July 31

THIS Makes the BEST Business Intelligence Solution

Why Data Analytics is Gaining HYPE in the 21st Century | by Rinu Gour | Towards Data Science

Having spent most of my professional career in the business intelligence and analytics space, I am qualified to share my honest opinion of what constitutes a good business intelligence solution.

We live in a world where competition is fierce, all from the likes of various providers such as Microsoft, Qlik, Tableau (Salesforce) and much much more. I’ve spent a good share of time exploring each product.

Here’s my take on what makes a good business intelligence solution:

Seamless Data Ingestion

The ability to load data without any hiccups during the connection process, or during the automated, recurring data refresh cycles would be a god-send. BI Platforms sometimes use their own proprietary logic to transform queries and execution plans. This results in time-out or other conflict errors occasionally.

Development Scalability

I can’t stress enough the number of times I’ve made something nice and fancy that worked well when it comes to visualizations (such as a tile-view KPI), and had to replicate it. I cane to find out that there is absolutely no way of copying and pasting the component/widget. Some BI solutions require you to rebuild them from scratch. Thankfully, some do allow you the ability to copy and paste them for scalability and simply replace the values with the additional measures you’d like to add.

Report Distribution

Report Distribution is definitely a requirement for a business intelligence solution to be effective. Business users and leadership want to be able to monitor the business without having to jump through hoops. What better way to accomplish this than having periodic reports sent to their email inbox?

This, alone, does not satisfy the requirement however. In a perfect world, the dashboard/report should render exactly how the dashboard was developed or would look, should one choose to visit it themselves. The report should be a well-rendered body image that is not distorted, and additionally be attached as a file – such as a pdf – so that it is downloadable and printable.

An additional nice to have, since I’ve come across just about every business requirement you can think of, is being able to send the report distributions dynamically. That is, being able to send or not send the report only if a certain criteria is met – such as if the data is successfully refreshed as designed, or if the data presented is of significance to the itemized, respective recipient(s).

Self-service analytics

We all preach how self-serve BI tools are a given with all platforms. However, this is simply not true. There is a lot that should go into what constitutes self-service analytics.

As a first, the data and fields need to be simple and cohesive to the audience, and the audience needs to be competent enough to be able to navigate the BI platform with minimal training. A well-designed product is one that doesn’t require much training. The BI platform for self-service use should be straight forward and simple to use. Additionally, it is incumbent on developers to ensure all reporting and dashboards in the organization follow the same design language and principals, setting an organizational standard.

While keeping simplicity in mind, the platform also needs to be feature-rich. Different audiences and users have varying preferences as to how they wish to analyze information – whether it be through tables, excel sheets, or visualizations. A good BI tool must offer the ability to consume information through any of these views, as per the user’s preference. Additionally, a very effective nice-to-have would be enabling a dynamic hierarchy drill-down for the end-user to use. Want to see sales numbers by product by region? Sure. Want to mix it up and see sales numbers by region, THEN by product? You got it, just drag and drop the dimensions as you wish.

Ultimately, there is no single perfect Business Intelligence tool out there. I can confirm this as I’ve used most of them and when one feature works well, another falls short for each one. However, my qualified opinion through many years of working in this space is that the above mentioned features should be the foundation of what makes you select the best business intelligence solution for your organization.

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March 31

Why Amazon’s Shelving Practice Works

Amazon has built a pretty robust reputation for exceptional logistics and customer service.

This is partly credited to their robust, unorthodox organization – or lack thereof organization of merchandise in their warehouse shelving. Rather than clustering items by SKU, or category in a certain bin or location, they’re typically just scattered everywhere throughout a matrix of aisles. For example, you may find a toothbrush and a banana in the same bin of an aisle, rather than finding them separately in a more organized fashion.

The Irony.

One would think this is quite odd, and would lead to a very impractical and in-efficient logistic practice. On the contrary, this is likely more efficient than conventional picking systems. The reason for this is quite simple – time savings. Let’s look at things this way: Suppose you visit a grocery store, and you know you want to purchase bananas…and a toothbrush. You’d walk towards the oral care aisle somewhere in the left or right inner area of the store. Then you’d walk towards to produce section towards the outer area of the store before going to the checkout. For all we know, these 2 items may be completely on opposite sides of the store. Imagine how much walking you’d have to do just to pick these 2 items.

