Oz Analytics

How to Find Your First Job as an Analyst

Continuing on my YouTube Channel covering everything you wanted to know about being an analyst, business analyst, data scientist, and any other data-using role in business today.

Here is part 2 of my tips on how to land a job in analytics:

 

Part 1 was published a few days ago here and you can subscribe to the channel here as well.

As mentioned before, I've also put together a related playlist on YouTube of a few videos that include those made by others on similar topics that I have found on the net. 30 minutes of watching this whole list should give you some insight into how you can go about finding that first job. Good luck!

The Naked Analyst

I've just started a YouTube Channel covering everything you wanted to know about being an analyst, business analyst, data scientist, and any other data-using role in business today.

I'm doing this because I want to give back a little to the analytic community that has given me such a great career. In short, each video will give you (hopefully useful) tips from a 25 year veteran of the analytic profession. My hope is that people will find it a useful way to spend a couple of minutes and that it will compliment this blog.

I may live to regret the name 'The Naked Analyst' but hopefully most viewers will notice that I am, in fact, not broadcasting naked and will move on to more fertile pastures! I chose the name hoping that this will indicate my 'unaligned' status. Unaligned in that I am talking about analytics without any particular bias or influence from the myriad of vendors and consulting companies.

So no hidden agendas and no marketing push to buy the lastest tool from a vendor promising to solve all of the problems in your organisation. Not that this ever happens ...

Here are the first 2 videos. The first is a quick introduction to the channel:

 

This second video is Part 1 of some tips for people who would like to get their first job as an analyst:

 

I've also put together a related playlist on YouTube of a few videos that include those made by others on similar topics that I have found on the net. 30 minutes of watching this whole list should give you some insight into how you can go about finding that first job. Good luck!

Day 5 Week 6 of the CORTEX MBAnalytics

Continuing week 6 - part of the 60 day information management refresher course from the CORTEX.

The CORTEX

Master of Business Analytics

Week 6, Day 5

Theme: Analytics In The Real World

Week 6, Friday

This week's theme is application - not in the sense of a computer program - rather in the sense of 'use it or lose it'. This week we look at how analytics is being applied in the real world.

WATCH       Today's task:  Making $79B Agile 

15 minutes

'Making $79B Agile: How Procter & Gamble Handles BI', Patrick Kern, Director of Business Intelligence at Proctor and Gamble interviewed by Bruno Aziza, Director of Business Intelligence at Microsoft

Key takeout: This short interview contains a good overview of how one large company has addressed their business requirement for enterprise wide agile decision making.

Next installment of the MBAnalytics will be on Monday October 10th.

That's it for week 6. This time there is a long weekend in Australia and I think it's time for a 'half term break', so I will see you back on Monday October 10th for the next installment. As always, comments, questions and ideas are all welcome.

The MBAnalytics is just one part of the Business Intelligence CORTEX - a community of Business Intelligence, Data Warehousing, Analytics and Project Management professionals in Australia, New Zealand and Asia. Membership is free and the forums are very active with over 20,000 posts offering a uniquely Australasian viewpoint.

Back To School With the 60 Day MBAnalytics

I've been lucky so far and have had an enjoyable professional career for over 20 years now. Twice in the past I have had a 'crisis of interest' after several years in the same field or industry. I have a pretty low boredom threshold and the ensuing crises spurred me on to launch into new endeavours looking for something exciting to do. In the early 1990's I left international banking and joined a European think tank in the South of France. While there I conducted research into emerging technologies and their impacts on the future of society in the 21st century. This led on to several high-tech startups in the field of data visualisation in Europe and the US. Then in the early 2000's I decided to return to Australia and work for the first time in the land of my birth. This had the added attraction of getting my kids learning english and the aussie way of life - and there are worst places to live than next to a Sydney beach. That opened up my third career in corporate information management (IM).

Why am I thrilling/boring you with my life details? Because another period has passed and I find I am still loving IM. Sad? Perhaps. I find (perhaps to my own surprise) that I don't want to make another sudden career change - although the Provençal lifestyle is still there at the back of my mind calling me. What I have felt over the last few years is a strong need to expand my horizons. This has led me to spend a lot of my spare time listening to and participating in a wide range of activities outside of my 'day' job. The business intelligence CORTX is but one example of this.

