The SQL Users? Group met at the KOIN tower downtown in the Robert Half Consulting meeting space.  The material covered was based on the presentation titled ?Crossing the BI Chasm?.

Some of the key points in the presentation:

• You must become knowledgeable about the specific business.
• You must be able to speak at a 30k altitude all the way down to the technical nitty gritty.
• Maturity of reporting;  infancy (excel chaos, multiple truths, ad-hoc workarounds), adolescence (dynamic querying tools, etc), mature (scorcards, etc, KPIs)
• ClickTek (anti- data warehouse people because they can get right to the data other ways), DataMart, DataStore, Cubes…
• Maturity levels of culture – infancy (don't understand data, IT overloaded with unrelated work), adolescence (learning what is available, IT starts to know business), maturity (data savvy).

After the presentation there was 5 BI Professionals answering questions from the audience.  Questions ranged from how many people are in or would be in a BI project to who is the key person to manage a BI project.

The multiple roles answer depended highly on the project size, which is obvious.  However the simple idea of people being generalists, and stepping into the communication hat, the guru hat, and then the learning hat all within a short period of time.

The answers where thorough and informative, with audience and panel members participating.

One answer that came later in the panel discussion was something that I?ll just parallel with props for Agile.  One of the main ideas behind Agile is lots of communication, effective communication, based on learning.  Always learning, eating, breathing, and living the learning, never stop.  To learn, one must communicate and successful BI is not possible with effective and steady unending communication and learning.

Again, part of the rocking Portland technology event!  A great night.

Microsoft has some new competition coming in Google’s new OS.  Regardless of their success or failure, this should really be awesome to see, as with any competition when it heats up.

I’m watching, inquisitively.

I decided to write up a short bit on web analytics 101 finally.  What I’m going to cover here will traverse over data points retrieved from 3 different reports that can be pulled via Webtrends Marketing Lab Analytics OnDemand Offering.  Keep in mind, this is an extremely minimal amount of data I?m collecting, as it is only my tech blog which doesn?t have much traffic.  As your traffic bumps up there are a lot of other data points that you can collect that provide actionable steps toward increasing sales, traffic, etc.  This entry will cover these basic reports and how I use the data to orient my blog toward my readers (and of course me, because I enjoy it).

The Pages Report

The pages report is a vital place to start. One thing I always do is eliminate the initial root domain from the results.  The reason behind this is that removing that, places a more appropriate view of the graphs in relation to actual page views among the individual views.  Usually the root has so many more views & visits than any other page that the results will be heavily skewed toward the root.  Thus removing that puts a more representative view of the results on display.  This is easy to do, just merely click on the Visits or View number for the root domain page and click, a menu will popup that will allow you to select "less than" this result.  That will remove the single root page and boom, results are now spread solely against the backdrop of actual pages.

The All Entry Pages Report

This report I really dig.  The path analysis chart is golden.  There is some similar data with the Pages Report but this really shows the path in which users are entering the site.  It provides an immediate point of recognition for the analytics analyst to get immediate insight into the navigation users’ take when coming to the site.  This is something that marketing, designers, developers, and anyone working with a website ? especially e-commerce ? must keep up with to assure the website is utilized efficiently.  If pages aren?t being hit that are high priorities, the appropriate actions need to be taken, and this report shows that with about 3 seconds of review.

The Overview Dashboard

I have a love and hate relationship with dashboards.  Dashboards are a necessity for getting quick insight into data points, but often cause one to ignore further investigation into various data segments.  In all of the reports above, when the traffic is heavy further investigation is almost always mandatory for true insight into what is going on with a site.  This report provides a way to find out where one should investigate and in what order.  Are your new versus returning visitors numbers off?