Maybe I was the last person on the planet to know about this but if you don’t already subscribe to RSS feeds for IBM Cognos products then do yourself a favour and set them up.  There are a bunch of them here.

The main Cognos 8 Business Intelligence feed seems to include a post every time a new knowledgebase article is added which is potentially very useful.

One of the most interesting information slides for me was from Gartner’s Phil Sargeant who shared some Gartner research into enterprise data growth.  They currently believe that:

• Enterprise Data Growth in the next 5 years is estimated to be 650%
• 80% of this data will be unstructured data
• 40 exabytes* of unstructured new information will be generated worldwide in 2009
• The estimated average storage capacity growth in Australia in 2009 is 60%…
• in 2010 they estimate it will be 62%

*(an EB is a billion GB)

I know we talk about huge data volumes in a dispassionate manner given our roles as information providers, but just looking at those numbers and reading them out again I can’t help but take it as a very timely reminder to build for the future and ensure everything is optimised for performance and scalability.  Could your warehouse ETL processes handle 7 times the current data volumes in just growth alone in 5 years without relying on technology performance improvements?

You can see an additional chart for ‘Math’ and some more comments on the data in the original post.  Nathan quotes the data as being sourced from the US National Center for Education Statistics.  I’ve had a quick peep at the site and there seems to be a huge amount of data there.  If only I had more time…

I’ve wondered for a while whether it would be worth constructing a dimensional model and associated metadata and reporting capability to assist with IT (or indeed any) project tracking.  I think I’d come to the conclusion that it would be very difficult to capture the current state of all projects in a consistent and accurate way at a frequency that improves on the traditional monthly ’stock take’.  That, after all is the problem with traditional project tracking - it tends to be performed periodically - typically in the form of a weekly, fortnightly or monthly status report.  The Project Manager scurries around getting people to tell them how much work has been done or is remaining against each of the tasks and then rolls it all up to some percentage complete figure.  This process is repeated across many projects every time the status report deadline is looming.

A problem with this is that the status report deadlines aren’t necessarily synchronised so the organisation never has a point in time picture of the status of all of its projects.  The only way around this problem I know of is to synchronise the dates in which case there is an end of month (or worse) frenzy for a day or two when no one actually does much productive work while the updates are captured.

An alternative might be for the updates to be provided constantly, trickle-fed into some storage medium (like a warehouse perhaps) on a daily basis, ready for reporting on demand at any time. No end of month frenzy and continual currency of all project data.

I realise that the above might not apply to all organisations, perhaps a monthly reporting frequency is fine and perhaps there are other reasons for needing to use this approach.  I also realise that consulting organisations are serving both internal and client reporting needs which aren’t necessarily aligned - perhaps all the more reason for a more flexible dimensional approach?

If we decided to try and implement such a system, the critical component would be the trickle-feeding of the daily updates into the warehouse.  Using Scrum as our development approach really helps in getting status updates on a current sprint and many of the modern tools, including the one we use, store the tasks and updates in a relational database that could be interrogated by a nightly ETL process.  The project backlog would have to exist and be estimated for the entire known project but of course as that flexed, so too would the multi-project reporting.

Aside from being able to report using BI tools, another nice thing about having project reporting in the warehouse would be around conformed dimension reporting where we exploit pre-existing warehouse content.  This enables reports such as Staff Project FTE : Staff Total FTE by Department Ratio which could illustrate commitment or investment in projects or programs of work at any point in the organisational structure.

Worth some more thinking?  We’ll see how readily we can get access to the project updates and the frequency of these in our brave new world of program and project management, but if this data is available then I think it could be a relatively simple schema to build and quite a powerful one to use.

The scary thing is it isn’t a million miles away from what you get if you do a Google image search for ‘Executive Dashboard’.  I’m starting to suspect that not a lot of thought has gone into the design of those devices either.

So let’s think a little more about the purpose of the executive dashboard in a modern university:

• inform the university executive about institutional performance
• communicate instantly, clearly and unambiguously
• automatically highlight matters that require attention (not just extremes)

Such a device might do this through:

• comparing actual performance against targets and/or prior periods
• careful selection and limited use of colours and saturations
• intuitive and informative arrangement of elements
• deliberate removal of unnecessary ‘clutter’ such as axis values when providing macro context
• use of simple elements - tables, bar, column, line, sparkline and bullet charts
• dynamic highlighting of data determined to be of high importance
• aesthetically clean and appealing presentation of information

If you review your favourite local BI report, the one you’re really proud of, does it achieve any of the above?  I did and it didn’t, but the change needed is underway.  When you do make change in light of improved understanding, the improvement really is quite obvious and something that can be learned.

I’ve actually been reading and learning (a lot) about visualisation for a little while now and I know there is a wealth of information out there to help us avoid building fuzzy felt disasters, but they just keep on coming.

I personally cringe when I see a lot of presentations, television commercials (oh don’t even go there) and magazine ads.  Does that make me a visualisation snob?  I guess it could but it also makes me want to evangelise even more.  I firmly believe part of our role as BI/DW professionals is to do a great job of communicating information.  The better and more developed our appreciation of good design, the better our communication, and as everyone keeps telling me these days, you can’t communicate too much.

If you’re curious about your ability to judge between good and bad graph design then have a go at Stephen Few’s Graph Design IQ Test and if you think you need some help then his book Information Dashboard Design should probably be on your desk (a lot of this also applies to BI report design too by the way).

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…

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.

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.

At the moment the listserv mailing list is running in parallel but as I understand it, the plan is to review the list and perhaps create additional or replacement lists for direct correspondence in the future.

One of the immediate benefits of registering for the new site is that you can see the product and version number of the BI platform used at each of the registered institutions along with details of the ERP system where one exists.  As of right now there are already 28 registered institutions and 122 registered users.

I’m interested in claims reported on the BBC website that Gloucester College is seeing “significant improvement” in retention through the use of facebook.  As you may know, UNE has been an active advocate of Facebook for some time, a fact I proudly reported earlier this year and strategies such as these are very useful for UNE where such a high number of our students are based off-campus.  But I’m not sure how any of these various strategies can be directly associated with a change in retention.

While we all wish that the features of Facebook would just naturally appear in a Virtual Learning Environment or an online portal of some kind that students interact with, the painful truth is that they don’t, and even if they did students wouldn’t use them.  They like Facebook and they’re on that platform anyway so it would appear that Gloucester College and City of Sunderland College are finding ways to go with the tide rather than against it.

The problem of seeing who is using these systems, for how long, when and for what is something I feel is necessary before we can start claiming that they are having a direct affect on issues such as retention.  Maybe these UK colleges have found a way to tap into useage stats or perhaps they’ve built their own applications that include transaction logging which they can track back to some kind of student ID.  Maybe I’ll see if I can find out…

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…

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?