It’s no secret that healthcare is all the buzz these days. The US has the highest healthcare costs in the world. We have a new president elected by a large (relatively speaking) margin who put healthcare at the center of his platform. Major publications worldwide are suddenly interested in McAllen, Texas because of its extraordinary healthcare spending per capita. We’re operating in the worst economy most of us have (or will, hopefully) ever seen and the government just pledged billions for healthcare. If consultants are bees, healthcare is the latest honey.
What is particularly interesting to us of the analytical persuasion through all this is the totally awesome scale of data and analytics that are going to be needed if the US is ever going to come to grips with “the biggest threat to its balance sheet.” Obama got a standing-O and experienced his highest approval rating so far after stating “healthcare reform cannot wait, it must not wait, and it will not wait for another year”. It’s go time. So where do us consultants start?
Well, the short answer is nobody knows. It’s overwhelming at best and impossible at worst.
There are delivery and drug costs to reduce. There are Medicare abusers to root out. There are methods for predicting healthcare needs based on family history, lifestyle, and demographics to create. The high level check list goes on…and on. It’s scary.
There is good news in all the mess, however. First, the government is putting its money where its mouth is. As a part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act Obama shelled out $150 billion for healthcare. A large part of that is going to healthcare delivery (Medicare, insurance subsidies, etc) but there’s almost $30 billion in there for the sorts of work that analytical consultants make careers on. About 2/3 of that $30 billion is specifically for “health information technology”.
Now that’s a pretty vague and potentially broad bucket but, on the other hand, $20 billion can buy a lot of IT and consulting and that’s not including what the NIH (National Institute of Health) already has tucked away.
My feeling: start beefing up on healthcare and gas up your analytical engines. I’m not alone here. All the big firms have been moving to promote their own healthcare expertise in the last 6-12 months. Using numbers to fix healthcare is officially en vogue. The question I’m interested in answering is where are the big breakthroughs, analytically speaking, going to come in all this?
Showing posts with label data analytics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label data analytics. Show all posts
Thursday, July 9, 2009
Tuesday, July 7, 2009
OLAP for the masses
Summary
XLCubed is a strong option when it comes to finding user-friendly ways to deploy OLAP technology.
What could be better: integration with other multidimensional sources besides SSAS, version controlling in the local edition, more formatting options
A finished XLCubed dashboard using the Adventure Works OLAP cube
The business
Business Intelligence junkies have no shortage of words when it comes to describing the wonders of OLAP technology and the end-consumers of that technology, typically those in some position of management, love what they see. “Slicing and dicing”, “drilling”, “drag and drop”; multi-dimensional data browsing is a proverbial candy store to data hounds everywhere. It is unsurprising, then, that virtually every BI vendor of note has made a point of pushing its own flavor of the technology.
To start, users are presented with all the data available to them in a friendly GUI that resembles a pivot table creation screen. They can drag and drop data across columns, rows, or headers and populate the values with whatever measures they may wish. For hierarchical data (e.g. dates) selecting a level to default the report to is as simple as expanding the familiar Windows Explorer-esque “[+]” box next to a data field and selecting something below.
In the report users can continue to drag data elements around, just like in a pivot table, and the report will refresh without losing any functionality or calculated columns or rows that have been manually added (unlike a pivot table). The sheet can be formatted using normal Excel formatting and, all of a sudden, with almost no extra training or knowledge the Excel user has a custom Excel report or model but this time based on centrally stored and maintained data.
To address issues of security and version control the guys at XLCubed also created a web-version. With an extra license users can upload anything they create to a central website (intranet or extranet) and it will become available to anyone with access rights which, conveniently, are administered on a user-level basis. Most impressive, however, is how similar the web-based reports look to those sitting on a local instance of Excel. The functionality it almost identical, including navigation, which is key. Users can manipulate what others have created, take reports offline, or simply start from scratch, assuming they have the security clearance.
The point here is not to create an exhaustive account of all of XLCubed’s functionality. For that their website is a good resource (http://www.xlcubed.com/) as are their introductory tutorial videos on YouTube (simply search for XLCubed). Instead we simply want to draw attention to the fairly basic and yet seemingly difficult to solve problem that XLCubed has addressed: user uptake.
We would never suggest that any software is without drawbacks either and for all of its virtues, XLCubed is no exception. For starters, it is currently only compatible with the Microsoft stack. That is to say, it requires data to be stored in a Microsoft Analysis Services cube. While it’s not picky about SSAS versions (it will take SSAS 2000, 2005, or 2008) this is obviously limiting for any organization that doesn’t run a SQL Server back end.
