Making Data-Driven Decisions – Tableau Analytics Demo

On July 9th, StatSlice Systems and Tableau hosted a lunch and learn event in Dallas, Texas to share how Tableau enables people at all levels throughout an organization to investigate data to find nuances, trends, and outliers in a flash and can better enable you to make data-driven decisions. During the event, Jim Vogel presented a case study on using Tableau effectively for business analytics.

Make Better Business Decisions by Being Data-Driven

Recently, there has been an increased focus on businesses attempting to become data-driven. Companies are investing heavily in storing, tracking, and managing data, but data alone doesn’t tell much of a story. Analytics provide the window into what the data means, but proper analysis is critical to avoid a data disaster.

Big Data and Today’s Marketers

I recently read an article on Information Week about the common lack of big data skills among marketing professionals. As a marketing professional myself, I can attest to the truth of that statement. Even if you have very little knowledge of marketing practices, you might be familiar with the 4 Ps: Product, Price, Place, and […]

Webinar: Big SQL Analytics – Cloudera Using Impala

On October 22, Brett Neuman, Manager Consultant at StatSlice Systems, presented a webinar on Cloudera using Impala as part of our series on Big SQL Analytics. This webinar was recorded and is available below. This webinar is the third video in our series on Big SQL Analytics, and it covers the results of our Cloudera […]

Big SQL Analytics – Cloudera Using Impala

This is an overview of the webinar on Cloudera using Impala presented by Brett Neuman on October 22, 2013. For more information on this webinar, click here to view the video or continue reading to below. Overview In this webinar, Brett gives you an overview of Cloudera’s Impala platform and how you can use it […]

Visualizing University Business Intelligence & Analytics Programs

Earlier this year, we collected information about the business intelligence and analytics programs that are currently being offered by universities in the United States.  Not surprisingly, there was an incredible amount of interest in the result of that data collection effort, with more than 1000 list downloads.  However, when I made an attempt at visualizing […]

Is Your Job Really In Jeopardy?

In few a short years, your job will be obsolete. We’ve all seen messages like that. It seems that every few years we get a rush of news stories about how the latest trends in technology are going to put us all out of business.  The media loves to sensationalize the notion that one day […]

Webinar: Big SQL Analytics – Amazon Redshift Overview

On August 20, Bernard Wehbe, co-founder of StatSlice Systems, presented a webinar on Amazon Redshift as part of our series on Big SQL Analytics. This webinar was recorded and is available below. This webinar covers the results of our Amazon Redshift investigation where we walk you through the POC we performed and highlight the capabilities […]

Persistence and Flexibility: What Analytics Can Learn from Physics

I’m pretty certain that any philosophical text carries a hidden instruction set which directs the human brain to <loop infinitely> until a self-preserving interrupt command is issued on our behalf by some other part of the brain.  Whether for infinite loop torture or mental floss, I do look for and sometimes come across interesting philosophical […]

Big SQL Analytics: What Is It and Why Should You Care?

Today, analytics have become mainstream in the majority of organizations. Moreover, most of the analytics and data warehousing implementations have been built using traditional relational database platforms such as SQL Server, Oracle, or DB2. As data volumes grow larger and more data sources come online, organizations are hitting the limits of these traditional platforms leading them […]

Information Singularity and the Principles of the Analytics Rock Star

What makes an analytics system great? Great design, quality code, strong business sponsorship, accurate requirements, good project management, and thorough testing are some of the obvious requirements for successful analytics systems. As a professional in the field, you must be able to do these things well since they form the foundation of a good implementation. This is good enough for most people but not good enough for you—if you want to be in high demand and help your organization overcome its critical challenges.

Successful analytics professionals should follow a set of guiding principles. These very important principles are often missed by traditional methodologies. In this whitepaper you will learn about these principles that, once implemented, can make you an analytics rock star in your organization and increase your worth in the marketplace.

Self-Service Dashboards in Excel 2013

Power View has been around as a feature in Microsoft Office Excel since they released Office 2010, but in order to use it, you had to have SharePoint 2010 available to you. Now, with the release of Office 2013, Power View can be used without a server component. This means that you can take advantage of the easy reporting capabilities of Power View by using your own Excel Spreadsheet data.

Webinar: Budgeting and Planning with QlikView

What many people don’t realize is that QlikView comes bundled with a GUI/visualization layer, storage layer, and data integration later – all of the pieces that are necessary to build a fully functional planning application – at a fraction of the cost of traditional planning software packages. Once the concepts are understood, a custom-built app in QlikView works equally well on your desktop using your own data as well as on a corporate server dealing with multiple users and budgeting/planning requirements.

BI for the Right Side of the Brain

Earlier this year at the Gartner Business Intelligence & Analytics Summit on March 19, 2013, Donald Farmer,VP of Product Management at QlikTech, delivered a presentation discussing the enigmatic human side of BI. He suggests that BI contains an emotional and intuitive aspect that enables users to back decisions by exploring instincts.

Research Report: Universities Offering BI and Analytics Degrees

In early 2013, Steven Crofts, Director of Marketing for StatSlice Systems, posted a question on various BI, Analytics and Data Warehousing LinkedIn™ Groups, asking what group members knew was being offered in universities and colleges—either locally or from their alma mater(s).

There was a large response with many good details on what universities were doing. It prompted us to dig deeper and to build a master list based on the responses from the LinkedIn™ Groups and our own subsequent research.