Microsoft has been doing exciting things in business intelligence for years. The technology that they have incorporated into SharePoint, Excel and SQL has brought BI tools to the masses. It used to require a significant capital expenditure to gear up for BI, but Microsoft has reduced the cost and increased the quality with each successive version of SQL Server.

The biggest change, this time, comes in the form of Tabular Modeling. This is an in-memory business intelligence model that is based on standard relational ideals. In other words it is a reporting database that “looks” like a normal database. Since it follows all the standard practices of a relational database the tabular model requires less of a learning curve than multidimensional modeling. The tabular model can be accessed by all your favorite reporting tools (Excel being one of them). The model is resident in memory so performance is quite impressive. Not to worry, advanced compression keeps it to a reasonable size.

Another big addition is KPIs. SQL now supports the creation of a KPI (Key Performance Indicator) that can be stored as part of the database. This allows for KPIs to be evaluated directly against measures and increases the performance of your BI reporting tools. The ability to drill-down is also built in which creates a hierarchy of KPIs that can show more and more detail.

These new features can dramatically lower the top and bottom line costs for a business intelligence solution. DataFive can help your company take advantage of these new features. If your business is going to upgrade or is about to implement SQL Server then you must educate yourself about these upcoming changes. The savings could be significant.

The movie follows a baseball general manager (GM) as he tries to rebuild a team that has been ravaged by trades and buyouts. As a small market (baseball wise) team their budget is low but aspirations high (sound like anyone’s business?). He starts, where he’s always started, with scouts and gut feel. He quickly meets a person with some statistics background, a Yale econ graduate, who explains that baseball is not about pretty swings and home runs, but about on-base percentage. The logic is that if a baseball team wants wins it has to score runs, to score runs they have to get on base. The outcome of all of the stats crunching is that many factors lead to on base percentage, but that on-base percentage is the culmination of the rest and leads to the outcome of a win. The movie goes on to show how others are skeptical and that these two manage to turn the skeptics on their heads by winning an amazing number of games. In the end the skeptics aren’t convinced, but future World Series teams (Red Sox) are.

While not 100% accurate from a business intelligence perspective (it is rarely one data point that rules them all), the idea is very sound. You could replace baseball with business and play out the story in nearly any company throughout the world. The importance of separating outcomes (wins/profits) from the things that go into that outcome (on-base percentage/sales conversion as an example) is a critical step in taking your business to the next level. We work with companies that are sitting on mountains of data but still making decisions by gut feel; once the conversion is made to harnessing the power of the data, companies start playing a whole new ballgame.

If you want to max out your company’s on-base percentage and really drive growth and profits contact us to setup a game plan.

In our business we help executives to better manage what’s happening so they can achieve their long term goals. When we first engage with them we always start by asking what their company’s mission statement is; to help us (and them) understand where they are going. Unfortunately there is a lot of confusion and misunderstanding about what a mission statement is for. The function of a company mission statement is to state what the purpose of the business is – why it exists. We’ve seen a variety of ill-conceived mission statements – from none at all to multiple paragraphs describing what they are going to achieve and how they are going to do it. An effective mission statement is meant to be timeless, easily understood and inspiring. Examples of good mission statements:

• Merck – To preserve and improve human life
• Disney – To make people happy
• Cargill – To improve the standard of living around the world

A mission statement is the foundation by which all goal setting and planning should be based. So now think about your own personal goals in life and try and find a theme. It’s not easy! In fact, the more challenging this exercise the greater your need for a personal mission statement. Think about what makes you happy and fulfilled in life. I’m sure ‘get rich’ hopped into many peoples’ minds. But ‘get rich’ is a goal, not a mission statement. If you received $100 million tomorrow you would be rich, so what would you do next? …Race cars? Travel? Philanthropy? Creating your personal mission statement might take some incremental steps in order to uncover what your real purpose in life is.

Don’t set goals (including New Year’s resolutions) until you have created your personal mission statement. Otherwise you might be setting goals that really aren’t going to fulfill you. Once you have your personal mission statement you have a powerful decision making tool – every decision, large or small, can be weighed against your personal mission statement. Do I get a hamburger or a salad? Do I borrow money to pay for it or save up?

