NW Business Intelligence Consulting

Does it feel like sometimes the BI team does nothing more than deliver reports, updates to reports and more variations on the same reports? I have a hunch that is the case more often than a lot of us would like to admit. The promise of BI is always big when making the initial investment in software and hardware. That juicy suite of tools and studios are demonstrated as a tightly integrated whole capable of pumping out solutions that will turn your business into a well oiled machine. Executive management is sold if even half of it turns out to be true. But, initially at least, efforts almost always focus on reports, operational in most cases.

A few months back I wrote about the aesthetics of information, or information visualization, and how it is a vital part of getting your reports (charts and presentations, etc.) to be more effective. I'm always on the look out for tools and articles on the topic so this posting is just a nod to a couple things I've seen and liked lately in the area of data visualization.

First, to Stephen Few at Perceptual Edge. I recieved an older white paper he had written for Cognos on the principals of viusal communication that led me to his web site, which of course is his business storefront. Of interest is a nice list of articles and other white papers here. He includes both articles of his own as well as from other authors on the topic. I like his style of writing and he seems to keep an open mind and avoid stating absolutes. I have not had a chance to read many of his articles but the few I have read lead me to think he is a real champion of data visualization.

My experience has been that most BI developers don't understand the importance of visual design in the their work. The tendency is to brush it off as "eye wash" or leave it for the end users to bring up in user acceptance testing. I'm biased perhaps because my educational background in architecture included the visual as a key element in every "deliverable". Communicating with the eye in that field is essential. I don't see it any other way in BI when part of a deliverable includes something more than lists and cross tabs.

Lastly, a nod to a company getting some buzz lately is Lyzasoft. People are blogging about them and there are some lively discussions. I have not had a chance to check them out beyond getting a feel for where they sit in the broad spectrum of BI. Sounds like they sit somewhere between Tableau and QlikView. I'll have to add them to my list of tools to try after my very positive experience with Tableau a few months back. From what I've read I don't expect them to be that advanced in visualization though.

 

I'll admit it's a slow day and I'm in need of something new to put up on the front page and this is what I came up with. I've been messing about with Cognos 8.4 installs lately and in the process I usually try a few sample reports. I picked one at random as I usually do and I liked the look of it enough to check it out.

It had some nice spark-line charts so I thought I'd have a look at it in Report Studio and see what's going on behind the scenes. This particular report was based on a dimensionally modeled data source. This means the data source dimensions have built in hierarchies and when you work with them in Report Studio it means certain things are done differently. If you're not a Cognos developer this probably means nothing to you. In fact, if you're not a Cognos developer you're probably long gone by now! The nit I found to pick was lurking on the inside of this report.

Got this nice tip on how to calculate the date range for "next week" from a posting on IT Toolbox.

 Relies on the value of day number of the week in relation to the number of days in a week.

Here is the pseudo code: Some_Date minus Day_Number_in_Week + 8 gets the first day of the next week. If your weeks start with Sunday being day 1 then it would be Sunday. The last day of the week is derived the same way but by adding 14 instead of 8. Nice tip! Here is the link to the original posting.

After recently upgrading to OpenOffice 3 we discovered during a project that saving documents to the Word .DOC format seemingly resulted in files that, when opened in Word 2007, were less than ideal. Specifically the headers, footers and many other aspects could not be edited. This was a real pain and meant we had to adopt some clumsy work around methods.

The good news is, it was simply a feature of Word 2007 we were not aware of. My colleague discovered that these restrictions could be removed through menu options inside Word 2007. Here is how to do it.

Click the “Review” tab. Click “Protect Document”. Click “Restrict Formatting and Editing” option to adjust these settings. Specifically checking the line that says Unrestricted Access seems to allow you the freedom to do whatever is needed. We did not spend the time to read the manual of course but you might be more diligent than us and want to post a comment below to enlighten us as to what exactly the right thing to do might be.

 

 

I wanted to post this tip I got from another posting I found on line at Software Tips and Tricks about a feature of the Cisco VPN client a lot of people use for remote access. It was posted in 2005 so this feature has been around at least since then. If you use the Cisco VPN client on a PC that is part of a network and you have found that it cannot be pinged by other systems on the network then open the Cisco VPN tool, go to Options, and uncheck the feature that says Statefull Firewall (Always On). This is how it works in version 5.x at least. I believe this is the default setting after install. Insidious if you ask me. I spent months living with this wondering why laptop was invisible on the network even with the Windows firewall disabled. No wonder, I still had this one on!!

Here's some history if you're interested. I had tried everything I could find in the way of troubleshooting. I Googled all manner of strings looking for anything related to "can't ping Windows PC from Linux" because I thought it might be specific to that. Then I booted my other system as a Windows box and remembered that I'd had this problem for months. I never put 2 and 2 together but not now I realize it all started about the time I installed the Cisco VPN client (over a year ago!). Probably because my network configuration was completely different at the time. However, most troubleshooting postings do suggest people turn off their firewalls on both sides as a first step. Of course I had already tried that and looked at the one in the router as well. So, just because you have checked the obvioius doesn't mean you might not have other firewalls installed. Lot's of utilities that are communications related might have built in firewalls. The moral of the story is, if you have "ping" problems or other basic network comm. issues, check for any new or updated communications tools first. Who knows what might be lurking.