He's not Immortal. He just Designs Universes.

I recently interviewed Business Objects universe designer and reporting expert David Hansen. Here's what he had to say:

Which school did you get your degree from and what did you major in?

I attended Carroll University from 2005 to 2009 and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in software engineering and a bachelor’s degree in mathematics. During my time at Carroll I played on the D3 soccer team there. My senior year we made it to the second round of the NCAA D3 soccer championship. For me, college was a great experience because I was able to experience both the academic and athletic sides of college life.

What area of Business Intelligence do you consider yourself a subject matter expert in?

When it comes to Business Objects, I’ve got a lot of experience in just about everything. Business Objects requires a universe to be built before you can build any reports. This universe is built “on” a database, so you have to know your database before building the universe. The universe follows the same rules as a database does, so you’ll need some experience in setting up a database with relationships and foreign keys before building a universe. Once the universe is built, you can use the Business Objects report designer tool to start crafting some reports. What is nice about the report designer tool is that you can override the sql query the report automatically creates to write your own, more complex query if you are good with sql.

Do you enjoy what you do and why do you feel it is important?

I love what I do, and I’m so lucky to have found such a fun, interesting career path. Creating reports and dashboards using queries and code is right up my alley. With degrees in mathematics and software engineering, I’m able to accomplish both things I love on a daily basis. And it isn’t worthless, either. For instance, the movie Moneyball recently came out, and that movie was about metrics in baseball. Using mathematics and numbers to determine strengths and weaknesses in players and build a strong team is close to what I do. Instead of making business decisions on gut feelings, I try to build reports for executives so they can make decisions based on numbers and facts. I’m helping them run their business as efficient as possible. If I can help people understand what is really going on with their area using reports and dashboards, the company can work more efficiently.

I’m hearing a lot about dashboards and dashboarding. What is this?

A dashboard is a user interface that is designed to give a quick, but deep, overview of what is going on within a certain area of business. A dashboard should be easy to read and understand, and it should be able to be able to convey all relevant information within the first two minutes of seeing it. This is different than a scorecard or report. A scorecard lists a bunch of numerical values for different metrics in a business area, and a report lists all the information a business area might have. A dashboard differs from these because it creates charts and visuals in such a way that it can tell you how your business area is doing without jumping into all the numbers of a scorecard and a report.

What challenges do you face when trying to procure data for analysis? How do you overcome this?

One of the biggest challenges when it comes to producing data is making sure that the data is accurate. In a perfect world, any data collected is relevant and carries the same weight as everything else. Unfortunately, you run into situations where business areas try to “cheat the system” to improve their numbers without improving their quality of support. To get around this, you can try to write rules to get rid of outliers and data points that will have an adverse affect your reports and dashboards.

If you do development work which language/environment do you prefer to develop in and why?

During school, I got to taste a number of different languages: Visual Basic, C++, C#, Java. However, I think the most important language in my work every day is VBA (Visual Basic for Applications). VBA is pretty much a watered down version of Visual Basic. However, it is still powerful and dynamic enough to do some great things. What makes VBA so influential is that it lies behind all the Microsoft products (press Alt + F11 to open it). Using VBA, you can do a wide array of things right from Excel, like pulling data from a database and producing a dashboard, or simply copying and saving files from one folder to another. One of the things that makes my job so much fun is a lot of people hack and slash a report together in Excel, and it takes them hours upon hours to create. But then I come in, write some VBA code behind their report, and allow them to click a button that creates their report in seconds. The look of astonishment on their face is awesome.

Do you feel Business Intelligence Analysts will become increasingly necessary in the years to come or that BI will become more of a commodity as DBMS, ETL and reporting tools mature?

The one thing that Business Objects has going for it is that you can create ad-hoc reports with ease. Obviously you’ll need a knowledgeable person to set up the Business Objects universe. However, once that is done, the learning curve to building reports isn’t that steep. That’s where I think Business Objects shines; you don’t need an expert in report building to create a report for you. Now, there are more complex reports that require a little more knowledge than your average bear. Yet, most of the simple, ad-hoc reporting can be completed by the end user, which frees up the time of the data experts and allows them to focus their time on higher level reporting. The end user is able to gather his or her data whenever he or she wants easily and effortlessly, and that is important for a tool.

For businesses that don’t have a business intelligence strategy, where do you think they should start?

The starting point is building a well designed database and gathering data. Bring someone in who knows a lot about data integrity and database design. Once the database is running, start collecting data! Once you have your preliminary data, you can start to evolve your thinking about a company. Maybe at first you just want to see call times for your support staff. After collecting data for a couple months, maybe you want to see what types of calls have which call lengths. Then, maybe you want to see what time the calls are mostly coming in so you can determine what staffing you need. Once you have a starting point, you can start to grow and learn more about your company and how business actually works!

What hobbies do you have?

I’ve got a ton of hobbies and am a very active person. I do soccer, curling, tennis, golf, bowling, chess, video games, fishing, hiking, traveling, board games, card games… I’m a competitive person who enjoys any type of game, so I do just about anything! Except basketball. I’m terrible at basketball.

Curling is quite a different hobby. Do you need special shoes for this sport?

I love curling. It’s addicting and fun. Some people describe it as chess on ice. And it’s a drinking sport. Who doesn’t love drinking some beer while throwing rocks down a sheet of ice? And actually, you don’t need special shoes for curling. When you shoot a stone, you need the least amount of friction as possible. Ergo, when you shoot, you put a special sole over your tennis shoe that creates a lot less friction. After you shoot, you take it off so you can re-gain most of the stability on the ice. I highly suggest that a person try curling, and you can always look online for more information regarding the sport!