XLCubed also doesn’t fully solve the spreadsheet-farm problem that many organizations are grappling with when they turn to BI. It’s a bit misleading to categorize this as a shortcoming both because the whole point of the software is to keep users in Excel and because the web edition does, by and large, address the issue. Nonetheless, anytime users are manipulating data locally there is risk of a knowledge gap (or worse, conflicting versions of the truth) developing and this doesn’t go away with XLCubed.
So at the end of the day XLCubed isn’t revolutionary in what it allows users to do. Everyone can provide calculations on the fly, hierarchical data browsing, and dimensional reporting. Everyone preaches improved data quality and accuracy. While XLCubed provides all that, it certainly isn’t the best at any of it.
What XLCubed does with distinction, however, is to make that functionality easily available to anyone that can use Excel. Gone are the weeks of training, endless calls to the support desk, and user manuals that would seem fit for the latest models of nuclear submarines. Instead, new users are faced with supplementing their tried-and-true methods for analysis and reporting with a couple of extra buttons and one drop-down menu. Most importantly, everything is within a framework that users are already comfortable with so adding to it, instead of replacing it, is refreshingly simple.
To sweeten the package, local edition licenses for XLCubed move for well under $1000/license. The server licenses are equally competitive starting at around $15k for 10 concurrent users. Granted an OLAP engine will be needed for the source but, even for those few companies that don’t already have some sort of SQL server or other enterprise data solution, the price tag for XLCubed almost invariably comes in substantially below a full BI stack.
XLCubed is a strong option when it comes to finding user-friendly ways to deploy OLAP technology.
What we like: seamless Excel integration, full Excel functionality, compatibility with Excel 2003 or 2007, drag and drop reporting, calculated members created directly in Excel cells with the regular formulas, Microcharts, web posting, ease of use
What could be better: integration with other multidimensional sources besides SSAS, version controlling in the local edition, more formatting options
A finished XLCubed dashboard using the Adventure Works OLAP cubeThe business
Business Intelligence junkies have no shortage of words when it comes to describing the wonders of OLAP technology and the end-consumers of that technology, typically those in some position of management, love what they see. “Slicing and dicing”, “drilling”, “drag and drop”; multi-dimensional data browsing is a proverbial candy store to data hounds everywhere. It is unsurprising, then, that virtually every BI vendor of note has made a point of pushing its own flavor of the technology.
Microsoft offers Analysis Services. Cognos picked up TM1. Microstrategy has its proprietary analysis module. QlickTech has...well, everything they offer. Whether it’s a traditional OLAP cube, in memory processing, or a proprietary ROLAP engine, any BI solution without it is incomplete. So why doesn’t everyone have it?
As The Data Warehouse Institute, the Aberdeen Group, and Gartner all point out, one of the leading causes of failure in business intelligence solution deployments is a lack of uptake among staff of the new technology. With all due respect to the three research groups, this “finding” is hardly insightful to anyone who’s been involved even tangentially with BI. The reality is the vast majority of the users of BI solutions are not particularly technical themselves. What they are is busy and less than enthralled with the idea of learning to use new pieces of software, such as those offered by the aforementioned BI giants. Enter XLCubed.
XLCubed is a plug-in for Microsoft Excel – the business world’s ubiquitous data analysis platform. It allows users to connect directly to an OLAP cube through their trusted front-end with just a few clicks. Upon connection, the already familiar Excel functionality is supplemented with the power of OLAP.
To start, users are presented with all the data available to them in a friendly GUI that resembles a pivot table creation screen. They can drag and drop data across columns, rows, or headers and populate the values with whatever measures they may wish. For hierarchical data (e.g. dates) selecting a level to default the report to is as simple as expanding the familiar Windows Explorer-esque “[+]” box next to a data field and selecting something below.
Once happy with the layout of the report, the user clicks “Insert” and they’re off to the races. A grid report, as it is referred to in XLCubed lingo, is immediately placed into the open Excel sheet. Users can
double click on any hierarchical data and the entire report will expand.
double click on any hierarchical data and the entire report will expand.In the report users can continue to drag data elements around, just like in a pivot table, and the report will refresh without losing any functionality or calculated columns or rows that have been manually added (unlike a pivot table). The sheet can be formatted using normal Excel formatting and, all of a sudden, with almost no extra training or knowledge the Excel user has a custom Excel report or model but this time based on centrally stored and maintained data.
To address issues of security and version control the guys at XLCubed also created a web-version. With an extra license users can upload anything they create to a central website (intranet or extranet) and it will become available to anyone with access rights which, conveniently, are administered on a user-level basis. Most impressive, however, is how similar the web-based reports look to those sitting on a local instance of Excel. The functionality it almost identical, including navigation, which is key. Users can manipulate what others have created, take reports offline, or simply start from scratch, assuming they have the security clearance.
