I’m excited to be presenting at the European Sharepoint, Office365 and Azure Conference in Copenhagen on 26th – 29th November. The conference has great content delivered by Microsoft MVPs, Regional Directors and Microsoft team members. It’s a great place to get all of your Microsoft content and news to help you with your current technical estates, as well as plan for the future. I’d recommend attending since it is THE European conference for these topics and there are thousands of attendees going along to learn, so why aren’t you?
BOOK YOUR TICKET today and use coupon code ESPC18SPK to receive a €100 discount.
To help you to navigate the conference, here’s a set of handy tips. I hope to see you there!
PLAN Your Sessions
Explore the ESPC18 SCHEDULE to identify what sessions you’d like to attend. Create your own schedule suited to you. If you are travelling with colleagues, divide and conquer by attending different sessions. Afterwards swap notes to increase your learning.
Don’t have time to delve through our 120+ conference schedule? We have created dedicated pages to save you time. Check out the ESPC conference schedule based on IT PRO, DEV, BDM, AZURE or MICROSOFT SESSIONS.
CONNECT with Your Peers
Join the ESPC18 App (Login details announced in the coming weeks) & follow the hashtag #ESPC18 to find out whose attending. Why not make your presence known by sending out a tweet introducing yourself. Arrange to meet new individuals at ESPC – you never know what you might discover! Helpful tip: Carry some business cards with you to share with the new people you meet.
LEARN, Learn, Learn
Before arriving at ESPC, take some time to identify what questions you want answered. Prepare them advance to ask during a session Q&A. Why not take a break from sessions and advance your skills at the ESPC labs or check out the Ask the Experts session. Remember, it’s good practice to note three important key takeaways from each session.
Have Fun
With 2,000 delegates expected to attend, ESPC offers a host of exciting day and night experiences. Check out the WOMEN IN TECHNOLOGY LUNCH, a jam packed EXPO HALL or challenge other delegates and the ESPC team to some fun games in the Community Area.
Not enough? Be sure to join the EXPO drinks on Tuesday evening or enjoy a magical night at the sell-out ESPC18 PARTY: A NIGHT AT THE CIRCUS.
SHARE with your Team
Schedule a meeting post conference to share your key learnings with your fellow co-workers. Impress colleagues with your advanced knowledge while maximizing value for your company. Share your inspiration and make plans to implement what you learned.
Still undecided about attending The leading European SharePoint, Office 365 & Azure Conference? Visit 10 REASONS TO ATTEND ESPC18 to see why you need to be there.
BOOK YOUR TICKET today and use coupon code ESPC18SPK to receive a €100 discount.
I’m delighted to say that I’m doing the Community Reporter role for Microsoft Ignite. This means I get to interview the Microsoft Executive Team, such as Amir Netz, James Phillips and Joseph Sirosh. I have complete stars in my eyes! I don’t often get the chance to speak with them so I’m delighted to get to do that. Also, they are very interesting and they have a lot to say on topics I’m passionate about, so make sure and tune in for those. I’ll release more details about times and how you can watch as soon as I can.
What does a Community Reporter do? During Microsoft Ignite, the Community Reporters will be your go-to’s for live event updates. If you aren’t attending the conference this year, these reporters will be a great way to see what’s happening on-the-ground in Orlando. Check out my content on my blog here and on Twitter and LinkedIn follow me on social to stay up-to-date on all things Microsoft Ignite!
Artificial intelligence is popularized in fictional films, but the reality is that AI is becoming a part of our daily lives, with virtual assistants like Cortana using the technology to empower productivity and make search easier. What does this mean for organizations that are running the Red Queen’s race not just to win, but to survive in a world where AI is becoming the present and future of technology? How can organizations evolve, adapt, and succeed using AI to stay at the forefront of the competition? What are the potential issues, complications, and benefits that AI could bring to us and our organizations? In this session, we discuss the relevance of AI to organizations, along with the path to success.
Microsoft Power BI, Microsoft R and SQL Server are being used to help tackle homelessness in London by providing actionable insights to improve the prevention of homelessness as well as the processes in place to help victims. Join this session to see how Microsoft technologies are helping a data science department to make a difference to the lives of families, by revealing insights into the contributors of homelessness in families in London and the surrounding area. Join this session to understand more about finding stories in data. The case study also demonstrates the practicalities of using Microsoft technologies to help some of the UK’s most vulnerable people using data science for social good.
