July 2016 - Business Intelligence Info

Monthly Archives: July 2016

High Fivin’ with Cats

July 31, 2016 Humor

Posted by Krisgo

High Fivin’ with Cats

About Krisgo

I’m a mom, that has worn many different hats in this life; from scout leader, camp craft teacher, parents group president, colorguard coach, member of the community band, stay-at-home-mom to full time worker, I’ve done it all– almost! I still love learning new things, especially creating and cooking. Most of all I love to laugh! Thanks for visiting – come back soon

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Deep Fried Bits

Gradient Boosted Trees? Deep Learning? In less than 5 minutes? You Bet!

July 31, 2016 BI News and Info

As most of you are already aware, RapidMiner is a kick-ass platform offering pretty much everything you need for doing data science in a very efficient way. But what you don’t know is that …

RapidMiner Studio just got even more awesome! Wait… is this even possible? Well, it was no easy task – but we have done it: Introducing RapidMiner Studio 7.2. Let’s take a look at some of the new features:

New Machine Learning Algorithms

We’ve added 4 new algorithms for machine learning, and I am still having a hard time figuring out which one I like the most:

Gradient Boosted Trees
Deep Learning
Generalized Linear Models
A brand-new implementation of Logistic Regression

Naturally, I gave them a test run on some data sets, and was pretty freakin’ impressed with the prediction accuracy, automatic tuning capabilities, and runtimes. On the well-known Sonar data set, for example, I consistently achieved performance results of 78% to 80% without any parameter tuning. This is a nice bump over other algorithms which only get up to 70% to 75% after heavy optimization circles.

This lift in performance can in part be attributed to the fact that these algorithms tune themselves. They are designed to find the best parameter settings for optimizing prediction accuracy. This not only delivers better accuracy; but also reduces some of the effort required for tuning these bad boys.

By now, you might be thinking to yourself – hmmmmm, won’t this negatively impact runtime? No, not really, since all of these new algorithms support parallel processing for multiple cores. Welcome to the next generation of machine learning, my friends – compliments of RapidMiner!

Picture1 Gradient Boosted Trees? Deep Learning? In less than 5 minutes? You Bet!

Say “Hello” to the newest operators in RapidMiner Studio: Gradient Boosted Trees, Deep Learning, Generalized Linear Models, and a brand-new implementation of Logistic Regression.

Updated Operator Search

You will also find in RapidMiner Studio 7.2, that we expanded our search functionality to support tags in addition to operator names. Why is this a big deal? Because there are so many different data science terms that reference the same thing – that it may not be entirely obvious which to use. For example, let’s say you want to get rid of some of the columns in your data, but you are not sure which operator to use. Instead of having to remember the exact name of the operator, now you can type in “filter” or “remove” or a variety of other possible search terms, in order to locate the correct operator (which is called “Select Attributes” by the way). Although simple, this key enhancement proved to be very helpful for many customers who participated in our beta program. Less remembering, more mining. Sounds like a good deal to me.

Picture2 Gradient Boosted Trees? Deep Learning? In less than 5 minutes? You Bet!

Operators can now be easily found with the new tag-based operator search.

Performance Enhancements

In addition to all those new operators now making use of parallel cores (if you have them), we also made an effort to speed things up a bit in other places. A few operators we improved are: Write Excel, Set Minus, Join, Nominal to Numerical, and FPGrowth. Our PostgreSQL connector got a nice speedup as well.

We also brought in an exterminator – so there are a couple of dozen bugs that won’t annoy you any longer. Zap!

All Features for Everybody

The free version of our RapidMiner Studio 7.2 now includes functionality that was previously only available in the commercial version, for example, connectors to commercial databases. Moving forward, all the features of our RapidMiner platform will be available to EVERYONE. I told you it was even more AWESOME! This new release will allow you to truly experience the value of RapidMiner Studio, while providing us with the necessary resources to keep building great products. I love it when a plan comes together!

So stay tuned – we will publish more about these exciting changes next week with the official release of RapidMiner Studio 7.2.

