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!

Why Mergers Happen in IT

Prices can be set according to the benefits a seller thinks they provide, or they can be set to optimize profitability. At least option two is market driven, but that often leads to nothing but a pricing war. So if vendors want to avoid commoditization, they can either differentiate their product in a way that gets through to customers or they can reduce their customer's choices. Everyone knows that monopolies can charge whatever they want. That is why we dislike them and why even Adam Smith's invisible hand needs to be smacked on the knuckles like an ornery nun's ruler from time to time - a smack we call antitrust.

Sometimes mergers are good. They can allow a company with a broader reach to deliver innovative services previously only delivered by a more nimble upstart. They can also coalesce standards and mature products in a world previously chaotic from over-choice. This is usually early in a product life-cycle, however. Once a market matures and products are at risk of becoming commodities, mergers become the defensive maneuver to protect market share and profitability rather than a way to deliver better products and services.

This is where it can get tricky for IT managers. The easiest time to simplify to a preferred vendor is when the market is mature. This is also the ripest time for a "mad merger" to happen; the kind that happens simply to reduce choice. This mad merger can be especially bad if your vendor is acquired by another company with no previous relationship with you. Your best option may be to continue your efforts to simplify along the routes of preferred vendors, but keeping a 4th and 10 playbook in your back pocket just in case this mad merger ever happens. Consider things like 3rd party support for for your environment which will give you time to prepare your next move. You may also consider a backup vendor you can go with. This may sound unimaginable, but it is far easier to migrate a simple well oiled environment if you want to than to manage a kludgy patchwork of interconnected chaos because you have to. So in a nutshell, be mindful of the mergers and have a plan just in case, but do not stop simplifying!

Why BI is Primed to be BIg

The ideas behind Business Intelligence (BI) go back decades. Online Transaction Processing and Decision Support Systems are the predecessors of something whose time has come. BI is primed to be the single competitive advantage that makes or breaks companies. Here are five reasons this is true:

1. Simplifying the Environment - IT environments are way too complex. There are too many applications running on too many systems being supported by too many people. This house of cards is being held together by a patchwork of home grown solutions and over customized out of the box middleware. Sound familiar? Reducing complexity can seem daunting and this keeps many shops paralyzed. The good news is that executives are getting the memo. The tough economy has taught us that less is more. Plus, the more you simplify, the easier it becomes to simplify more. Be tough on taking things out of the environment. Don't let politics dictate which pet technologies get to stay.
2. Virtualization - Virtual machines have drastically shortened infrastructure planning. They also allow data warehouse environments to be set up quickly for project managers to see how technologies will play together for their pilot or proof of concept before full scale Production deployments. Computing resources are also allocated more efficiently, allowing unused memory and CPU to be assigned dynamically to whatever needs it. Cloud computing will only accelerate this trend.
3. Database abstraction - New tools and programming practices are insulating users from the database details, freeing IT to set up data in business terms one time rather than writing reports for each type of decision that needs to be made. This empowers business users to get the answers they seek, creating BI analysts in their respective business areas of expertise.
4. Social networking - There are new sources of data available directly from existing and potential customers. Business Intelligence systems can meld customer interests, friend networks, and buying behaviors from traditional point of sale sources to generate new leads, improve forecasting, and guide product development. These days, product life cycles are short, public sentiment can turn on a dime and competitors can come out of nowhere. To stay on top of things, intuition and fact based decision making need to be partners.
5. Mobile Computing - Today's business leaders and sales people want their information from anywhere on all of their devices. This creates a headache for information security, but real opportunities for BI since better data is created when it's entered in real time and tagged with location metadata.

These five things will enable BI to be big, but that won't necessarily make it big for you. For you it should start with goals (start with your mission statement and go from there). Once you know the goals of your organization, you're equipped to look for answers that can enable you to achieve those goals. Along your data mining journey, you will come across many interesting things, but if you don't use your goals as the foundation, these interesting nuggets can just as easily lead you astray, so stay focused and happy mining!