Building data driven companies — 3 P’s framework.

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Data Driven Comapnies need Process Platform People

Data Driven Companies — 3 P’s framework

People:

To build data-driven organization, you need decision makers to use data instead of anything else. So you need to help built a culture where data-driven decision-making thrives — usually this is most efficient if you have executive buy-in. Example: A CEO who is a stats-junkie! Of course, not every company would have this. It could be that you find yourself in an organization where the CEO is known to make huge bets just using “gut” — in cases like this, an organization could have some of the best platform and processes but unfortunately, it won’t do any good.

Now just having people who make data driven decisions is not enough — you (as a data professional) need to deliver “data” to them. To do that you need 1) Processes 2) Platform. So let’s talk about them:

Platform:

A platform in this context is the data and analytics platform used by the organization to get the data they need, when they need it. If the organization is small (e.g. less than 15 or so) then the platform could be excel and engineers/analyst writing ad-hoc queries but as you grow (= team size expands) then you need better platform to serve the data needs of the organization. Some tools are better than others and you would usually wind up using multiple vendors in your analytics stack — but remember that jut having a great analytics platform is not enough. You need the “people” and the “processes” to go with that. So, with that let’s talk about process:

Process:

Process is everything between Platform and People. Let me expand on this. Here are few things where having a defined process is key for building data-driven organizations.

  1. How to prioritize the analytics request? It will be great to have a process where you/team will work on projects that closely align with the strategic objective of the company
  2. What does the analytics org-structure look like? Do you have analyst embedded in each team or do you have a centralized team or do you go for a hybrid approach?
  3. What is the process to justify investment in analytics?
  4. Which is the “right” metric definition? (There needs to be a process that keeps the metric definition standardized in an organization)
  5. What is the process to clean data? (Maintaining data integrity is key. You could put this on “Platform” bucket as well)
  6. How do users get “help”? (Is there a ticketing system that they should use? Is it just another “IT” ticket? Who responds to tickets? What’s the SLA around analytics queue tickets? etc)
  7. Who owns “analytics”? There needs to be someone on the team owns analytics like analytics manager, VP of analytics and he/she should be reporting to someone on management team (CIO, CFO, COO, Chief of Staff, CEO) who is held responsible as well.

The list goes on…but I hope you get the point. Having a well-defined processes in an organization is important — usually, this stuff gets less attention and org’s/teams tend to focus just on “platform” which might not be the best thing to do.

Having shared the 3 P’s, let me share few tips on

How to go about implementing the framework:

Three tips:

  1. Identify the “P” that has the best ROI
  2. It’s an iterative process!
  3. Refine as needed

On #1. To help you identify the “P” that has the best ROI, your first step could be to create a matrix to help you evaluate where your organizations falls. I have shown an example below:

Building Data Driven companies 3 Ps framework matrix

If you want to build analytics from scratch then you would love working at early stage startups (bottom-right) but if you like advanced stuff (data-science) then Top-right corner is great! Also, For org’s in Top Left where you have the platform and processes but lack data-driven people — it would be wise to crank up your efforts to drive adoption. (since you already have the right platform and process than any additional investment here would yield little to no ROI).

On #2. Understand that it’s an iterative process. You are never done optimizing any of these P’s! It’s a journey and not a destination.

Continuos Improvement Process People Platform

On #3: Just like with other frameworks, you’ll need to refine and adjust this based on your needs. You may have noticed that I focused on “Org-wide” framework but you could be heading up an analytics function for a department and in that case, not all of the things here would help. “People”, “Process” and “Platform” would still apply on a high level but it might just be that you don’t have “control” over the platform. So, you may need to refine/adjust this as needed.

I hope the framework is a great tool for you to think about building data driven companies!

Best,
Paras Doshi

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Doing Data Science at Twitter — A great read!

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Doing Data science at Twitter

Doing Data science at Twitter

Why is “Doing Data Science at Twitter” a great read?

This is an insider’s perspective from someone who is working at a company that I classify as having the highest level of analytics maturity — In other words, Twitter is known to apply knowledge gained from data science into their products and business processes.

It’s also important to recognize that every company is different and the analytics/data-science tools/techniques/processes that would be implemented would also vary based on the analytics maturity — I love that this was one of the key insights shared in this article.

Also, the article talks about two types of data scientists…I thought it was great way to classify them because there’s a lot of confusion in the industry around what a Data scientist does. With that, Here’s the URL:

My two-year journey as a data scientist at twitter

Best,
Paras Doshi

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500 posts! New Blog Domain name = InsightExtractor.com!

500 blog posts paras doshi
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A new milestone for this blog — 500+ posts! To commemorate this, I decided to change the domain name from ParasDoshi.com to InsightExtractor.com — my goal was two-fold:1) provide an easy to remember name 2) representative of the work that we all do: we help extract insights from data.

Remember to subscribe to this Blog via Email or RSS.

