Data has become a central asset to organizations and visualizations are critical to present data in a clear way. Visualization helps organizations make data-driven decisions. Optimizing data visualizations conveys the information in an accessible way that enhances the user experience. This article provides seven practices you can follow to improve your data visualization process..

Agile test metrics and KPIs are measurements that enable Agile teams to assess how effective their software tests are and whether their testing efforts help achieve specific business objectives. An important aim of Agile software testing is to get testing up to speed with development—metrics and KPIs can assess the efficacy of the Agile testing team in this context.

In this article, you'll find out about the important difference between a metric and a KPI, and why you need to distinguish between the two. You'll also get some examples of KPIs and metrics relevant to Agile software testing efforts. Finally, you'll learn exactly how KPIs and metrics can lead to overall improvement in software testing within an Agile framework in addition to understanding some important measuring pitfalls..

Modern enterprises gather data from many disparate sources, including social media, websites, customer databases (CRM systems, sales records etc), customer support systems, and HR software.

Merely collecting lots of data isn't useful in itself—it's the insights you get from such data that can drive more informed business decisions. This post aims to teach you about the bedrock processes required for obtaining insights from your data—ETL and ELT.

We'll begin by discussing data integration, before moving on to two vital forms of data integration—ETL and ELT. When you're finished reading, you'll fully understand what ETL and ELT are, and which process is better suited to your business in terms of getting actionable insights from different data sources..  

Data warehouse security is vital for organizations that take the huge step of collating all their important data in one place. Unauthorized access to data warehouses can have devastating consequences, ranging from compromised customer information to exposing of high-level business intelligence that gives an enterprise its competitive advantage.

This article introduces warehouse security, discusses some of the challenges involved in securing a data warehouse, and offers some best practices for data warehouse security, including the use of FIPS 140-2 certified software and hardware..

This article describes how CoolaData implemented Druid to provide a real time infrastructure for its behavioral analytics platform, and discusses some benefits and limitations of Druid..

Written by Yair Harel, Senior Software Architect at CoolaData

Business Intelligence gets more traction by the day: with offerings on the Cloud and mobile devices getting wider acceptance from the market.

MicroStrategy Reporting Suite is a complete BI platform that covers all data analysis needs that a company or public entity may have. Dashboards, Scorecards, KPIs, and all kinds of reports can be explored and manipulated in the desktop application, web interface, mobile devices or cloud..

Mariano Garcia and Dario Bernabeu recently announced on his blog of Dataprix the publication of his new book 'Pentaho Reporting 5.0 by Example: Beginner's Guide'.

Knowing both authors and their previous work, we are confident on the utility of that book for anyone who wants to work with Pentaho Report Designer, but we'd rather interview them to explain it themselves..

This article is the first of a total of three that we are going to publish from LITEBI, each one will be part of a Whitepaper focused on the effects and contributions of Business Intelligence to the company from the point of view of the CEO. 

What is Business Intelligence?

Wikipedia gives us the following definition on this concept:
“Computer-based techniques used in identifying, extracting, and analyzing business data, such as sales revenue by products and/or departments, or by associated costs and incomes”

In other words, software tools that enable that all the information of a company (sales, purchases, financial information, production, marketing, etc.) “flows” in an organized way through the business, reaching the right person, at the right time. To this, in LITEBI we would also note that achieving Intelligence needs full-featured and integrated tools to manage and optimize the performance of the company as a whole and to align it with the business strategy.

A tool with all these characteristics makes things easier for those in charge of the decision making in each department: a CFO, a Sales Manager, a CEO or a Controller.

In a Linkedin debate members have proposed a list of references and useful links about Cognos BI, as well as forums, blogs and resources. I've organized a bit the proposals. I hope you find it useful..