Tag Archive for: BI

Bridging the Gap Between Legacy and Modern BI Platforms – Amazon Quicksight

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Today, Amazon QuickSight Announced Paginated Reporting; Cited Ironside as a QuickSight Delivery Partner

Connecting the Past to the Future

The past decade has seen a tremendous shift in how we consume analytics – from enterprise, templated, and paginated reporting to interactive, embedded dashboards with ML-augmented capabilities. It’s no surprise organizations have been eager to put these new tools in the hands of their employees. Unfortunately, they quickly realized a lift-and-shift approach for BI platforms requires extensive planning and training because of the fundamental differences between how legacy and modern BI tools address reporting needs.

Enterprise reporting has been the standard for decades. It’s what many business leaders and users alike are used to – and for good reason. Consumers could receive reports tailored to their individual needs and in various formats (PDF, CSV) on a scheduled cadence that contained all of their KPIs and performance metrics. Within the legacy BI space, organizations have been able to scale this extremely custom and robust reporting solution to their hundreds of users with great success for many years.

But in the age of big data, enterprises needed to approach data discovery and analysis differently. Data analysts became a highly valued and growing community within organizations. Companies rightly prioritized empowering these analysts to better leverage their technical skills and business acumen to drive meaningful impact. This meant migrating to modern BI platforms that favored interactive dashboards over reports numbering in the tens-of-hundreds of pages.

Among the many challenges of migrating from legacy to modern platforms was the reality that legacy users could no longer access reports with the same look and feel they’d grown accustomed to for years. Companies found that even with robust migration strategies, careful execution, and exhaustive change-management programs, they were left with reporting needs that neither a legacy system or modern BI tool could meet on its own. Instead, they had to maintain multiple systems to meet analysts’ needs for powerful dashboards and legacy users’ needs for robust operational reports.

Bridging the Gap

So – how do organizations move to a platform that incorporates the modern analytics movement of cloud-based, self-service and augmented analytics, while also creating limited friction for users entrenched in legacy reporting models? Amazon QuickSight Paginated Reporting is beginning to bridge the gap.

This release is centered around paginated reporting, distribution and analysis – the core tenets of an enterprise reporting implementation. The disparity between platforms continues to shrink, allowing organizations to spend more time evolving their new ideas rather than reimagining existing ones. Lastly, this release addresses an important piece to a successful adoption – creating a smooth transition for the user community.

Enterprise Reporting in the Cloud

Enterprise reporting entails the delivery of insights in templated and tabular formats on a regular basis. Some users prefer fewer visualizations and more granular data, including pivot tables spanning multiple pages. Amazon QuickSight has new features that allow report authors to design, build and distribute presentation-ready formats from within the same platform.

  New report creation tools

  • Headers & Footers
    Gives the author the ability to add custom report information within dedicated sections to make reports easier to scan and absorb
  • Page Margins, Padding Controls & Guardrails
    New formatting tools allow authors more flexibility in customizing how reports appear
  • Repeating Content
    Allows authors to quickly build stories by taking different slices of a particular chart and recreate them within a report

New report distribution and analysis tools

  • Custom schedules with enhanced features
    Gives administrators the flexibility to address the wide variety of distribution requirements from the user community
  • Historical snapshots
    Allows administrators to audit report delivery and track usage to inform scheduling
  • PDF or CSV
    Provides two options so users can receive reports in the desired format for effective analysis

Amazon QuickSight customers can rely on ongoing innovations. Some AWS releases feature exciting new technology. Other releases are about incorporating existing legacy functionality to better meet user needs. The goal is to help companies envision a future within a modern BI platform – and make getting there easier. Paginated Reporting accomplishes both.

Questions?