For people who want to build careers and manage teams, it is crucial to understand diversity and how it impacts your organization. Increasing the role of women in technology has a direct impact on the women working in hi-tech, but the effects can go far beyond that. How do female tech workers influence innovation and product development? How do men benefit from having more women working in technology? Can the presence of women in tech affect a company’s profit? Join a lively discussion on diversity, and hear proactive steps that individuals and companies can take in order to make diversity and inclusion part of the organizational DNA.
I’m excited to be speaking three times at the Data & BI Summit in Dublin, 24th – 26th April. It’s extra special for me since it will be my first event as a Microsoft Regional Director and also after having been named one of the top 20 women in Artificial Intelligence, Data Science, Machine Learning and Big Data by Big Data Made Simple by the team over at Crayon Data.
I’m speaking on the following topics:
R and Power BI
Azure CosmosDB and Power BI
Azure Data Lake Analytics with Power BI – details to be announced as there have been a few logistic changes.
When: Tuesday, April 24 16:00 – 17:00 Where: Liffey Meeting Room 1 (it’s on the first floor) In this session, we will start R right from the beginning, from installing R through to data transformation and integration, through to visualizing data by using R in Power BI. Then, we will move towards powerful but simple to use datatypes in R such as data frames. We will also upgrade our data analysis skills by looking at R data transformation using a powerful set of tools to make things simple: the tidyverse. Then, we will look at integrating our R work into Power BI, and visualizing our data using beautiful visualizations with R and Power BI. Finally, we will share our work by publishing our Power BI project, with our R code, to the Power BI service. We will also look at refreshing our dataset so that our new dashboard has refreshed data. This session is aimed at getting beginners up to speed as gently and quickly as possible. Join this session if you are curious about R and want to know more. If you are already a Power BI expert, join this session to open up a whole new world of Power BI to add to your skill set. If you are new to Power BI, you will still get value from this session since you’ll be able to see a Power BI dashboard being built in an end-to-end solution.
Good news for Developers and Data Analysts; it’s possible to have rapid application development and analytics with the same data source, using Azure Cosmos DB and Power BI.
Azure Cosmos DB is a schemaless database, so how is it possible to analyse and create reports of the data for analytics and Business Intelligence tools? A single Azure Cosmos DB database is great for rapid application development because it can contain JSON documents of various structures, but this needs careful data visualization. In this session, we will analyze and create reports of Azure Cosmos data using Power BI, looking at data from both developer and data analyst aspects.
In this demo-rich session, you will learn about Azure Cosmos, understand its use cases, and see how to work with data in a schemaless Azure Cosmos database for Power BI.
Businesses struggle with many different aspects of data and technology. It can be difficult to know what technology to choose. Also, it can be hard to know where to turn, when there are so many buzzwords in the mix: analytics, big data and open source. My session at PASS Summit is essentially talking about these things, using Azure and Apache Spark as a backdrop.
Vendors tend to tell their version of events, as you might expect, so it becomes really hard to get advice on how to have a proper blueprint to get you up and running. In this session, I will examine strategies for using open source technologies to improve existing common Business Intelligence issues, using Apache Spark as our backdrop to delivering open source Big Data analytics.
Once we have looked at the strategies, we will look at your choices on how to make the most of the open source technology. For example, how can we make the most of the investment? How can we speed things up? How can we manipulate data?
These business questions are translated into technical terms. We will explore how we can parallelize your computations across nodes of a Hadoop cluster, once your clusters are set up. We will look combine use of SparkR for data manipulation with ScaleR for model development in Hadoop Spark. At the time of writing, this scenario requires that you maintain separate Spark sessions, only running one session at a time, and exchange data via CSV files. Hopefully, in the near future, we’ll see an R Server release, when SparkR and ScaleR can share a Spark session and so share Spark DataFrames. Hopefully that’s out prior to the session so we can see it, but, nevertheless, we will still look at how ScaleR works with Spark and how we can use Sparkly and SparkR within a ScaleR workflow.
I’m holding a series of training courses around the UK, more details will be published. In the first instance, on 15th September, I’ll be holding a day-long practical workshop on Working with Business Data for Busy Executives in SME Organisations in Hertfordshire, England. The cost will be £100 pounds plus VAT, food and workshop materials included, and you can also network and share experiences with other attendees who will also be running businesses, like you.