To cut a long story short, I have on my travels across the global IM landscape come across a great deal of inspiring new people with knowledge that I now want to share with you. In short I have put myself through a refresher course in information management and I want to share this with the world. After looking at the excellent Juice Analytics 30 day guide to data visualisation I thought that I would borrow from their idea and produce a 60 day Masters of Business Analytics for anyone who wants to be exposed to the latest trends, ideas and applications of information management. The latest and best thinking there is on the subject.

So starting next Monday AEST and for the next 60 or so days it's back to school. In this blog I will be publishing material and links that will deliver this experience in short bites of between 5 and 30 or so minutes a day. One day you might be watching a short video, the next reading a whitepaper or newspaper article or listening to a podcast. I hope that those of you who are as time-poor as I am will take the opportunity to expand your horizons.

UPDATE: The MBAnalytics is underway and the first day is here.

If you get into the swing of things and hunger for more, I will also be including additional material for extra credit. 

Enjoy and please let me know if you love or hate the material. Even better, add to the group zeitgeist by contributing links and material that has impressed you. Forget MIT or Harvard! Are you up to the 60 day CORTEX MBAnalytics challenge?

This is a non-profit venture and I hope that just a few of you will be inspired to do greater things as a result.

Equally, if you have some rights over the material presented and object to being included then please let me know and I will remove the offending material.

Beyond all of this - just have fun.

The Death of BIG Business intelligence

In the second decade of the 21st century the BI platforms from the SIMO vendors (SAP, IBM, Microsoft and Oracle) are dinosaurs.

A provocative statement - but bear with me.

Over the past few years I've blogged about a lot on the emerging trends of information management: real-time, BIG data, agile BI, actionable performance management and the like. The one thing that they have in common is that they are all big. Either big in terms of expensive or big in terms of the changes that they require within organisations.

I've tried to relate many of these trends to practical actions that (for those of us without large budgets) we can still extract value from. The context of these actions is that I have often been advising medium and large commercial businesses with existing business intelligence operations. So what I have experienced may not necessarily apply to government or small organisations.

Frequently my advice has involved technologies from one or more of the BI platforms from the SIMO vendors. SIMO and cheap are not words that go together. It's not a criticism of the platforms. They are what they are but I argue that their time has past because there are now a number of alternative approaches available that leverage newer low cost products and methods.

I have been increasingly looking to the benefits of open standards and web-based solutions to create low cost platforms without further investment in the SIMO vendor platforms. In the past I have used open source to extend SIMO platforms so that I didn't have to pay for the 'enterprise version' or 'additional module' that the SIMO vendors always seem to suggest when I want my platform to do something new.

An example of this was to extend our web-based dashboards to include sparklines¹. This type of graphic was not supported by the SIMO vendor product at the time but was easily extended using open source. It also saved the company the considerable expense of buying the enterprise dashboard for $250,000 + 20% annual support charge.

Now I have questioned the idea of using the SIMO platform at all. In the above scenario I today have invested in something like Tableau which although very definitely not based on open source code, is significantly cheaper to purchase and more adaptable to a variety of data sources and presentation types.

At this point, I will digress into more technical considerations. So if you become glassy-eyed at the mention of java, then it's best if you skip over the next couple of paragraphs and start reading about the example.

Open standards-based initiatives make our world of data so much more open than it once was. Everyone has heard of Big Data, but there are also dozens of open initiatives such as Mondrian (or more correctly: the Pentaho Analysis Services Community Edition) - an Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) server that enables business users to analyze large quantities of data in real-time.

Why do we care? Mondrian gives us an open standard way to access OLAP using Java on the client side. I'm not referring to XML/A the 'open' standard that Microsoft has been promoting for some years. XML/A is not truly open. Mondrian and Saiku should provide a true open driver capability to those of us building best-of-breed platforms. In time, I hope that market pressures will convince the SIMO vendors to build their own drivers for Mondrian.

A lot of brainpower has been invested over recent years improving database technologies so that they better support business intelligence activities. Combine this with the computing power now available on our desktops and in our data centres and clouds and I think you will find that best-of-breed technology stacks where you decide each layer will often do the job more sustainably and cheaper than an equivalent SIMO investment.

