Mainstreaming Data

What type of discussions are you having with your strategic data solution providers?

Initially USEReady is often asked to fix a report or two, or to provide an amazing dashboard for marketing. But then, as the relationship evolves, the conversations turn to data strategy. What role should the IT group play,? How does the CIO manage data? What are best practices for traditional BI and Analytics 3.0. How do they live side by side? What is possible with Visual Analytics, Big Data? Where is the real impact on the organization? What are the risks and how to manage them?

We agree with Gartner’s finding below because we have helped companies successfully implement traditional and analytics 3.0 side by side.

WSJ arsticle by Joel Schectman
Reporter
As data analysis becomes mainstreamed within organizations, CIOs run the risk of becoming bypassed. But putting data analysis in the hands of more workers comes with its own risks.
A new study from Tableau Software Inc. suggests CIOs are not seen as being in charge of data management strategy, a responsibility which can include how to best utilize customer information to leverage growth. The survey of 530 senior executives found 27% of respondents believed their CEOs were primarily responsible for data management strategy, compared with just 21% who said CIOs were at the helm. Indeed, CIOs only tied with senior business executives when it came to being viewed as being bosses of data strategy. Taking out IT as the gatekeeper of centrally stored data can promote “better fact based decision making across the organization,” said Ted Friedman, an analyst at Gartner Inc.

A diffusion of responsibility over data strategy is part of a broadening use of analytics beyond IT staff and specialists. The study found 51% of respondents believed employees across an organization should use data analytics, compared with just 18% who believed analysis should be left to analysts or IT staff. As businesses collect more and more data, there’s a growing push to find ways to use that information to promote efficiency across the enterprise. And new Web-based analysis tools like Tableau can often be purchased without input from IT, while allowing workers to tap into silos of data within departments.

But while allowing more autonomy in analysis can make organizations more agile, bypassing the CIO can have unintended side effects like risks to privacy and the quality of the analysis, says Gartner analyst Merv Adrian. “If you don’t have to go through a procurement process and IT, you’re a lot freer to do what you want,” said Mr. Adrian. “But all of that carefully constructed governance is completely undermined, you can be drawing incorrect conclusions, and exposing risks to privacy because they are doing things IT hasn’t vetted.”
Decentralizing control over how data is used and analyzed can leave companies struggling to decipher which numbers to trust, Mr. Adrian said. Without someone making sure that terms like “customer” or “visit” are defined the same across datasets, different units could end up having incongruous numbers, Mr. Adrian said.

Contact USEReady for answers that may pay impact your compensation
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USEReady Enables Analytics 3.0

The following WSJ article provides a solid background to our efforts within financial services, media, entertainment, and healthcare. What is USEReady’s expertise and what can we help with?

USEReady delivers cloud and on premise visual analytics and big data solutions.

Thomas H. Davenport
Guest Contributor
Analytics are not a new idea. The tools have been used in business since the mid-1950s. To be sure, there has been an explosion of interest in the topic, but for the first half-century of activity, the way analytics were pursued in most organizations didn’t change that much. Let’s call the initial era Analytics 1.0. This period, which stretched 55 years from 1954 (when UPS initiated the first corporate analytics group) to about 2009, was characterized by the following attributes:
• Data sources were relatively small and structured, and came from internal sources;
• Data had to be stored in enterprise warehouses or marts before analysis;
• The great majority of analytical activity was descriptive analytics, or reporting;
• Creating analytical models was a “batch” process often requiring several months;
• Quantitative analysts were segregated from business people and decisions in “back rooms”;
• Very few organizations “competed on analytics”—for most, analytics were marginal to their strategy.

It was in 2010 that the world began to take notice of “big data,” and we’ll have to call that the beginning of Analytics 2.0. Big data analytics were quite different from the 1.0 era in many ways. Data was often externally-sourced, and as the big data term suggests, was either very large or unstructured. The fast flow of data meant that it had to be stored and processed rapidly, often with parallel servers running Hadoop. The overall speed of analysis was much faster. Visual analytics—a form of descriptive analytics—still crowded out predictive and prescriptive techniques. The new generation of quantitative analysts was called “data scientists,” and many were not content with working in the back room. Big data and analytics not only informed internal decisions, but also formed the basis for customer-facing products and processes.

