SharePoint 2013 Business Intelligence Pointers and Designing Dashboards

As a software consultant, I am always learning novel ways to create dashboards and data visualizations that provide value to my clients. SharePoint 2013 provides a valuable framework for surfacing business intelligence applications; it’s up to the consultant to shape those dashboards into tools that can convey data, information and knowledge that is timely and relevant. It’s paramount, then, that software consultants stay versed in the best practices of information design.

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Managing Big Data: Focus on Problem Solving

Yesterday, I started sharing a list of five strategies for successful data management from the Harvard Business Journal’s article “Why IT Fumbles Analytics.”

Their main point is IT staff will use conventional methods for managing and deploying big data projects to their peril. Instead, “they need a fundamentally different approach and mind-set.” I have covered the first two strategies, focusing on how people use information and emphasizing information as the method for unlocking value from IT. Here are the other three:

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Successful Data Management Strategies

The Harvard Business Review (HBR) wrote about data and information management in their January/February 2013 issue in an article called, “Why IT Fumbles Analytics.” Their insights on how to move past viewing “information as a resource that resides in databases,” to seeing “information as something that people themselves make valuable,” is one that every company should take into account.

While many companies treat a big data or analytics project like a conventional, large IT project, the author contends this approach is the surest way to failure. HBR shares five great strategies for achieving data management success. I will share the first two today and the other three tomorrow.

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Key Performance Indicators: Not Just for Internal Metrics Anymore

We’ve talked a bit lately about key performance indicators (KPI) and how they can be used internally to measure things like customer retention, capital expenditure, loan loss, refinery capacity and more. But what about using those same KPI’s to please your customers?

For a major equipment rental company, Entrance built a Silverlight application, hosted as part of a larger application, in order to report their key performance indicators.  Some of their most important KPI’s include where money is being spent on equipment, such as backhoes, generators, pumps, etc., in addition to utilization of this equipment.

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Monetizing Information Assets with Oil and Gas Software

I took notice yesterday of a release by Gartner stating that 30% of businesses will be be monetizing their information assets by 2016. FierceBigData also highlighted in an article covering the statement that only one percent of the world’s data is being analyzed.

The main reason for this monetization is the high cost of storing and managing big data. If your company is one of the 30% that is working to surface and monetize their information, there are a few things to keep in mind:

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What’s wrong with your dashboard?

When it comes to making informed decisions these days, it really is about surfacing the right subset of information at the right time, with the right purpose. We all know that Business Intelligence and Dashboards manage the process of sifting through and presenting information, but what struck me recently was that, paradoxically, more information can also lead to bad decisions.  In fact, these ‘intelligent’ solutions are only at their best if they take human factors into account when looking at information.

Goals change the way  you view information

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Entrance’s First Windows 8 Application

We were pretty excited about the launch of Windows 8, and as a proof of concept we took publicly available well data and used it to create an application that shows how an energy company might be able to use it. The app shows  a high level view of a group of wells with drill down ability to see the specifics of any given well. In the image below, I have drilled down into the date for one of these wells.

This is a great example of business intelligence meeting new technology! Read more about Windows 8 applications and how they might apply to your business need….

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SharePoint 2013: New features enable increased productivity

Entrance recently completed the envision phase of a project that will lead to implementation of SharePoint 2013 for a local energy focused insurance company. We wanted to share how some of the new SharePoint features could be leveraged there to improve productivity.

As it stands, our client manages all their documents through a file share, and this system makes things difficult to find. In addition, they are currently a profitable but small company, and they would like to grow profits without hiring many extra employees. So the main areas where they hope to leverage SharePoint are for document management and improved workflow.

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When Do I Need Business Intelligence?

Business Intelligence can be a boon to businesses of all sizes, but BI solutions come at a cost. There are both tangible costs—like the cost of procurement, development and implementation of the software components—and less quantifiable costs. Users have to be trained to use a new tool. Existing processes have to be revised. The size and maturity of a company can have a tremendous impact on these intangible variables.

