Daniel Upton's BI Blog: Recent Comments

Comment on "KPI Street Cred" ...You heard it here first!

2008-09-09T15:33:55Z

Interesting comments, Ernst.  If you can clarify your comments' usage of the terms "domain-level" and "topology" in BI terms, I will reply to that more specifically.

Meanwhile, yes, we've rolled up sets of KPI's into single "critical success factors" (aka "objectives), as part of a board-level balanced scorecard. We've also done the same for manager and worker-level KPI collection's and their relationship to a single roll-up objective. As you may know, the higher-level (eg. board vs. worker) the scorecard, the more challenging, yet more crucial, it becomes to identify KPI's that are truly actionable. Just in case you want more on that topic, I recommend the book, "Key Performance Indicators..." by David Parmenter.  Click here to review it on Amazon

I have found that MS PerformancePoint Server (M&A module) provides a sufficiently flexible set of KPI target metrics (min, max, % of target, higher-is-better, lower-is-better, closer-to-target-is better), and KPI-rollup (to objectives) algorithms (raw average, weighted average, worst-child, "show-all"), and with PerformancePoint, that can be accomplished downstream from an OLAP cube, thus reducing the resource constraint associated with MDX hand-scripting of KPIs. In PPS, KPI's are built in a "scorecard" object, which is then dropped onto, and configured for, a deployable dashboard.

Thanks again for your comments, Ernst.
-- Daniel

Comment on "KPI Street Cred" ...You heard it here first!

2008-09-02T13:07:34Z

Good post - right to the point and easy to understand. We use a construct that is essentially a logical representation of the business (sort of a domain-level model with some attribution that makes sense to the client) as a basis for data management (we call it a Topology). Have you done any associations of KPI's at the business level for data management? I think that KPI's can be "rolled up" from a management perspective so that an enterprise board can govern them. Rollups, as you rightly point out, happen then at the "dashboard level" up to this domain level. Whaddya think?
thanks.
Ernst

Comment on Getting BI Skills... To Land The Job... To Build On Those Skills... To Advance On The Job... To...

2008-02-22T23:42:40Z

Question #1: I have approached (thus far) growing my BI skills by taking on, as you state, the 800lb gorilla first. In my 8yrs experience in RDBMS development and reporting I have had to do many ETL type functions but have, in the past, always hand coded everything in T-SQL rather then using DTS. I had more control and I didn't have to learn some tool that I was weary of. In 2005 that all changed when I really started to dive into SSIS for my last contract. SSIS can be overwhelming and I have not mastered it by any means but after several months of working with it almost night and day I feel confident at this point that I can accomplish most ETL tasks with out any hicups. Next on my path I have been working on gaining a solid understanding of Dimensional Modeling and Cube Development at the same time. Lastly will be Data Mining as from my experience not many organizations are at a point where they can even consider it. So in order to be able to really gain value from data mining I would need to be good at all the other aspects first. This is why I've chosen data mining last, although I have studied it briefly.

Question #2: I believe BI Architects must poses all of these qualities in order to their job successfully and that anyone wishing to become well versed in BI will inevitably learn all aspects of the solution. However, when someone is first trying to get into BI Development it may make sense to have them focused on only one aspect of the overall solution.

Question #3: Don't know what this is...I really hate the word Extreme though :-)

Cheers,
Ben

Comment on Questions to Answer When Considering a New BI Initiative

2006-12-04T23:59:28Z

Right on, Daniel! These subjective considerations are imporant and cannot be overshadowed by technical jargon.