Big data, of course, is still a popular concept, and one might think that we’re still in the 2.0 period. However, there is considerable evidence that organizations are entering the Analytics 3.0 world. It’s an environment that combines the best of 1.0 and 2.0—a blend of big data and traditional analytics that yields insights and offerings with speed and impact. Although it’s early days for this new model, the traits of Analytics 3.0 are already apparent:

• Organizations are combining large and small volumes of data, internal and external sources, and structured and unstructured formats to yield new insights in predictive and prescriptive models;
• Analytics are supporting both internal decisions and data-based products and services for customers;
• The Hadoopalooza continues, but often as a way to provide fast and cheap warehousing or persistence and structuring of data before analysis—we’re entering a post-warehousing world;
• Faster technologies such as in-database and in-memory analytics are being coupled with “agile” analytical methods and machine learning techniques that produce insights at a much faster rate;
• Many analytical models are being embedded into operational and decision processes, dramatically increasing their speed and impact;
• Data scientists, who excel at extracting and structuring data, are working with conventional quantitative analysts who excel at modeling it—the combined teams are doing whatever is necessary to get the analytical job done;
• Companies are beginning to create “Chief Analytics Officer” roles or equivalent titles to oversee the building of analytical capabilities;
• Tools that support particular decisions are being pushed to the point of decision-making in highly targeted and mobile “analytical apps;”

• Analytics are now central to many organizations’ strategies; a survey I recently worked on with Deloitte found that 44% of executives feel that analytics are strongly supporting or driving their companies’ strategies.
Even though it hasn’t been long since the advent of Big Data, I believe these attributes add up to a new era. It is clear from my research that organizations—at least the big companies—are not keeping traditional analytics and big data separate, but are combining them to form a new synthesis. Some aspects of Analytics 3.0 will no doubt continue to emerge, but organizations need to begin transitioning now to the new model. There is little doubt that analytics can transform organizations, and the firms that lead the 3.0.

Agile Analytic Methods

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How can you minimize risk?
Investors hate surprises as the article below illustrates.
Manager dislike surprises when it comes to business performance, as most are on the downside. One way to limit your risk is to effectively track internal performance. Another is to give everyone a way to immediately see how they are executing, how their department is acting and how the overall market is trending.

China Life says 2012 Profit May Fall on Market Slide

China Life Insurance Company, the nation’s biggest insurer, said profit probably fell about 40% last year on lower investment yields and increased impairment losses because of the weakness in the capital market. Shares Dropped.

Net income was 18.3 billion yuan ($2.9 billion) for 2011, the Beijing-based company said in a statement to the Hong Kong stock exchange yesterday. The insurer in October reported its first quarterly loss since 2008, at 2.2 billion yuan. Profit for the first nine months of 2012 was 7.4 billion yuan, down 56% from the same period a year earlier.

Traditional reporting tools do a nice job of providing the answers to a standard set of questions. If you want the whole company to be on the same page, then we suggest a one page interactive dashboard instead. That one dashboard is the equivalent of +30 traditional reports. This way everyone can see the real picture, good, bad, or ugly. Because your family hates surprises too, like why you have to work over the weekend to explain the stock drop.

Good, Bad, or Ugly
 

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How can dashboards help with sales of complex financial instruments?

Let’s take a look at this headline;

U.S. Stock Futures Advance on Durable-Goods, Housing Data

U.S. stock futures rose, predicting that the Standard & Poor 500 Index will rebound from declines from the previous days, as orders for durable goods climbed more than forecast in February and home prices increased the most since June 2006.

Goldman Sachs Group Inc. jumped 1.3 percent after agreeing with Berkshire Hathaway Inc. stock in exchange for warrants obtained in 2008 investment. Peabody Energy Corp. climbed 2.8 percent after Raymond James Financial Inc. upgraded its rating on the company. Children’s Place Retail Inc. dropped 6.2 percent after its full-year forecast fell short of analyst expectations.