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RapidMiner

GW150914 gravitational wave detection incident analysis

July 31, 2016 BI News and Info

I’m analyzing the data from LIGO project, about first detection of gravitational waves. In one of the many threads here, someone said when I want to do an ASD of the strain I should use PeriodogramArray (where 1/dt=4096.):

PeriodogramArray[data, Round[1/dt], 1, HannWindow]

I used it, but the resulting density is much less than in the original tutorial. The order of magnitude of the density I’ve got is about ten to -43… What could be the reason of that? Someone else did the signal processing of those data?

Tom

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Recent Questions – Mathematica Stack Exchange

Using Analytics to Attack Opioid Abuse

July 31, 2016 FICO

Recently, congressional staff requested a briefing from FICO on how our analytics are tackling the opioid epidemic – an issue that, despite pervasive gridlock in Congress, has become a priority for both Democrats and Republicans. Our experts welcomed the opportunity to share their experiences. We believe that the increased use of analytics can play a pivotal role in confronting this challenge.

Opioids are a class of drugs that include heroin as well as pain medications such as codeine, oxycodone and morphine. In 2014, according to the Centers for Disease Control, more than 28,000 people died from opioids – a number greater than the deaths from traffic accidents that same year. And the opioid problem is getting worse, with increasingly more deaths involving fentanyl and other synthetic opioids.

The House and Senate recently approved a bill addressing the opioid crisis by nearly unanimous votes. Though both parties wanted additional provisions, the compromise bill is a rare showing of bipartisan cooperation during a particularly divisive time on Capitol Hill. The Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act of 2016 expands educational resources and strengthens prevention, treatment and recovery efforts by providing medical professionals and law enforcement with more tools to assist people suffering from drug addictions. On July 22, President Obama signed the bill into law.

When congressional staff reached out to FICO, their goal was to learn more about how analytics are being used to combat the opioid crisis. FICO introduced behavioral analytics to combat healthcare fraud more than 15 years ago, leveraging learnings from our success in using analytics to significantly shrink fraud losses in the payment card space. As our experts explained to congressional staff, today our analytics identify and score anomalies associated with opioid fraud, waste and abuse among a full range of stakeholders: pharmacies, prescribers, members and even employees.

FICO also illustrated how we can leverage our link analysis tool to discover true identities of opioid abusers through social network relationships between people, entities and activities. This is especially helpful in scenarios where an individual is “emergency room” shopping for opioids by using false identities.

As our experts imparted, using the right analytics can be a huge part of the solution to this global epidemic. However, there are also disincentives in the system that need to be resolved. For example, payers for self-insured entities, representing 60% of the employer group healthcare market, get compensated for processing transactions, not for identifying fraud, waste and abuse.

Clearly, there is more work to be done. As policy leaders continue to identify the most effective methods for combating the growing opioid problem, we expect the use of analytics will receive even greater emphasis as part of an overall solution.

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Want to Grow Up Big and Strong? Think Design.

July 31, 2016 SAP

Startups are embracing design thinking and setting themselves up to succeed

Perhaps it’s the way we romanticize them, or we are blinded by stories of staggering success, but when people discuss startups one crucial detail is often left out: 90 percent of them fail.

The statistic is gloomy, but it shouldn’t come as a surprise. Even in some of the world’s largest companies, where teams of people spend their time dreaming up the next big thing, very few innovative ideas ever see the light of day.

Of course, no one overarching truth can explain why, but there is an underlying factor that might get close: somewhere along the way, they lost sight of the user.

At SAP’s Design and Co-Innovation Center (DCC), we work to help companies big and small avoid that mistake by practicing and teaching the principles of design-thinking. While perhaps design alone can’t deliver on the promise of innovation, the frameworks fundamental to a design-centric approach provide the methodologies and mindset required for winning solutions that put the customer first.

Ignoring design principles can mean the death of any innovation, but the stakes are even higher for startups that don’t have the luxury of failure. This was on display recently at AppHaus Palo Alto when the DCC hosted a design-thinking workshop for an enterprise software startup looking to learn from our expertise.

[embedded content]

“We are very agile, we move very quickly,” said Vinay Khosla when describing Zenyx, the two-year-old startup he co-founded with Srikant Sharma. “Not a lot gets written down, it happens.”