Now on the flip side, let’s assume this grocery store stocked toothbrushes and bananas right next to each other on aisle 5, and you presumed this would be the case before walking in. You would need to simply walk to that one aisle, and out to checkout and be done. This would translate to significantly less distance walked, and less time spent picking the items.

The Amazon picking system works sort of like this, where pickers, through their device, can determine the exact locations they need to travel to – and through these arbitrarily placed stocking methods – can minimize the number of aisles they would need to explore, as they can now pick a variety of different products in a small number of aisles, reducing picking time.

The reason I’m writing about this is because a personal experience helps me relate to this phenomenon.

Folding clothes.

When I used to live alone, I would do my laundry and leave my clothes in a pile of mess. Conventional wisdom would typically frown upon this. However, now that my significant other folds the laundry, and organizes them into their dedicated areas throughout the room and various drawers and closets, I’ve come to realize that folding and storing clothes in a neat fashion is counterproductive. It takes a substantial amount of time to not only fold clothes, but to put an outfit together and pick each piece from their dedicated locations. I know this sounds silly, but give it some thought. Alternatively, the pile of unfolded clothes was far more time-efficient. At a single glance, I could easily see all pieces of an outfit lumped together, and just pick what I need from this centralized location without having to go on a quest.

It may appear unprofessional, or irresponsible, or impractical; but the fact of the matter is, the lump of unfolded laundry is much more efficient, similar to Amazon’s unorganized shelving practice.

Category: Productivity Hacks, Rant, Thoughts | LEAVE A COMMENT
January 31

OK GOOGLE…

Home Automation has become a must-have when you think luxury, comfort and convenience inside a home. It enables the ability to connect and control, through a Wi-Fi connected pull, various compatible devices across your home with just your vocalized wish. In my home, we’ve had lightbulbs, outlet switches, thermostats, doorbells, clocks and Smart TV’s connected just to name a few. Google Home and Amazon Alexa are a couple of the most popular such products that offer this service. Though, there is much more opportunity to integrate more devices and also streamline a centralized hub that helps regulate said devices which I believe would really solidify this technology and help drive more adoption. As a tech enthusiast, I must confess I have employed both the Google Home Assistant and the Amazon Alexa.

Rant

I must argue, I am not bias towards one platform over the other, however there is a huge difference in the way we interact with Google Home Assistant versus Amazon Alexa. This is when we first attempt to awaken the assistant by greeting them with their name. For Google Home Assistant, it is a bit of a formal “Hey Google”, or “OK Google”. For Amazon Alexa, it is a simple “Alexa”. In my opinion, that unnecessary and unnatural requirement to use 2 words instead of 1 greatly diminishes the user experience when using GHA over AA. Every time I wish to interact with GHA, I HAVE to use 2 words, whereas with Alexa, I just say “Alexa”, followed by my command, which is a very natural behavior when speaking with others.

To me, while this may have its advantages, it is just bad design. It is unnecessary and thus inefficient. As a user, it requires more input from me, indefinitely as many times as I wish to awaken this device for interaction. While I haven’t heard anyone else complain, it appears as an inconvenience. At a personal level, one critical component to designing my solutions is ensuring the end user has to interact as less as possible to begin their actual journey. For example, when I build websites, I do what ever I possibly can to ensure the end user achieves the highest ROI, in that they get the best, quality content sought out but with the least amount of effort on their part. This may include caching user inputs, or reducing the amount of clicks needed to navigate to a particular page for a faster experience.

Perhaps Google’s intention with this was to reduce false alarms, since whoever in the room says “Hey Google” likely intends to awaken GHA. But maybe they could have simply created a new, unique name to prevent errors and eliminated the need to say “Hey”.

Regardless, this is just my opinion and hopefully serves as some constructive feedback for future updates. OK Google?

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