The important question for executives, then, is when to consider a business intelligence solution. Not if, but when. As mentioned in my last blog, BI primarily solves issues of data visibility and validity. This in turn allows decision-makers to work faster using accurate, timely information. When the total cost of working with slow, inaccurate data exceeds the costs of implementation, it is time to consider implementing a business intelligence solution. Read More

Oil Comm Conference: Let’s Turn off the information firehose

Entrance attended the Oil Comm conference recently and one of the big topics of discussion surrounded how to manage data even as it proliferates more and more every day. During the keynote, “The Pursuit of the ‘Holy Grail’: Does it all come down to strategy,” J. Michael Kuykendall, Vice President, Global Information Technology, Apache Corporation put it this way: it’s all about “data, data and more data.”

And once you have this data, what do you do with it? Apache is still working on solutions to this problem, but Kuykendall stated that “more bandwidth isn’t the answer.”

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Leveraging the Power of Web Portals

For many of the new clients we see coming in these days, one of their top questions is, “Can you build us a web portal?” There are a lot of good reasons why web portals are a big deal. For one thing they can bring any stakeholder, internally or externally, into the loop by making the information they need available online. And offering a portal solution if competitors don’t can be a real brand differentiator.

We put together a few cliff notes  from a presentation on web portals that Entrance’s president,  Nate Richards, recently gave explaining what they are and how they can be used:

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Entrance Moderates Panel on Measuring Success through Dashboads

Today, Entrance’s president Nate Richards presented a session for The Entrepreneur’s Institute (TEI), “Measuring Success: Executive Dashboards.” The hands-on workshop covered key performance indicators (KPI), and how they can help answer questions that all executives face when running a business, such as:

  • Where do your KPI’s come from?  
  • How do you monitor them? 
  • What do you do when one needs action taken? 

You can download a copy of the worksheet they used in the session here. Learn what other executives use to keep their company’s performance front and center with what we call Actionable Intelligence!

Know it? Prove it! Use SharePoint Drill Downs

Reliable, accurate, verifiable Business Intelligence is key to making good decisions as a business.  Ideally at the strategic level, the information you live and breathe on is lower-level data rolled-up into an at-a-glance format that can be quickly interpreted and consumed by the decision maker.  But even with the best team, the most eye-catching charts, and a perfect presentation, a trust issue often arises between the decision maker and the source of the intelligence.  A trust-but-verify mentality will (and should) prevail.

So how do you establish Business Intelligence trust?  Enable the decision maker to delve further into the building blocks of data that make up his information.  By drilling down into the individual line-items of data you validate your claim made at the broader, strategic level.  Seeing the components of rolled-up information gives decision makers the necessary trust to remove roadblocks and continue toward an informed decision.  The faster this process becomes, the more agile your business will become.

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InfoPath + SharePoint = Professional, Clean Data Management

InfoPath is key to getting clean, useful information from users into SharePoint. Your valuable information can easily be gathered at a granular level with InfoPath forms, and SharePoint can then extract data you care about to create relevant, useful information for decision makers. Basically, InfoPath translates inputs from user information into data points, preparing SharePoint with good data to produce actionable information – ideally customized for specific users.  Because of it’s ability to control data input, InfoPath is the tool to use with SharePoint in order to gather and validate data, which can then be sorted and sourced by SharePoint’s document management system. So what exactly is InfoPath then?

InfoPath is a platform for developing, distributing, filling and submitting forms. The InfoPath desktop software exists in two forms; a design mode (for developers) to create the form and a filler mode for data entry. A well-made form would contain rules to format and validate all data entered into the form preventing any malformed or invalid data from polluting your system.

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Act: Confirm your kill

Business intelligence with military tactics.

The most important aspect of taking action is tracing the follow-through, measuring the result and then creating an efficient and effective feedback loop. With faster feedback come faster observations, faster orientation, faster decisions and faster action; in short a faster OODA loop. The faster you can make intelligent decisions the better positioned your company will be to compete. Keep a tight, documented connection between actions and consequences, and then keep that data in front of decision makers in actionable form.

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