During these early stages, organizations like his make company-defining decisions every day. But when things are happening so quickly and you are always concerned with whether a feature can scale rather than whether it’s right, it’s easy to lose sight of the customer — arguably the most important factor contributing to long-term success.

While many companies that are just starting out pick a direction, ignore all warning signs and go full steam ahead only to eventually crash and burn, Vinay understood how essential it is to define a company on the customer’s terms and build great products that resonate.

Coming off a strategic turning point that changed the direction and character of their business, Vinay brought the rest of his team at Zenyx, a cloud and mobile solution that saves time at work by keeping everyone better informed, connected and organized, to SAP’s AppHaus Palo Alto to work with the leaders in enterprise design services. There, amidst whiteboards, among the trees and with guidance from team of design “coaches” from the Design & Co-Innovation Center (DCC), the young company was able to take a step back, reboot and redirect, eventually coming to see their target consumer — and themselves — in a new light at a critical time.

It’s easy to think that great ideas and insights strike at random, but that’s rarely how truly successful innovation works. Like most things, it takes time and effort to grow companies and get the most out of the ideas they are founded on. In design thinking, organizations have discovered a methodology to do just that. But, as Vinay professed, for those unfamiliar with how the process works or without sufficient time or resources, a little guidance goes a long way.

During the workshop, the team generated, validated, and visually documented ideas and concepts about Zenyx’s customer base and began to see how they could better cater their product to their customers.

“We are heading down this journey of trying to understand our customer, and trying to really apply a design-oriented methodology and thinking to building our product. While we have made a little bit of progress on our own, this was a quantum leap forward,” Vinay explained when asked about the biggest takeaways from the workshop. “It is just a huge validation. It really helped up us, and I’m really impressed with the team, with the skill, and with the expertise.”

While great design is one of, if not the, most important competitive advantages companies lean on these days, being design-centric goes beyond just products. Instead, for design and innovation to be sustainable and scale, companies must place design and design-thinking at the very heart of their organizational culture.

Moving forward, Zenyx plans to actively apply a design-oriented methodology to its business practices, leaning on lessons learned with the DCC at the AppHaus.

“Now I’m going to make strides and efforts to build the design thinking methodology into our business and into the culture of our business.”

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SCN : All Content – SAP Business Trends

Microsoft PowerApps: The next big thing in application development

July 31, 2016 BI News and Info

Over the years, SharePoint has helped organizations centralize much of their enterprise data and has become one…

Step 2 of 2:

inlineReg Test4 safeHarborLogo Microsoft PowerApps: The next big thing in application development

of the most popular intranet content management systems. Whether organizations use it to store and retrieve documents or to take advantage of InfoPath forms to capture specific business data, the platform has undergone tremendous adoption.

But since the end of InfoPath product development was announced, SharePoint administrators have been puzzled as to why Microsoft would end its Form Builder tool that has helped many fill the gap in capturing relevant and specific business data. But with the release of Microsoft PowerApps, there are indications that the feature may offer capability that renders InfoPath largely irrelevant.

Announced in April 2016, Microsoft PowerApps provides the ability to build interactive forms that can capture data, offering the flexibility to go on any device regardless of size or platform and without a single line of code.

PowerApps enables any user without development experience to design and manage a custom, mobile-friendly business app. These apps can connect to business data from multiple sources. The service allows business users to build different screens and functions without technical development training. Let’s look at some of its capabilities from a technical and non-technical standpoint.

Building apps without code

With a lightweight designer, users can design new apps within minutes. Users can exploit the designer application by starting from existing app templates, such as asset tracking, service requests apps, and home inspection apps. In addition, the application allows end users to choose from various data sources where the business data lives and also where the captured new data will reside via existing connectors to software-as-a-service-based solutions or other commonly used data storage destinations.

Out-of-the-box integrations

Integrating multiple platforms and applications has always been challenging, and some projects stall because of a lack of integration capability or the high costs associated with building the interface for the systems used by the company. Microsoft recognized that, for enterprise users to adopt PowerApps, it would have to address the integration piece. As a result, Microsoft PowerApps ships with existing integration adaptors, from Office 365 to Dropbox to Twitter, SQL, Salesforce, MailChimp, SharePoint, Slack, CRM online and Azure Service Bus. Figure 1 showcases all of the currently available connections offered under PowerApps.

sContentManagement Figure1 072516 mobile Microsoft PowerApps: The next big thing in application development Various connections offered under PowerApps.

