7 Tips to Optimize Data Visualizations

Data has become a central asset to organizations and visualizations are critical to present data in a clear way. Visualization helps organizations make data-driven decisions. Optimizing data visualizations conveys the information in an accessible way that enhances the user experience. This article provides seven practices you can follow to improve your data visualization process..

Popular Agile Testing Metrics and KPIs and How to Use Them

Cumulative flow diagramAgile test metrics and KPIs are measurements that enable Agile teams to assess how effective their software tests are and whether their testing efforts help achieve specific business objectives. An important aim of Agile software testing is to get testing up to speed with development—metrics and KPIs can assess the efficacy of the Agile testing team in this context.

In this article, you'll find out about the important difference between a metric and a KPI, and why you need to distinguish between the two. You'll also get some examples of KPIs and metrics relevant to Agile software testing efforts. Finally, you'll learn exactly how KPIs and metrics can lead to overall improvement in software testing within an Agile framework in addition to understanding some important measuring pitfalls..

Data Integration: ETL or ELT?

Data integration: ETL vs ELTModern enterprises gather data from many disparate sources, including social media, websites, customer databases (CRM systems, sales records etc), customer support systems, and HR software.

Merely collecting lots of data isn't useful in itself—it's the insights you get from such data that can drive more informed business decisions. This post aims to teach you about the bedrock processes required for obtaining insights from your data—ETL and ELT.

We'll begin by discussing data integration, before moving on to two vital forms of data integration—ETL and ELT. When you're finished reading, you'll fully understand what ETL and ELT are, and which process is better suited to your business in terms of getting actionable insights from different data sources..  

Data Warehouse Security Best Practices

DWH securityData warehouse security is vital for organizations that take the huge step of collating all their important data in one place. Unauthorized access to data warehouses can have devastating consequences, ranging from compromised customer information to exposing of high-level business intelligence that gives an enterprise its competitive advantage.

This article introduces warehouse security, discusses some of the challenges involved in securing a data warehouse, and offers some best practices for data warehouse security, including the use of FIPS 140-2 certified software and hardware..

Business Intelligence with MicroStrategy

Business Intelligence with MicroStrategy CookbookBusiness Intelligence gets more traction by the day: with offerings on the Cloud and mobile devices getting wider acceptance from the market.

MicroStrategy Reporting Suite is a complete BI platform that covers all data analysis needs that a company or public entity may have. Dashboards, Scorecards, KPIs, and all kinds of reports can be explored and manipulated in the desktop application, web interface, mobile devices or cloud..

Interview with the authors of "Pentaho 5.0 Reporting by example"

 

Pentaho Reporting by ExampleMariano Garcia and Dario Bernabeu recently announced on his blog of Dataprix the publication of his new book 'Pentaho Reporting 5.0 by Example: Beginner's Guide'.

 

Knowing both authors and their previous work, we are confident on the utility of that book for anyone who wants to work with Pentaho Report Designer, but we'd rather interview them to explain it themselves..

 

BI and General Management

This article is the first of a total of three that we are going to publish from LITEBI, each one will be part of a Whitepaper focused on the effects and contributions of Business Intelligence to the company from the point of view of the CEO. 

 

What is Business Intelligence?

Wikipedia gives us the following definition on this concept:
“Computer-based techniques used in identifying, extracting, and analyzing business data, such as sales revenue by products and/or departments, or by associated costs and incomes”

In other words, software tools that enable that all the information of a company (sales, purchases, financial information, production, marketing, etc.) “flows” in an organized way through the business, reaching the right person, at the right time. To this, in LITEBI we would also note that achieving Intelligence needs full-featured and integrated tools to manage and optimize the performance of the company as a whole and to align it with the business strategy.

A tool with all these characteristics makes things easier for those in charge of the decision making in each department: a CFO, a Sales Manager, a CEO or a Controller.

BI USABILITY: evolution and tendencies

Introduction

What is known today by the name Business Intelligence (BI) has an origin and evolution that should be looked at in order to introduce the concept that will be the subject of this article: “BI Usability”.

One of the principal goals of BI is that users find the information they need to make decisions in due time and proper form. The form includes, among other things, the format in which the information is presented and the level of interaction expected to obtain the desired result. The previous points make up the term “BI Usability”.

 

Usability can be defined as software’s ease of use, in which factors such as the familiarity of the design, comfort, attractiveness, level of interaction permitted, response time, etc. also come into play.

Various definitions of usability have been selected to complement the concept: (*1):