An Example

I can best explain the business logic behind my ideas by taking an example such as business MDM (master data management).

Old School

You purchase an MDM solution from the SIMO vendor you already have in-house. Let's take IBM in this case. So you will need to purchase the Websphere Business Glossary and probably the MetaData Server and Workbench. What's this going to cost? I'm guessing $1 million or more for an enterprise license once you factor in the specialist technical skills you will need to integrate it into your organisation.

IBM's Websphere Platform (courtesy IBM)

Now Websphere is a nice platform and the integration between DataStage, QualityStage, Information Analyzer and Business Glossary is a joy to have as a business manager of this stuff. I've just never had the business case to buy the entire platform. This is true of the majority of IBM platforms implemented across Asia-Pacific today. IBM is no exception and this is true of the other SIMO platforms. Budgets, capabilities and maturity levels almost always mean that only parts of a SIMO platform are implemented in an organisation. What a missed opportunity - but there is no point in crying over spilt milk. If the business case to implement entire platforms existed, then the SIMO vendors would be the first to let you know.

Microsoft is the exception to this rule, having a much cheaper licensing model. Unfortunately their MDM capability is very much a 'you build it' one, so the TCO (total cost of ownership) is still significant.

The challenge today is being smarter and more effective than past attempts. 

New School

Means that you leverage your existing investments - often those in web solutions.

For example, an MDM on-the-cheap solution would be to have your content management (CMS) platform hold critical business metadata. SharePoint is frequently the CMS of choice for large traditional corporations. Even if not already implemented, Using SharePoint to build a custom workflow and collaboration solution is pretty straightforward. So with a modest effort, the CMS can support an intranet-based community of business owners to create and maintain business metadata.

Making use of this business metadata is also possible. Continuing with the MDM scenario above, and assuming you use BusinessObjects, Cognos or similar, then you can export the business metadata easily to universes/cubes so that it is available to report writers, users and decision makers. This will drive the use of standard definitions of data and measures and make enterprise performance management easier.

We are also reaching the point where the presentation layer products (reports, dashboards and scorecards) from the SIMO vendors are now intelligently integrating back into - you guessed it - the CMS's like SharePoint. So production and consumption of business metadata is done on the most widespread platform available within the organisation.

This takes BI and IM out of the analytic ghetto and integrates it seamlessly into the corporate intranet - and beyond.

Cost? A conservative $100,000.

 Conclusions

What's the overall result? You get 50% or more of the benefits at 15% or less of the cost. Ongoing maintenance is also less. Most crucial of all is that the cheaper option is also the one most likely to be funded by an organisation. Why? Simple: it's CHEAPER.

This blog started with the statement that the SIMO vendors were dinosaurs. This is not quite true, but as my example above illustrates, it is now time to integrate your existing SIMO investments into your corporate intranet. Not by buying more SIMO products. Instead use more open technologies to integrate them into the intranet. Treat the SIMO-based data and report repositories as services to be consumed via a web front-end that does not require those extra SIMO products.

I thought about calling this approach 'Poorman's BI' and 'Lagging-edge BI' but I will stick with another term that I have used in the past: 'Slow BI'. It is slow in a good way because I have seen this approach allow an organisation to build a level of support for BI that is solid, broadbased and delivering benefits that the organisation can measure and acknowledge.

Slow BI provides an enduring organisational and technological platform that focuses limited resources on delivering practical business capabilities. These become part of the operational business and decision making processes among people that are only dimly aware of business intelligence and information management. This is an important step towards the elimination of analytic ghettos and the creation of an information workforce.

Slow BI over the long term exceeds the benefits of the SIMO platforms as they frequently struggle to achieve widespread adoption outside of the analytic ghettos. Perhaps slow-and-steady beats the big-bang?

 

 ¹ Sadly Microsoft has recently tried to patent sparklines - despite the wide acknowledgement that Edward Tufte invented and defined sparkline as a term to describe "small, high resolution graphics embedded in a context of words, numbers, images".