You can truly have a Happy New Year by creating a personal mission statement – the basis to really fulfill yourself. Happy New Year!

I have worked on projects for many companies over the years. We would spend months on requirements, months on user flow and months on user interfaces. When I would bring up security eyes would glaze over and people would act like it was some annoying technical detail not worthy of their time. When your business is on the web your most valuable asset is data! You use data to bill, acquire, service, and market to customers. Protecting it should be as important as what your website looks like and how a user will get from point A to B.

Securing your user data is not overly complex or expensive. It is far less expensive than buying credit protection for all the customer’s whose data got stolen when your database gets hacked. There are a couple of easy things that your small business can do to step up security and make it much harder for hackers to get access to your customers’ data. If your business is not doing these things then contact us today for a free consultation and learn how to get started.

• Do not store passwords in plain text.

If your business is storing passwords in plain text then you have already lost. The rest of these recommendations probably won’t matter. Encryption or hashing is a must for password data.

• Do not store credit card data.

Most professional credit card clearing companies will provide services so that you do not have to store credit card data. Payment profiles and recurring transaction codes will allow the payment gateway to securely store credit card information so you don’t have to. Customers can still have payment information on file and your business is not responsible for securing that data. The best of both worlds.

If you absolutely must store credit card information then encryption and hashing is a must. Hashing is simply not enough. It takes under a minute to crack an industry standard hash using any of the hundreds of programs available by Googling hash cracker.

• Use separate database user accounts and secure connection strings.

Many applications use a single database user (the account that the application uses to access that database). In many cases this user is an administrator with full access to the database. A database administrator can select all data, delete data and wreak havoc on your database. A better solution would be to use a specific user account that has limited permissions to access your database.

Many connection strings are stored in plain text on the server. This is just lazy. In .NET there are simple utilities to encrypt and secure these connection strings. Other languages have similar utilities. Plain text is fine for development but production strings should be secured.

These are just the baseline things that your business can do. More advanced security options are available and can be implemented with minimum cost and effort. Security may not be the driving factor in acquiring clients but a lapse in security will make it impossible to keep the clients you have. There is no such thing as 100% secure. Anything can be hacked with enough effort and time. That doesn’t mean your business should be an easy target. DataFive can help secure your data and prevent you from becoming a headline.

Any flavor of SAP (small business or not) is a complex implementation. The act of setting it up and using it can tax most any IT department and for a small business it might mean many months of effort. The last thing any small business executive is going to want to hear after that kind of effort is that they need to do another similar size project to get the information and insight they need out of SAP. While SAP may be good at running your business you will still be left with getting the information you need out of it to make good business decisions.

Our partner, Tableau, has developed connection engines to SAP to alleviate the burdensome effort of a massive BI project. Using Tableau Desktop individuals can connect to the SAP business warehouse, or the new HANA product, and get real-time data out of their SAP system. Using Tableau Server these insights can be shared with the entire company. The setup time is negligible in comparison to other BI suites and Tableau provides lightning fast access.

We can help companies get this kind of project up and in use in as little as a couple weeks. After a small business has spent the kind of money and time to get SAP in place it is a shame that so many implementations stop there. SAP gathers an amazing amount of data that can give executives real insight into how their business is running and what they should be doing to expand.

With this partnership, VisionWaves provides proven performance management software technology that further enhances DataFive’s ability to provide outstanding business intelligence solutions. DataFive’s expertise and the unique integrated performance management capability of VisionWaves offers a portfolio which will be a key market discriminator.

As Chuck Brans, Vice President of US and Canada of VisionWaves Inc. observed; “DataFive has the experience and skills to work with customers and determine how to improve their strategic objectives and processes. So we are delighted to be working with the DataFive team and are looking forward to many successful implementations for their clients.”