RSS:

https://insightextractor.com/feed/

Email:

Best,
Paras Doshi

[VIDEO] Microsoft’s vision for “Advanced analytics” (presented at #sqlpass summit 2015)

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Presented at #sqlpass summit 2015.

SQL Server Reporting services: How to display “There are NO rows” message?

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Problem:

You have a SQL Server reporting services (SSRS) report that has a table which displays some records — but sometimes it can have NO rows; In that case, how to display “There are No rows” message so that it doesn’t confuse the consumer.

Solution:

  1. Open the report in SQL Server Data Tools and go to the “design” tab of your SSRS report
  2. Select your table (do NOT select a cell inside a table. Make sure that the table is selected) SQL Server reporting services NO data rows message
  3. While the “table” is selected, Go the Properties section OR you can use F4
  4. Inside the Properties section, find “No Rows” section and you should see a NoRowsMessage property:SQL Server reporting services NO data rows message v2
  5. Go to the preview tab to make sure it’s working and you should be ready to deploy the change!

That’s it! Hope that helps.

Official reference:  https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd220407.aspx

Author: Paras Doshi

How to change the Data Source of a SQL Server Reporting Services Report (Native Mode)?

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Problem:

You have your SQL Server Reporting Services environment in native mode — and you want to modify the data source of a report there.

Solution:

  1. Navigate to Report Manager.
  2. Navigate to the Report that you want to Manage and run it
  3. After the report renders, you will have a breadcrumb navigation on the top right
  4. Click on the Last Part of the Breadcrumb NavigationSSRS properties report native mode
  5. It should open up the “properties” section of this report
  6. On the properties section, you should be able to manage the data source
    SSRS Manage Data Source Native Mode Shared
  7. Make the changes that you wanted to the data source settings of this SSRS report — and don’t forget to click “apply”
  8. Done!

Author: Paras Doshi

Back to Basics — What is DDL, DML, DCL & TCL?

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I was talking with a database administrator about different categories that SQL Commands fall into — and I thought it would be great to document here. So here you go:

ACRONYMDESCRIPTIONSQL COMMANDS
DMLData Manipulation Language: SQL Statements that affect records in a table.SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE
DDLData Definition Language: SQL Statements that create/alter a table structureCREATE, ALTER, DROP
DCLData Control Language: SQL Statements that control the level of access that users have on database objectsGRANT, REVOKE
TCLTransaction Control Language: SQL Statements that help you maintain the integrity of data by allowing control over transactionsCOMMIT, ROLLBACK

BONUS (Advance) QUESTION:

Is Truncate SQL command a DDL or DML? Please use comment section!

Author: Paras Doshi

How to fix the Non-unicode to unicode data type conversion problems in SQL Server Integration Services?

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Problem:

Are you trying to import an Excel file into SQL Server using SQL Server Integration services…And ran into error that has words like “Non unicode” and “unicode”? Then this blog is for you.

Why does this error occur?

Well it turns out that things like SQL Server and Excel have encoding standards that they follow which provides them a way to process, exchange & store data. BUT turns out that SQL Server and Excel use different standards.

Solution:

So, the solution is simple right? Import the data from Excel into non-Unicode format because that’s what you need for SQL Server.

So how do you that? Between your Source and Destination tasks, include a task called “Data conversion” and do the following for all columns that have text:

Excel SQL Server Unicode Nonunicode

And in the destination task, you’ll have to make sure that the mapping section using the new output aliases that you defined in the “data conversion” step.

Conclusion:

In this post, we learned about how to solve a common error that pops up when you try to import excel file to sql server using SSIS. Hope that helps.

Author: Paras Doshi

Titanic Data

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Here’s a link to download the Titanic data — http://lib.stat.cmu.edu/S/Harrell/data/descriptions/titanic.html — it’s really useful in analytics and data science projects. You can:

  1. Build a predictive model. Example: https://www.kaggle.com/c/titanic
  2. I also use this data set to create interactive dashboards on tools like Qlik and Tableau to understand their features.

Enjoy!

If you liked this, you may also like other data sets that I have here: http://parasdoshi.com/2012/07/31/where-can-we-find-datasets-that-we-can-play-with-for-business-intelligence-data-mining-data-analysis-projects/

Productivity Tip: Learn to Comment/Uncomment SQL code using shortcuts

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I spend a lot of time writing SQL code — and as a reader of this blog, You might be in the same boat. So any productivity gains that we could get here could go a long way. On that note, here’s a quick productivity tip: Learn to comment/uncomment multiple lines of SQL code using keyboard shortcut.

COMMENTS SQL CODE

If you are using SQL Server Management Studio, it’s “CTRL-K followed by CTRL+C” for commenting AND “CTRL+K followed by CTRL+U” for uncommenting.

If you are using some other Data Management Software tool, I am sure you can find it using their HELP section or googling around.

Either ways, these shortcuts go a long way in making you more productive! What is your favorite productivity tip?