Agile BI, Not Automatic BI

Forrester's Boris Evelson recently published a paper introducing "Agile BI" with the same definition we've been pushing for years:

1. Faster initial development
2. React more quickly to changing requirements

The rest of the paper goes on to discuss "metadata-generated BI" which is "one such example of a new technology supporting Agile BI". These metadata-generated BI applications essentially do the same work a traditional BI environment requires (building a data warehouse), but much of it is automated. I look forward to hearing from Boris about other Agile BI technologies, because Automated BI doesn't thrill me.

By automating the initial data work, I'm sure a lot of time and effort is saved, but you may not get what you want. This is where an application like ours steps in. Instead of doing the same old thing faster, we take a new approach. We support Agile BI by eliminating the upfront effort of creating a Data Warehouse, and instead providing Data Mashup. When you have the application (reports and dashboards) designed the way you want it, then you can setup a Data Grid Cache to make it perform better. By having the data transformation be virtual, it is much faster to create and much easier to change. The tools mentioned in the paper automate the ETL work based on the metadata, before reports and dashboards are created. We automate the ETL work after the reports and dashboards are created, and only if desired.

Apparently some of these tools will also automatically generate reports based on the data. Again, is the saved effort worth anything if the finished product is not what the users want? By providing our web-based drag-and-drop tools for both interactive data visualization and publishing-quality reports, we help our customers create exactly what they want, and more efficiently than traditional tools.

Metadata-generated BI is the same old-world monolith, automated. It eliminates much of the work, and unfortunately much of the intelligence, from the process. The BI world needs better tools for skilled humans, not the same tools in the hands of robots.

Data Visualization in a Mashed-Up World

I've been invited to participate in a DMRadio round table about visualization and mashup. If you're interested, please visit this site to register.

US Job Losses

There's plenty of political posturing about the current recession and whether the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (Obama's stimulus bill) helped. I never rely on conjecture, so I went in search of facts. These were easy enough to find from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Then, instead of staring at raw numbers of unemployment values, I substracted consecutive values to see the differential of the Job Losses (in other words, the rate of change or velocity) from month to month. Out of curiosity, I also gathered the numbers for men and women. I plotted these on a chart, added an annotation for when the stimulus bill was passed, and then added trend lines (using least-squares) to smooth out the jaggedness. Here's the resulting graph, which you can click on to see the code for:

Wal-Mart Stores Over Time

Here's the latest visualization I created, showing the growth of Wal-Mart over the years. What's really interesting is the local focus for the first 20 years.

NYC District Data Analysis

The City of New York is running a contest to develop the best data visualization application using public data from various NYC departments. This is to help promote http://www.nyc.gov/data

The easiest way to participate is to build a dashboard using Visualize Free, and then submit it on http://www.nycbigapps.com/. The deadline is tomorrow.

Here's my entry: http://visualizefree.com/public.jsp?id=sYixthhp

And the listing: http://www.nycbigapps.com/application-gallery/analysis-of-district-data-on-an-interactive-map

Black Friday 2009 Offer Browser

Using Visualize Free I created an interactive flash tool to slice and dice all the best shopping deals for this year's post-Thanksgiving buying craze.

The Black Friday dashboard allows you to filter by store, brand, category, price, discount, doorbuster, and more. It currently has over 7000 special deals, and I'm going to be adding more.

Free Visualization

I think it's about time for another shameless plug. However, this time it's for a free service that InetSoft provides.

We just launched a website (http://visualizefree.com) that will allow you to use our software for free, without downloading anything. Better still, you can upload your own data and create your own dashboard!

Once you create your dashboard, you can easily send your friends a link, or embed it in your own web page. Take a look at the simple example I put together for the unemployment rate (if the small iframe below is too cramped, open a new window by clicking this link).

Move the ends of the slider to adjust the time period displayed. For a real kick, click the pencil icon in the upper right corner of the chart to change what fields it displays.