Love Your Data

Love Your Data……

Breathe it, Dream of it, think of it as you would think of that special someone.

Hi, I am Nilhan. A Student, a Foodie and now a major enthusiast in the field of Business Intelligence. I am currently a Software Engineering Student and an Intern at One of Sri Lanka’s Premium Technology Solutions partner’s that cater to Industry Leaders around the World.

The term Business Intelligence was first introduced to me by Google :p.  I was doing some research one afternoon about Big Data and the role of a Data Scientist and this term Business Intelligence was quite frequently mentioned in most of the articles I read, so out of curiosity, I looked it up and well there was quite a lot on it, but I could not clearly understand what it was at that time.

Fast Forward One year and I am attending a training program conducted by this cool person who also happens to be one of the very few people here in Sri Lanka to hold a Microsoft MVP status in the SQL and Data Platforms. So on the first day of training the very first thing he had to say was to be passionate and love your data. Which I truly agree on as well, because if you do not love what you do, then you are most likely going to end up doing something quite shabby.

A few minutes into it I came across two sets of words, one very familiar and the other not so. They happen to be “Business Intelligence” and “Data Analytics” and Finally I learnt what the two of them mean and their differences.

Business Intelligence
“Providing the right information to the right person at the right time, to make effective business decisions”

Data Analytics
“Inspecting, cleaning, transforming, and modeling data with the goal of discovering useful information, suggesting conclusions, and supporting decision-making” – Wikipedia

Business Intelligence Vs. Data Analytics
Business Intelligence makes use of data analytics to provide the right information (to the right people at the right time) and the rest is still up for argument.

Also a few other interesting topics we touched on were

The types of Data Analytics
  • ·         Descriptive – Shows What Happened
  • ·         Diagnostic – Shows Why It Happened
  • ·         Predictive – Shows What Will Happen
  • ·         Prescriptive – Shows How to make it happen


My thoughts on this suggests that we are currently in a state of transition between Predictive Data Analytics and Prescriptive Data Analytics, and even though Descriptive and Diagnostic Data Analytics are still in wide use, the future lays in Prescriptive Data Analytics, which gives an organization the ability to process their data into essential information needed to run the organization and also to use it as a tool to make crucial business decisions.

In Conclusion, Business Intelligence and Data Analytics has and will play a major role in day to day decision making when it comes to an Organization and as far as our personal lives are concerned, it could actually help us make better and informative decisions in making the right Choice.


That’s all for now folks, and don’t for get to Keep It Real until next time!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Integrating data onto Power BI from INSIGHTLY CRM

Image
Hi Guys, The other day I was looking at possibilities to get data from INSIGHTLY and visualize it through Power BI. I was given the following link that lead me to the INSIGHTLY Developer portal, https://api.insightly.com/v3.1/Help#!/Overview/Technical_Details and I came across the following article that showed how to directly connect the REST API to Power BI, https://dev.applicationinsights.io/documentation/Using-the-API/Power-BI I followed the steps mentioned on the page associated with the link above and voila! it worked! However, the above article talks about "Displaying a time series using the Metrics API". Let ma explain how this can be applied to get data from INSIGHTLY. For this example, lets look at the steps required to get Project related data onto Power BI. Pre-requisites 1. Access to INSIGHTLY. You can sign up for a Free 14 Day Trial. 2. Power BI Desktop. Steps 1. Login to INSIGHTLY CRM > Navigate to the user menu and se...
Read more

Power BI - Importing fbprophet and using Anaconda as Default Python

Image
Hi Guys, The other day, I was trying to use the fbprophet package to do a Time Series Analysis using Python  through Power BI and "Smack!", I hit a roadblock. I tried installing the fbprophet packeage using pip install fbprophet but it threw a ton of errors. So naturally I looked around on the internet and came across quite a number of forums that confirmed there was a problem when installing fbprophet through pip on Windows 10. One such link is https://github.com/facebook/prophet/issues/2 While I was reading through a few more articles I found out that by using the Anaconda platform it was possible to install and implement the fbprophet package and so I tried it out and after a few struggles I managed to get it to work! These are the steps I took, 1. Uninstalled the existing python instance/s on my machine 2. Deleted the existing application folders 3. Downloaded the graphical installer(Python version 3.7) for Anaconda from the website below https://www...
Read more

Power BI- Route Map

Image
Hey Guys, It’s been awhile :p So, I was working on a little project where I wanted to show a proper route that was mapped correctly (much similar to google maps) on Power BI, however there was no visual supporting it at the time. As always, I looked into alternatives for this and I found a visual called route maps on the market place by Weiwei Cui. Figure 1 : Route Map - PBI Marketplace I was also able to find the guide for this visual (link below) https://weiweicui.github.io/PowerBI-Routemap/ This did not quite do the trick as it showed the displacement of the two inserted locations and not the route to it. Figure 2 : Incorrect Route (Displacement) I was getting a little annoyed this point, so I googled alternate options and I found out these things. The ability to create customs points on google maps The ability to export it in KML/KMZ Format The ability to convert it to an Excel file ...
Read more