S&P 500 futures expiring in June added 0.3 percent to 1,550.7 at 9:15a.m. in New York, after the equity benchmark fell 0.3 percent yesterday. Contracts on the Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 35 points, or 0.2 percent, to 14, 421.

How can you convince investors that they need to act? That the underlying conditions are just right for them to invest in new products? Communicating new ideas, especially to banks, hedge funds, and insurance companies is always a challenge. USEReady has worked with traders, portfolio managers, and marketing managers to do just that.

You can refer to the news items and show them why it’s a great time to pull the trigger.

Contact USEReady

Data Article- How to migrate from flat reports to dashboards- part 3/3?

Rule 6 – Why are you standing still?

Once you have a clear sense of what has driven you to find a better way. Get going, get a data dump from your systems into Excel and contact USEReady. We will ask you all the questions in the previous posts, but with an appreciation for your vertical and role. USEReady has working with many users in different verticals: financial services, healthcare, media and entertainment. We will take your existing data and connect to Tableau. Within days you will see what’s possible. You will have insight for the first time and a solution to those painful reports. Often the reactions that new customers have after looking at the dashboards are: cool, is that really us, come in here you got to see this.

Once you see a dashboard then you will have many ideas, many new questions and many new answers. Now you can begin to improve your visibility and understanding. Almost for the first time you will be able to appreciate your web traffic, your customers, your patients, or your portfolio. Most of all you will have the satisfaction that you were right, there was a better way. (and you do not have to spend anything to find out- POCs are free). The process will be very fast, don’t worry we can keep up. It will be fun and cool. When was the last time that a data project, a report, was fun or cool?

Once you see the first dash you have taken the first step needed to replace all those reports. You need a visual reference to get started and we can provide that, that very important first dash in five days or less.

You will ask better questions. Here’s one, should you have USEReady do all this for your company? Or do you want to do it yourself? We can help either way. Our i5 BI offering is cloud based Tableau SaaS ready for you today. Our dashboard experts can design in no time. Or we can set you up, provide data consulting, Tableau software, train, and ongoing support.

Contact USEReady

the data doctors are in

Data Article- How to migrate from flat reports to dashboards- part 2/3?

As promised

Rule 1- Don’t ask the end user#$!
Specifically do not ask the end user what he/she wants the visualization to look like.
You know you don’t know. You might take some of the existing reports full of pie charts and ask for something just like that. Pie charts have very limited value as visualization tools. (Don’t get us started on why)

So if you should not ask yourself or the end user what to do, what do you do? Ask a lot of questions.

Rule 2- What is the big picture?
Remember, what industry, sub industry, company, department, group, cubical, chair, mouse. A marketing manager at a media company and a marketing manager at insurance company will have very different problems. Many users forget that their vertical has a specific language, a culture, and a way of relating to information. USEReady can help to highlight best practices, which can something come from other industries.

Rule 3- Who are you as an end user?
What’s your role, what’s the title, who’s the manager, who is the audience, what is the job, what is expected? Hint- it is not to cut and paste into Excel!

Rule 4- What are your questions?
What question do you want to answer, so what, why that question, how many questions, what happens next, how quickly, how often, what does the day look like, how many people are supported, what happens if it’s wrong, what happens if it’s late, do you trust the data? You would be surprised how many times we are asked to fix a 100 page report. When we drill down why 100 pages, we determine that the goal is to find a few outliers. Sometimes only 20 rows!

Rule 5- What is the existing report pain?
Every company has an outsized invested in data, in technology, in BI – yet you are still not happy, still cutting and pasting, still wasting family time, being a SEO admin vs a SEO guru, etc. What are you actually doing and why? What is broken, too many systems, no access, dirty data, waiting for your support team.

So OK ask lots of questions, but how do you actually get rid of those reports for something much better? The simple answer next post we promise.

