Since the YouTube video below got released last week I have had many people ask me "what's your secret" and "how did I spot that in the data" ?
As I am sure you are all aware I am certainly no clairvoyant and do not possess the skills that Dustin Hoffman's character had in Rain Man.
What I do every time I see a new data set or a whack of information is to try and apply the "I" in Business Intelligence that is truly lacking these days. My thought process usually goes something like this when seeing the new information:
In the case mentioned in the YouTube video above it was very much a 1. situation as the customer had been staring at the same report for well over a decade and it was clear they never fully grasped the effect of the data that was being presented to them. They do say that no presentation is complete without a pie chart and suddenly, when the data that was always buried in a long winded auditors reports was presented in our trusty pie chart did their outlook change on the data.
The beauty about BIOndemand, besides the fact that it is free, is that in a very short space of time you can be slicing and dicing your static data and getting new insights into your data. As you can judge by the tone of this post, I LOVE this product, and use it as my "secret weapon" when ever I am going to see a new customer. How do I do that? Simple!
Most customers we deal with are listed companies and have audited financials/reports posted all over the internet. Before the meeting I always extract some of that information and then, on my iPad, during an introductory meeting show the customer the "art of the possible" with their own data which really is a powerful message. It really can be as simple as taking their balance sheet and showing them visually where the bulk of their liabilities lie... the permutations are endless !
To me you can never underestimate the power of customers seeing the information that they can relate to - the world has moved past the stage of the "How many green T-shirts were sold in California ?" demos.
So what I decided to do, and I limited myself to an hour to prove a point, was to get some random data off the internet and put it in a BIOnDemand instance and see how/where I could add value to give you an idea of my thought process....
As I know a lot of us consultants spend our time bouncing between airports I managed to find this site which has all the data based on how and why flights are on time through out the US.
The graphing looks like this:
I then downloaded their raw data which came in this format:
If you look closely in the "airport_name" column there is a lot of information there, namely:
Other enhancements I made to the file were as follows:
Below are a few screen shots that I have taken in BIOnDemand to get an idea of the new added functionality and the multitude of ways that you can now analyze your information:
Pic 1: The warmer it is the more people fly
Pic 2: Planning for TechEd in Vegas - SouthWest have the most flights into Vegas - but also the most delays !
Pic 3: The top 10 most reliable airlines flying into Vegas in October for two years (2010,2011)
Pic 4: Weather delays, which I "think" are peoples biggest fear of flying, cause less than 1 % of delays
Pretty cool stuff... well I believe so ... I could go on forever - but you will be glad to know I won't :wink:
Yes there are some negatives about the free BIOnDemand service if you have to take a closer look, such as:
There are 2 main points that I want to stress before people get carried away with BIOnDemand and go replacing their Enterprise Data warehouse (EDW) with BIOnDemand - there is a product that begins with a Q that already tries to achieve this:
Please feel free to contact me if you would like to play around with this dataset on BIOnDemand as I will happily share it with you. If you would like access to the data directly then click here
Really keen on your thoughts on this technology and I feel if you ensure that you pitch this tool at the right level and carefully explain where it fits in then it will become an awesome part of your arsenal
Clint