Build it once and deliver it to multiple platforms

With the understanding that there is a significant mix of platforms in the mobile space, Microsoft has ensured that PowerApps can be published and used from Android, iOS and Windows devices. This flexibility guarantees that companies needn’t hitch their wagon to a particular platform. Figure 2 displays the options a user can choose from to build their app for their desired platform.

sContentManagement Figure2 072516 mobile Microsoft PowerApps: The next big thing in application development Different options for users to select.

A much faster get-to-the-user strategy

Historically, developing apps required developers (to do the technical architecture planning and coding) and business users (to articulate the need). On many occasions, there was a significant amount of back and forth happening to ensure that all the requirements were collected and that the team could agree on what to deliver. This can cause delays and additional costs. But it looks like PowerApps’ ease of use and code-free designer will enable business users to wear the app creator hat.

The real hidden gem of Microsoft PowerApps

As many SharePoint users are aware, InfoPath leveraged the workflow capabilities that SharePoint has. Despite the limitations of what workflows can do out of the box, it was still a popular feature. But with PowerApps using Microsoft Flow (the latest cloud-based workflow), organizations can access true business automation and integration at its best and most fully integrated with the apps created through PowerApps. With some useful out-of-the-box and customizable workflows within Flow, business users can automate processes as never before; examples include capturing an order from a custom PowerApps app and then seamlessly pushing that data directly to Microsoft CRM or sending email notifications. Another example is detecting specific items from social media services such as Twitter and then sending an email or uploading a file.

sContentManagement Figure3 072516 mobile Microsoft PowerApps: The next big thing in application development Commonly used templates within Flow to help automate a business process.

Go beyond the keyboard with your apps

If InfoPath created form fields to capture data, PowerApps shows off a much nicer upgrade. The platform enables end users to build desired web and tablet apps that take full advantage of capabilities that are based in the hardware on which the app runs. GPS, pen control and camera can all be natively accessed from the app with very little effort that still does not require development.

As a result of how work is being done today, in multiple devices and platforms and with the common gap between business applications’ capabilities and the needs of businesses, Microsoft PowerApps could alleviate some of these issues. Today, the PowerApps platform is available as a free service throughout the preview period. While Microsoft plans to offer a paid version, pricing hasn’t been released yet, but based on capabilities being offered within the platform, it is likely that many business users and developers will evaluate the platform and plan to take advantage of it.

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ECM, collaboration and search news and features

Occam's Orange: Trump gives aid and comfort to destabilized Middle-East

July 31, 2016 Humor

Saturday Jul 30, 2016 · 2:40 PM PDT

2016/07/30 · 14:40

Occam's Orange: Trump gives aid and comfort to destabilized Middle East

flaming bag of dog poop whistle on doorstep: “infidel boots on Saudi soil”

Only an idiot real estate guy complains about charging rent without thinking about…diplomacy or even national security or what, foreign policy

Occam's Orange: Trump gives aid and comfort to destabilized Middle East

There’s just one problem with this. There isn’t supposed to be an American military base in Saudi Arabia. This revelation could and should mean huge consequences for Donald Trump, who has called for the arrest and indictment of Hillary Clinton for mishandling of classified emails.

Trump is now complaining “we pay rent for our base to Saudi Arabia”

According to the government, Donald Rumsfeld was supposed to have closed the American base in Saudi Arabia right after 9/11. If what Trump is saying is not just another of his made up facts, that means that a secret military base is now public.

If there is now a US military base in Saudi, it is classified and mentioning it should have legal consequences.twitter.com/…

The consequences of Trump’s actions today are not yet, and may never be, made known to the public. However, you can be certain that the location of that base was classified for a reason, and now that protection has been compromised.