SEO admin or SEO guru?

News Article- The Social Media Report

Consumers continue to spend more time on social networks than on any other category of sites-roughly 20% of their total time online via personal computer (PC), and 30% of total time online via mobile. Additionally, total time spent on social media in the U.S across PCs and mobile devices increased 37% to $121 billion minutes in July 2012 compared to $88 billion in July 2011.

While the computer remains as the predominant device for social media access, consumers’ time spent with social media on mobile apps and the mobile web has increased 63 percent in 2012, compared to the same period last year.

Data Article- How to migrate from flat reports to dashboards?

Reports – you cannot kill them and you cannot live without them. The Social Media report is just one of the countless existing reports. Most “reports” are flat, cross tab, full of columns and rows of data. Reports rarely provide answers and let’s not even mention insight. It’s enough to make you sick.

There is an antidote for this reporting disease, it’s called visual analytics. What happens once you wonder if there is a much less painful way to work with data? That is the topic of this post.

How does the migration from columns and rows start? First it starts with you: a business leader, a manager, an inquisitive smart web analyst, a sharp trader, we have worked with many. You are after all reading this.

So first we identify and work with you, a champion who wonders why visualizations is considered the new normal. How do you create that first dashboard, that very important one, the one that everyone sends to each other, the one that wakes everyone up??

What are the rules for success? Next post

Here’s an example of a cross tab, and how we migrated it to a sales dashboard

Dashboard-ing the new trend in data

Just when did a dashboard become a verb? As in we are a day away from presenting the pitch book so we spent the entire night dashboarding? Really, to borrow a word from SNL.
It is a sign of the times. Data volumes continue to grow exponentially. Business managers and IT managers have changed their focus from getting more data, to trying to manage it, to finally attempting not to get buried by it.

Facebook, Twitter, web, mobile, machines, big data, sensors, mobile clothing….
All these media channels generate tons of bits 24×7 globally.

So why do dashboards solve the volume issues for all? Dashboard leverage one of our greatest strengths. We are visually oriented. And we can naturally, more easily, spot patterns in data. So dashboards plug into our naturally abilities to discover, to see things in new ways, to have insight. But dashboards provide even even more benefits:

Interactive – They give users the ability to follow their thoughts, to see what if, to play…
Intuitive- Looking at different graphs together in one place – is often a quick an easy way to see answers

No wonder businesses are dashboarding. USEReady had found Tableau before it had become the darling of business, growing at upward of 100% per year. They make the best dashboards. Actually Tableau created the platform that helps everyone, not just IT, to be dashboarding.

Happy Dashboarding

Data is getting better, upgrade your data soon

As the article below highlights the data on the economy indicates an uptick. How are managers reacting to this news? Most managers we talked to are cautiously optimistic. What does that mean? They are vigilant how they spend their money and especially wary about increasing headcount. So how will that translate into data projects and related professionals? Which is USEReady’s specialty.

The old math, the legacy ROI, hire X IT professionals, execute Y projects, has been broken. We are talking about just data, not all of IT. But still many projects have a data component. And BI continues to be a major focus for managers.

Why is the data IT relationship broken? Because projects that took 5 months previously now can only take one month. That is great news to managers. But because they have been so trained, so brain washed, by IT vendors, most are not even aware of this amazing development.

We are astonished that managers are not asking their vendors the basic investment questions: how long will that take to get basic reports done, what is the time required to edit an existing report, how many resources are needed to support the business. And our favorite- how come after spending so much money I have a huge backlog of reports and my business users are using Excel?

Are you a leader who is open to conversations about the new paradigm in BI;
Would you still want to talk about features if there was a solution that cost five times less and is 5 times faster to implement.

Ask us about USEReady’s i5 BI, Cloud based Dashboards powered by Tableau

And now that article, you should probably consider upgrading your data soon….

