Despicable Me!

Blogging, yes, that is how desperate the tiding of my life have made me. I remember starting this blog to provide a vent to my effervescent personality and here I am, a circle completed. I am closing down on the 25th year of my existence and the concept of life still eludes me. I know I don't want to sound all philosophical and shit but it is true I am lost at sea. My old friends would remember my self composed saying from class 11th- "Life is a progressive realization of your chutiyaaps", I dont know if I was stuck my brilliance at the moment of it's composition or is it truly is the sad reality of existence. Maybe I grew too fast, matured to early to suckle the trivial joys of life that to me seemed trifle. My critique nature has become a poison. I feel the purpose missing, the motive fading and the journey tiring. There is a parasitic conglomeration of multiple personalities within me each trying to drift me in a new direction but like all symmetric vector forces they cancel each other and I stand unmoved untouched. The yonder days are too deeply engraved, I miss them. Mom always used to yell at me for having too many friends and too involved with them, but guess what here 10,000 miles away in the so called Land of Dreams with respectable money and a prospective career, them is what I yearn for. Enough of self loathing, I need a purpose, a rejuvenating force to propel me away from this carcinogenic surrounding called my mind.

MIS 587 comes to an end

MIS 587 comes to an end.... It was a busy semester starting with GOMC to various tools and softwares and then ending the semester on a high with Social Media project. Over all the entire course was very interesting, engaging and learning. We learnt the various strategies employed in the industry right from collecting data cleaning it, finding the business value hidden in that information. The course has prepared us not only for the current industry but even for the future by making us adept with online marketing and web analytics. Thanks to the various projects we did in the course I can talk a lot more about BI in the interviews than before. It has instilled a sense of confidence in me and has made me competent in facing any position and any profile. The final aim of someone wanting to gain experience in the world of BI is to become a data scientist. We have now the theoretical knowledge that we need to leverage with the industrial experience and prove our mettle. Thank you Professor and my awesome team mates.

Infographic Resume

HW-6 was one of the more fun projects we have dine in MIS 587. We have been asked to make an inforgraphic resume, basically use pie charts, bar graphs and timeline to represent how you have grown professionally over time and make this resume as an application for a job applications. So what I did was use a pie chart to represent my level of expertise and my past work experience. Use a network model to list out all the tools and programming languages I know of. Also make a tree structure to details the work I have done in the past. This was a fun project as it allowed us to use out imagination and still use concepts of BI such as data representation skills, data visualization techniques to showcase ourselves in the best way possible. Having a colorful, dynamic pictorial resume looks very attractive and maybe help us get a job that we could not have gotten otherwise. Link: https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B-Nt4sKnLiuGMUpDLWp1T0tVQ3c/edit?pli=1#

Ad Hoc OBIEE

As I went through the OBIEE tutorial there were various things I wanted to implement which I couldn't figure out from the processes explained in the tutorial so I did some self-research and found something interesting using which I could do Ad Hoc reporting!!!
There is an option of setting up a prompt in the dashboard. How the process work is that you predetermine the column or columns over which you expect the user of the dashboard would want to use his discretion. You can select the possible values of those columns he can choose and then after selecting multiple columns and multiple values in each column you can add this prompt to your dashboard.
The benefit comes when the user wants to select some or all columns to view the data of or plot in the graph. This benefit allows the user to compare a set of value against the other set of value. And use the selected view to extract business information.
The universal benefit of this approach will help a single dashboard answer company wide queries. The same dashboard can be sent to all managers whether in the same department or different, they can choose to see the various products of their department and also compare their department's performance against some other department.
The one stop ad hoc reports are the real benefit the OBIEE provides, ANd I am glad I used them to the best in my homework 5

OBIEE

The recent project was really helpful in understanding how BI works in a current enterprise whether be it healthcare or retail or forecasting based on historic data.
The tool OBIEE is a really helpful OLAP tool where you can create almost any report you want to create. The dimensional model of the data eases the complexity as the facts and dimensional tables really help one understand the details he/she is looking for and pull the necessary details to present the output as desired.
Whats improves the tool is the ease with which a person can plot various graphs and not only plot them but change the various components to get the exact data representation they are looking for. With the wide variety of details provided be it a pie chart, line graph or anything else, along with being able to swap the columns as X or Y axis is also a very convenient way by which one can present his manager easy decision making capability.
The best part is the mobility component of the whole process. You don't necessarily have to be tied down to a system and the connected server to procure the data you desire.
This is the future of BI reporting on the go!! And with the Oracle's latest service which allows users to pull reports from their iPads and other tablets makes the market more futuristic.
There is still more to come like Real time BI. Well we are still chasing our dreams and real time BI is not the end of it, as every distance you cover shows the path that lies ahead.

Data Warehousing, Star Schema, facts, Dimensions

Data Warehousing:
Shifting data from transactional system to a data warehouse or a data mart allows you to secure your data and also gives you the functionality to retrieve trends and other business values from the historic data.
Business Intelligence would not be possible without data warehouses. But even data warehouses need to be tweaked to make them best suited for BI. The process is converting normalized tables to de-normalized form so that a dimensional model can be implemented in place of the typical ER model.
Dimensional Model allows for easier data retrieval and any user even with minimal technical knowledge can understand how data is saved using star schema.
Star Schema is composed of facts and dimensions. Fact is the numerical data field which is usually aggregated over the related fields. E.g. Sales
Dimensions are the related fields that give additional information about the fact field. E.g. ProductID, StoreID etc.

Indexing allows faster query fetching but slows the system by slowing update, delete append!!!

Long Tail and e-Commerce

When I first saw the Long tail graph the first thought that came to my mind is this is 1st quadrant 1/x. and the unique property of 1/x is that it tends to 0 at infinity implies it always has a finite value for even the largest value of x. Now moving from graphical to the business implication:

Long tail property allows e-commerce business which have low inventory costs and offer low search costs to provide "unpopular" products. By just observing you can see that one can provide equal or more sales by offering low demand products than by selling the popular products.

E-commerce provider low search, storage costs which has resulted in exemption of Pareto's 80:20 rule- 80 % of your sales will come from 20% of your products. Now companies like Amazon and Netflix can house the products economically at a centralized warehouse and offer a wide range of products. This change has affected people's preferences as earlier they could not find the product of their choice which was outdated.

Final verdict: The more extensive the data warehouse will become the thicker the tail will be.