perception of these rankings and is there a correlation between ranking and perception?

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Posted in Business Intelligence, Higher Education

Correlation Street

September 10th, 2009

I mentioned to a few people at the recent AAIR Load Management SIG that I believed there were some leading indicators that might be useful in gauging demand and therefore load way ahead of the actual enrolment process.  I’ve had this hunch for a long time but hadn’t quite managed to find the time to see if it was true.

Well, yesterday I did a little bit of digging and I think the results are quite interesting, almost exciting even.  Just to back up a little, the issue we have is being able to understand the main variable of load forecasting - the commencing student intake (we can get the continuing numbers through the use of retention statistics).

Right now we’re concerned with the main 2010 first semester intake, the census date for which is way off into the future (March 31st next year).  At that point we will know what our commencing load and income will be.  Until then it is all down to the black art of load forecasting - or is it?

If we look at admission applications and compare the numbers with the eventual enrolments we find a pretty good correlation.  Here is how things ended up for us last year in terms of commencing students, each dot represents a course.  This data however shows all admissions for last year and all eventual enrolments.  I need to do an ‘on this day last year’ comparison to see if this is truly a leading indicator this far ahead of time, but either way it gives us a high confidence level at least a month or so ahead of census date.

picture-13

But here’s where it gets really interesting.  What if we look at leading indicators of admission activity?  We’re talking about demand generation here, the interest in a subject that ultimately becomes translated into an enrolment if we achieve conversion in Marketing speak.

So what might it look like if we took the number of course searches carried out ahead of the up-coming admission and enrolment period?  Might this show some relation to the eventual enrolment?  Well I think it does.

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The above chart shows the number of course searches in the month of September 2008 compared to the subsequent final enroloment in that same course at March 31st 2009, that is over 7 months into the future.

At this stage the figures are pretty rough and the process is quite manual but it only took a couple of hours yesterday to do this and I think the chart speaks for itself.

The other great thing about course and indeed unit searches is that they are high in volume.  We’ve been capturing this data since September 2007 and have over 9.2 million individual searches.

So the next step in our quest for automated and dynamic load forecasting is to somehow use these leading indicators to bring perhaps just a little systems input to bear on the mysterious black art.  Hopefully, (much) more (very) soon…

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Posted in Business Intelligence, Load Management, Visualisation

Charts and More Charts

August 20th, 2009

So what on earth have I being doing for the last 10 days?  Neglecting this blog I know.  But with good reason.  We’re putting the finishing touches to our Unit Monitoring BI outputs which I think are pretty cool.  I hope that as an institution we really begin to benefit from this type of resource and that academics find it informative and useful.

We will shortly be publishing data for just about every unit of study at our institution.  The data is based on 20 measures ranging from Enrolment and Load through to Unit Evaluation.  The following is an example of part of the reporting that will be available to academic staff to better understand what has happened and is happening in their unit.

Charts

The above time-series charts supplement a much deeper ‘current period’ perspective which provides traffic light style reporting and tabular presentation of measures.  The double page spread for each unit contains 551 data items.  With 783 units being reported, that amounts to over 431,000 separate pieces of information available twice a year.  That is a lot of information to present on 2 sides of a single sheet of paper but I think we’ve managed to make it consumable.

We shall see what the reaction is, as ever we will be receptive to suggestions for improvement, particularly with respect to the presentation, layout and format of the data.

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Posted in Business Intelligence, Higher Education, Metrics