US Economic Growth picked up in the third quarter, boosted by stronger consumer spending, and improving housing sector and increased defense spending. Gross domestic product, the broadest measure of the nation’s economic health, grew at an annual rate of 2% from July to September, the Commerce Department said Friday, faster than the 1.3% rate in the second quarter. Economist from CNNMoney had predicted growth of 1.7% for the third quarter. Growth around 2% a year is in line with the pace of the sluggish recovery and is hardly enough to lead robust hiring.

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Dashboards track and communicating market trends

Chief marketing officer, sales VP, product manager – they all need to keep an eye on the big picture. USEReady helps companies to accomplish that with minimal effort.

Minimal effort is the key.

We find that most managers cannot get the data that matters to them. What they settle for is data that is cut and pasted from various databases and service providers. What is the default solution to understand major market trends? We see Microsoft Excel as the platform of choice in most of these situations. That is unfortunate, when we ask why Excel the answer is revealing. It was the only way they could get their information without spending a ton of money, again. After all the major investments in BI, and the associated resources, Excel was perceived as the only approach to simply track trends. Managers are not happy with that fact, and not happy with what they get from Excel.

USEReady has a better way, Tableau Software. We used to say that Tableau was like Excel on steroids. But we have fine-tuned that: Tableau is like an Apple designed Excel- easy to use, intuitive, and stunning. Actually Tableau is designed by Tableau. We love great design.

So the next time you want to see how your trends, your marketing campaign, your Google analytics, your product positioning, your Saleforce opportunities, your customer satisfaction, your survey; contact USEReady.

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News Ratings Believable

Headline- Decline in Credibility Ratings for Most News Organizations
Tags- Media, News, TV, Newspapers, survey

How are you tracking what customers are saying about your brand? How are you sharing that with your organization to influence and improve services? USEReady has seen Tableau help with that.

In the news survey, positive believability ratings have fallen significantly for nine of 13 news organizations tested. Across all 13 news organization included in the survey, the average positive believability rating is 56%. In 2010, the average was 62%. A decade ago the average rating for the news organizations tested was 71%.

Tableau 8 will dramatically reduce data cost

If you’re an existing data user you will love the next version of Tableau. If you are a manager Tableau 8 has much to offer. We continue to like Tableau because it is one of the few platforms that reduces the cost of data consumption.

USEReady believes that the biggest impact on cost and productivity will come from this new Tableau feature:
Browser based report and dashboard editing
Many existing Tableau users, more like fans actually, naturally focus on the differences they can see;
New visual graph types
Floating and tiled dashboards

These and others are nice. But we predict that impact on the industry could be major from browser based capability.
Why? Consider this:

Tableau is already the easiest end user focused platform. That ability to create the dashboards on the desktop by an end user is a major reason for Tableau’s success. It is the fastest growing BI platform with rates close to 100% per year! The dashboards are interactive in the browser and everyone can filter to answer their specific questions. Everyone in the BI space is desperately attempting to catch up.

Now with browser based editing- everyone can instantly publish dashboards from a browser. This is for the medium user. So the power users can publish on their laptops, more casual medium users can edit and publish in the browser and everyone can consume the dashboards.
Now if only you could get it in the cloud.

-i5 BI – USEReady Tableau SaaS

Headline- Health System Wasted Fund Slow Deficits
Tags- Healthcare, hospitals, payer, cost, deficit, data

Managing a hospital these days means you have to look over your shoulder to manage costs. Public and federal perception is no help, as the article below indicates. Great business intelligence solutions are critical to a hospitals’ success. Hospitals call us because the existing brands do not deliver. Time is running out, by the time you finishing listening to their PowerPoint presentation, we are usually halfway done with a dashboard. You can listen to their promises or watch results powered by Tableau.

Hospital Profitability by Market

The health care system squanders $750 billion a year, which is 30 cents of every medical dollar, through unneeded care, byzantine paperwork fraud and other wastes. Controlling health care cost is one of the keys to reducing the deficit. The Report came from a panel of 18-members including experts, doctors, business people and public officials

Typical headline: $1T Saved Over Past Decade on Prescribed Drugs• Industries- Healthcare , Pharmaceuticals, Generics,

As the article below suggests generic drugs will impact every body’s financial health. Payers, providers, pharma, and patients all need to analyze their impact. How are you doing that?

