On Analytic Innovation: A Bold Assertion
June 13, 2012
The model of data management that relies solely on enterprise data warehouses (EDW) is on the way out. So proclaims Shawn Rogers at Inside Analysis in “A Wave of Analytic Innovation.” He writes that for the last twenty years:
“The EDW has played a critical role in how we serve our businesses with information and, for most of us, has proven to be an excellent investment. Early on, the EDW did an excellent job of serving the needs of business intelligence professionals, but was often challenged to maintain pace with how information use was evolving.
“Today, the EDW is under pressure from forces that were not present as recently as five years ago. These changes don’t spell the end of the EDW era, but certainly indicate that the ecosystem will expand to include new technologies and systems. Most companies are stepping away from an EDW-only ecosystem and moving toward a hybrid data ecosystem.”
Rogers lists the four factors he says are driving the change: a maturing user community; new technology; economics; and (I’d think most importantly) the proliferation of unstructured data. The new choice for many firms has become what the article terms hybrid data ecosystems. Data integration poses a particular challenge for these projects.
The write up is worth checking out. Rogers details the points I’ve outlined above, as well as providing a list of best practices for organizations looking to adopt a hybrid data ecosystem.
Our view is that as computational capacity goes up, more analytic methods become possible. Much of the “new” analytics is actually “old” methods which are now feasible. There is lots of “new” math to implement. So “new” may not be really “new.” Got that?
Cynthia Murrell, June 13, 2012
Sponsored by PolySpot
Can One Build an Ethical Medical Data Store?
June 10, 2012
There are many ways to gather data, some more scrupulous then others. Gaining permission to share personal history is the more ethical, but according to the article How to Build a Mountain of Patient Data: Don’t Ask for Permission, there’s a professional health loophole in regards to information sharing.
“One of the reasons Indiana has been successful is we haven’t over-regulated the private sector. It’s allowed the market to blossom. We were able to do a lot of that work when there was less scrutiny.”
Opinion, something about saying ‘private sector’ followed by ‘more work with less scrutiny’ just seems wrong.
According to Molly Butters of Indiana Health Information Exchange:
“The result is many patients may not know they’ve been included. And if they are aware, opting out is hard: Patients must be granted permission by their health care providers to opt out of the exchange. The number of people who opt out is few.”
Indiana has around 6.5 million residents over all. Indiana Health Information Exchange along with their exchanges, have requisitioned the medical information of 4.5 million of those residents.
Building a data store is necessary, but not at the cost of privacy. It seems Indiana has added the clause ‘can be shared throughout health industry’ to the HIPAA Act. How many professional librarians are comfortable with this approach? How many traditional publishers? How many of the Facebook generation? Let’s think about that… None, some or all?
Jennifer Shockley, 10, 2012
Noetix Brings Business Intelligence to Healthcare
June 8, 2012
Here is a case study about the value of business intelligence in healthcare. Noetix declares in their blog that “Noetix Analytics is a Game Changer for Invacare.” Invacare Corporation is a leading worldwide provider of home and long-term care medical products. In 2006, the company wisely decided to pursue a modern business intelligence (BI) system. In that regard, Invacare is way ahead of the crowd in the healthcare field.
The forward-thinking company tapped Noetix Analytics for several reasons, not the least of which is its great ease of use. The write up informs us:
“Today, 100 end users are accessing financial reports through Noetix Analytics linked with Cognos 10 BI, and more users are trained daily. [Invacare CIO David] Mewes says this is revolutionary for the medical products field, which has historically not used cutting edge technology to conduct this type of business. ‘This industry doesn’t use a lot of IT tools and we’re finding Noetix Analytics to be very much a game-changer for Invacare.’
“Profitability is more important than ever in the medical devices industry due to government financial reimbursement and the ways competitive costs are scrutinized. The financial analytic reporting that Invacare has been able to conduct around its profitability has radically changed the company’s business outlook.”
We applaud Invacare for embracing BI technology. The company is now implementing Noetix Analytics globally; they plan to make it the data repository for all of their transactional systems.
Headquartered in Redmond, WA, Noetix also has offices in London, UK and Hyderabad, India. Since its founding in 1994, the company has accumulated some big-name clients, including Starbucks, Toshiba, and Visa. Now known, they say, as the Oracle Applications Reporting Experts, Noetix began as an Oracle consulting firm. In 2009, the company acquired business intelligence analytics company Jaros Technologies Corporation, which specialized in packaged analytics for Oracle E-Business Suite.
Cynthia Murrell, June 8, 2012
Sponsored by PolySpot
Data Visualization Solves One Piece of the Analytics Software Puzzle
June 6, 2012
We came across an interesting summary of visual mining for bioscience in the form of an abstract from PubMed from the U.S. National Library of Medicine. The background, results and conclusions were shared in, “Methods for Visual Mining of Genomic and Proteomic Data Atlases.”
