Project Gemini and Excel Dashboards

Posted on November 17, 2008 by Dashboard Spy

One of the highlights of Microsoft’s Business Intelligence 2008 Conference in October was the announcement of “Project Gemini”. As Forrester reported, “With its just-announced Project Gemini, Microsoft aims to bring an Excel-based user analytics mashup tool into the core of Microsoft’s BI and data warehousing product portfolio. What is now only in the hands of OLAP data modelers and other highly trained staff will — as Community Technology Previews roll out to public beta testers late next year — become available to any company employee as an in-memory, drag-and-drop, pivot-table-enabled dashboard.”

According to Forrester, Microsoft’s ubiquitous spreadsheet, Excel, is already the most popular front-end program used by business analysts and others who want to analyze and display the results of their BI queries. This announcement of Project Gemini shows that Microsoft wants to accelerate the use of Excel as the ubiquitous front end for business intelligence dashboarding.

So what is Project Gemini? It’s an Excel add-on planned to ship with Kilimanjaro (a business intelligence focused release of SQL Server) that incorporates column-based in-memory business intelligence.

If you’d like to hear how Microsoft explained it, let’s go back in time to the Microsoft Business Intelligence 2008 Conference keynote speeches.

View the MS BI Conference web cast: Low | High

To view Donald Farmer introducing Project Gemini, fast forward to about 1 hour and 26 minutes. Also worth watching is the “BI Fairy Tale” at 1 hour and 17 minutes.

But, what is the real impact of Project Gemini for us Dashboard Spies? Well, thanks to the good folks at SiSense, makers of a business intelligence tool called Prism, we have this contribution of an article that makes sense of Project Gemini.

Thanks goes out to Roni Floman and Eldad Farkash for this article:

What does Microsoft’s project Gemini announcement mean for the business intelligence world?

By Eldad Farkash

Microsoft announced its Project Gemini on October 6th 2008. In essence, Project Gemini adds to Excel the ability to perform column based in-memory business intelligence without much of the terminology today’s BI consultants need to master.

Why does in-memory matter when it applies to business intelligence?

Traditional business intelligence solutions are OLAP centric. The OLAP was developed to rapidly answer multidimensional analytical queries (a paraphrase on Nigel Pendse). Since disks aren’t that quick, the OLAP pre-computes and aggregates the data.

The OLAP’s pre-calculation and pre-aggregation of business intelligence metrics was successful in that it enabled the early success of business intelligence and powered its growth. It is what made business intelligence so important for the large corporations that could afford to maintain it. This also points at the weak point: OLAPs create a lot of new data, require a data warehouse and involve long projects. This is the same as saying a high total cost of ownership.

This is where in-memory business intelligence comes in. It takes advantage of column based data structures (as opposed to row based tables or pre-aggregated cubes), and uses the already available super fast RAM to aggregate and calculate millions of cells on your regular Desktop (or on any cheap data server for that matter), without the long lasting table scans and indexing techniques that are required by traditional OLAP & OLTP systems. Coupled with modern, intuitive user interfaces, it lets users slice, dice and filter data in a way that is easy to learn.

Click on the “read more” link below to view the rest of this post:
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Bling My Dashboard

Posted on November 13, 2008 by Dashboard Spy

Here’s a proposal for a new dashboarding technique that lets your dashboard users control the amount of “eye candy” that they see on thier dashboards and scorecards. How about a “bling” button that you can use to “turn up” the graphic volume of your business dashboards? Imagine being able to toggle back and forth between a minimally styled chart and a more lavish approach to graphing?

The idea comes from SAS dashboarding guru, Robert Allison, who has done some unique work in this area. Take a look at these two versions of his Oil Refinery Production dashboard. Note the “Bling Button” at the top of these dashboards that you use to toggle the amount of eye candy. Robert’s commentary follows the charts.

This is the dashboard eye candy version of the graphs:

Business Intelligence Dashboard with Eye Candy

If the eye candy is too much for you, just click the “Un-bling My Dashboard” button!

Dashboard without bling

Robert sent in the following as an explanation. Click on the “Read More” link to view the rest of this post.
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Direct Marketing Metrics Dashboard

Posted on November 10, 2008 by Dashboard Spy

A Dashboard Spy reader wrote me to ask what the abbreviation UAA stood for. It seems that she is a designer who just joined a marketing metrics dashboard project team and was reviewing some wireframes that a business analyst created. On the top of a couple of columns of numbers were the letters “UAA” and the phrase “UAA Percentage”. She didn’t want to appear dumb in front of the BA and so decided to ask me instead.Of course, this triggered a “there’s no such thing as a dumb question” lecture from me. A business analyst would be happy to explain business content to a visual designer. Also, there may be a glossary of terms among the project documentation where you could find something like “UAA”.Anyway, UAA is an abbreviation for the term “Undeliverable-As-Addressed” and is a metric of high concern to direct marketers. Mail that has an invalid, incomplete or illegible address is considered UAA. It’s a huge problem that generates excess costs to marketers. As just one example of the magnitude of the problem, the U.S. Postal Service handled in 2004 over 9.7 billion pieces of undeliverable-as-addressed mail at a cost of $1.85 billion. Remember, this is mail that is already paid for and can’t be delivered because of addressing errors.This problem is not restricted to direct marketers. The blog for the Association for Postal Commerce (yes, there is such a thing!) tells this story (via intellisent.com/postalaffairsblog):

The Associated Press has reported that “The IRS on Thursday announced its own little economic bailout plan, worth about $266 million, for taxpayers who didn’t get their economic stimulus checks or regular income tax refunds the first time around because they couldn’t be found. The tax agency said it couldn’t deliver about 279,000 rebate checks worth about $163 million coming from the economic stimulus package that Congress enacted last February. It said the U.S. Postal Service returned about 104,000 regular refund checks totaling about $103 million because of address errors”.

Intellisent adds this comment:

Now that puts a really personal price tag on UAA mail! That bears repeating — “the U.S. Postal Service returned about 104,000 regular refund checks totaling about $103 million because of address errors.” Much has been communicated regarding the cost of UAA mail to the Postal Service, and to mailers – this is a great example of the cost of UAA mail to mail recipients. What other critical mail items are recipients missing, completely unaware? Food for thought, this makes UAA efforts even more important for both mailers and mail recipients.

Now you understand why the investment in systems that aide in UAA efforts such as address change services, zip code validation and other address updating systems.

In terms of UAA as a marketing dashboard metric, we look at a post by Michael Overturf titled Communication Intelligence for Production Management.Let’s first take a look at the direct marketing dashboard that he discusses: Direct marketing dashboard with mailing campaign metrics including Undeliverable as Addressed UAA