Healthcare Insurance Expenditures

Generic Drugs written by prescribers has risen to a current rate of $1 Billion every other day. Because of these actions taken, the United States health care system has saved more than $1 trillion over the past ten years.
Generic Drug savings in 2011 has increased 22 percent over the prior year. Also, nearly 80 percent of the 4 billion prescriptions written in the U.S. were dispensed using generic medicines, while accounting for 27 percent of the total drug spending.

Check out this short video in the Wall Street Journal with the Tableau’s Director of Visual Analysis

Are your leveraging Big Data? USEReady has been working with companies in many industries to help them in this exploding data field. Companies in financial services, healthcare or media are all wondering what they can really accomplish with Big Data? What type of skills and technology should they utilize? USEReady has found some interesting and surprising aspects. You would expect Hadoop, Cloudera, Apache, to be part of the conversation, but would you guess visualization, like Tableau Software?

Why does it seem that no matter the topic we end up demoing Tableau Software and asking- “like that?”
USEReady believes in real life solutions delivered tomorrow, not PowerPoint sales pitches.

What do customers talk to us about?
• Traders highlight how painful it is to

generate new ideas

• Analysts share frustration with their

Client Investment Portfolio

inability to produce research

• Risk officers articulate the landmines associated with

hidden risk

• Marketing managers want to create

new complex products

• The @%$#! Data Warehouse

We whip out Tableau to ensure we understood the issues.
And that’s when meetings get interesting as we play with the data and ask – “like that”.
Everyone sees what’s possible in minutes not months.

What would you think if we suggested:

100 times faster report generation
Instant integration of isolated systems
2-4 times cost savings

We save the sales pitch, and instead dice and slice your business data so your data paradigm might just change- “like that”.

Take us up on it.
Contact us

Quick- what is the gender wage gap for your occupation typically?

In the original post we started to show a high level view of the gender wage gap. Typically customers start with such a high level view before digging deeper.

The original dashboard enhanced.

HR Compensation

So let’s dice and slice. By clicking on the Job Type, say Professional, we see only the gray circles and perceive the overall trend on the upper left. Additionally if we hover over the many circles on the upper right- the “tool tips” tell us the exact median pay by gender by occupation. We can hover over the dots and notice that pharmacists are pretty close in pay but lawyers are relatively far apart in. Interesting- and that is the point – insight.

Perhaps we want to see the same data but in another view. Many times we will work with customers to turn data into insight. With bar graphs we added a simple filter- Occupation -for the view at the bottom of the dashboard. Now if you pick say Chief executives- you notice that they are relatively far apart.

And many times we want to tie our view together to really tell the story. Did you notice that when we click on the circles in the upper right all the views sync up?

So how did your wages fare?

Gender Wage Gap by Occupation

USEReady wanted to cover some basic topics regarding ad hoc analysis and how easy it can be utilizing Tableau Software. As simple as a few clicks, a drag and a drop, and your data is useready.

We will cover

Aggregated and non-aggregated measures
Calculated Fields
Trend lines
Graph types
Hierarchies
Filters

Our starting point- an interesting topic.
It is common knowledge that a gender wage gap exists.
What insight can we bring?

A while back The New York Times published this article with a view
Why Is Her Paycheck Smaller?
Published: May 18, 2010
An interactive chart that shows the stark wage differences between men and women within the same occupations.

We went to the Bureau of Labor Statistics to grab some data.
And created a similar dashboard.

HR Compensation

We dragged and dropped two measures and Tableau automatically aggregated the SUM of women’s vs. men’s median weekly earning. All the earning are SUMMED across a specific dimension- Job Type. The six job types are color coded on the right. We easily created a calculated field- wage gap, and dragged and dropped in the view. Now we can easily see what the gap actually is per job type. Our code for the calculated field:
[Women's median weekly earnings]-[Men's median weekly earnings]
Really

We then right clicked, duplicated the view and unchecked aggregation to see the specific earning by each job type.
We added another dimension – occupation to give us even more detail.
Done.

