The Business Intelligence Blog

That’s really a great news to the BI world during these dull days of business. I’m sure other companies will start becoming confident on the never understood phenomenon of ROI. Makes a day !!

According to research presented in a new report, “Data Management for Business Intelligence,” 77% of Best-in-Class companies are able to automate the integration of data from multiple sources, compared to 54% of Industry Average companies, and only 22% of Laggards. This capability was identified by respondents as being critical for solving the top business pressure — the need to reduce the time-to-information for non-technical end-users.

Best-in-Class companies are making investments in technology enablers to alleviate this pressure. 82% of Best-in-Class companies are currently utilizing data warehousing software solutions, versus 56% of all other respondents. 80% of Best-in-Class companies are currently deploying Business Intelligence query and reporting tools, versus 47% of all other respondents. Finally, 68% of Best-in-Class companies are currently implementing data warehouse appliance technology (packaged hardware and software solutions) versus only half that number (34%) of all other respondents.

Its interesting that more and more sports associations are starting to use Business Intelligence software to analyze statistics. As Ian Ayres points out in his latest book, Super Crunchers, the competition between the traditional experts and number crunching softwares has ended. And number crunching softwares are being increasingly used by tranditional “intutional” experts to analyze the data better.

These are clearly the days of Data Mining Softwares. This one is about IBM Cognos. Read more -

“Our analysis of player performance is as complex and dynamic as the work of high-powered business analysts in Fortune 500 companies, and we need to use the same robust, flexible interface to achieve reliable results,” said Doyle Pryor, Assistant General Counsel of the MLBPA. “Conducting complex analysis in real-time allows us to improve our planning processes and IBM Cognos TM1 Executive Viewer enables the agents themselves to view reports and perform almost limitless ‘what-if’ scenarios for further analysis of the data.”

“The interface for analysis will provide sophisticated users with the tools they’re familiar with and the ability to quickly modify views and reports with as little effort as possible,” said Doug Barton, vice president, product marketing, Cognos, an IBM Company. “Users of IBM Cognos TM1 Executive Viewer continue to gravitate to its features that provide interactivity, immediacy, and flexibility, which, in turn, enable them to accelerate the management of their business’s performance.”

From the Press Release -

Panoratio, a provider of innovative technology that maps statistical content from large and complex datasets, has selected OpenViz data visualization software from Advanced Visual Systems (AVS) to be incorporated into its Data Explorer product.

Panoratio uses OpenViz to provide highly interactive and graphical displays of dense imagery in near-real time, with virtually no restrictions on the complexity or amount of data that can be analyzed.

Panoratio’s Data Explorer is a smart data analysis tool that rapidly queries Panoratio Portable Database Images and delivers results in seconds with built-in intelligence that assists analysts in finding patterns and relationships in the data which they might not otherwise discover.

According to Dr. Oliver Mihatsch, Chief Technology Officer of Panoratio, “We selected OpenViz because it was by far the most flexible data visualization system and was more-than-able to meet the real-time demands of our high performance data mining technology.”

Independent software makers such as Panoratio use OpenViz to serve as an embedded graphics platform for interactive analytics and data visualization. Designed to overcome the limitations of static charting packages, OpenViz enables application designers and product managers to create high performance solutions from extremely complex data, algorithms and integrated corporate content.

New York times ran a story last week about a online data mining company called Phorm. While the data that the company mnes is controversial, they are starting to be talked about in the industry. Read more about Phorm at NYT-

Amid debate over how much data companies like Google and Yahoo should gather about people who surf the Web, one new company is drawing attention — and controversy — by boasting that it will collect the most complete information of all.

The company, called Phorm, has created a tool that can track every single online action of a given consumer, based on data from that person’s Internet service provider. The trick for Phorm is to gain access to that data, and it is trying to negotiate deals with telephone and cable companies, like AT&T, Verizon and Comcast, that provide broadband service to millions.

Phorm’s pitch to these companies is that its software can give them a new stream of revenue from advertising. Using Phorm’s comprehensive views of individuals, the companies can help advertisers show different ads to people based on their interests.

Reading this Technology Review, it seems inevitable that such advanced mining technologies will pop-up in the near future. The world has a wealth of information and every single thing will be data mined in the future. And what a movement that will be.

By the way, the MIT Technology Review calls Reality Mining as one of the 10 technologies that we think are most likely to change the way we live. Exciting, Ain’t it ?

Also Surprise Modeling which combines data mining and machine learning to help people do a better job of anticipating and coping with unusual events is also one of the Top 10 Technologies listed by MIT Tech Review. This is being advocated by Eric Horvitz, Microsoft Research.

From the article on Reality Mining -

Reality mining, he says, “is all about paying attention to patterns in life and using that information to help [with] things like setting privacy patterns, sharing things with people, notifying people–basically, to help you live your life.”

Within the next few years, Pentland predicts, reality mining will become more common, thanks in part to the proliferation and increasing sophistication of cell phones. Many handheld devices now have the processing power of low-end desktop computers, and they can also collect more varied data, thanks to devices such as GPS chips that track location. And researchers such as Pentland are getting better at making sense of all that information.

To create an accurate model of a person’s social network, for example, Pentland’s team combines a phone’s call logs with information about its proximity to other people’s devices, which is continuously collected by Bluetooth sensors. With the help of factor analysis, a statistical technique commonly used in the social sciences to explain correlations among multiple variables, the team identifies patterns in the data and translates them into maps of social relationships. Such maps could be used, for instance, to accurately categorize the people in your address book as friends, family members, acquaintances, or coworkers. In turn, this information could be used to automatically establish privacy settings–for instance, allowing only your family to view your schedule. With location data added in, the phone could predict when you would be near someone in your network. In a paper published last May, ­Pentland and his group showed that cell-phone data enabled them to accurately model the social networks of about 100 MIT students and professors. They could also precisely predict where subjects would meet with members of their networks on any given day of the week.

Presentations without explanation or slide notes are always cryptic.

But while browsing Slideshare, I found this neat presentation on Extended Two Phase Architecture for data mining time series data. If you are in the field of data mining, this wouldn’t be hard to understand and its a must read too.

On the other hand, if you are a newbie at Data Mining, while there are numerous sources for Data Minin literature on the web, here is a simple, Data Mining Concepts presentation.

Also, the Microsoft version of Data Mining for Developers, introduces Data Mining concepts determining the problems between traditional Business Intelligence and Predictive Analytics. Very Interesting !!

From the detailed Washington Post report –

Pilots and executives at 16 other airlines have similar data-monitoring initiatives approved by the Federal Aviation Administration that are known as flight operations quality assurance programs. The carriers scour the flight data, which is often combined with pilot reports, to identify potential “precursors,” a buzzword in aviation circles used to describe events that often go unnoticed until they lead to an accident. The data are amazingly detailed — small onboard memory discs (not the “black boxes”) capture hundreds of parameters that include airspeed, pitch angles, engine temperatures and movements.

Such data initiatives have grown so extensive in recent years that the FAA has launched its own effort to mine the information in search of precursors. Seven carriers have signed on to the initiative, which began in October. The FAA, which already combs government safety databases looking for precursors, thinks the flight data will be a powerful tool when combined with other information, including pilot reports and radar plots.

Yep, It’s on Boston Globe, Denver Post and government/legal blogs.

Atleast the Data Mining awareness is spreading. And that’s good.