Phil Pickering, President & co-founder DataFive; “We are delighted to announce our partnership with VisionWaves. The VisionWaves’ product solves a critical business problem – how to successfully harness the power of your data to sustainably deliver exceptional business results. Its comprehensive set of features moves businesses away from reactive decision making toward proactive and successful execution of business strategy.”

ABOUT VISIONWAVES

VisionWaves develops unique management software to help companies in the aviation and defense, healthcare, finance and public sector industries manage their business to create maximum value whilst keeping costs at a minimum. Every user has a tailor-made portal, which provides all the key management capabilities needed to manage their areas of responsibility. The software can be fully integrated with existing IT environments, such as Business Intelligence (BI), Business Process Management (BPM), Corporate Performance Management (CPM) and Governance, Risk & Compliance (GRC) tools. For more information, visit www.visionwaves.com.

ABOUT DATAFIVE

Based near Boulder, CO; DataFive provides expert consulting services to help executives build powerful dashboards and business intelligence solutions that lead to greater profits and a sustainable competitive advantage. DataFive helps its clients discover the internal and external forces that influence their business so they can make better decisions, faster. With deep expertise in a broad spectrum of technologies DataFive knows how to build the right system, at the right cost to help businesses grow.

The above quote comes from a BusinessWeek article. I tried most of the weekend to determine why this quote, and article, bothered me so much. It comes down to two things; hypocrisy and laziness. I’ve seen this type of thing happen before and know firsthand what it can do to an organization. Does this methodology or attitude improve morale in the organization?

I’m a realist and know that you can’t make everyone happy all of the time. In fact some people can just not be made happy. The distinction is if their attitude and complaints bring the team down, or just you. This article and CEO don’t make that distinction. They are cleaning house of all the complainers and in many cases these complainers are putting to voice what the rest of the team is feeling. This is the hypocrisy that I spoke of. Every company likes to say things like they have an “open door policy.” A lot of employees are too scared of retribution (and with a CEO like the one above I can’t imagine why), or don’t know exactly what’s bothering them to avail themselves of the open door. Instead they complain anonymously or amongst themselves. If a group of employees is negative it’s time to discuss and learn, not fire and smile.

When this happened at a company I was working at the negative people seemed to also be people with a lot of talent. This wasn’t a coincidence. Negativity in your most talented group of people should be an alarm for you, not a death knell for their career. If something is fundamentally wrong in your organization the talent will most likely spot it first (they are talented!) and their growing negativity is a sign that you should jump on the problem. Firing these people sends two messages to the organization. One; talent doesn’t matter. Two; if the talent gets fired for complaining then I as an average employee better walk around with a fake smile and bring no bad news because I won’t even get to box up my stuff before they throw me out. A culture of fear and toadyism has been created.

There are ways to spot problems in your organization before your employees even start complaining about them. The data about employee happiness and engagement is sitting in reviews, time sheets and complaint cards. Harness that data and learn the trends, the ebbs and flows, of morale so you know if the current mood is just the standard winter funk or something you really need to change in your organization.

The quote at the top of the article could just as easily be this sign put up in the break room, and would have exactly the same effect.

I find most of the fads in software development to be pretty tiresome, mostly because they tend to not work and spark religious style flame wars in the same place that I’m trying to find the answer to whatever the current problem I’m trying to solve is. As an aside that current problem usually has something to do with an unintended consequence of whatever fad is being peddled at the moment. The amazing part is how long some of these fads stick around.

One of my favorite, or least favorite, is the idea that you can just throw more people at a problem to solve it. I thought The Mythical Man Month blew this out of the water with so much data that when I read it in college I was convinced I’d never see this problem in industry. In fact, I see this problem all the time. Managers constantly try to save late or over budget projects by adding more people (or changing the people who are working on it). There are reams of studies and data that refute this, but it keeps coming around. What is equally amazing is that managers who should know better (i.e. former developers) do this as often as those who might not be as versed in development (i.e. business majors). They justify this flaunting of the data by assuming they are being roguish leaders who will prevail where others have failed and try to convince the team of this approach by using whatever buzzword is popular that day. I’ve heard “pulse the team”, “flex resources” and my personal favorite “strike team.” As if there is some development Nerd SEALS who can drop in without disrupting the existing team, come instantly up to speed and “hit the ground running” to solve a project’s problem. Yeah, I threw in another one there.