The point here is not to create an exhaustive account of all of XLCubed’s functionality. For that their website is a good resource (http://www.xlcubed.com/) as are their introductory tutorial videos on YouTube (simply search for XLCubed). Instead we simply want to draw attention to the fairly basic and yet seemingly difficult to solve problem that XLCubed has addressed: user uptake.
We would never suggest that any software is without drawbacks either and for all of its virtues, XLCubed is no exception. For starters, it is currently only compatible with the Microsoft stack. That is to say, it requires data to be stored in a Microsoft Analysis Services cube. While it’s not picky about SSAS versions (it will take SSAS 2000, 2005, or 2008) this is obviously limiting for any organization that doesn’t run a SQL Server back end.
XLCubed also doesn’t fully solve the spreadsheet-farm problem that many organizations are grappling with when they turn to BI. It’s a bit misleading to categorize this as a shortcoming both because the whole point of the software is to keep users in Excel and because the web edition does, by and large, address the issue. Nonetheless, anytime users are manipulating data locally there is risk of a knowledge gap (or worse, conflicting versions of the truth) developing and this doesn’t go away with XLCubed.
So at the end of the day XLCubed isn’t revolutionary in what it allows users to do. Everyone can provide calculations on the fly, hierarchical data browsing, and dimensional reporting. Everyone preaches improved data quality and accuracy. While XLCubed provides all that, it certainly isn’t the best at any of it.
What XLCubed does with distinction, however, is to make that functionality easily available to anyone that can use Excel. Gone are the weeks of training, endless calls to the support desk, and user manuals that would seem fit for the latest models of nuclear submarines. Instead, new users are faced with supplementing their tried-and-true methods for analysis and reporting with a couple of extra buttons and one drop-down menu. Most importantly, everything is within a framework that users are already comfortable with so adding to it, instead of replacing it, is refreshingly simple.
To sweeten the package, local edition licenses for XLCubed move for well under $1000/license. The server licenses are equally competitive starting at around $15k for 10 concurrent users. Granted an OLAP engine will be needed for the source but, even for those few companies that don’t already have some sort of SQL server or other enterprise data solution, the price tag for XLCubed almost invariably comes in substantially below a full BI stack.
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
On crowd-sourced analytics
The analytics community is a powerful but fragmented one, and that is both good and bad. Good in the sense that for all intents and purposes, every meaningful challenge in the business community has already been solved in one place or another. Bad in the sense that no one of us shows up Monday morning with any more than perhaps 30% of that collective toolset at the ready...at best.
So what do we "quant blue shirts" do when we encounter intractable business problems in our management consulting lives? We reach out to our limited network, and we cobble together the best solution we can given what's been done before, periodically innovating in the margins and typically producing incremental value add. Tight project timelines don't often allow for truly white space analytical thinking, but we get by alright. Thrillin' and billin', right?
These tight timelines, however, have always made management consultancies poor at collecting and leveraging intellectual capital. More devastatingly, there is a culture, particularly among top tier management consultants, to create but not to use intellectual capital. If rewards are given for creating the next great thing, scorn is cast on those poor plebs who, the next week, use what was discovered on another project. And so IC is cast into the abyss of some arcane, mystic IC tracker, like the warehouse from Raiders of the Lost Ark, never to be seen again, next month's IC award go to someone in the Milan office who unknowingly created from scratch a tool or approach that was solved years ago in the Tokyo office (or perhaps in the Milan office).
I would posit for the group that crowd-sourcing analytics is one answer. When an cagey problem arises, it should immediately and without scorn be thrown to the community, who can and will consume it like a swarm of locusts. The collective memory and capability of the community is as sinewy and agile as Ajax (the Homeric Greek, not the language, though perhaps both apply?). The rule of the road will be, "solve problems in your wheelhouse (yours and others') and throw the rest to the group.
I would take this a step further, however, and lay down the claim that the academic community needs to be closer to these problems. (Yes, I said it.) I think the "community" should include students. I remember, as a student, flying through Multivariable Calculus exams that today would make my head spin, and I know that my peers are nodding when it comes to other quantitative methods like econometrics or applies statistics. Even a shaky solution to a simple consumer polling challenge could be corrected with swift precisoin a freshman undergrad who happens to be on that chapter.
And why would they log on in the first place? There's no better way to understand how to apply their academic concepts than to apply them, and there is something appealing about seeing your own wizardry at work in the real world. Plus, students want jobs, and they want jobs they like. Log onto a site from time to time and interact with these blue shirts--you'll see if it's for you, if you like the work in the trenches and if you like the people, the pace, the culture.
