Sunday, January 22, 2012

Abbreviations Used in Business Intelligence

ADS – automated decision systems

ADW - active data warehousing

ANN – artificial neural network

BA – business analytics

BAM – business activity management

BI - business intelligence

BICC – BI Competency Center

BPM – business performance management

BSC - balanced scorecard

CPM – corporate performance management

CRISP-DM - cross-industry standard process for data mining

CSF – critical success factor

DBMS - database management system

DMAIC - define, measure, analyze, improve, control

DSS – decision support system

DW – data warehouse

DWA - data warehouse administrator

EAI - enterprise application integration

EDW – enterprise data warehouse

EII - enterprise information integration

EIS – executive information systems

EPM - enterprise performance management

ETL – extract/transfer/load

GIS – geographical information systems

GUI - graphical user interface

HITS - hyperlink-induced topic search

HOLAP - hybrid OLAP

IPA - intelligent process automation

KDD - knowledge discovery in databases

KMS - knowledge management systems

KPI – key performance indicators

MIS – management information systems

MLP - multi-layered perception

MOLAP- multidimensional OLAP

NLP - natural language processing

ODS - operational data store

OLAP – online analytical processing

OLTP – online transaction processing

PDA – personal digital assistant

PLM - product life cycle management

RDW - real-time data warehousing

ROLAP - Relational OLAP

RDBMS -  relational database management system

SEM - strategic enterprise management

SEMMA - sample, explore, modify, model, assess

SOA - service-oriented integration

SCM – supply chain management

SVD - singular value decomposition

SVM - support vector machines

TDM - term-document matrix

TUN – Teradata University Network (teradatauniversitynetwork.com)



Supporting sites:

teradatauniversitynetwork.com

pearsonhighered.com/turban

information-management.com

tdwi.org – the Data Warehousing institute

olapreport.com

dssresources.com

businessintelligent.ittoolbox.com

b-eye-network.com

aisnet.org
enterprise.waltoncollege.uark.edu/mec.asp

hbsp.harvard.edu/b01/en/academic/edu_home.jhtml

bpir.com

idea-group.com

knowledgestorm.com

cioinsight.com

technologyevaluation.com

baselinemag.com

Saturday, January 21, 2012

2012 - The Year of the Big Data

According to the Wall Street Journal columnist DENNIS K. BERMAN, analytics harvesting from massive databases will begin to inform our day-to-day business decisions. He calls it Big Data, analytics, or decision science. Over time, this will significantly change our world. Computer performance power grows so fast, that "systems can now chew through billions of bits of data, analyze them via self-learning algorithms, and package the insights for immediate use." Analytics and self-learning algorithms will be a game changers. An example of the trend is the fact that Hewlett-Packard recently bought Autonomy which has a technical solutions to clean unstructured data and to apply analytics to that big data. It also helps organizations to derive meaning and value from their information. A collection of computer technologies that work with the Big Data are collectively known as Business Intelligence (BI), and also referred to as business analytics.


The importance of analytics is that it help us reduce human biases from our decision-making. Using BI will help us eliminate our worst human tendencies. The key point is to have analytics in a real time. Such information is a must for all types of decisions, for strategic planning and forecasting, and even for survival. Now business cycles become shorter and compressed; that is why faster, more informed, better decision making is a competitive imperative. Organizations have to work smart. A championship of BI become a smart choice for more and more companies.


Examples of how Opera or Mu Sigma helps their customers improve decision making and as a result increase revenue attract venture companies. Investing money in BI becomes very actual due to the fact that there is a whole class of things that couldn't be done five years ago.



Resources: DENNIS K. BERMAN http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203462304577138961342097348.html





Wednesday, January 18, 2012

Organizational Perspective - from good to great.

Does every company has a strategic plan? Is this plan communicated to all level of organization and used for creating operational plans in every department? Are operational plans in every department even exist? A good example would be a marketing department.  If such a plan exist, is it aligned with the organizational strategic plan? Continuing as example with the marketing department, are all activities in the department, and project portfolio are driven by this plan? These are questions that any growing organization starts to ask at some point during its growth.

According to the Organizational Project Management Maturity Model (OPM3), an organizational strategy can turn a good organization into a great one. And of course strategies that fail, or luck of strategy can quickly damage the organization's reputation and brand, internally and externally. "Effective strategy execution is the responsibility of all level of management, who must be involved actively and consistently to orchestrate required organizational changes and to manage the portfolio of investments that underpin these change initiatives."


An organization should have a governance mechanism that force the linkage between strategy and project portfolio. The right governance in project portfolio management provides decision-making transparency and increases likelihood of realizing desired return on investment.

 OPM3 contains the Best Practices designed to help organization to achieve that.

The OPM3 framework contains three interrelated components: Best Practices, Capabilities, and Outcomes.

Best Practices include:
  • SMCI Best Practices - Standardize, Measure, Control and continuously Improve
  • Organizational Enabler Best Practices - structural, cultural, technological, and human resources.
A Capability is a specific competence that must exist in the organization to be able to execute project management processes. Development of Capabilities leads to Best Practices. These capabilities determine the organizational maturity.

An Outcome is a tangible or intangible result of applying a capability.

OPM3 maturity assessment can help organization to see which Best Practices, Capabilities, and Outcomes an organization has and reveal about the organization's maturity level.  Based on the assessment an organization can create an improvement plan.


Resource: PMI, Organizational Project Management Maturity Model (OPM3), Knowledge Foundation.