@yarotrof @Bencjacobs gotta hop train, but that’s tricky lgl ? Hinge on what he was told, if he had indpt knwlge 1st, what statute says, etc

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How Successful Investment Firms Are Using CRM in Unexpected Ways to Outpace Business Demands

July 31, 2016 Microsoft Dynamics CRM

According to CEB research, most investment firms say CRM is their most used system, yet it ranks among the lowest in perceived effectiveness. Why? Because they tend to stick to traditional functions—contact management and capturing sales data. They don’t see CRM for what it can be: a multi-faceted platform supporting multiple lines of business, supporting operations across the organization.

If you think the only job of CRM software is to manage your sales pipeline, you’re going to be very surprised. Across all industries—including investment management — CRM is propelling companies to a new level of performance and service.

xRM: Thinking Beyond CRM

The most successful financial services firms are leveraging the power and potential of CRM. How do these organizations do it? With extended CRM—or xRM. As xRM, CRM becomes an operational platform that:

Allows you to quickly customize and extend it to address new opportunities throughout the business
Facilitates innovation, which allows you to rapidly build out other line of business solutions, enabling you to manage operations more holistically
Provides a 360-degree view of the client, with all data, history, and analytics in one place to drive better, more efficient, and more profitable interactions
Enables you to provide personalized client experiences delivered through pinpoint targeting, offers that are customized to meet identified needs, and highly relevant client service
Delivers operational efficiency improvements achieved through familiar tools like Microsoft Outlook and workflow that streamlines processes across the organization.

In fact, CRM has been put into practice by some of the world’s most recognized brands:

A large hedge fund that had a stellar reputation for client service and wanted to keep it that way. The firm now uses CRM across the organization to help their investor services group easily manage clients with repeatable, low-risk, end-to-end transaction processes and the ability to handle complex high-volume reporting requirements.

A leading wealth management firm uses CRM as the cornerstone of operations, integrated with over 100 mission-critical applications and data jobs. With CRM, the firm can easily grow and expand into new markets.

A global investment management authority nearly eliminated risk in implementation, operations, compliance and client relations and optimized performance to provide better client service—and reduced the total cost of ownership by moving away from antiquated systems.

A global leader in innovative indexing and asset allocation strategies improved reporting by 75% and increased usage by 30%, helping them build stronger connections and more loyal clients—all while lowering TCO.

Tap into the power of CRM as a Platform

The common thread in all the definitions of xRM and methods of extending it is that your applications will use CRM as a platform, leveraging its capabilities to deliver business value to your users—and by extension, your clients. CRM as an extended platform can help you:

Keep on top of complex and changing compliance requirements
Stay ahead of growing client demands
Put the right data in the hands of the right employees with powerful analytics
Manage events and track commissions more effectively

To learn more about how you can extend CRM to transform your business, download and watch Redefining CRM – Innovative Ways Today’s Investor Firms Are Using CRM to Outpace Business Demands, a webcast presented by AKA Green Beacon and CEB.

by AKA Green Beacon

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CRM Software Blog

Determine slicer (or visual) influence on other visuals in Power BI

July 31, 2016 Self-Service BI

Just a quick one today as I do get this questions every now and then: How can I change which slicers interacts with a visual? By default Power BI is very interactive, anything interacts with anything but in some cases you might not want this. Excel has this build into its slicer functionality since day one but Power BI only added this in early 2016 so I can imagine some folks missed it.

Let’s look a a scenario here where I have a report with the following visuals:

When I click on No Discount on top everything else automatically filters down:

Now imagine I want to turn off any the interactivity between the slicer and the “sales transaction” card.

First I go to the filter I want to turn off the interactivity, select format and then click on “Edit interactions”:

This now brings Power BI Desktop in a mode that allows me to turn on or off if this visual interacts with the others:

There are 3 options on each visual:

1 Filter: This filters the visual by the selected value in the filtered visual

2 Highlight: This highlights the visual by the selected value in the filtered visual, this is only available for visuals that can show highlights like tree map or chart.

3 None: This visual will not be filtered by any the selected value in the filtered visual

In this case I set the card to “None”, you immediately see the number goes up from 58K to 60K as it is no longer filtered to just show the sales transaction for “No Discount”:

Now I could go in and toggle the same setting for each individual visual if I want to get ultimate control.

