Now that got your attention - didn't it?
I have been ranting about how Business Intelligence needs to be quickly consumable even though it takes great effort to get the data, clean it and put it in big data warehouses! Now that part we have spent a lot of time on with ETL tools, big data warehousing solutions, etc and have created Terabyte sized datawarehouses for many Fortune 1000 companies around the globe. Now the trick is to figure out ways of using this data in ways we have not tried before - quickly, easily, interactively!
Tableau Software ran a very interesting Data Visualization contest the past couple of months and the winner is now known. They ran this in collaboration with ReadWriteWeb. The Contest was for people to download a version of Tableau Software called Public, download one of a few sets of data they had provided, analyze the data, create your own interactive visualizations and publich a web page that showed interactivity also!
I loved the pure nature of focusing on the data and the information you got out of it rather than the tools. This is the way it ought to be if value is to be gotten out of all those big datawarehouses that we are creating!
Here is the original page announcing the ReadWrite Web contest and the Youtube Video that shows how you competed in this contest:
The winner of this contest, Rina Bongsu-Peterson created the following entry on the interpretation of US Obesity data in her blog:
Rina made this interactive in that you can choose any state and analyze county wise differences.
The Obesity data shows that a sedentary lifestyle leads quickly toi supersized caskets!
The bottomline advances from a BI perspective demonstrated in a very interesting way by Tableau are the following:
a. Business Intelligence can be summed up in two simple components - Measures and Dimensions!
b. It is possible for anyone to create highly informative, interactive visualizations and publish it to the web as quickly as possible.
c. It is possible for the people coming your web page where published this to do their own further analyses of the information the way they want them to subanalyze! (Sort of from BI1.0 (static published graphs and dashboards) to BI 2.0 (Drilldowns possible) to BI 3.0! (drilldowns possible from publicly published reports)
Very impressive demonstration done in an interesting way!
You can observe a lot by just watching. - Yogi Berra












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