CIA is working with Grook Networks to develop some P6 Tutorial Videos…

Construction Intelligence and Analytics, Inc. is working with Grook Networks to develop ~10 hours of tutorial videos explaining how to utilize Oracle Primavera’s P6 Project Management to plan, track and control your projects.  These videos will be available strictly on www.grook.net and will give in-depth instruction – not just theory – on the inner workings of P6.

This project will be completed in about (2) months but the videos could potentially be released 1-by-1 as they are completed.  So, stayed tuned to Consult-CIA.com and Grook.net for the latest news!

Posted in CIA News, Oracle / Primavera, Oracle / Primavera P6 Administration, Oracle / Primavera P6 Schedule Development

CIA is working with Trauner Consulting!

Construction Intelligence & Analytics has joined forces with Trauner Consulting!  Trauner is a top-notch Construction consulting firm that not only does things the right way, but they often write the book on it!  We’re very happy to have Trauner as an ally, as their unlimited expertise in our field will surely be a great benefit.

 

Please read a little about Trauner:

 

In the construction business, every action you take can have enormous consequences. Failing to act can be worse. Make sure every step you take is on firm ground.

TRAUNER CONSULTING SERVICES provides the extra measure of guidance needed to act with confidence. We work daily on multi-million-dollar construction projects in virtually every market sector. From construction claims analysis to CPM scheduling, from drafting initial contract language to providing expert testimony, TRAUNER’s done it all. It’s given us an invaluable perspective on when, how, and why problems arise—and the unparalleled expertise to guide our clients to success.

Guidance up front. Call it street smarts. Our breadth and depth of experience enables us to recognize red flags immediately—so you can avoid or resolve disagreements before they escalate into expensive and bitter disputes.

Dogged detective work. When a project does derail, TRAUNER can determine precisely how it got off track. We methodically dig through the details of a project, identifying the source of an issue, its effect on the parties, and its credible resolution without assumptions or bias.

Impartial expertise. You can trust in what we say. We drill down to the truth—good, bad or otherwise—and effectively communicate those findings. We bring the skills that resolve issues and let you get back to business.

That’s why owners, builders, sureties, and the attorneys that represent them turn to TRAUNER again and again. TRAUNER CONSULTING SERVICES. We build confidence.

Posted in CIA News

QlikView Business Discovery World Tour: New York

CIA just attended the QlikView Business Discovery World Tour.  There were many great lectures by Donald Farmer (VP of Product Development) and also a guest speaker Jeffrey Ma, the infamous kingpin of the MIT Blackjack card counters!  Please go here to see their next stop:  Business Discovery World Tour.

Posted in Business Intelligence, QlikView

QlikView White Paper: BUSINESS DISCOVERY: POWERFUL, USER-DRIVEN BI

Here is an excerpt from a very interesting QlikView White Paper. To download the full .PDF click here: DOWNLOAD QLIKVIEW WHITE PAPER

Business Discovery:The Tectonic Plates Are Shifting in theBI Software Market

The promise of business intelligence (BI) software is to enable decision makers at all levels in an organization to leverage data for business advantage—to explore data, draw insights and meaningful conclusions, and make better decisions. Traditional BI solutions have delivered reliable, operational data tied to pre-defined, static reports—but haven’t provided the self-service, on-the-fly, user-driven source of insight people crave for addressing daily business challenges.
IT organizations tend to favor report-based BI solutions from stack vendors like IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP. But business users are becoming more vocal, demanding, and influential than ever. They are going out and purchasing BI software on their own–and they’re not buying traditional BI solutions.
Business users are choosing what Gartner calls data discovery platforms, and we call Business Discovery platforms.1 And they’re buying in droves. According to market research firm IDC, end-user query, reporting, and analysis tools (which include Business Discovery platforms) comprised more than 80% of the BI tools market in 2010.2 In this research, IDC found that smaller vendors such as QlikTech are outpacing the overall market growth.

Traditional BI Is IT-Driven and Tightly Controlled

Analyst research shows that what business users want from BI is the ability to ask and answer questions on their own so they can make better business decisions. But traditional BI solutions aren’t well-suited to users who need to directly interrogate or interact with data in a self-sufficient manner. Instead, what business users get from traditional BI is a report-centric solution (see Figure 1). They get fixed drill paths, predefined reports and queries, pre-configured dashboards, and locked-down data definitions.
With traditional BI, the role of the IT organization is to create data models, establish a semantic layer, build reports and dashboards, and protect and control the data. As a result
of this intensive workload, user requests for new queries and reports can accumulate in
a long queue, leading to user frustration and reducing the value the organization gets from its BI investments.

Empowered Consumers Are Driving Change En Masse

People’s expectations of business software have changed dramatically during the last
decade. Applications from Google and Apple invite users to click on an icon, interact with
a simple, friendly interface, and become instantly productive. The search bar, status box,
“like” button, and multitouch screen have transformed the way people explore, consume,
and share information (see Figure 2). Today, people want the same ease of use and high
relevance from their business tools as they get from their consumer tools at home.

