Aiimi Giving – It’s On launch event

Yesterday was the official launch of the It’s On website.  The launch event was a celebration of a 12 month working partnership between Aiimi, Southwark Council and four Southwark schools – Walworth Academy, St Saviour’s & St Olave’s, St Michaels and Sacred Heart.

We are confident that It’s On will be the start of an amazing journey into the world of local government, cross sector partnership working, data and youth participation.  We’ve got huge plans for taking forward the excitement and energy that the project has harnessed but at this juncture we wanted to share our story and think about the opportunities and challenges that lie ahead.

MicroStrategy 9.3 : Visual Insight

Visual Insight is MicroStrategy’s answer to business intelligence tools which look for rapid and easy deployments such as Tableau and Tibco Spotfire; it enables business users with limited IT experience to create and polish off functional dashboards which are compatible with mobile platforms in a matter of hours instead of days or weeks. Visual Insight allows users to begin asking – and answering – questions which they may not have come up with originally by allowing them to take a hands on approach in creating the dashboards.

I felt that having a short article going through some of the new Visual Insight features introduced in version 9.3 would be good since I have noticed many of my visitors are interested in the new capabilities of MicroStrategy’s latest release. I base many of my notes on some personal usage of visual insight (available free to try on MicroStrategy Cloud) and on a video I found on Youtube (it’s also the same video shown to me when I attended MicroStrategy’s partner training day).

UK Charitable Giving

Recently I found an interesting dataset from the Guardian’s datablog showing the levels of charitable giving across different age groups in the UK. The data is interesting as it uses more than 30 years of data and shows the changes in attitude towards donating money to charities over time.

Originally I used this dataset for one of my other blog articles (Business Intelligence Bout: MicroStrategy 9.3 vs. OlikView 11) but decided that it could also be used in an article which demonstrates the power of business intelligence and how it reveals the story behind data.

Business Intelligence Bout: MicroStrategy 9.3 vs. QlikView 11

As a special request I have taken a look into the latest versions of both MicroStrategy (9.3) and QlikView (11) for a comparison between the two platforms. I have already looked at and written about both of these technologies in BI Battle Royale but will be making a slightly more detailed study for this article.

I will be exploring and making my judgements based on the following key points:

• Data Source connectivity – The different kinds of data sources you can use and how simple it is to make a connection
• Report Capabilities – What kind of functionality comes with report development and how flexible this tool is
• Dashboards – What kind of functionality comes with dashboard development and how flexible this tool is
• Mobile Capabilities – How the technology can be used on a mobile medium
• Aesthetics – The amount of freedom a developer has with pixel perfect design and fine-tuning

Business Intelligence Battle Royale 2 – Web Dashboards

A Comparison of BI Tools by Kingsley Hau (Continued…)

In the first installment of Business Intelligence Battle Royale I made some simple comparisons between four different BI platforms to determine their strengths and weaknesses and to find out if there was any factor which made them stand out from the others. The comparison was between MicroStrategy, SQL Server Reporting Services, Tableau, and QlikView. As the article was well received and continued to gain popularity I decided to extend my research into further platforms and will be sharing my findings. The platforms I have looked into for BI-BR II are as follows:

• IBM Cognos Express
• Jaspersoft
• Pentaho
• Tibco Spotfire

When I initially announced BI-BR II I mentioned including a few other platforms such as Oracle BI and SAP Business Objects. However as they are both quite complex platforms it has taken me longer than expected to analyse them properly. Therefore i’ve decided to publish them in a third and final installment of Battle Royale which will also include the full fledged version of IBM Cognoss BI (Three heavyweights in the realm of Business Intelligence).

The It’s On Portal – Providing Data Intelligence into youth activities around Southwark

As we come closer to the launch date for the It’s On portal, I thought I would share with you guys some of the progress we have made since my initial article on the project.

Many of the reports which were made in SSRS have been tested and refined so that they display all the required data to tell users information about the different youth activities available in Southwark. These reports have also been integrated into a website created by my colleague so they are easily accessible and intuitive to users. The easiest way to demonstrate the progress is a tour of the website itself; since the website isn’t fully complete yet i’ll just keep the tour to the main pages with content. I will be writing an article in future when the website is fully operational and will be giving a full tour 🙂

Business Intelligence Battle Royale II Update

Welcome all to this very brief update on the state of play of BI:BR2.

Firstly, just wanted to point out the change of theme (if you didn’t notice already…) – Hopefully this isn’t going to cause any problems for people who enjoyed the old theme but I wanted to attach the Aiimi logo to this blog and it didn’t quite fit with the darkish style of piano black 😦

Announcement of Business Intelligence Battle Royale II

Just under 2 weeks ago I published an article where I did a comparison of BI tools: Business Intelligence Battle Royale – Web Dashboards. The article became popular quite quickly and generated much more interest than I initially expected!

Because of this I have decided to extend my comparisons to other platforms and publish a part 2 article with the results of my research. This list of platforms contains the following (Subject to change):

It’s On – A Week of Work Experience with Aiimi

A few weeks ago I published an article talking about the It’s On project. As previously mentioned Aiimi is collaborating with Southwark Council and four schools in the borough to create an online portal called It’s On. It’s On will provide intelligence and analysis regarding the local activities young people are involved in. Since that time, the website portal which we are developing has progressed greatly. We also had two students, Bobbi and Dana from the It’s On project, working with us last week as part of a student placement programme. Over the course of that week we asked them to help us in developing, testing, and fine-tuning our reports and website. On their last day I asked the two girls to write a short blog for me so that I could share with you guys some of the amazing work they did.

Business Intelligence Battle Royale – Web Dashboards

A Comparison of BI Tools by Kingsley Hau

Recently I have been introduced to a few business intelligence platforms which I haven’t worked with before and it was suggested that a comparison between them would be an interesting topic for an article. As I have already written articles about MicroStrategy and SQL Server Reporting Services, I thought it was quite a cool idea and set about creating a few quick and simple dashboards. There are 4 different technologies in play here which are MicroStrategy, SSRS, Tableau Public, and QlikView.