Back To Basics: The Business Requirement For Reporting

Corporate business intelligence is my bread and butter and I have just spent some time writing down some basic explanations for business managers that I want to share with you.

For many line managers, talk of analytics can often feel to them like a 'nice to have'. The following tries to explain the types of reporting they need and to do this within a very basic framework. The intention is to identify certain characteristics of their reporting (i.e. reporting) needs.

• Operational – At the lowest level, business operations use data that is: 
  
  • Very low grain (e.g. account level), little to no summaries or aggregates, not analysed
  • Narrow scope (i.e. a single function of the report, limited information)
  • Limited usage - perhaps a single user in the organisation that reviews each day/hour
  • Very source specific (i.e. no requirement for across source view) but often larger organisations need to merge data from multiple (but still specific) sources
  • No interactivity - just a simple plan text list of numbers and attributes
  • Capability to produce directly from source system with minimal impact on performance
  • Business Unit functional reporting to answer 'what's happening today' questions
  • Business critical - less than 1 day and increasingly needed in real-time.

• Management – information that is:
  
  • Used to assist management decision making over periods longer than a single day
  • Used for targeting, forecasting, trending or historical analysis (standard reporting, interactive, slice-and-dice analysis)
  • Hierarchical and summarised
  • Enterprise wide - multiple sources/dimensions view of data or widespread use across business units
  • Difficult to produce directly from a source (disparate data, no-history, high impact on performance)
  • Business Unit ad hoc reporting requirements to answer 'what if' questions
  • Regulatory reporting
  • Business critical if there is a 1-2 days outage.

• Strategic – supporting the ‘big’ questions:
  
  • Highly analytic using large data sets but presenting the analysis in a summarised form
  • Wide scope (i.e. new products and services, business lines)
  • Limited interactivity – but usually visualised
  • Business enterprise insight to answer big 'what happens when ...' questions
  • Business critical in the medium to long term.

Once a line manager 'gets' this stuff, we can then use the framework to better identify and organise their own business information requirements.

It's basic, but you have to get the basics right if you are going to be successful in the more advanced stuff.

 

The Future Of Business Intelligence

Keynote address to the Next Generation Data Warehousing Conference, IDG Korea , Seoul, South Korea, February 16th 2011

I presented my thoughts to a couple of hundred Senior Managers from a wide range of Korean organisations. Crystal ball gazing is something I usually leave to vendors and consultants so I focussed on the following aspects that I at least have some practical experience of:

• Key trends to the end of the decade
• Best practices
• Organising the future intelligence capability.

The following key trends struck me as important factors influencing the future of our work in analytics:

• An Unprecedented Explosion In Data. “Between now and 2020, the amount of digital information created and replicated in the world will grow to an almost inconceivable 35 trillion gigabytes as all major forms of media”
  IDC iView, "The Digital Universe Decade – Are You Ready?" May 2010
• The Dominance of Mobile Multimedia Content. “Global mobile data traffic will increase 26-fold between 2010 and 2015 ... Mobile network connection speeds will increase 10-fold by 2015 ... Two-thirds of the world’s mobile data traffic will be video by 2015.”
  Cisco Visual Networking Index: Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast Update, 2010–2015, February 2011
• The End Of English. Chinese-language content will dominate the internet by 2014
  Gartner 2009.

I'm not completely convinced about Chinese domination - but I agree that the Internet will become strongly multi-lingual as the rise of China and Brazil continues.  In any event, we all now live in a world of BIG data. Data that is growing annually by orders of magnitude and is moving to mobile/embedded devices that generate real-time multimedia data. On the other hand, IT skilled people - those with the skills most likely to handle data growth - are only predicted to grow 1.4 fold over the same period. So there is an emerging massive skills shortage coming and we have four choices:

• Do nothing. You wouldn't be alone if this is your strategy.
• Focus your current analysts on embedding their skills in a broad range of your staff.
• Try to buy the skills by poaching staff from other organisations. This could get to be very expensive as you will likely to be in a bidding war with other organisations facing a similar skill shortage.
• Use software that enables your analysts to handle vastly more data than they can today.

Just to complicate things, the era of the English/Western Internet is being supplanted by Chinese - a language that is impervious to processing by most of the current and emerging intelligence capabilities out of the US.