Hover over the dots and lines to bring further insight.

So what can you learn from just the first view? You can quickly tell the gender gap by job type. And if you hover over the line you can learn what type of raise a female worker should receive. On average 19% to fill the wage gap. But female executives, they would need a 33% bump in pay before they are equal. Interesting. Just hover over the lines and the tool tip will give you the line formula, revealing the slope of the line.

next – we dig deeper

We think Tableau Software is an enterprise technology company,  and so does the market according to the New York Times.

Bits: The Boom in Enterprise I.P.O.’s

The fact that they are preparing to go public in the future is just one indication of their success. USEReady’s recommendation to enterprise companies -go evaluate their analytics and business intelligence platform. As a authorized Tableau Software partner we think that a demo or a proof of concept is a wise investment of your valuable time. We can help you to see what the excitement is all about.

Gapminder, great non-profit.  “The idea is that all people, independently of their political agenda, should get free access to already existing statistics about global development to easily improve their understanding about the complex society.”  Like Tableau Public but  focused on politics and education.  

Tableau Public provides free access to a broader spectrum of information.  Statistics covering sports and entertainment for instance.  Of course this broader view, has led to some strange applications of Tableau. (?)  So at Tableau there are some really gifted and talented folks, Ph.D.’s,  data scientist  and statisticians creating a remarkable platform.  Yes politics and education are well covered areas. Additionally the fruits of their labor have been utilized to enhance our comprehension of Reality TV?  To be factual, the purpose of  the number one viewed dashboard was to analyze the performance of the Reality TV Fantasy League Standings.   (go Snooki of Jersey Shore, go). 

Need to know the brake down of Male Crying vs Extreme Intoxication? Really. Does that strike anyone as a bit ironic and funny?  (to be fare Snooki did say that Tech is very sexy).

 USEReady will stick to financial services, healthcare, big data or corporate departments.  We think it’s callenging enough making those categories sexy.

Vote- Which company does Tableau Software remind you of?

In keeping with Tableau Software’s theme of telling the story behind the numbers- we are telling the story behind the conference.  

 You meet someone and they remind you of someone else.   Same is true of companies.  So which company does Tableau remind us of?  We have a few folks at our company who had been with Hewlett-Packard.  We all heard the stories of the early HP years.  Founders that were engineers, started from scratch, great values, wanted to build for the long term, were on a mission, wanted to build a great culture and led by example.  The similarities between HP and Tableau are numerous.  The management and the culture impressed us even more than the software.

 Here’s a little taste of leadership by example.  So are taking the Mastering Tableau Software Class.  (why are we in the class? We’ll explain later)

 Christian Chabot (CEO & co-founder if you lived in a coal)  pops in for a few minutes.  We think –  Nice touch.  What happens next  lasts for a couple of blinks of an eye.  During the class one of the students asks the instructor a demanding question.  We track  Christian’s eyes and realize by his reaction he instantly knows the answer.  Extra credit, he’s the real deal not a marketing cut-out.  But he does not answer  it.  The instructor takes an extra millisecond and gets to it.   Leading by example requires patience and believing in your people.   All in all we score that an A+.     

 Next we’ll share what’s coming out next from Tableau Software.  Some of the very interesting and telling comments and  who had the best quote of the event and what it was.

Vote- Which company does Tableau Software remind you of

We hope to meet many fans, customers and  Tableau folks at Hotel W the next couple of days.  If you see us please stop and say hello.  We are wearing the white hats with our logo!

 We are very excited to deep dive into one of our favorite tools/platforms/brands/up-and-coming companies.   Stay tuned.

We met a ton of great people and saw some really impressing features.

Marketing, analytics, data, data mining, retailers, consumers, cognitive science, privacy laws and pregnant women.
This recent article from the New York Times has it all. If you love marketing, or love data analysis this is a great read. Once you’re done take a look at some of USEReady’s marketing dashboards powered by Tableau Software. Is your marketing data user ready?

