Category Archives: Tableau
Fear! Excitement! Trends disrupting your career in the 2020s!
Do you feel left behind? If you are witnessing today’s unprecedented speed of technological change, a sense of apprehension would not be surprising.
In a hyperspeed environment, individuals cannot gain expertise quickly enough. By the time you learn and master a topic, that expertise already seems obsolete. From a corporate perspective, a lack of technology talent pushes companies toward other options, one of which is automation to reduce reliance upon human workers.
Our current automation trend will eliminate a large chunk of today’s jobs. However, that same disruption causes many more opportunities to emerge for the right individuals. Do not be careless and allow your career to be destroyed in the 2020s. Be aware of technology trends, prepare, and pivot to a new place of success.
Here are five areas you should watch in the next few years.
CLOUD
Motivated by competitive and cost-saving reasons, companies are migrating on-premise applications and data onto cloud platforms such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. Companies benefit by eliminating the significant overhead private data centers, hardware, and support services. Plus, they gain market agility by being able to scale digital assets almost immediately.
Companies will eliminate the jobs associated with legacy, on-premise support. With talent at a premium, companies may retrain these individuals for other roles, but the cold reality is most management might instead eliminate long-time legacy employees and replace them with new talent.
Software vendors will reduce costs by moving to cloud-only solutions, eliminating the need to install and support on-premise applications. Field technical staff who performed these roles will no longer be needed; only a smaller core group for the centralized cloud support will remain.
AUTOMATION
Companies will continue automation, combining software with artificial intelligence and machine learning, to reduce costs, gain competitive advantages, and increase revenue. With smart automation, firms will replace many individuals who perform repeatable tasks in controlled environments. It’s a simple decision: automated work can be performed 24×7 without stoppage and at lower costs than humans.
Vendors will provide automated tools to accelerate the movement from on-premise applications to the cloud platforms. During the next few years, you will see a mad rush to push business applications onto cloud platforms.
NEW COMPETITORS
New endeavors with new technology will emerge and disrupt legacy businesses. One advantage is they do not have the baggage of legacy platforms, bureaucracy, and long-time employees. These nimble barbarians will attack the fortresses of established empires, speeding the decline of well-known companies.
DISPOSABLE TECHNOLOGY
Rapid technological improvements mean that older technology needs to be thrown away sooner. Ongoing changes, new competition, along with lack of talent pushes companies to speed their elimination of legacy applications and old ways of doing business.
When everything becomes a paid cloud service, companies need fewer technical support employees. However, individuals who can train others in emerging technology will be important. Because modern tools change quickly these tech trainers must quickly pivot and learn. Instead of working for one company, these individuals may provide global online services, generating both active and passive income. To meet demand, online courses and certifications will grow.
CELEBRITY TALENT
While automation will eliminate many legacy jobs, rapidly changing technologies and lack of resources will provide a Wild West goldrush for savvy individuals in the 2020s. Some will become solopreneurs with a strong social media presence, causing firms to find a new HR model, other than their legacy comand-and-control methods designed to restrict employee behaviors.
Instead of dependency upon full-time employees, companies will leverage project-based, remote talent who can be shuffled in and out as needed. Firms will need to develop the culture and skills for working with free agents. A corporate initiative will begin to resemble the effort of producing a blockbuster movie using contracted talent during development.
As a result of a smaller talent base, corporate work conditions will change. Work-from-home will gain even more acceptance and individuals will not need to live within an hour commute of a downtown office building. Instead, technology will be securely available from cloud platforms and workers will spread out, with less clustering in mega-urban centers. Headquarters will become occasional convention sites for talent community-building, celebration, and edification events.
Depending on your worldview, the technology trends of the 2020s are either fear-inducing dangers or exciting opportunities. Make sure you wield this double-edge sword properly. Contact me at Doug@kencura.com.
Preparing for FOCUS-to-WebFOCUS Conversions
If you are considering converting your FOCUS 4GL environment to the new web-based version, here are some things you need to know.
Many people want to understand the difference between FOCUS and WebFOCUS and come to my blog looking for a comparison between the two products, so let me start there.
Both are software products from Information Builders and both share a common 4GL processor. In fact, the vendor in recent years has been able to consolidate these two products into a single code base, which is fairly portable and independent of any particular operating system.
The FOCUS product was used both interactively and in batch. Online users could communicate with menus and screens for providing information or go directly to a command processor for simple ad-hoc requests. Programs could also be run using JCL or other batch control mechanism with parameters passed in or determined by the program itself.
There are two three broad components of the FOCUS 4GL, the main piece being a non-procedural language for reporting, graphing, analysis, and maintaining data. There is also a procedural scripting language (Dialogue Manager) that provides some logical control of the embedded non-procedural code, symbolic variable substitutions, and multi-step complex processes. These are critical to enabling WebFOCUS to perform complex, dynamically-generated web applications.