If you have questions about migrating to Amazon QuickSight, and how Ironside can help, email us at AscentIQ@IronsideGroup.com

A message from Ironside’s CEO: Stronger Together

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As we enter into the Independence Holiday weekend, I wanted to drop a quick note. It’s hard to believe three months have passed since my last letter. The world is evolving daily and technology continues to play a critical role in how we all connect, track information and communicate worldwide. Despite the shift toward working remotely, the executive team and I continue to be impressed with the level of productivity, cohesiveness, employee engagement and strength as an organization that we have seen demonstrated by our team. 

Here are a few highlights:

Teamwork. My team has pointed out how their interaction with each other has expanded — collaboratively tackling projects, sharing knowledge to prepare for webinars, and helping clients deal with COVID-19’s impact on their data and business analytics. We’ve hosted weekly Town Hall forums and internal Step competitions that have promoted teamwork company-wide.Under our Strategies for Success free content offerings to our clients, we’ve rallied around our Take30 Series. 

These sessions hosted by Ironside’s Data Science, Data Advisor and Business Intelligence Leads, have made it important for Senior Consultants, Partners and Clients to come together to offer the best of our thinking. The planning and delivery has been mutually beneficial for our team and the ever-growing number of participants who we have shared 30 minutes together, multiple times per week since the start of the pandemic.

Education. This unprecedented time when we are not traveling to clients has offered a time for our consultants to learn additional skill sets and to expand their certifications. One of the greatest values we offer to our clients is understanding best practices related to integration aspects between our key partners: IBM, AWS, Precisely, Microsoft, Trifacta, Tableau, DataRobot, Snowflake, Alteryx, Matillion and Alation. For us, to continue to excel with these partners — cross-training between our Business Intelligence, Information Management and Data Science practices on our most utilized tools — has created many “a-ha” moments toward streamlining our delivery services.

Client Engagements. Despite the sunsetting of “business as usual” for now, Ironside’s business is strong. COVID-19 has impacted businesses in various ways, whether they are operating and accessing data differently or needing to measure the impact of the global environment on their businesses’ analytics. Perhaps now, more than ever, the demand for information and analytics is a “must-have” versus a “nice-to-have.” Some of our clients have found themselves busier than ever and racing to keep up with the demand for new analytics and reports. Other clients are compelled to be more hands-on with analytics that used to be automated by machine learning models that have been rendered invalid. In these cases and beyond, Ironside’s Analytics Assurance Service is here to help. Our team’s expertise is being leveraged for immediate, short term assistance to support organizations running as efficiently as possible, allowing clients to use their own skills for other tasks to avoid stifling tradeoffs. 

Thank you for your continued relationship with our team. From myself and my team to you and yours, we wish you a wonderful Independence Day. Stay safe and remain strong, both in business and in health.

Best,
Tim

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Analytics Assurance Services: Delivering Confidence During Uncertain Times

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The world has changed dramatically over the course of a single month, and companies are struggling even more with things that have historically challenged them:

  • Finding the best people to run, build and innovate on their analytics tools and data
  • Making these environments accessible to employees in a work-at-home model

In this Forbes article, Louis Columbus cites a recent Dresner survey that shows up to 89% of companies are seeing a hit to their BI and Analytics budgets due to COVID-19. The survey includes these two recommendations:

Recommendation #1

Invest in business intelligence (BI) and analytics as a means of understanding and executing with the change landscape.

Recommendation #2

Consider moving BI and analytical applications to third-party cloud infrastructure to accommodate employees working from home.

89% of companies are seeing a hit to their BI and Analytics budgets due to COVID-19.

We’re here to help you explore your options.

Now that the role of analytics is more important than ever to a company’s success, analytics leaders are again being asked to do much more with much less — all while companies are experiencing staff reductions, navigating the complexities of moving to a work-from-home model, and struggling to onboard permanent hires.

To address these short-term shortages (and potentially longer-term budget impacts), companies are naturally evaluating whether leveraging a managed-service approach — wholly or even just in part— can help them fill their skills gap while also reducing their overall spend.