Interactive Marketing Dashboards Powered by Tableau Software

Steven Colbert from the Colbert Report elevates the conversation on data to a higher level.
The Word- Surrender to a buyer Power

Interactive Marketing Dashboards Powered by Tableau Software

USEReady needs your help!
We have created multiple versions of a venture capital dashboard using Tableau Software. Help us to determine which Tableau Software dashboard (aka viz) is your favorite. This is just one of the many steps before we determine if a Business Intelligence solution is user ready. We not only do this for simple analysis and reporting projects but also for more complex missions like big data integration. All too often user testing does not include any fun components. Our customers find it incredibly helpful in getting end users (and IT) engaged, excited, and trained.

So please have some fun click around
and VOTE
We appreciate your feeback.

Tableau Software Dashboards

V1

Venture Capital Financing

V2

Venture Capital Financing V2

V3

Venture Capital Financing V3

Contact us to experience a demo or even better a 1 hour proof of concept using your data!

Big Data continuing to make news.  Here’s a New York Times article that puts Big Data in perspetive for everyone.  The Age of Big Data

USEReady continues to work with customers on small, large and Big Data.  Here’s an example of how you can visualize vast amounts of data:  Dow Jones Industrial Average

Which makes us wonder, is a song about Big Data  in our future?

A quick snapshot of the 2011 BI report, because many customers either reference it or ask about it. We think that Gartner did a great job on this one.

Customer Rate their BI Platforms 2011

Key Findings
Interactive visualization and dashboard capabilities showed the greatest increase in use over last year’s survey, increasingly replacing reporting and ad hoc analysis, which showed the greatest decline.

Customers of megavendors continued to supplement their deployments with products from data discovery and independent vendors to fill ease of use and functional gaps.  This trend was evident in last year’s survey and has accelerated.

The survey shows that some large BI platform vendors (including megavendors) have narrower product use than some smaller independent vendors.

Hello to everyone at Chelsea Piers in New York City on December 1-2.

Contact: Alex Spiewak  alex@useready.com  908.227.4443

Please review these  helpful resources below and play with the dashboards :  

So how would like to have a totally different user experience with Excel spreadsheets, cubes, and databases?

Marketing Satisfaction Survey

Global enterprises have evolved from an era of individual reporting and analysis to a collaborative and contextual world of Business Intelligence. We have evolved our BI and Reporting platforms to adapt to the business critical needs of analyzing the past coupled with understanding and forecasting the future. We recognize that insights are valuable if information is made available to make business decisions in a timely fashion.

Our BI implementation provides a fast and agile mechanism to gather, analyze and act upon transactional information in real – time. Read about our related offerings below:

• Business Intelligence
• Business Collaboration
• Integrated Data Management
  

  HR Insurance Claims

   

Clean, consistent, timely, and efficiently managed reference data is the essential component of every securities and asset management process

Each financial organization’s trading and operational processes have unique data requirements. This leads to multiple complex systems that work is disconnected mode with disparate sources of information. We leverage our expertise and experiences in the Business intelligence and Business Collaboration horizontals to create a consolidated centralized data management framework that integrates these systems while maintaining one version of truth for all referential information.

• Single version of indicative data such as asset classes and security terms and conditions
• Information management , governance and enrichment
• Seamless integration with standard industry third – party products
• Robust data extraction, transformation and load into a central warehouse
• Support for entire range of asset classes
• Single point of entry for information such as accounts, securities, positions, trades
• Single Integration framework for reference and transactional data distribution across systems
• Business intelligence and collaboration framework to slice and dice information for reporting, reconciliation and risk analysis
• Storage of time series information for historical analysis and regulatory reporting
• Standard end user tools like Excel used to surface operational information and business intelligence to user desktops

USEReady has years of experience in the integration of security / price master, portfolio accounting system and OMS / EMS systems via a high availability integration framework. We also specialize in data warehousing, reporting and analytics on point-in-time as well as time series information. Please contact us for further details and references.