A third important component is the metadata and adapter layer, which hides the complexity of the underlying data structures, allowing developers and end users to write 4GL programs with minimal knowledge of the data.
Major Features of the Procedural Scripting (Dialogue Manager):
- Symbolic variable substitutions (calculations, prompting, file I/O, etc.)
- System variables (date, time, userid, platform, environment settings, etc.)
- Calculations of temporary variables
- GOTO branch controls and procedural labels (non-conditional as well as IF-THEN-ELSE conditional branching)
- Embedded operating system commands
- External file I/O
- Green-screen interactive with the user (not functional in WebFOCUS)
- Executing procedures (EXEC command and server-side code inclusions)
Major Features of the Non-Procedural Scripting (FOCUS 4GL):
- Reports and output files (TABLE facility)
- Graphs (GRAPH facility)
- Joining files (JOIN facility)
- Matching files (MATCH facility)
- Database maintenance (MODIFY facility; non-screen features supported in WebFOCUS, otherwise replaced by MAINTAIN)
- Statistical analysis (ANALYZE facility; was rarely used and not ported to WebFOCUS; recently R Stat support was added)
- Environment settings (SET phrases)
- Calculation of temporary columns (DEFINE and COMPUTE phrases)
FOCUS-to-WebFOCUS Conversion issues:
Despite the portable FOCUS 4GL that lies beneath the covers of WebFOCUS, there are still some considerable challenges to converting from legacy to web-based architectures. I have solved some of those problems for you by automating the process. Below are some conversion issues and their potential solutions.
1) Major architectural change (single technology stack to enterprise web stack)
Solution: architect a solution that minimizes change
Solution: for new WebFOCUS app path commands, automatically add to existing code
2) New end user environment
Solution: automatically convert existing 4GL programs for users; generate scripts for loading Managed Reporting Environment; provide user training
3) Persistent sessions not supported in web environment
Solution: analyze and determine how to replicate persistence (for example, loss of “global” variables)
4) Batch processing handled differently in web environment
Solution: replicate batch jobs using WebFOCUS ReportCaster scheduler/distribution product
5) Output report formats default to HTML, which does not respect original layout
Solution: automatically add stylesheets and PDF support
6) Dumb terminal green-screens not supported in WebFOCUS
Solution: for simple menus, convert to HTML
Solution: for simple data maintenance, convert to HTML and MODIFY
Solution: for complex data maintenance, convert to MAINTAIN
7) WebFOCUS eliminated some legacy FOCUS features (text editor, end-user wizards, type to screen, ANALYZE statistical facility, etc.)
Solution: analyze and develop work-around
8) New Graph engine
Solution: automatically add support for new graph rendering (third-party Java product)
9) If moving to new platform, multiple problems, including access to legacy data, embedded OS commands, file names, allocations, user-written subroutines, userids, printer ids, integrated third-party tools (e.g., SAS, SyncSort, OS utilities), etc.
Solution: analyze and automatically convert as much as possible
10) Organization typically wants to take advantage of new features quickly
Solution: automatically add some support during conversions (e.g., spreadsheets, dynamic launch pages to consolidate existing FOCUS code) — in other words, get rid of the legacy product as quickly as possible by doing a straight replication, but try to give the business some new things in the process
Trying to manually convert FOCUS to WebFOCUS is just not a good approach. By utilizing a proven methodology and software toolkit for automating much of the manual effort, you will dramatically reduce the time, cost, skill-set requirements, and risk of doing the legacy replacement.
Be sure to read some of my other blogs on this topic. A good place to start is here.
If you have questions, feel free to contact me.
- Preparing for FOCUS-to-WebFOCUS Conversions
- Converting the NOMAD 4GL to WebFOCUS
- Convert FOCUS Batch JCL Jobs for WebFOCUS
- Automatically Modernize QMF/SQL to WebFOCUS
Merging Blogs
I am in the process of merging two blogs together.
For the time being, see this soon-to-be-eliminated blog: BI Software | Business Intelligence (bi-software-webfocus.blogspot.com).
Taking the Mystery out of Big Data
To shake off the mystery of this “Big Data,” it’s useful to know its history.
- Scale-out techniques to distribute data and process in parallel
- Lots of commodity hardware
- Open-source software (in particular, Apache Hadoop)
- The “Common” modules, handling features such as administration, management, and security
- The distributed data engine, known as Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS)
- The parallel-processing engine (either the traditional MapReduce framework now known as YARN or an emerging one called Spark)
- A distributed data warehouse feature on top of the HDFS (HBase for standard reporting needs or Cassandra for active, operational needs)
- Programmatically with languages (e.g., Java, Python, Scala, or R), you can use Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) or a Command Line Interface (CLI)
- Streaming data using the Apache Flume software
- Batch file transfers using the Sqoop module
- Messages using the Kafka product
- Programmatically with languages
- Hbase, Hive with HiveQL, or Pig with PigLatin which all provide easier access than using MapReduce against the underlying distributed file system
- Elasticsearch or Solr for searching
- Mahout for automated machine learning
- Drill, an always-active “daemon” process, which acts as a query engine for data exploration
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Information Builders Talking Big Data at Summit 2015
Be sure to attend the following sessions:
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Wendy’s Wins Big with BI/Analytics
IB wrote this about Wendy’s enterprise dashboard:
“The Wendy’s Company, the world’s third largest quick-service hamburger company, created a BI portal and dashboard environment that integrates an enterprise point-of-sale system to deliver targeted reports with drill-down capabilities for decision-makers at every level of the company. WebFOCUS helps managers control costs and make informed decisions that improve the bottom line. Thousands of international and domestic franchises currently use WebFOCUS dashboards, helping Wendy’s to improve profit margins at hundreds of restaurants.”
