March 12, 2010

Business Intelligence in the clouds

Posted by josediacono @ 10:29 am under Uncategorized

I attended a media briefing yesterday  by MyDials and Netsuite. It was about Right Time Business Intelligence using cloud computing.  By ‘Right Time’, they mean ‘promptly, when you need it’ . Not real time as in industrial control systems, but you don’t need BI updated every second. Per day or hour (even per week!) is probably  much better than many managers are getting now.

While most large companies have their BI in place, its daunting to implement for middle sized and SMEs which is where MyDials concentrates. Companies don’t have big upfront licencing fees, training or hardware costs. Its scalable, low risk. (If the customer doesn’t get value they simply don’t renew their subscription).

I see a big opportunity there for complementing the Software as a Service (SaaS) with Information as a Service (IaaS).  BI is only as good as your data and if you can give your own business data more context but overlaying  public data (such as demographic data for a health fund) it will be so much more powerful. With all the public sector information being made much more freely available (http://data.australia.gov.au/ and its state counterparts) , rather than every company importing and overlaying it, if one service provider can do it,  its a huge productivity gain.

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Fixmystreet

Posted by josediacono @ 10:09 am under Uncategorized

There is talk of creating  a Fix My Street for Australia. . I had a look at the UK version, typing in the postcode of the village I grew up in (in North Yorkshire)

http://www.fixmystreet.com/?pc=yo62+6rz

you can check out the status of the reports and follow interesting threads  http://www.fixmystreet.com/report/66368 (not all result in the problem being fixed but add to community understanding of what is involved – disruption to traffic, several agencies have to cooperate, financial priorities etc)

You can also sign up for an RSS feed or be emailed about new problems reported in your area.

a mashup australia entry doing something similar was http://its-buggered-mate.apps.lpmodules.com/

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March 2, 2010

Good documentation in 15 minutes

Posted by josediacono @ 4:33 pm under Uncategorized

While the technicalities of metadata confound me I am interested in the people side and  processes required to create it – since it seems to be such a vexed area. Ross Johnson sent me this link. It took about 15 minutes to read and is well worth it.

My browser warned me that this site had a dodgy security certificate but I figured that if it is part of the US government it should be ok.

https://www.nosc.noaa.gov/dmc/swg/wiki/index.php?title=Creating_Good_Documentation

National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is a US government agency. It is a veritable goldmine about the processes we should use to write documentation including metadata and the different types of people who need to be involved ie.

  • Users (current and future)
  • Data Collectors/Providers who collect and processing data. (the wiki talks about observations but I think we can substitute data)
  • Data Stewards who take long-term responsibility for sharing data often long after the Data Collector/Provider has moved on.  Chief communicators with users
  • Standards Experts who assist the above

I get the impression that in many jurisdictions it is the standards experts who dominate the discussion rather than playing a supporting role.

The wiki makes the point that all the above must be involved in an iterative process of collecting documentation, formulating it according to standards, checking back with data collectors that it is accurate and then with users that it is meaningful. It even weights how the tasks are split between the groups (60%/30%/10% etc ).   It also emphasizes the importance of consulting future users – don’t just assume that everyone will have the same level of knowledge as current ones – so important as we attempt to widen the use of spatial data.

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