You’ve probably noticed that you shouldn’t trust this blog for real-time news tracking. The following are essentially timeless, however, so here we go…

Rob van Gelder (of DailyDoseOfExcel fame) shared a tip back in May on how to build a simple Gantt chart in Excel. I’m posting a link here because it’s the easiest I’ve seen so far.

Jeff Smith exposes his Golden Rule of data Manipulation over at sqlteam.com. While he elaborates on his statement from a programmer’s standpoint, it’s all applicable to knowledge workers and spreadsheets:

“It is always easier and more flexible to combine data elements rather than to break them apart”

From a data analysis standpoint, Jeff’s examples are essentially related to what I would call attributes (such as phone numbers). His rule still holds true with values, though. As you work towards summarizing a data set (say, daily financial transactions that you want to analyze by month), you’ll want to aggregate values as late as possible instead of running the risk of losing valuable information by aggregating too early. Spreadsheet programs hit a limit between 65k and 1M records, but there are tools to take it from there - which brings us to Paul Steynberg’s advice for considering OLAP tools as part of a financial system manager’s toolbox.

OLAP technologies are particularly well suited to handling large amounts of data. I personally share Paul’s opinion of Microsoft’s SQL Server Analysis Services, which I would describe to the non-initiated as Excel on steroids. On lots of steroids, that is. SSAS gives you access to summaries and advanced computations based on millions of underlying records, usually responding in just a few seconds.

EDIT (Sep. 10, 2008): Using adefinition as crude as “Excel on steroids” for SSAS left me feeling alittle guilty. I’m over it now, having just read Andrew Fryer’s post on business intelligence for small business;-)

Andreas Lipphardt informed me that BonaVista Systems (or should we now say XLCubed?) are running an Excel dashboard competition. Participants can win an iPhone, a data visualization workshop or one of Stephen Few’s books.

I’ve wanted to posted about the KPI library since reading Cubegeek’s post on the subject. From their homepage:

The free Key Performance Indicator (KPI) Library is a community of business professionals that provides a catalogue of KPIs for identifying & prioritizing the KPIs that really matter for your organization’s success.

The library does get update quite regularly so far. Interesting stuff.

Alex Osterwalder posted a while ago his first public draft of a business model innovation manual, which looks like an interesting framework.

I can’t seem to find the original Hugh McLeod quote Andrew Fryer is referring to, but here is how it goes anyway:

On-Line Analytical Processing (OLAP) is actually about business, it just sounds like a science project.

This potential confusion is one more hint that this field (multidimensional modeling and analysis but really Business Intelligence in general) requires both technical skills and business acumen. Probably just another argument in favor of Business Intelligence Competency Centers…

Still on the OLAP front, a new (beta) version of Palo is available. Wikipedia has a short summary:

Palo is a memory resident multidimensional (OLAP or MOLAP) database server [...] typically used as a Business Intelligence tool for Controlling and Budgeting purposes with Microsoft Excel as a user interface. Beyond the multidimensional data concept, Palo enables multiple users to share one centralised data storage (”Single version of the truth“).

There’s a (somewhat old) discussion thread here. I only played 10 minutes with it - it seems to offer many interesting features. You can also apparently connect Palo and Microsoft Analysis Services using software from Cubeware.

Now this is interesting. Not only do the XLCubed and MicroCharts Excel add-ins work much better together today than when I originally wrote about combining them, but the publisher of the former has actually acquired the publisher of the latter. This is extracted from the message that went out to MicroCharts users:

Linking XLCubed with MicroCharts connects Dashboards direct to the data and makes them dynamic. It also makes them easier to build as the OLAP Cube can also store the control information for the dashboard as well as the data.

This sounds promising, particularly if microcharts are made available within XLCbubed grids. Formula-mode integration is perfect for dashboard-style reporting but remains limited for dynamically exploring data. More on all this when I’ve had a chance to actually try the “integrated” version.

Thanks to Dick Kusleika’s article on EuSpRIG 2007 and after browsing the latter site a bit, I located a couple interesting papers I want to share here. These are full of good high-level tips related to spreadshet design:

• How do you know your spreadsheet is right?
• Spreadsheet Modelling Best Practice

Chris Webb shared several valuable tips recently that I want to post here for future reference:

• Using Linear Regression to Calculate Growth
• Modelling Goals and Thresholds in Measure Groups
• An MDX Challenge: Debtor Days
• Calculating Seasonally-Adjusted Values in MDX

Once more, I’m unfortunately only referencing someone else’s content but this is too good to pass up.

A recent post at Accounting Mechanics suggests accountants should do anything necessary to fill the gap between Finance and IT. While I fully agree accountants are in a better position than IT specialists to provide useful management information, I can think of a few issues with that positioning, though:

• Old-school finance people might see you too much like an IT resource
• IT will most definitely see you as competition;-)
• The added value is obvious once you’re part of an organization and start to deliver results, but it’s difficult to “sell” that particular skill set without sounding too much like “an IT guy”
• You run the risk of ending up maintaining systems instead of using them to answer the very questions you built them to find answers to in the first place

Still, there seems to be quite a few of us out there tackling those issues and getting involved with a whole set of typically IT-only technologies. Feel free to let me know of any experience you wish to share in the comments.

I’ve essentially seen Clayton Christensen (”The Innovator’s Dilemma“) quoted in the context of the high-tech industry so it was refreshing to read about him in a post about innovation in wealth management. Alex Osterwalder suggests a few questions to ask yourself if you intend to identify “the next Skype of Private Banking”:

• What are the unfulfilled needs and niche markets?
• Which innovations (products & services, business models, technology, processes) are perceived as substandard?
• Which disruptive innovations have already conquered a niche market and are expanding customer numbers?
• Is any disruptive innovation already changing the incumbents’ market?

What do you think?