Archive for January, 2007

Collaborating for a better financial reporting infrastructure

January 8, 2007

I’ve wanted to elaborate on this post by Andrew Wiles for a while but it appears this isn’t going to happen anytime soon so I’ll simple refer you to it. Andrew analyzes some of the reasons why financial reporting (and MIS reporting in general) should be handled separately from mainstream IT, and goes on to discuss
how responsibilities can be assigned accordingly. Chances are, if you’re reading this, you can relate to the situation described in his article:

  • Financial reporting is reactive and requires dedicated, in-house, resource who can respond without delay.
  • IT departments are project driven with formal procedures to allocating resource during project conception and manage change after implementation.

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Posted in Data Management, Management Accounting | Leave a Comment »

Choosing Colors for Data Visualization

January 7, 2007

Going through the bookmarks that have accumulated over the last months without further processing on my part, I stumbled upon this article where Maureen Stone summarizes a few key ideas about choosing colors for representing data visually. It’s a year old but the principles it teaches are timeless:-)

This page listing articles by Stephen Few (author of Information Dashboard Design) might also interest you if you’re into this kind of thing.

Posted in Data Visualization | 1 Comment »

MDX Trick: Top 10 Plus Other Query

January 5, 2007

Here is – essentially for my own future reference – a trick that Reed Jacobson posted a while ago. I didn’t use it yet but this will come in handy at some point.

WITH
SET [TCat] AS TopCount(
[Product].[Subcategory].[Subcategory],10,[Measures].[Sales Amount]
)
MEMBER [Product].[Subcategory].[Other] AS
Aggregate([Product].[Subcategory].[Subcategory] – TCat)
SELECT { [Measures].[Sales Amount] } ON COLUMNS,
TCat + [Other] ON ROWS
FROM [Adventure Works]
;

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Posted in Business Intelligence | Leave a Comment »