SAP HANA is Like LED Floodlights for Business Data

July 9, 2015 Jim Brogden Cisco, Cloudera, Featured, Professional Development, Project Management, Routing & Switching, Technology, Training in Business

“Bigger and faster” is a major understatement when describing the raw power of today’s high-performance databases and database appliances. Unless you’ve been stranded on a deserted island in the South Pacific and have a volleyball named Wilson, you’ve probably heard terms like big data, columnar databases and predictive analytics more times than you’d like to admit. But there’s a good reason for that — we’re living in a database revolution and these terms describe tools that are nothing short of transformative to nearly any type of business.

Scorecards – Not Just for Tracking Your Golf Score

May 14, 2015 Jim Brogden Cisco, Cloudera, Featured, Professional Development, Project Management, Routing & Switching, Technology, Training in Business

Keeping a scorecard isn’t just for weekend golfers or cricket aficionados; it’s also for tracking results in business. Keeping score, or grading performance, can be reviewed at a very high level for executive analysis or at a much more granular and detailed level for analysts and department managers. But regardless of the role, the primary object is the same — monitor and manage KPIs to make the most strategic and tactical decisions for the organization based on their findings.

What Do I Need to Build Reports, Dashboards and Scorecards?

April 23, 2015 Jim Brogden Cisco, Cloudera, Featured, Professional Development, Project Management, Routing & Switching, Technology, Training in Business

High on the list of challenges for any data visualization project is the need to show results that clearly communicate information and help users identify areas for improvement. Without providing the information for business leaders to act on findings and “steer the ship to safer waters,” Business intelligence (BI) projects are nothing more than interesting, and far from essential. If you’re a BI developer, like me, you’d probably much rather be considered essential than plain old “interesting.” It’s that simple. But it can also be quite complicated with all of the moving parts and team members required in each stage of a data warehouse, not to mention all of the choices available to developers.

Empowering Self-Service Analysis with SAP’s BI Tools

April 15, 2015 Jim Brogden Cisco, Cloudera, Featured, Professional Development, Project Management, Routing & Switching, Technology, Training in Business

Removing the technical complexity from report creation and data analysis is one of the leading tenets for business users when it comes to accessing data. For nontechnical professionals, a degree in computer science along with extensive knowledge in SQL is no longer a requirement in today’s BI landscape. That work can be left for the data scientists and BI/DW team. But for actual decision makers and their staff, retrieving information from the data warehouse (running queries and building reports) should be intuitive and an extension of their business knowledge.

Top 10 Reasons for Choosing SAP BusinessObjects

March 18, 2015 Jim Brogden Cisco, Cloudera, Featured, Professional Development, Project Management, Routing & Switching, Technology, Training in Business

In many of today’s enterprise data warehouses and decision support teams, data scientists and data visualization specialists have reached near rock star status. This is in large part due to their ability to produce unique, clever and insightful perspectives with company information. These analytical gems often bypass obstacles to explain complex business data. This line of work is both an art and a science, and is generally most effective when the right blend of business intelligence tools are in place.