Questions regarding existing BI reports to Business Users.

• How do you access these existing reports?
• Whats the existing frequency of report updates and data updates?
• What reports go together to make them relevant?
• What other tools do you use for analyzing the data out of these reports?
• What are the report delivery mechanisms existing right now?
• Are these refreshed on a batch process or based on demand from the users?
• Any specific features in the existing report that you would like most and does not see loosing it which may cause potential business implications?
• What are the existing bottlenecks with each of these reports?
• Are the goals in existing reports still relevant?
• What are the different parameters used in these reports? Whats the frequency of each parameter being used?
• What reports do you cross check to make sure your reports are upto date and are valid?
• What reporting metrics/KPI are being created in these reports? Are there special formulae being set in these reports as we bring data from the data warehouse?
• How do you perform your routine analysis? How does the existing reports aid in getting your job done faster? Do you see any trends in what kinds of routine analysis are you being tasked with?
• How complicated can these ‘one off ‘ reports being created? How long does it take to create these reports? How often do you think the data is already available in data warehouse but not in reports?
• Who are the power users for each of these reports? Organizing these users by department, by task can give you a very good insight of what reports can be grouped together in an OBIEE dashboard.
• Is there report usage tracking mechanism already available? Do we like to see this moving further into OBIEE?
• Open up your c-level executive’s high level requirements and see whether they are being already covered by these existing reports.
• Is there a backlog of users requests for enhancing the existing reports, create a new flavor of report based on the existing report?
• Can all reports be viewed by every one? How are the users segmented so that groups can be created to access these reports?
• Does the report format change based on the user? Is there any row level security involved? Is there any column level security involved in these reports? Simply ask ‘Who can see what’ for each of these reports.
• Do you analyze information or conduct analysis quarter over quarter or year over year? How far back do you go to support your analysis?
• Ask for access to the recent support ticket logs and see whether there is any trend of problem areas with the reports.
• Organizing the reports by business importance i.e. mission critical every day, end of month report to be ready by 2nd fiscal week of next month etc. etc..
• What is the existing support structure for these BI reports? Ex: When a user has problem, he goes to his assigned power user, if power user cant resolve it, create a ticket for BI team.
• Identify the existing drill down capabilities in the existing reports. Is this still valid? How often does these hierarchies change? Ex: A Product Hierarchy is created every month, we create a new IT request to include this new product hierarchy and it gets added.
• Identify the common dimensions and hierarchies used in most of these reports. Ex: Time, Product, Customer
• Identify the common set of filters that are being built across all these dimensions.
• What are the known gotchas with the existing data in the data warehouse. Do we have reports where multiple versions of truth is always a problem just because the way these reports are set up?
• Are there any decodes, if this is ‘x’ then ‘y’ kind of expressions developed as part of the reports?
• Are we happy with the existing refresh schedules?
• What output formats are being supported by these reports? Ex: Excel, PDF, web-based always.
• Identify any enhancements that would really delight the customer based on an existing report.
• Identify opportunities where previous attempts failed and the it did not make any financial sense at that time. Review these with your users and see whether that it is still the same.
• Document on how each of these reports fits strategically to the organization’s goals and performance monitoring. What are the success factors for your organization? Are these factors quantifiable? How do you know you are on track to achieve your results? How often does the department’s/organization’s goals change?
• Does any of the existing reports help you predict problems? Are there any alerting mechanisms built into these reports? Who gets these alerts?
• Check the reports for the visualization techniques used in the existing reports. Does it make sense to replicate them as is or see whether you can add new web 2.0 widgets for data visualizations. Ex: There was never a goal against this KPI before. Now, we have one. We like a dial chart on the first page of our report to show how we are performing weekly, quarterly, yearly.
• Identify users and see what level of familiarity do they have with this data. Segment these users based on criteria like influence, authority, participation levels. You always need high influencial, high authoritative and high participative users. Deal slowly and patiently with low influential and highly pessimistic users.

Identify the BI technology trends in their organization. Ex: We used to have these nice and fancy all excel based reports. Then the IT has changed our strategy 5 years ago and asked us to start using Micro Strategy tool. Now, we are going to go OBIEE. Check the pulse of your users to see how excited they are. As the technology changed, did something worked better? Did something get lost as part of the transition. Look for those transition pain points and make sure you have/develop some strategies on how to deal with them if you encounter one.

