Dashboards, Reporting & Business Intelligence

My classmate Anuraag forwarded these rare pics…vow!

1) Tim Berners Lee — Founder of the World Wide Web

 

2) Picture taken when microsoft was started

3) Steve Woznaik(sitting) and Steve Jobs of APPLE Computers.
He was three months late in filing a name for the business because he couldn’t decide any name for his new company.
So he told the staff: “If I’ll not get a better name by 5 o’clcok today, our company’s name will be anything i like…”
so at 5 o’clcok nobody comeup with better name, and he was eating an APPLE that time…
so it was decided the name of the company as Apple Computers
4) Bill Hewlett(L) and Dave Packard(R) of HP.
Behind them in the picture is the famous HP Garage.
Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard tossed a coin to decide whether the company they founded would be called Hewlett-Packard or Packard-Hewlett.
And the winner was NOT Bill… the winner was Dave.
<5) Ken Thompson (L)and Dennis Ritchie(R) - creators of UNIX.
Dennis Ritchie improved on the B programming language and called it 'New B'.
B was created by Ken Thompson as a revision of the Bon programming language (named after his wife Bonnie)
He later called it C.

6) Larry Page(L) and Sergey Brin(R), founders of Google.
Google was originally named ‘Googol’.
After founders (Stanford graduates) Sergey Brin and Larry Page presented their project to an angel investor…
they received a cheque made out to ‘Google’ !…
So they kept name as GOOGLE

7) Gordon Moore(L) and Bob Noyce(R) founders of Intel.
Bob Noyce and Gordon Moore wanted to name their new company ‘Moore Noyce’.
But that was already trademarked by a hotel chain…
So they had to settle for an acronym of INTegrated ELectronics… INTEL
Andreas Bechtolsheim , Bill Joy, Scott Mc Nealy and Vinod Khosla of SUN(StanfordUniversity Network) MicroSystems.
Founded by four Stanford University buddies.
Andreas Bechtolsheim built a microcomputer;
Vinod Khosla recruited him;
Scott McNealy to manufacture computers based on it;
and Bill Joy to develop a UNIX-based OS for the computer…
SUN is the acronym for Stanford University Network .
 

9) Linus Torvalds of Linux Operating System Linus Torvalds originally used the Minix OS on his system which he replaced by his OS.
Hence the working name was Linux (Linus’ Minix).
He thought the name to be too egotistical and planned to name it Freax (free + freak + x).
His friend Ari Lemmk encouraged Linus to upload it to a network so it could be easily downloaded.
Ari gave Linus a directory called linux on his FTP server, as he did not like the name Freax.
Linus liked that directory name and he kept the name of his new OS as LINUX…

10) Picture was taken when INFY was started. This picture was found in the album of the clerk who took this picture…
The picture was with that clerk only because it was his birthday and he just told everyone to stand together at one place to take a pic.
He borrowed a camera from his friend and as he could not tell any of his superiors to take picture he took it by himself… even though it was his birthday.

AND THIS PICTURE WAS TAKEN WHEN SUPERHIT SHOLAY WAS STARTED……

They were looking at Asrani as he was practicing first time with his funny Jailer’s dress… ALONE on one rock…

Enjoy!
 

 

In the hard physical world there are standard tools available that can do the job easily. For e.g a Screw Driver can drill holes in the wall, wood and wherever it says it can. Similarly there are pressurized Air Guns available that do similar job in road and building construction.

But in the soft world drilling is not so straightforward. When the client asks I want to drill to details then that’s not good enough. Your counter questions are what is the source, target, parameters, context blah blah blah… The counter questions are not an exuse to buy time but the fact is even the client doesn’t know how the data is stored, aggregated and seggregated.

I guess drilling is a process where you aggregate the details to a higher level and then try to figure out a way to reach back to the details using a different route.

 

Let us take an example. For e.g most of the BI effort is around dealing General Ledger Data. GL is the big boss, everybody including AR, AP, PO, INV, WIP and remaining subledgers report to GL in one way or the other. That’s the true essence of ERP. So no matter how each of the SL (subledger) operate or manipulate transactions every SL reports their status to GL in a standard manner for GL to understand.

Each subledger when they send details to GL they get created into Journal Entries and when the Journals are posted they get summarized to GL Balances. So you may say GL Balance is the final boss but things don’t end here.

Executives, Managers etc don’t readily understand the data in GL Balances. Since the data in GL_balances is dimensioned by Company, department, account, product etc it makes it a little hard to comprehend by all the dimensions at once. So they build data warehouse and cubes around this GL Balances so that they can see and analyse by one dimension at a time.

 

Now atleast the first problem of understanding the data is resolved but this creates another problem. How do I know what makes up this data, where is this data coming from and so on. In short everybody loves and wants the ability to zoom in and zoom out of any information at any level they ask for at a click of a button. This makes drilling in soft world complicated (if not tougher) than drilling in the physical world.

 

In a later post we will see how to drill from GL to subledgers in more detail.

 

Eve : Do you love me?

Adam : Who else?

  

The way Oracle is on buying spree pretty soon we may end up in a situation where the customer has nobody else to love but Oracle.

 

 

 

How do I know? But let me guess, To me it seems like something that costs lots of BIG BUCKS and that promises to SAVE/EARN/(or lose) BIG BUCKS.

Is it Intelligence about the Business or Business built around Selling Intelligence of your Business?

I guess it is a mutual give and take relationship, You give me a dollar and I will tell you where you are losing your dollars? (see, you just lost a dollar ) So where is the mutual give and take thing ??? See I took your dollar and then told you where you lost it. I know what you are thinking it should be phrased as take and give thing right??

If you think the above is a joke then let me quote something serious from serious people/organization and companies.

BI is a popularized, umbrella term introduced by Howard Dresner of the Gartner Group in 1989 to describe a set of concepts and methods to improve business decision making by using fact-based support systems. The term is sometimes used interchangeably with briefing books and executive information systems. A Business Intelligence System is a DSS.
services.eliteral.com/glossary/decision-support-systems-glossary.php

Business intelligence (BI) is a category of applications and technologies for gathering, storing, analyzing, and providing access to data to help enterprise users make better business decisions. BI applications include decision support systems, query and reporting, online analytical processing, statistical analysis, forecasting, and data mining.
www.informatica.com/solutions/resource_center/glossary/default.htm

Normally describes the result of in-depth analysis of detailed business data. Includes database and application technologies, as well as analysis practices. Sometimes used synonymously with “decision support,” though business intelligence is technically much broader, potentially encompassing knowledge management, enterprise resource planning, and data mining, among other practices. Business process engineering: The analysis and re-design of business processes and associated technology systems, with the goal to eliminate or reduce redundancy and streamline interactions.
it.csumb.edu/departments/data/glossary.html