I don’t believe in a ‘stack ’em high’ approach, which doesn’t give a pleasant experience for learning. So, classes will be restricted to 12 people only, unless otherwise stated. This means that you will get a good amount of attention.
I’m doing the Executive MBA at the University of Hertfordshire Business School, I’ve also been a NED (Non Executive Director) for PASS, who are based in the United States. As I’ve been spending time leading organisations, I’m keen to share this knowledge and expertise with the community from a data-driven, data leader perspective. The following blog post will give you a flavor of the workshop. along with some of my thoughts on Microsoft Data Insights Summit. If you have any questions, please pop them in the comments box and I’ll read them from there.
Here are my slides from Microsoft Data Insights Summary, combined with some of the slides from the keynote by James Phillips, held in June 2017.
For those of you who know me, you’ll know that I have extensive experience in Tableau as well as Power BI. However, most of my consulting data visualisation is in Power BI suite of products. Why is that?
Tableau is wonderful at data visualisation, as is Power BI, of course. However, for enterprise customers, where I’m building a data warehouse, I prefer having analytics closer to the data source, perhaps in a data warehouse or data lake. I like to think about the overall business intelligence architecture. Tableau is superb at data visualisation and it also cleans and integrates data, but to a much lesser extend, which is why they partner so well with Alteryx. I don’t like cleaning data or doing repeatable analytics so close to the end reporting layer and business people seem to want to do it there, without thinking of issues such as robustness, repeat-ability and longevity in the analytical formula that they are creating. I prefer to hand off clean data and analytical formula to the reporting tool as far as possible.
I’m not thinking about Business Intelligence in terms of a spot solution for data visualisation or reporting, for example. I’m looking at the whole canvas. I prefer to clean the data and have it all fixed closer to the source, so that I can get the same number for the same report, regardless of the reporting technology that I use. With Power BI, I can stay within the Microsoft playpen of technologies. I do note however that Tableau Server is in Azure and if you are looking at analytics, that’s another option so that the analytics formula isn’t contained in disparate workbooks. Instead, they are published to Tableau Server and people can should download their workbooks there, for ‘one version of the truth’.
As an external consultant, I work with Power BI because I think it has an astonishing reach technically as well as geographically. Some of my customers are global and I really need the certainty of global resiliency.. Gone are the days when Microsoft had a lot of disparate reporting technologies that didn’t talk to one another very well and we had lots of different interfaces that used to overlap. Customers got really confused about what to use. For example, do you put your KPIs in Analysis Services, or in Reporting Services? Now:
The answer is always Power BI! Take a look:
Apart from Data Visualization, what is Power BI useful for?
Power BI is particularly useful for:
businesses that are acquiring other businesses and they need somewhere to put the data, and keep the business running in the meantime
cost savings
GDPR – if you don’t know what this is, you need to contact me to find out more. Microsoft are in the forefront of working with customers to make sure that they are compliant.
Do I still see Tableau?
Yes – some of my customers don’t need public cloud because they pop up their own data centres if and when and where they need them. So, for them, they tend to stick with what they know, and what works for them.
What Business Intelligence tools do I see less of?
I see Qlikview less and less, as customers look to align their reporting and they can replicate their Qlik scripts in SQL Server and SSRS.
I also don’t see Pyramid Analytics appearing much, and I don’t get asked often about them. According to the Gartner report, 2017 may represent a critical period for the company and, rightly or wrongly, the Gartner Magic Quadrant does carry enormous weight when customers are looking for solutions. With many solutions, customers don’t use the full range of features contained in any technical solution, and Pyramid are going to have to work hard to explain how they compare / compete with the Power BI on-premise solution, which is going to go from strength to strength.
However, for others, particularly in the SME market, the Azure offering is extremely compelling. Power BI and Azure together mean that you can focus on the business, rather than working on the technology to support the business. I can also see that more and more data is going into the cloud, and I am part of projects where I am doing exactly that – cloud business intelligence. Cloud Business Intelligence is a real growth offering for me and I plan to keep being ahead of the curve.
Are people using Power BI or is it simply good Microsoft Marketing?