The speed and frequency at which new ideas come into the world of software development are what make it an exciting and really fun area to work. That doesn’t mean that ideas shouldn’t be put to the test and discarded if they are found to be lacking. All too often ideas are accepted and defended because they match the individual’s world view, not because they are empirically better or worse. As software increases its already huge footprint in the world measurement and effectiveness become increasingly important. We, both businesses and developers, need to understand what works to achieve greater and greater results.

The overriding point to the article I link to above and this post is that our guts, preconceived notions and dime store truisms don’t really help us as much as we think. Data driven decisions are dramatically better than intuition and end up saving more than the time spent gathering and analyzing the data.

Language barriers are a tough hurdle to overcome for a small business. Translation and localization require a significant investment in both time and capital. How does a small business, with limited amounts of both, overcome this problem? The answer is; they don’t. Instead of going after the tough market of non-English speaking people we can tap into the much easier market of English speakers around the world.

Did you know that there are more English speakers in Germany than there are people in Canada? What percentage of your advertising budget are you directing to Europe, where 46% of the population speaks English? Europe ranks second in the world for English speakers, and that doesn’t include the United Kingdom! India is another hotbed of English speakers with a whopping 125 million. The map below shows the top 50 English speaking countries in the world. The larger the circle the more English speakers there are. The map is interactive so you can zoom, select countries and mouse over the circles for more details.

When you take into account the lower relative cost of Google PPC (Pay Per Click) globally then you start to recognize that targeted marketing in these English speaking areas can really pay off. You can even undercut your international competitors as keywords are priced in dollars and without VAT for U.S. buyers.

Information and visualizations like this can take your business to the next level. DataFive can provide this analysis and information tailored for your specific business needs. Contact us to find out how.

As a software developer the web is my toolbox. If I need something I go to Google and it searches the cavernous workshop and comes up with a set of tools that could possibly work. Experience helps me cull the list then trial and error eliminates what’s left. The process can be very quick, the easy solution being the first thing in the list because others have had this problem before. Most of the time the search is not this easy, and more digging is needed.

When I need a solution to a development problem I head to StackOverflow. This is a site where developers can ask questions and get responses from other developers. Questions and answers are rated, posters get reputation and everyone can see who the most authoritative source is on any given topic. A lot of media attention has been given to Quora, but while Quora was getting press StackOverflow was giving me answers. I use the site on a daily basis and would happily pay a subscription, but lucky for us it’s free.

There are times when a problem is so specific, or vague, that searching the ether is not going to yield an answer. These times are what social media is made for. A couple of weeks ago, while working on this website, I was struck by the differences in font and layout that other websites have. Some look good to me, some do not. This arbitrary metric (looks good) led me down a rabbit hole of searching for a tool that rates a website’s readability. I know the topic has been studied ad nauseam because when you search all you get is studies. I needed the practical application of those studies.

Given my geek nature my social circle (not a plug for Google+) includes quite a few software developers. In searching Twitter feeds, Facebook walls and Google+ I happened on a tool written by a friend. Kevin Gorski wrote a simple little utility CYRIN (Can You Read It Now) that uses jQuery to scan the CSS / layout of a page and rate readability. It even gives suggestions on can be done to improve a site’s readability and layout. This tool is the wrench that fits the special bolt, behind the thing, upside down. It is exactly the right tool for the specific job. Using this utility I modified the layout of DataFive.com and am much happier with the outcome.

Finding the right tool for the job makes all the difference in the world. Sometimes it just isn’t worth the time to search and going to a pro makes more sense. There’s nothing quite like that eureka moment when you find what you’ve been looking for, or when someone can give you that last little bit that puts you over the finish line. It’s my favorite part of being in technology and what I want to do with this company. When you’re done searching come to us and let us help you find the answer. We’ve got the right tools for the job.