Personally, I see as our best hope a strategy that focusses on embedding analytic skills into the general business community. This greatly enhances analytics usefulness in the short term, whether-or-not you believe in the above trends. It will also buy us the time to see smarter software emerge that does the 'heavy lifting' of BIG (Chinese?) data for analysts. The analogy I used in my address was transportation and the London underground network. The actual network looks like the following:

It took Harry Beck in 1931 to analyse the London underground network and realise that the actual physical location of the station was less important than the information about how you can get to your destination.

This is exactly what analytics needs to achieve. I like to call this actionable insight.

If you have any doubts about the explosion in data we can expect, take a look a recent years. The Washington Post has created a created a graphic that shows how data grew from 1996 and 2007:

After looking at the impact of these trends, I went on to discuss templates for both the analytic skills we need and how to best to organise your teams. I have posted about these topics previously here.

After the presentation there were questions from the floor and it was interesting to see that the questions could have come from any country. The problems and challenges discussed were exactly the same as I hear in other countries. It's nice to know the we are all in the same boat.

 

Korean Business Intelligence

Next Generation Data Warehousing Conference

IDG, Seoul, South Korea, February 16th 2011

I'm in Korea having just given the keynote address at this conference. I was asked to speak about the future of intelligence (and I will talk about some of my ideas in another post soon) but first a little about the rest of the conference. 

This was my first visit to Seoul and it has been interesting to see business intelligence from a new perspective. The presentations were evenly split between those by vendors with a technology platform emphasis, and client case studies. The 3 case studies were:

• Korea Credit Bureau - using a DWH Appliance (Neteeza & Greenplum) to improve efficiency and reduce costs at this industry owned credit checking business. Future directions were discussed and these included the use of Neteeza Spatial to analyse their credit data using maps.
• LG U+ - enhancing the EDW to support improved customer analytics at a large mobile telco.
• Hanwha General Insurance - integrating data after the acquisition of the Jeil Fire Insurance company.

What impressed me most was the detail given in the presentations and the methodical approach taken to solve the problems. It was nice to see people talk in some detail about their solutions. All too often I find that case studies are short generic stories of little interest. These presentations went into considerable detail and I got real insight into the strategies employed. Very impressive.

I could be generalising, but the Koreans seem to have a no-nonsense, 'just do it' approach to BI. Is this one of the reasons why I now find my life in Australia surrounded by the products of Samsung, LG and Hyundai?

 

Big. Really big

"Information Management is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to IM."

What Douglas Adams would have said if he was in my position.

 My role includes the words Information Manager in the title and that's where the confusion begins. Only 1 person in 100 knows what it means. A further 10 in 100 think that they know what it means - but when pressed for an explanation you will get at least 11 different interpretations.

It's hardly surprising that the wider business community is unsure about what IM is. So just to set the record straight, here's what I believe IM is:

• Data quality – to create high quality information.
• Metadata management – to clearly define all elements.
• Data integration – to bring the data together for all management processes to use.
• Analytics – processes data to reveal hidden meaning.
• Business Intelligence – delivers insight to the people and processes making decisions.
• Performance Management – uses consistent and uniform measures of core entities (departments, staff, customers, products, accounts, etc.) to optimise operations.

 

Wrap-up: Mastering SAP BusinessObjects Conference Day 2

I'm listening to the final presentation of the track I'm chairing. The topic was to have been about SAP BusinessObjects XI 4.0. Unfortunately the talk couldn't proceed as SAP hasn't yet released their product roadmap. What a pity. The SAP guy (Noam Berda) did say that you can be briefed later if you sign an NDA.

The day has been worthwhile as I learnt some useful techniques when using BusinessObjects Explorer (SAP's 'google-like' interface). It's a product that, along with their data integration tool, I will take a closer look at when back in the office. It could fill a gap in our current BI platform.

Andrew Rose of IBM Australia gave an insightful session on RapidMarts. These are products that provide 'reporting out of the box'. Not sure how much they cost. Andrew wasn't saying and a quick google didn't find an answer. So I'm guessing the price is 'not cheap'. Still they look interesting and may be worth looking at. Apparently they come with good and extensive documentation.