As they weigh this decision, cost, technical expertise, market uncertainty and the effectiveness of going to a remote-work model are all top-of-mind. Here’s how these factors might affect your plans going forward:

Factor 1: Cost

As the Dresner number showed, most analytics teams need to reduce spend. Doing this mid-year is never easy, and usually comes at the expense of delayed or canceled projects, delayed or cancelled hiring, and possibly even staff reductions. All of these decrease a company’s analytics capabilities, which in turn decreases its ability to make the right business decisions at a critical time. A managed services approach to meeting critical analytics needs, even just to address a short-term skills gap, can provide valuable resources in a highly flexible way, while saving companies significant money over hiring staff and traditional consulting models.

Factor 2: Technical Expertise

A decade ago, your options for analytics tools and platforms were limited to a handful of popular technologies. Today even small departments use many different tools. We have seen organizations utilizing AWS, Azure, and private datacenters. Oracle, SQL Server, Redshift all at the same company? Yes, we have seen that as well. Some of our customers maintain more than five BI tools. At some point you have to ask: Can we hire and support the expertise necessary to run all these tools effectively? Can we find and hire a jack-of-all trades?

In a managed services model, companies can leverage true experts across a wide range of technology while varying the extent to which they use those resources at any particular time. As a result, companies get the benefit of a pool of resources in a way that a traditional hiring approach simply cannot practically provide.

Factor 3: Effectiveness of Remote Work Engagement

If you weren’t working remotely before, you probably are now. Companies are working to rapidly improve their processes and technologies to adjust to a new normal while maintaining productivity.

Managed service resourcing models have been delivering value remotely for years, using tools and processes that ensure productivity. Current events have not affected these models, therefore making them an ideal solution for companies  trying to figure out the best way to work at home.

Times are changing. We’re ready!

Ironside has traditionally offered Managed Services, to care for and maintain customer platforms and applications, and consulting services, to assist in BI and Analytics development.

Companies can leverage our Analytics Assurance Services temporarily, for a longer period of time to address specific skills gaps, or to establish a cloud environment to support remote analytic processes.

With Ironside, you can improve your data analytics within your new constraints, while reducing your costs. We’d love to show you how.

Contact us today at: Here2Help@IronsideGroup.com

What Does Self-Service Analytics Actually Look Like?

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You’ve undoubtedly heard the term “Self-Service Analytics” thrown around, but what does self-service analytics actually look like in practice? What does a self-service user look like? And what prep work is needed to enable these people to serve themselves?

I spoke with Crystal Meyers, our resident Tableau guru and self-service analytics advocate to learn more. The following is a conversation with Crystal, where she explained some of the nuances of self-service analytics. Read more

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The Reinvention of BI Leadership in the AI Enterprise

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At least weekly, I am granted the opportunity to meet and work alongside experienced professionals who serve in a corporate business intelligence (BI) leadership function. When they describe their role upon introduction, there is a common thread to the scope of influence and control which usually intersects one or more of these domains: Read more

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Netezza – Design Best Practices & Guidelines

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Today’s big data challenges for both transactions and analytics are increasing demands on data systems. Traditional data warehouses sometimes struggle as they are often NOT designed to meet the demands of advanced analytics on big data. That’s where solutions like Netezza come in.

IBM PureData for Analytics (formerly Netezza) is a data warehouse appliance that has a purpose-built analytics engine and an integrated database, server, and storage. With simple deployment, out-of-the-box optimization, no tuning, and minimal ongoing maintenance, the IBM Netezza data warehouse appliance has the industry’s fastest time-to-value and lowest total cost of-ownership. Read more

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The Business Intelligence Maturity Model

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Much has been written recently about the value of transforming data into useful information for decision making. It has become a strategic must-have for organizations to figure out how to use the structured historical data they already own, make sense of the ever-expanding amount of unstructured social media data out there, and implement the appropriate analytics platform to use these assets to their fullest extent through developing business intelligence maturity. Read more