Good Data in Action
It’s been a long time since my last post, but things have really been cooking with Good Data and I’m happy to share our first “public project.” Public means that anyone can view the reports and go in and create their own reports from this sample data.
For the first public project, we’ve loaded historical Major League Baseball stats compiled by player and team going back to 1871. There’s a ton of info there and baseball fans should have a good time compiling lists of players from different eras or computing formulae for their fantasy baseball team.
Here is a report I created showing the top 50 “Wild Things” in the history of baseball. Wild Things are pitchers who have hit a lot of batters in their career. I couldn’t believe that there was a major league pitcher who hit 14% of batters faced! (If the report is cut off, try viewing this blog post on its own page.)
So if baseball’s your thing, click through and check it out…. There are a bunch of sample reports, but I’d really love to see the kinds of things you can come up with. There’s a ton of data in there it would be great to see what the community can generate. After all, this site is called Collaborative Analytics, right?
Aligning Business with Business Intelligence
I came across an article today on the B-eye-Network that caught my attention. Maureen Clarry writes her “Ten Tips for Aligning Business and Business Intelligence.” Point #8: Communicate really caught my attention:
… it is important to document the current measures, as well as those that have been discarded. Some examples of information about the measurements that could be tracked might include: description of the measure, how the measure is calculated, role responsible for measuring, information source, type of presentation, frequency, usage, etc.
On some level, this seems so basic as to not need explaining. But communication problems arise all time, even with people you see on a daily basis. I’ve had this happen to me recently, and it’s not a good feeling to realize that something’s messed up that could have been avoided with more communication and transparency.
Everyone knows this intuitively on some level, yet why are communication tools an afterthought to most BI tools on the market? To my mind, this is something that should be standard with every solution. But it’s not, and even more amazing, it’s not something that anyone is really asking for!
It’s great and even essential to be able to crunch a lot of numbers and integrate tons of data into a BI solution. And it’s essential to be able to derive some knowledge from this data to plan a course of action. But what comes next, what causes alignment? Communication! Getting the word out to the members of the company, so that each person can align their priorities with the overall goals.
What this means to me is that there is a large opportunity out there for collaborative analytics, and I’m excited about the upcoming full beta release of Good Data. The upcoming release has a lot of new features that incorporate collaboration and communication across metric and attribute creation in addition to finished reports and charts. Just a couple weeks away…