Analytic software is in an interesting place currently. Users demand a high level of scientific reasoning within an intuitive and efficient tool. Data visualization is part of the answer as it enables the user to interact with diverse and complex data directly manipulating it on screen.
The paper both discusses and provides illustrations regarding an approach to developing visual mining tools capable of supporting the mining of petabytes of information. For laypeople like my colleagues and I at Beyond Search we stuck to reading the text.
The paper concludes with the following thoughts:
“The mining of massive repositories of biological data requires the development of new tools and techniques. Visual exploration of the large-scale atlas data sets allows researchers to mine data to find new meaning and make sense at scales from single samples to entire populations. Providing linked task specific views that allow a user to start from points of interest (from diseases to single genes) enables targeted exploration of thousands of spectra and genomes.”
While we thank the authors for their work on the subject, they must understand that visualization is not a silver bullet.
Megan Feil, June 6, 2012
Sponsored by PolySpot
Free Book Available Online Discusses Linked Data
June 4, 2012
How refreshing it was to see a free book available on linked data. Linked Data: Evolving the Web into a Global Data Space is being offered at no cost as an HTML document. PDF and hard copy versions are also available for a cost.
Linked Data involves using the Web to connect related data that wasn’t previously linked. Sometimes it is also about using the Web to eliminate the roadblocks to linking data that was previously linked using other methods.
The first chapter of the book discusses how structure can either enable or prohibit sophisticated processing. As a general rule of thumb, the more well-defined the structure of the data the easier it is for people to process it.
The article continues this discussion:
“While most Web sites have some degree of structure, the language in which they are created, HTML, is oriented towards structuring textual documents rather than data. As data is intermingled into the surrounding text, it is hard for software applications to extract snippets of structured data from HTML pages.To address this issue, a variety of microformats5 have been invented.”
Those interested in best practices for exposing, sharing, and connecting pieces of data should definitely check out this free information.
Megan Feil, June 4, 2012
Sponsored by PolySpot
A Moment of Clarity in the Big Data Hype Noise
May 30, 2012
Which is a more beneficial tool to utilize in business, algorithms or big data? Both are useful, but when put to a test there was a clear winner. You might be surprised by the answers in the article Data Is More Important Than Algorithms.
Netflix offered to pay a million dollars in 2006 to whoever could improve their recommendation system by at least 10%. A year passed and a team improved their system by 8.43%. The company also provided the source code of algorithms utilized. After further evaluation, Netflix decided not to use the codes based on the effort necessary to evolve the code into their production environment.
Their reasoning was simple;
“Algorithms are certainly important but they only provide incremental value on your existing business model. They are very difficult to innovate and way more expensive to implement.”
“Most importantly, you should focus on your changing business — disruption and rapidly changing customer behavior — and data and not on algorithms. One of the promises of Big Data is to leave no data source behind. Your data is your business and your business is your data. Don’t lose sight of it.”
It is ironic that Netflix basically paid a high price for nothing in the end. However they did a service by proving big data to be the most beneficial tool. Netflix paid a million to allow a moment of clarity in the big data hype noise.
Jennifer Shockley, May 30, 2012
Sponsored by PolySpot
Inforbix to Present at Solid Edge University 2012 Technology Showcase
May 29, 2012
Many manufacturing companies are struggling to stay ahead of the data game with the growing amount of product data surfacing in the field. Inforbix Apps provides the necessary tools that address the specific product data tasks that are encountered in manufacturing.
These groundbreaking tools are now being released for public showing. Inforbix will be presenting and demonstrating its cloud-based product data access apps June 11-13 at Solid Edge University 2012 Technology Showcase in Nashville, Tennessee. This will be the first public showing to the Siemens PLM Community. This showcase will allow SolidEdge Partners and other attendees to see Inforbix in action.
Inforbix is a Boston-based software company founded in 2012 that addresses the excess of product data specifically within manufacturing companies. The company develops software solutions and apps to address specific data trends and improve productivity. Inforbix is currently a cloud service and assists customers in finding and sharing product data companywide.
Inforbix CEO Oleg Shilovistsky comments on the upcoming presentation in the recent news release, “Inforbix to Attend Solid Edge University 2012”:
“We are excited to introduce Inforbix to the Siemens community at Solid Edge University 2012. We believe there is a growing affinity among Siemens customers, partners, and Inforbix users. This community has always been among the first to adopt new products that are cost effective and easy to use, and which make their products more competitive. At Solid Edge University 2012, Siemens users will learn more about Inforbix and confirm that Inforbix delivers these benefits. We are pleased to share Inforbix with the Siemens community.”
One-on-one meetings will be available at the showcase to allow customers and partners get detailed answers about how Inforbix is helping manufacturing companies make better use of their product data.
The software is reasonably priced and is now available for demo. Just direct your browser to http://www.inforbix.com/demo. The Beyond Search team is proud to recommend the company and the manufacturing data solutions it provides. As always, we look forward to seeing what is to come from Inforbix.
Andrea Hayden, May 29, 2012
Sponsored by PolySpot
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