New Workforce - The Weblog of New Equities

DB2 - the home version

For novice SQL/DB2 enthuasiasts, IBM is offering a free tutorial in the form of The DB2 Business Game:

If you're a beginner with IBM® DB2® and SQL, you may wonder how the technical skills you're learning are used in the "real world." Here is a chance for you to put your DB2 SQL skills into play in this interactive game! Jump into a "run your own business" scenario, where your company's future depends on a key report needed to secure funds for a critical upgrade. Use your relational database skills to build this report.

This is part of an ongoing series of SQL and DB2 tutorials currently offered by IBM.

Analyze this!

An interesting post from Juice Analytics on "Lightweight data exporation in Excel", which shows how to set up in-cell bar graphs using Excel's REPT function. A follow-up post has more examples and a spreadsheet you can download and play with. A must for data analysts and Excel power users.

Open-source BI suite

JasperSoft is attempting to shake up the Business Intelligence marketplace with its announcement of a Java-based open-source BI suite:

The Jasper Intelligence product line will include a server for generating reports. In about a month, the company is expected to release a component for doing analysis and then a so-called ETL product later this year for moving data between different sources.

The Java-based server products will complement the company's existing open-source product, JasperReports for generating reports.

Business intelligence software--a collection of products tools for analyzing business data such as sales records--is one area corporate customers continue to spend on, according to analysts' surveys. The segment is dominated by larger, full-service companies, such as IBM and Oracle, and specialized vendors, such as SAS, Cognos, Business Objects and Hyperion.

JasperSoft's strategy is to undercut entrenched vendors on price with a simpler product, said Paul Doscher, CEO of JasperSoft. It is designing its product to appeal to developers, who can take the software and embed data analysis into applications they write, rather than try to sell directly to end users.

IBM, Cognos and SAS are probably not losing much sleep at this point, but if nothing else, this may provide an inexpensive entry point into the BI space for developers looking to expand their range of capabilities.

"It's all about the data"

Um, well, yes it is.

Managing information as a supply chain

Optimize has an interesting Q&A on looking at information flow from a supply chain perspective:

Q: What's the problem with the way companies deal with data today?

A: Companies think the way to attack the data management problem is to create a big warehouse. They presume that if they centralize the data, it'll be easier to access, but that creates obstacles as well. I think that by applying supply chain constructs to information management, we can get rid of the myth that a data warehouse will solve the problem.

Information management is a hot topic now, because of regulatory and compliance issues. Our clients are wrestling with how to take control of data. Now, it's not necessarily a new concept to apply supply chain concepts to data; there are articles that talk about applying lean manufacturing principles to information management. We're trying to figure out how the entire supply chain management perspective can be applied, initially in financial service opportunities.

Q: What are the benefits of thinking of information as a product?

A: If you look at financial services, a lot of their products are mortgages—loan applications come in and are sent off into the secondary market—and those are essentially products. That's a lot of contract data that comes through. Why can't you treat that as raw material, as a product in a manufacturing sense? The manufacturing process converts raw materials into products. Thinking along those lines could be applied to information management—start by looking at how fast your product comes through the front door and goes out the back, and if you want to increase the cycle to meet demand, you can apply these concepts to the market. It's just an implementation of information flow and cycle time.

Vista delays? Blame it on quality!

E-Week reports that Microsoft is paying much closer attention to software quality than it used to, so much so that it has delayed the release of Windows Vista, based on data from its own internal Software Quality Metrics (SQM) suite:

The SQM tools, which sound as if they are being used across almost every major and minor product group inside the software giant, provide teams with reports on software reliability, quality of service and usage.

The SQM reports can provide real-time feedback on the potential impact of a user interface tweak, a feature cut or the wording of a product-feedback box.

SQM also aggregates this quality data into fact tables and OLAP (online analytical processing) cubes. This historical data is stored in data warehouses, and project members can view and manipulate that data with Excel, we hear.

There is discussion in the halls of Redmond to make SQM available to developers outside the company.

That Microsoft is emphasizing quality in its Vista release is welcome news, but the SQM tools sound pretty interesting as well - if they are allowed to see the light of day.

The perfect BI storm?

In a recent article for B-eye, Claudia Imhoff identifes three key trends that are expected to have a huge impact on the evolution of business intelligence technology: 1) The consolidation of BI companies; 2) Moving from strategic BI to operational or right-time BI; and 3) More sophisticated analytics and data visualization.

SAS BI goes vertical

From eWeek: "SAS Launches Enhanced Vertical BI Line". New applications announced yesterday at SAS Institute's annual user conference will focus on financial services, manufacturing, retail and telecom.

In the area of financial services, the software includes an anti-money laundering application that sifts through huge amounts of transaction data to detect suspicious deposit and transfer patterns.

The latest version of this application provides enhanced data integration features through the SAS Data Integration Studio and related components.

A new version of SAS Credit Risk Management for Banking provides improved reporting features so information can be rapidly shared throughout a bank for scoring, rating and managing credit and credit risk.

SAS Fair Banking provides enhanced analytics to help lenders ensure regulatory compliance while improving the quality of lending decisions.

Follow the IT money in 2006

The Top 10 IT projects of 2006, according to Baseline Magazine, include CRM, Collaboration, Supply Chain Management, and Business Analytics, among others. Plan accordingly.

The revolution will be modeled

Hope you were paying attention in Math class. From BusinessWeek via ZDNet:

In a world teeming with data, we ourselves become the math nerds' most prized specimens. Researchers at Aetna Health Care, Amazon.com (AMZN), and many other companies are piecing together mathematical models of customers and employees. Some models predict what music we'll buy, others figure out which worker is best equipped for a particular job. For now, these models are crude, the digital equivalent of stick figures. But over the coming decade, each of us will give birth to far more fleshed out simulations of ourselves. We'll be modeled as workers, shoppers, voters, and patients. Some of the simulations will have our names and credit cards attached, perhaps a few genetic details. In others, our identities will be shielded. Many of these models will be eerily accurate and others laughably off mark. But companies and governments will use them all the same to predict how to sell us things, steer us clear of diseases, and ramp up our productivity. And yes, they'll try to use them to keep us from hijacking airplanes or detonating bombs.

This mathematical modeling of humanity promises to be one of the great undertakings of the 21st century. It will grow in scope to include much of the physical world as mathematicians get their hands on new flows of data, from atmospheric sensors to the feeds from millions of security cameras. It's a parallel world that's taking shape, a laboratory for innovation and discovery composed of numbers, vectors, and algorithms. "We turn the world of content into math, and we turn you into math," says Howard Kaushansky, CEO of Boulder (Colo.)-based Umbria Inc., a company that uses math to analyze marketing trends online.

We've been seeing a lot of press on the the importance of right-brain thinking for technology professionals. From this it's clear that there's still plenty of future for the extreme left-brain types.