Several consumer trends are driving the tectonic shift that’s taking place in the BI software
market — and many other business software markets.

• Internet search is the primary means of getting answers to questions. Google
has become a verb. Billions of consumers can fire up a browser, go to a search engine,
and get answers to complex questions quickly with a high degree of confidence in the
results. How many times have you been out with friends or sitting around the dinner table
when one person questions another person’s facts until someone whips out a handheld
device and ends the debate instantly?

• Humans are social creatures. People make decisions large and small by combining
data available to them (everything from movie times to investment opportunities) with
the opinions, advice, experiences, and expertise of people they trust. People are using
social networks and intuitive software to ask questions and share expertise, insights, and
experiences. Social networks like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn are enabling billions of
people to share information, connect with each other, and develop robust professional and
personal networks — with no technology background required.

• People enjoy using targeted, task-specific apps. Lightweight apps are changing
the world. Apps are quick and easy to create and can be discarded when no longer
needed. Developers are creating apps for multiple platforms: Mac desktop and laptop
computers, as well as Apple iOS, Android, BlackBerry, and Windows tablets and handheld
devices. Hundreds of thousands of lightweight apps are now available for everything
from health management to banking to tracking tides and weather. The app model has
significant implications for business software and the users it serves.

• Mobile people want their tools and information wherever they
go. People are bringing their tablets and smartphones into the workplace
so they can interact with people and information from anywhere. They want
access to their full suite of tools wherever they happen to be working—
whether at a colleague’s desk, a remote sales agent’s office, the factory
production line, or the retail floor. When people can access their business
apps and data “on location,” they can combine the data they need with
information they glean from the environment to reach new levels of insight.

Posted in Business Intelligence, QlikView

Great M.I.T. Sloan School Lecture

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 30, 2008

Lecture at MIT Sloan School
Earlier this week, I had the privilege of delivering a guest lecture on Business Intelligence for Professor Malone’s graduate “IT Essentials” class at MIT Sloan. The experience brought back fond memories from when I taught back in the early 1980s.

Most in the class already had some real-world business experience. As a result, there were a number of excellent and insightful questions.

Here are a few of the questions (paraphrased), with my responses:

Q: How do you create and sustain an “information democracy” in a startup venture?

A: First, you need to plan as though your “startup” will someday become a large enterprise. Decisions made today will either help or haunt you well into the future. So, with that in mind, at the top of the list are transparency and the open sharing of knowledge and insight. By nature humans are hoarders and prefer to withhold information for their own benefit. That’s why it’s nearly impossible to change the culture of a large organization where “in-transparency” has been the norm. Of course, it’s easy to put transparency in the mission statement and ignore it. However, to be truly successful, one must “live” transparency. This means encouraging and incenting the sharing of information – especially if it exposes problems!

It’s also useful to look at the dysfunction surrounding BI implementations in large organizations today: disparate applications and data, conflicting business semantics, multiple master files, and a multitude of user tools (including spreadsheets!) – have created pockets of BI automation and what I call information “myopia”. These problems can be minimized if you start out with the notion of an enterprise data model and build (or implement) enterprise applications that are fully integrated and which are equally well designed to analyze the data which they process and store. Although data warehousing will still be necessary, its creation and maintenance will be substantially easier.

Q; How do you balance data quality shortcomings and urgent user demands for access to information?

A: Data quality and integration are areas where getting it “right” is critical. It’s expensive, takes lots of time and energy (and skill) – but is hard to readily demonstrate value to business management. In contrast, users are easily excited by fancy BI tools with cool visualizations. And, with innumerable tools available for purchase and download over the internet – users are buying them and loading them with report extracts, spreadsheet data, etc. and making decisions based on incomplete or erroneous information.

The solution is to balance urgent end user requests with needed data quality programs. This means doing some things that are expedient: delivering user applications quickly without perfect data quality. As a part of this, users must understand the limitations and that the reliability and utility of these applications will eventually improve as a result of strategic data quality programs. One of the best ways to achieve this is through the creation of a BI competency center –whose charter it is to document and implement best practices for BI.

Q: Can organizations use the tools they have or do they have to buy new ones to succeed with BI?

A: It turns that that success with BI has much less to do with the tools than the people using them. I’ve seen some BI successes that employed very modest technology and some colossal failures that had all the technological bells and whistles. That’s why much of my book focuses upon the human and organizational issues that determine the success of BI initiatives. These include management vision and commitment, organizational alignment, culture, and skills. Although buying “yet-another-tool” is easier than solving these problems, it ultimately makes things worse.

-Howard

Posted in Business Intelligence

CIA website goes live!!!

Outside of a few little bug fixes and small additions,  the CIA website is up and running… please feel free to snoop around.  If you have any suggestions or see anything goofy, please let us know!!!

Posted in CIA News

CIA has completed it’s website and is nearly ready to go live!

After weeks and weeks of tweaking and manipulating, it is nearly here!  Stay tuned for Construction Intelligence and Analytics web presence!

Posted in CIA News