People are using it, yes. Here are the numbers, produced by James Phillips during the Power BI Keynote:
Power BI and the C-Suite
Given it’s reach within the organisation, Power BI can reach the C-suite level as well as the rest of us, in the organisation. Before continuing, it’s probably worth reading about linear vs exponential business growth models e.g. HBR.
You can watch the video below, or read on for some of the headlines:
Here are some headlines:
Gross and Net Profit
Net profit
Progress Towards Targets
Revenues and revenue growth rate
Expenses
Employee Engagement
Let’s get started!
Gross and Net Profit
Why do CEOs care? As part of the Digital Transformation process, the CEO must develop a guiding philosophy about how he or she can best add value whilst showing ongoing strategic assessment and planning. However, it is difficult for them to allocate time to the collection, cultivation and analysis of data. Instead, they need to focus on strategic decisions, and they need data to run their business, to understand how their customers behave and measure what really matters to the organization. Power BI can help to bring clarity and predictability to the CEO, and this session is aimed at CEOs, and those who support them with data, in order to see how they can be empowered by Power BI, and see it as a key asset within the organisations short and long term future.
Net Profit
This goes without saying, but keeping an eye on net profit at all times is essential for business leaders. This might be visualized as a line graph or quarterly chart. However you decide to represent the data, it needs to provide detailed, regularly updated information. You can get added value by allowing this data to be broken down.
With Power BI, you’d be able to tap your chart and see real-time data on profits by region, product type or team. First you calculate your gross profit, then your expenses, subtract expenses from gross profit, and you have net profit.
Calculate Gross Profit first:
Gross profit, also called gross margin, shows you how much money you made from selling a product.
It subtracts the selling price from your wholesale cost to calculate the difference. It does not take into account expenses from rent, personnel, supplies, taxes or interest. Gross profit is a required step toward calculating the company’s income or net profit.
Progress Towards Targets
You can use EXPON.DIST function in Microsoft Excel to help measure progress towards your targets.
Use EXPON.DIST to model the time between events, such as how long from the order placement takes to actual delivery. For example, you can use EXPON.DIST to determine the probability that the process takes at most 1 minute.
Revenues and revenue growth rate
By being able to instantly visualize how fast (or otherwise) your business is growing its revenues, it’s much easier to find out what’s going right and what’s going wrong. Need to lose some dead weight? Invest in a growing department? Respond to a new trend among consumers? Tracking your revenues closely is crucial and will help with those decisions. A line graph would again be particularly clear in this instance.
Think of a Rubik’s cube – people instinctively know how to use them, and to arrange the cube into colors. We also interact with colour and data in the same way; intuitively and quickly.
Expenses
Whether it’s staff, machinery, IT or property, your expenses are one of the biggest drains on your long term success. A dashboard can break these down instantly so you can see where your biggest outgoings are, and then make decisions about what’s costing too much.
Revenue per employee
Revenue per employee is a little like Return on Investment. Are your people actually making enough revenue to justify hiring them? Are they working at 100% capacity or is there room for them to work more, instead of employing new workers? A revenue per employee dashboard helps you make these choices rationally.
Employee Engagement
Measured by an anonymous survey, employee engagement is a key BI factor for any CEO. If your people are motivated, enthusiastic and giving their work 100%, you can be sure your company will grow. By contrast, unengaged colleagues will be a detriment to productivity. It’s essential to keep regular tabs on how employees are feeling about their work.
Summary
As part of the Digital Transformation process, the CEO must develop a guiding philosophy about how he or she can best add value whilst showing ongoing strategic assessment and planning. However, it is difficult for them to allocate time to the collection, cultivation and analysis of data. Instead, they need to focus on strategic decisions, and they need data to run their business, to understand how their customers behave and measure what really matters to the organization.
Power BI can help to bring clarity and predictability to the CEO, and this session is aimed at CEOs, and those who support them with data, in order to see how they can be empowered by Power BI, and see it as a key asset within the organisations short and long term future.
This girl! I am super excited and please allow me to have one little SQUUEEEEEEE! before I tell you what’s happening. Now, this is a lifetime achievement for me, and I cannot begin to tell you how absolutely and deeply honoured I am. I am still in shock!
I am working really hard on my demo and….. I am not going to tell you what it is. You’ll have to watch it. Ok, enough about me and all I’ll say is two things: it’s something that’s never been done at PASS Summit before and secondly, watch the keynote because there may be some discussion about….. I can’t tell you what… only that, it’s a must-watch, must-see, must do keynote event.
