· Big data and advanced analytics webinar series
· Data Science in the Cloud with Microsoft Azure Machine Learning and R eBook
· Predictive Analytics Can Infuse Your Apps with an "Unfair Advantage" - Forrester Whitepaper
Curious about how other businesses have taken advantage of advanced analytics?
· Read about Finland’s City of Helsinki, whose bus system expanded its data warehouse solution to collect and analyze data from bus sensors and reduce fuel consumption, improve driver performance, and make bus rides smoother and safer.
· Learn how Tangerine bank employed analytics tools to provide its business leaders easier access to customer feedback, more quickly acquiring a sense of exactly the kinds of services that customers are looking for.
Bring Your Data to Life with the Latest Enhancements in Power BI
Bring your data together, focus on the metrics that matter, and keep a pulse on the health of your business with Power BI. Learn more with these resources:
· Missed Microsoft Convergence 2015? Check out James Phillips’ presentation, Data Will Change Your Business, It’s up to You how Much.
· See how other organizations are using Power BI to unlock business insights: Laundry innovator Wash manages its growing business, and distributor JJ Food Service has adopted Power BI to maintain food temperatures and create delivery efficiencies.
· Watch The Power BI Developer Experience with Josh Caplan, where Josh introduces Power BI’s functionality and demonstrates how you can put it to use.
Want to learn more? Visit the Power BI website or stay tuned to the Power BI blog, and check out our Twitter and Facebook channels.
]]>Power BI allows customers to see all their data on operational dashboards, in powerful and stimulating visualizations and provides solutions to create content and publish reports.
A preview of the stand alone cloud-based BA service is now available for free to anyone with a US business email account, with aims to expand internationally soon, at PowerBI.com. Power BI will also soon be available for general availability for free, with a premiere version, Power BI Pro, soon to be announced, with additional data capacity and features.
There'll be numerous PowerBI-focused sessions at the PASS Business Analytics Conference in Santa Clara, CA this April:
Stay tuned for more sessions focused on Power BI!]]>Revolution Analytics is known as a leader in sponsoring and working with R user groups, events, and their open-source R projects, such as RHadoopy, DeployR and more, making great strides in predictive analytics and statistical computing.
David Smith, VP Marketing and Chief Community Officer for Revolution Analytics, is also a PASS BA Conference Speaker, and will no doubt be bringing his background in R and data science with his session, "Real-Time Big Data Analytics with R".
]]>– Carl Sagan
The trends in the industry are changing. For example, IDC recently estimated that our digital universe will double every two years. IDC also estimates that by 2020, as much as 33% of the digital universe will contain information that might be valuable if analyzed, compared with 25% today. That’s a lot of data. Where is it coming from? Us. In fact, research by Fusion IO shows we touch nine databases each day before breakfast.
The face of data is also changing. FICO’s research shows that unstructured data represents 80% of all data today. And the amount of unstructured data is expected to continue growing by 80% annually – from social media, email, customer service calls, even imagery. Data promises to solve many problems, but it’s not always clear how the data buried in unstructured and structured data can directly improve predictions and decisions. People need data they can understand and that they can turn into visualisations, then into decisions, and then into more questions. It’s a never-ending cycle.
Businesses are looking to analyse all sorts of data. But where are the people who have the skills to provide these analytics services? Dell predicts that the business analyst role will increase by 22% by the year 2020. SAS is already saying that the skills shortage is the biggest problem in analytics right now. Excel is a big part of that story, since it is the third most popular button in BI tools (I love Rob Collie’s post on this topic).
Data.
Data is the connective tissue that binds us all together. With respect to the Carl Sagan quote above, it’s not enough to have a ton of data. Collecting data isn’t enough – it needs to be used and loved. To get intelligence, we need judgment, and we get judgment from the facts and data. And we can arrive at better, data-based judgments once we’ve had the opportunity to analyse and process the data.
Who are the people wanting and needing to know more about analytics to do their jobs? Defining “business analyst” can be hard. Using broad brushstrokes to characterize this community isn’t easy because only a few people working with data call themselves a “business analyst” or “data analyst.” The majority tend to define themselves by knowledge or business domain rather than by technology. So you tend to see job titles like “accountant,” “economist,” “finance analyst,” and so on. Still the tie that binds us is data.
These are the people who continually ask and answer those questions to keep your business competitive, to understand what your business is and isn’t doing – and what it should do. The business analyst uses data to determine how to boost profits or reduce expenses, to find insights and suggest actions. And that’s just a start. Business analysts may not have hard technical skills, but he or she should be able to understand the technology well enough to communicate and negotiate with company leaders and business influencers.
PASS is uniquely placed to help build the skills for this new world of data, Data 2.0, supporting those who work with data – whether they are focused on building high-performing, secure data systems or on integrating, visualizing, exploring, analyzing, and finding insights in data. I see the data community as a “Rubik’s cube” of skill sets – different faces, distinct but connected by a love of the same thing.
Data is hard. We want to give a voice and a home to the folks who have to do stuff with data. My life experiences have taught me that there is nothing worse in the world than having no options. It’s one reason that I advocate diversity in technology: It gives people the opportunity to have a home. I’m excited to be involved with PASS as we help people to see options in their careers by offering education about a variety of data skills and technologies, as well as opportunities to become more specialized and expert at what they already do. We have to start somewhere, and the data helps show us where to begin. In the words of Mary Poppins,” well-begun is half-done,” and looking at the data is a well-begun start.
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