For you skeptics, I imagine there are two major hurdles, so let's hash them out. First, everyone wants to hoarde and silo IC, and we even have issues around postings of protected intellectual property. Clearly there needs to be an understanding around client confidentiality. Our clients don't want their analytical laundry aired, and consulting firms don't want their chief value distributed. Both of these, I believe, are manageable. Don't post anything confidential, and don't post anything protected. Most challenges are abstract enough that I feel we can cross that bridge when we get there. And if the problem originates in the community, the solution is one from the community. Information wants to be free anyway, and the realists out there are getting eroded.
The second challenge is that if we blue shirts making hay are leveraging insight from the academic community as well as our peer community, there could emerge the perception that consultants are looking for free labor, getting paid for other people's insight. I don't think this is the point, though I acknowledge it is something for which to look out. The point is to create a symbiotic community. Students get closer to real world challenges and areas to apply their skills and talents, as well as a forum outside of recruiting for interacting with those people with whom they may later choose to work. There's no better way to understand the work that consultants are doing than to dig in on some of their problems and interact with the personalities. Not everyone will want to get involved, but that's true of anything, so let's put it out there and see who picks it up.
Ok, brass tacks. I see two next steps coming out of this. First, we give it a try by posting real questions to real problems on this site, and we start the dialogue today--then see what happens. At the same time, I would be keen to get everyone's perspective on this, students, professors, consultants, would-be clients...
(This effects everyone.)
So what do we "quant blue shirts" do when we encounter intractable business problems in our management consulting lives? We reach out to our limited network, and we cobble together the best solution we can given what's been done before, periodically innovating in the margins and typically producing incremental value add. Tight project timelines don't often allow for truly white space analytical thinking, but we get by alright. Thrillin' and billin', right?
These tight timelines, however, have always made management consultancies poor at collecting and leveraging intellectual capital. More devastatingly, there is a culture, particularly among top tier management consultants, to create but not to use intellectual capital. If rewards are given for creating the next great thing, scorn is cast on those poor plebs who, the next week, use what was discovered on another project. And so IC is cast into the abyss of some arcane, mystic IC tracker, like the warehouse from Raiders of the Lost Ark, never to be seen again, next month's IC award go to someone in the Milan office who unknowingly created from scratch a tool or approach that was solved years ago in the Tokyo office (or perhaps in the Milan office).
I would posit for the group that crowd-sourcing analytics is one answer. When an cagey problem arises, it should immediately and without scorn be thrown to the community, who can and will consume it like a swarm of locusts. The collective memory and capability of the community is as sinewy and agile as Ajax (the Homeric Greek, not the language, though perhaps both apply?). The rule of the road will be, "solve problems in your wheelhouse (yours and others') and throw the rest to the group.
I would take this a step further, however, and lay down the claim that the academic community needs to be closer to these problems. (Yes, I said it.) I think the "community" should include students. I remember, as a student, flying through Multivariable Calculus exams that today would make my head spin, and I know that my peers are nodding when it comes to other quantitative methods like econometrics or applies statistics. Even a shaky solution to a simple consumer polling challenge could be corrected with swift precisoin a freshman undergrad who happens to be on that chapter.
And why would they log on in the first place? There's no better way to understand how to apply their academic concepts than to apply them, and there is something appealing about seeing your own wizardry at work in the real world. Plus, students want jobs, and they want jobs they like. Log onto a site from time to time and interact with these blue shirts--you'll see if it's for you, if you like the work in the trenches and if you like the people, the pace, the culture.
For you skeptics, I imagine there are two major hurdles, so let's hash them out. First, everyone wants to hoarde and silo IC, and we even have issues around postings of protected intellectual property. Clearly there needs to be an understanding around client confidentiality. Our clients don't want their analytical laundry aired, and consulting firms don't want their chief value distributed. Both of these, I believe, are manageable. Don't post anything confidential, and don't post anything protected. Most challenges are abstract enough that I feel we can cross that bridge when we get there. And if the problem originates in the community, the solution is one from the community. Information wants to be free anyway, and the realists out there are getting eroded.
The second challenge is that if we blue shirts making hay are leveraging insight from the academic community as well as our peer community, there could emerge the perception that consultants are looking for free labor, getting paid for other people's insight. I don't think this is the point, though I acknowledge it is something for which to look out. The point is to create a symbiotic community. Students get closer to real world challenges and areas to apply their skills and talents, as well as a forum outside of recruiting for interacting with those people with whom they may later choose to work. There's no better way to understand the work that consultants are doing than to dig in on some of their problems and interact with the personalities. Not everyone will want to get involved, but that's true of anything, so let's put it out there and see who picks it up.
Ok, brass tacks. I see two next steps coming out of this. First, we give it a try by posting real questions to real problems on this site, and we start the dialogue today--then see what happens. At the same time, I would be keen to get everyone's perspective on this, students, professors, consultants, would-be clients...
(This effects everyone.)
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