At the beginning, the idea was for an “above-the-store” executive portal where a few individuals could see all of the company’s KPIs related to revenue, speed of service, costs, and customer satisfaction. However, it did not take long before thousands of decision makers at different levels of the QSR organization asked for access to that valuable information.
For more information, see IB’s press release.
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Lessons from Doorbell Replacement
That was the task my wife gave me and it appeared within my abilities. Surely, I could be done within an hour.
My wife had already spent thirty dollars on a brushed metal doorbell that looked nice during the day with a back-lit button you could see at night.
On Saturday, I jumped into action and removed the old buzzer button, a simple twenty-year old plastic box. I pulled the doorbell away from the door frame and undid the twisted wires. Quite brittle, they broke easily. To get more length, I tried to pull the wires out farther, but they would not budge. If I was not careful, I would have to instead buy a wireless doorbell.
I examined the new doorbell as I took it out of the package. While the old one had just laid on top of the wood, this one had an inch-long metal piece that was supposed to fit inside a 5/8-inch wide hole. A search of my tool box came up empty for that particular drill bit. Plus, I didn’t really believe the doorframe was deep enough.
“Look,” I explained to my wife, “this isn’t going to work” and presented various reasons to discard her plan.
With open disappointment, she agreed; I put the old button back in place. Ding dong, it still worked.
At the home improvement store, we bought a different thirty-dollar brushed-metal doorbell button; this one could lay flat against the door frame but did not have a light, a compromise.
On the next Saturday, I went back to work. How hard could this be?
I once again removed the old doorbell button. This new one had two pieces: a back that attached to the door frame with screws, and a front that snapped onto the back. The wires gave me grief, but I was finally able to attach the new doorbell button.
This one would not lay flat; some type of plastic protrusion on the back always got in the way. The last doorbell ringer needed a hole, so I considered that as a potential solution for this situation. I got out a power drill and started poking little holes in the door frame.
Ultimately, I was able to get the button to lay flat. When I tried to snap on the front, however, it would not close; something was preventing the snap from catching. I completely removed the doorbell, busted some more holes behind it, hooked it up again, took it off, and repeated several times.
By now I was frustrated. It wouldn’t snap close, so I decided to try to keep it shut with some Gorilla Glue.
No luck. With brown glue spots all over the door frame and a ruined doorbell, I had failed. Trying to remove the Gorilla Glue mess, I scrubbed off patches of door frame paint. I tossed the thirty-dollar buzzer in the trash and once again returned the old plastic one to its proper place. Ding dong, it still worked.
Okay, I needed to stop and think about this. What approach was best? I still had the original back-lit doorbell buzzer that my wife wanted. I needed the right tools to do the job.
I made another trip to the home improvement store and bought a 5/8-inch hole drill bit with diamond grit (coincidentally, another thirty dollars). While there, I picked up white paint to cover the Gorilla Glue fiasco.
On the third Saturday, I removed the old doorbell buzzer, drilled the hole, and put in the new buzzer; it just barely fit. With some silicon chalking around the button and some white paint to cover mistakes, all was good. Ding dong!
After replacing this legacy piece of hardware, here are some of my personal insights:
- I started without assessing the situation
- I never had a proper plan
- Having never done this before, I did not have the proper know-how, expertise, or skills
- I did not have the proper tools to do the job
- It took longer than expected (especially without plan, skills, or tools)
- It cost more than expected
- I could have saved by hiring a professional
My personal experience with a doorbell buzzer is similar to companies replacing their legacy business systems. How hard could it be, for example, to get rid of old reporting applications and convert all of the existing procedures to newer technology?
Upper management already bought the new BI product, so you just assign the conversion effort to the college intern. How hard could it be? Surely, she can knock it out quickly.
Ding dong: no up-front assessment, no planning, no accurate expectations as to time and cost, no specialized skills or tools, minimal progress every Saturday.
You may consider a legacy system modernization initiative as a one-off project your team can just fumble through and then forget about. That can be the painful approach and you may have to cover up mistakes afterwards. Before you do that, consider there are professionals who have done modernizations before and who have developed methodologies and automated software to reduce the time, cost, and risk.
Don’t be a ding dong.
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