H1B visa- Facts and Myths

Myth 01 - I cannot have H1B and B1 visa at the same time.

H1B visa application is a 1 year long process. You can have both H1B and B1 visa.The only condition is that if H1B is filed for client A. You may not file B1 visa for the same client A, it has to be anyother client other than client A.

Myth 02 - The client for which my H1B was filed, is no more with the company and I need to go for stamping.

You will have to apply for amendment of LCA , the client should be a current client of the organisation.Once done you can go for stamping.

Myth 03- Dependent Visa should be applied while stamping of the concerned H1B visa person.

Dependent visa stamping can be done later too.

Myth 04 - If I switch the company my current H1B visa will expire - False, H1B and B1 visa can be transferred from one company to other.L1 visa cannot be transferred.

H1B visa - High level process flow

Step 01 – Your name gets nominated for the H1B visa from your organization. You would need the following:

1.       Employee Salary Structure(ESS)

2.       Client Letter

3.       Letter from Onsite Manager

4.       LCA letter approved from Department of Labour-USA.

5.       Educational Certificates

6.       Work Experience Documents.

7.       If you have travelled on other kinds of visas to US, you would be required to provide the information of dates and places you have lived.

Step 02 – The Immigration services will process your LCA and once done will flag you. The LCA is done so that Department of Labour is sure that the company is not under paying you.

Step 03 – Your name shall be given to the USCIS for the H1B selection. If initial slot of 20000 is reached (which happens in most cases) additional 65000 visas are made available via lottery known as H1B-CAP for graduate degree holders.

Step 04 – If your name is selected then you will have to go for stamping of your passport with H1B visa to the counsellet.

Step 05 – Since the process takes over a year,the project\client from which the LCA would be processed may change, hence it is advisable to apply for LCA amendment with the new project\client. To achieve the same a new ESS letter and Transfer letter based on client location needs to be generated.

But we can parallely go and get the stamping done on the old LCA to save time.

Once the LCA is amended the H1B visa will also have to be amended.

Step 06 – Face the visa interview and if you pass you are ready to fly.

Disclaimer - This is not legal advice, I'm just jotting down my limited knowledge.

Batch,Real Time and CDC -Data Extraction Techniques

1. Batch - {On-Demand, User initiated,Loss of transactional Lineage,Can be scheduled}
2. Real Time-{Maintains transactional Lineage based on architechture,Implemented to meet tighter SLAs}
3. CDC-Change Data Capture-Continuous extraction.Transactrional Lineage is maintained,Delete data is also captured in form of soft deletes.

-For CDC implementation we need to capture CreatedDate and LastModifiedDate of records

Difference between Kimball and Inmon approach

The Inmon approach is said to have the Hub and Spoke architecture. The primary feature of the same is the Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) which is maintained as a 3NF database. It is slightly different from the Operational database as it is:

1. Subject Oriented
2. Non-volatile - Data doesn't change . Soft delete is present by the use of timestamping.
3. Time variant - Maintains historical data
4. Integrated.

It does not have fact or dimensions, and has a set of functional data marts pulling data out of it.

OLTP  > EDW (3N) >Datamart (3N) >OLAP Cube

The Kimball approach is said to have the Bus Architecture. It contains set of stars i.e de-normalized groups of fact and dimension tables connected via conformed dimension (dimensions common to two facts)

OLTP  > Star Schema (Dimensional Model) >OLAP Cube

Definition of a DWH

A DWH is a

1. Subject Oriented i.e. Has the power to mould the transactional data around a particular subject.If we want to answer questions around the sales of a particular product, the DWH would be around the Subject-sales.etc.
2. Integrated i.e. Integrates data from various sources and keeps in form of dimensional model.
3. Non-volatile i.e. -Data once entered in DWH does not change.
4. Time variant - DWH maintains historical data.

collection of data.

Why is a DWH required in an organization?

1.       Data is an asset and has to be retained as per organizational needs.DWH helps us in maintaining          large volumes of data.

2.       To reduce IT involvement in report creation and helps the business to custom build the reports.

3.       MDM is used to maintain the single version of the truth.