Business Analytics – It’s really OK that it’s not perfect first time out!
Business Analytics is changing rapidly. Traditional BI is being challenged due to the rate at which we are not only collecting data, but wanting to leverage that data for business advantage. A recent survey of over 40 technology vendors’ clients by one of the largest IT research firms showed that ultimately, the customer experience matters. […]
TM1 Best Practices: The Power of Using Global Parameter Flags
TM1 is a completely customizable solution for budgeting and forecasting. It is extremely robust and flexible, but with that comes complexity. Two of the biggest challenges my customers face are the amount of time it takes to prepare their budgets and forecasts, especially if they are responsible for rolling monthly forecasts, and how difficult it […]
4 Ways to Optimize Your QlikView Application Performance
QlikView’s appeal and power is behind its ease of use and the speed at which users can perform data discovery without the need to bother IT with requests. Once an application is validated and deployed, business users have the ability to perform their own custom reporting needs quickly. But what if it’s not quick? Then […]
A Report Developer’s Guide to Sanity
IBM Cognos Report Studio is a tremendously flexible and useful application for querying and presenting data in a multitude of forms. From crosstabs to graphs, details or summaries, sales reporting to financial statutory reporting, Report Studio is both powerful and versatile. Due to its expansive feature set and extensibility, every report developer will have their […]
Documentation Tips for Report Studio
Report Studio Documentation Have you ever opened an existing report in Report Studio and blundered through the many components of the layout and queries wondering where the best place is to start trying to understand how it all comes together to form the output? If you’re a report developer, I’ll bet that you have. Report […]
How much memory is needed for a great user experience in QlikView?
This is a question I am always asked when designing and releasing QlikView applications to various user groups. As I’m sure you know, QlikView allows users to analyze data quickly due to the associative in-memory technology design. Unique entries are only stored once in-memory; other entries are pointers to the parent data. Therefore, memory and […]
Whose data is it anyway?
Good News, Bad News. Good news is that Excel can now hold more than 65,536 rows of data. Bad news is that Excel can now hold more than 65,536 rows of data. It is not uncommon for users to ask for everything they “need” downloaded into Excel. This confuses the IT group and usually generates […]
Business Analytics for Beginners
In the words of my favorite musical, The Sound of Music, “Let’s start at the very beginning, a very good place to start.” Business Intelligence analysts confirm that adoption is still not what we anticipated it to be. Recently I read a statistic that stated 64% of business users still make decisions on “gut” and […]