In a previous post, I said I’d talk about how to tune your dashboard without doing a bunch of analysis the hard way. As with the dashboard, it may not help you to know what works for my business, but there are some common themes, and I’ll dig into those here. Know Your Goal This is the hard part: what do you need to do? You can’t tune toward anything until you have a goal in mind. You need to clearly articulate your goal and the data set where you think the key information is. I like to do this Mad-Libs style: I need [what you need to see] so that I can [what you will learn when you see it]. I’ll know it’s working when [the goal you want to achieve] . Here are some examples: I need student data with roster, grade, continuation, and graduation rates so…
Month: January 2014
The World of Big Data – Perspectives and Predictions for 2014
2013 saw a lot of action in the big data space, both from a technology and application perspective. Almost everyone we talk to has a big data project underway or coming soon. The projects range from cross-system reports to adopting Hadoop and building applications on top of it. While there are a lot of challenges still ahead, it is very promising to see how much momentum big data initiatives are gaining. At the same time there is still a certain lack of knowledge or trust when it comes to this space. Some of the questions I hear are: “Do we have big data? Don’t only Facebook and Google have big data? Why should I use Hadoop or NoSQL?” While I certainly agree that not everybody on the planet works at Petabyte-scale, this question can sometimes miss the point behind the big data revolution. Let me use an example to explain…