We are in a new world of Data and Joseph Sirosh and the team are leading the way. Watching the keynote will mean that you get the news as it happens, and it will help you to keep up with the changes. I do have some news about Dr David DeWitt’s Day Two keynote… so keep watching this space. Today I’d like to talk about the Day One keynote with the brilliant Joseph Sirosh, CVP of Microsoft’s Data Group.
Now, if you haven’t seen Joseph Sirosh present before, then you should. I’ve put some of his earlier sessions here and I recommend that you watch them.
I hear you asking… what am I doing in it? I’m keeping it a surprise! Well, if you read my earlier blog, you’ll know I transitioned from Artificial Intelligence into Business Intelligence and now I do a hybrid of AI and BI. As a Business Intelligence professional, my customers will ask me for advice when they can’t get the data that they want. Over the past few years, the ‘answer’ to their question has gone far, far beyond the usual on-premise SQL Server, Analysis Services, SSRS combo.
We are now in a new world of data. Join in the fun!
Customers sense that there is a new world of data. The ‘answer’ to the question ‘Can you please help me with my data?‘ is complex, varied and it’s very much aimed at cost sensitivities, too. Often, customers struggle with data because they now have a Big Data problem, or a storage problem, or a data visualisation access problem. Azure is very neat because it can cope with all of these issues. Now, my projects are Business Intelligence and Business Analytics projects… but they are also ‘move data to the cloud’ projects in disguise, and that’s in response to the customer need. So if you are Business Intelligence professional, get enthusiastic about the cloud because it really empowers you with a new generation of exciting things you can do to please your users and data consumers.
As a BI or an analytics professional, cloud makes data more interesting and exciting. It means you can have a lot more data, in more shapes and sizes and access it in different ways. It also means that you can focus on what you are good at, and make your data estate even more interesting by augmenting it with cool features in Azure. For example, you could add in more exciting things such as Apache Tika library as a worker role in Azure to crack through PDFs and do interesting things with the data in there. If you bring it into SSIS, then you can tear it up and down again when you don’t need it.
I’d go as far as to say that, if you are in Business Intelligence at the moment, you will need to learn about cloud sooner or later. Eventually, you’re going to run into Big Data issues. Alternatively, your end consumers are going to want their data on a mobile device, and you will want easy solutions to deliver it to them. Customers are interested in analytics and the new world of data and you will need to hop on the Azure bus to be a part of it.
The truth is; Joseph Sirosh’s keynotes always contain amazing demos. (No pressure, Jen, no pressure….. ) Now, it’s important to note that these demos are not ‘smoke and mirrors’….
The future is here, now.You can have this technology too.
It doesn’t take much to get started, and it’s not too far removed from what you have in your organisation. AzureML and Power BI have literally hundreds of examples. I learned AzureML looking at the following book by Wee-Hyong Tok and others, so why not download a free book sample?
How do you proceed? Well, why not try a little homespun POC with some of your own data to learn about it, and then show your boss. I don’t know about you but I learn by breaking things, and I break things all the time when I’m learning. You could download some Power BI workbooks, use the sample data and then try to recreate them, for example. Or, why not look at the community R Gallery and try to play with the scripts. you broke something? no problem! Just download a fresh copy and try again. You’ll get further next time.
As part of the Business Analytics Portfolio, I am spearheading a series of Thought Leadership podcasts and I am looking for people to be interviewed in a ‘fireside chat’ format.
I am bringing together experts from our community to share insights, ideas, and tips on helping data executives lead the way to becoming more data-driven.
The first episode with Ken Puls is on the PASS website, and please do listen to his session. I am looking for more episodes, and I’d love to interview people in the PASS community. I will be your friendly interviewer, and the topic is YOU, how you got to this stage in your career, what’s your data story, and what wisdom would you share to a younger you? What do you think is happening in the industry now, and where is it going? What books do you recommend for people who want a more data-driven organisation?
I am looking for Thought Leaders and Budding Thought Leaders. This is your chance to showcase your expertise. It’s an informal podcast, so there are no slides. It’s just you, me and twenty minutes of your time.
Do you have a data story to share? If so, please email me at jen.stirrup@datarelish.com and let’s try to make it happen!
