Sunday, April 29, 2012

Homework Assignment 7


The semester has almost come to an end..And here comes our final assignment for the semester..We had to summarize what we learnt from BI in the final homework assignment. As usual my team was enthusiastic in doing something creative. Brainstormed a lot of ideas and finally came up with a plan of doing a skit and recording it. We decided to make a skit on two concepts – one on social media analytics and the other one depicting BI life cycle. We wanted it to be lively so we made a script with jokes here and there to add spice to our skit.


Part 1 -- The script on social media analytics was prepared by Praneeth and Dan. They explain how social media data is important and what BI analytics is about.


Part 2 -- This is about the BI life cycle and the script was prepared by Tarun and myself. This is a pretty longer one when compared to the first part.


I'm not going to break the suspense..watch out for the skit..!

So here is a movie poster that I designed for the skit. Hope you will enjoy it..!!  


Saturday, April 28, 2012

GOMC 2012




Ha...finally got back home at 5 30 pm after a long day starting at 5 30 am...But we came home with a “Cash Prize” which made our day. There were 12 teams which were scheduled to present 3 in a slot. The first team “ Honey Badgers” opened the show with their amazing presentation of clearly explaining how they tracked their conversions and results. Their client made an impressive statement about the team’s work which made the entire team feel proud of their contribution to the non-profit organization. Judges were impressed, audience were happy and my heart was beating faster. Next came our “desi” team whose client was our very own desi restaurant Kababeque located at University Blvd. The team’s result inspite of many hurdles like – management change on the client side was applaud able. They handled the Q&A really well and now my heart was in my mouth. What is going to happen to us ?! How are we going to justify our results ?! I kept instructing my co-team members to prepare for all possible questions. Six teams finished their presentations and it was lunch break. I grabbed something quick and gobbled down my throat and ran to have a practice of the presentation with my team members. Two of them had gone to take printouts of the slides. Fumbled a bit, missed out some points and stammered at places – during my practice session. Oh What am I going to do during the presentation. The clocked ticked 12 50 pm and our presentation was scheduled at 1: 00 pm. We ran to the presentation hall. But where are the two guys who went to take the print outs? It was 12 55 pm ..still they hadn’t turned up. Just two minutes before the presentation they came running into the hall with panting for breath. The show started. I introduced my client..spoke about our objective ..how we formulated the strategy ..then handed it over to my co-presenter. I could see  the judges smiling..ha..there was a sigh of relief on my face...We handled the Q&A also pretty well and went back to our seats..Five more teams presented and now it was the time for results. The judges were impressed with our batch’s performance and described about the winning teams before they gave away the prizes. Some comments and some description felt very similar to our presentation... I exchanged looks with my team members..”Are they talking about us?”..And when they called our team”Big Red” we were astonished and went running to the dice to receive the prize..My entire team was on cloud nine and we realized..”Hardwork always pays”..      

Balanced Score Card


Balanced scorecard is used by organisations to align business activities to the vision and strategy of the organisation. This is a kind of performance monitor that tracks the organisations performance against strategic goals. The balanced scorecard approach is to give a clarification to their vision and provide them with prescription to balance up in areas where they are lacking. This process allows the organisation to collect feedbacks in order to improve in their performance and hence their results.

Kaplan and Norton describe the innovation of the balanced scorecard as follows:

"The balanced scorecard retains traditional financial measures. But financial measures tell the story of past events, an adequate story for industrial age companies for which investments in long-term capabilities and customer relationships were not critical for success. These financial measures are inadequate, however, for guiding and evaluating the journey that information age companies must make to create future value through investment in customers, suppliers, employees, processes, technology, and innovation."


The balanced score suggests that any organisation should be assessed from four perspectives.


1.     Learning and growth perspective :
     This involves training and corporate cultural attitudes related to both individual and corporate self-improvement. Knowledge repository is a great asset to a company. Continuous training activities should be held in order to be with the technology trends. According to Kaplan it involves “learning” more than “training”.

2.    Customer perspective:
Customer satisfaction and customer focus are the key indicators for a “good” running business. If there is a high churn rate of customers then it is evident that there is some malfunctionining happening from the suppliers’ side or maybe we are not offering products of high quality. This might cause further decline in profits of the company.

3.    Internal Business Processes perspective:
This mainly concerns with the conformance of the business processes with the customer requirements. The metrics for measuring this should be carefully developed by inhouse subject matter experts and cannot be leased out to consultants.

4.    Financial perspective:
     Sources of funding, cost benefit analysis and risk assessment all falls under this perspective. Company’s continuous funding and profit indicators shows that the company’s performance. However the company should also evaluate its projects in order to justify its funding. This is the reason why they go in for cost benefit analysis. Financial support is what makes a company functioning healthily.

Sunday, April 22, 2012

Homework Assignment 6


It was a very interesting and a stress-buster assignment ...!!Haven't done anything like this for the past 10 years ( after my 8th grade drawing classes).. I guess everyone will accept my statement. When the assignment was announced I sat down with a pen and paper to list down my thoughts and ideas about it. Scribbled a lot..Crossed out ideas..tore the paper..!! Finally came up with two ideas – Creating a Facebook page for my resume and a BI dashboard. I wanted it to be both interactive and static. That is the reason why I had decided to do 2 resumes.

My facebook page has a cover photo of my BI dashboard and list downs my skills,achievements and degrees in a timeline format( Thanks to FB for introducing “Timeline”..made my work a little easy!!)
Here is a snapshot of my facebook page:

Drill down view of BI dashboard:
And here is the link to the dashboard

Really enjoyed doing this assignment..!


Monday, April 16, 2012

Dimensional Modelling

Dimensional modelling , a very important technique for designing data marts. It makes use of two types of tables- facts and dimensions. A fact table consists of “measures of a subject that is modelled for analysis” says Kimball. The fact tables are usually thin and long. Dimensions carry the descriptive attributes related to the subject mentioned in the fact table. The dimension tables are fat and short.

This kind of modelling makes the database very simple and understandable. Dimensional databases can be conceived as a database cube of three or four dimensions where anyone can access a slice of the database along anyone of its dimensions.

Example:

Considering a simple business which sells products in different locations and one would like to evaluate the performance of sales in a particular location over a period of time , it becomes very handy when you have modelled your database in a “cube” format. This would have time, products and location as the dimensions. The intersections of the cube will correspond to a particular measure describing a combination of product, location and time.

There are two types of dimensional model:
Star schema :  The name describes the structure of the model because it looks like a star with one central table around which a set of other tables are displayed. The central table is the fact and the surrounding tables are the dimensions.
Snowflakes schema : It is similar to start schema except for the fact that the dimensions are normalized into multiple related tables. The dimension tables are elaborate, having multiple levels of relationships and the child table has multiple parent tables.

OLAP vs OLTP



OLTP refers to the processing of operational databases. Updating, querying and inserting are performed on real time data.

OLAP refers to the general activity of querying and presenting. This mainly encompasses the act of presenting data from data warehouses and datamarts.It is a great decision support tool.


Usually organisations store the data in two different places and in different representations – one is for operation purposes (inventory monitoring or financial transaction record keeping) and the other one is for analyzing trends or patterns on the databases.And the operational databases can retrieve results faster when compared to analytical queries.


OLAP is built from OLTP databases except for the fact that OLAP has its own model so that it facilitates better understanding of the business problem at a broader perspective. The process of extracting the data from operational databases and transforming it into an analytical model that suits the business question and loading it on to the datamarts is called as ETL process.