Microsoft MVP, Gogula Ariyalingam covers how self service BI could be used to mine insights from day to day life data sets. A very practical, step by step guide on mining insights with self service BI tools.

1. Self-Service Business Intelligence
How you could use it in your day-to-day life
Gogula Aryalingam
Senior Architect – Data Analytics

2. About Gogula
 Senior Architect – Data Analytics
 Heads the Business Intelligence practice at Brandix i3
 Microsoft MVP – Data Platform
 PASS Regional Mentor – South Asia
 Blog: http://dbantics.com
 Twitter: http://twitter.com/gogula
 LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/gogula

3. Have you heard of Business Intelligence?Do you know what Business Intelligence is?Have you worked with Business Intelligence?

4. Business Intelligence (BI)
Raw data Meaningful &
useful information
Transform
Analyze
Make
effective decisions
Tools &
Techniques

5. Business Intelligence (BI)
Heterogeneous
data sources
Extract,
Transform
&
Load
Data Warehouse/
Data Marts
OLAP/Cubes
Visualizations/
Reports
Dashboards/
Scorecards

6. Traditional BI (also: Corporate BI, Enterprise BI)
 Historical data (Various sources) → Data Warehouse
 Periodically updated
 Weekly (Weekend-ly)
 Nightly
 Hourly (In recent times)
 Provides
 Hindsight (via Reports, Dashboards, Scorecards)
 Sometimes Insight (via Data Mining) and Forecasting

7. Traditional BI (also: Corporate BI, Enterprise BI)
 Expensive (Hardware, Software)
 Specialist/IT built
 Used by:
 Top level management
 Certain business users
 In a lot of cases not used at all

8. Problems
 Building a BI solution takes ages (sometimes 2-3 years)
 Things change
 IT (or someone else) builds it for you
 Fixed/Pre-decided reports
 You want more?You wait
*Source: Gartner
More than 70% of BI projects fail*

9. Winds of Change
 A new breed of business user
 Technical/Non-Technical
 Wants:
 To gain insight through data discovery
 To mashup data from various sources (including public domain)
 To access data without going through IT
 The tools to do all this

10. Winds of Change
 Bosses with Gadgets
 Non-Technical
 Wants:
 Access to Data on the Go
 “I want to see it on my iPad!”

11. Self-Service Business Intelligence

12. Characteristics
 Users are self-reliant
 Allows access to data with minimum/no IT intervention
 Allows users to bring in their own sources
 Allows for data discovery
 Allows for sharing/collaboration
 Agile
 Not a replacement forTraditional BI
 Makes use of traditional BI (wherever feasible)

13. Scenario
 Sales history and product info in cubes (traditional BI)
 Month long ad campaign – data on new CRM system
 You need to
 Analyze sales against ads – for effectiveness
 Analyze sentiments expressed onTwitter and Facebook about ads

14. Self-Service Tools

15. DEMO
Livestock Slaughter Statistics in Sri Lanka

16. Aftermath
 Share findings with peers/boss
 Collaborate
 Make effective decisions

17. Using self-service BI in your day-to-day life
 Self-service BI tools allow you to connect virtually any type of data source
 Use it to:
 Get insights of your utility bills at home
 Get an idea of how your campaigns are faring
 Get an overall understanding of your project progress
 The uses are limitless

18. Thank you
 Further References:
 A definition of Self-Service Business Intelligence
 Q&A on Self-Service Business Intelligence
 Try Self-Service Business Intelligence using Power BI:
 Tutorial: Facebook analytics using Power BI Desktop
 Guided Learning
No animals were subject to harm in the making of this presentation