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Kasper de Jonge Microsoft BI Blog

Microsoft Dynamics CRM vs. Salesforce – 5 Reasons Why Dynamics is the Better Value

July 30, 2016 CRM News and Info

If it takes the average person 10 minutes to decide whether or not to buy a shirt (Skipton Building Society), then how long does it take the average business to pick out a CRM solution?

While most CRM solutions provide standard functionality like opportunity and campaign management, there’s lots to consider when it comes down to which solution is best for your organization and your employees. There are a few things that you can zero-in on to make the process quicker and easier, such as native functionality, deployment flexibility, integration capabilities, and the user experience and efficiency it will bring to your business processes.

In many cases, these considerations reveal that Microsoft Dynamics CRM is a superior choice to an alternative like Salesforce.com. Here are a few big factors to consider if you’re evaluating CRM solutions:

As a Microsoft product, Dynamics gives you much more synergy with Office and other Microsoft technologies than Salesforce could ever achieve. CRM Online, for instance, can be seamlessly integrated with Office 365 to allow you to work right from within apps such as SharePoint, Yammer and Outlook.

In Outlook alone, you can continue to add leads and check off tasks while you deal with your emails and calendars. Compare that to Salesforce, which has only a modest plug-in for Outlook. If you already live in Office and the rest of the Microsoft ecosystem, Dynamics is the clear choice.

In the age of Twitter and Slack, many workers (especially sales and marketers) now expect to be able to see the data they want, when they want it. Enterprise apps, like CRM solutions, have kept pace with sophisticated dashboards, but not all of them are created equal.

When it comes to data visualization, Dynamics has a decisive edge over Salesforce. It inherits security and data privileges, supports charts, lists and iFrame panels and taps into real-time data. Salesforce, in contrast, often needs to be manually refreshed and requires users to go to specialized pages to find their dashboards. Dynamics CRM enables users to easily create their own role-based dashboards and share them across the organization.

One of the most distinctive things about Salesforce is its logo with a “no” symbol blocking out the word “software,” which is meant to emphasis that the solution is SaaS (Software as a Service). Indeed, Salesforce is only available through the cloud, and this one-dimensionality can greatly limit its use cases.

With Dynamics CRM, you have options.

For example, your business may actually need the security or control that can only be achieved through an on-premises deployment. Or, you might prefer a hosted setup, under which an experienced service provider such as Turnkey maintains your CRM within a public or private cloud. With Dynamics CRM, the choice between on-premise, private hosting, or CRM Online if you prefer SaaS. You can get a CRM system that is right for your requirements and helps you achieve an optimal total cost of ownership.

Microsoft has built the vision of streamlined business processes and integrated applications with its full ecosystem of business applications in the cloud. With the recent announcement of Microsoft Dynamics 365, the company has achieved its goal of one simplified platform to manage, integrate and run all your applications, across all your devices. Dynamics 365 introduces a common data model across Office 365, CRM, Financials and more, to enable true integration, seamless business processes and simplified IT management.

Dynamics CRM is readily built into this ecosystem, already sharing the common data foundation that will enable seamless application use. By choosing Dynamics CRM, you’re positioning your organization to take advantage of the future of business applications and IT.

You can download a free eBook – Sink or Sell: Your Guide to Modern Sales Survival – to learn how sales teams can be more efficient with integrated productivity tools.

Salesforce is one of the most expensive CRM solutions available, even for its more basic offerings. When evaluating comparable offerings between Dynamics CRM and Salesforce (Dynamics CRM Online Professional vs. Salesforce Lightning Enterprise), Dynamics CRM offers a more robust CRM solution for about half the cost of Salesforce. In fact, Dynamics CRM now includes advanced, comprehensive Field Service management as a standard component at no extra cost.

Not to mention, the customization and deployment flexibility of Dynamics CRM makes it better-positioned to accommodate your future goals and changes to IT.

For an instant cost estimate of Dynamics CRM for your organization, feel free to use our CRM Quick Quote tool!

By Turnkey Technologies, Inc. – A national, award-winning Microsoft Dynamics CRM and ERP Partner based in St. Louis, Missouri.

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Monthly Archives: July 2016

High Fivin’ with Cats

About Krisgo