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Si Blog

July 2008 - Posts

  • From Business Intelligence to Domestic Intelligence - Manage your personal expenses

     
     
    We're used to think about BI in terms of business use only.
     
    But BI is applicable at home too.
     
    If we have the tool to analyze any sort of data, why not use it at home?
     
    Here's an example: Most credit card companies let you download your personal spending data in Excel format. I put all these Excel files into one big file, and connected to it with Prism. Then I created a dashboard that shows me the important things I want to know when I go over my expenses:
     

     
     
    The beautiful thing about dashboards is that they're dynamic. I can change the year in the combo box or select different months on the chart, and all the widgets update accordingly. Here's a short explanation on the various widgets I created and what they show me:
    1. 'Businesses I paid the most to' - This pivot table shows me the businesses I paid the most to altogether, and in how many transactions.
    2. 'Most expensive single transactions' - Unlike the previous Pivot, this one only takes single transactions into consideration.
    3. Monthly gas expenses - This chart shows me my monthly expenses on fuel. I can also see my average yearly expenses on gas below the chart.
      To create this chart I created a 'Filter by Label' that filtered out only businesses with names of gas companies.
    4. Yearly analysis - whenever I choose a different year, I can see my average monthly expenses for that year, and the average number of transactions I do with my credit card.
    5. Spending or Saving? Whenever I choose a different month on the main chart, I get a green light if I'm saving, a red light if I'm spending, or a yellow light if I'm neutral. How do I decide? The traffic light widget uses a measure I created, that compares the selected month's expenses to the average expenses of the last 12 months (relative to the selected month). If I spent over 20% above the average, then I'm spending, if over 20% below, then I'm saving, and if my spendings are in-between the +/- 20% range, then I'm neutral. This traffic light gives me a quick indication on my spending during that month.
    Getting this kind of information is practically impossible by going over our records 'manually' the way we're used to. With Prism I can get answers to complex questions over different time periods in seconds. So once a month, I connect to my credit card's web site and download this month's Excel file, append it to my big file, and analyze the data in Prism. 
     

    Analyzing personal expenses has never been easier.

     

     

     

  • Private beta for Amazon S3

    We've just released a private beta for Amazon S3 users. The idea is that if you use Amazon's Simple Storage Service (that's where the S3 comes from) you get information about what you're using, why and how much it costs you.

     

    However, all the S3 information comes in as a log, but what if you'd like to show your boss a dashboard that looks more like Google Analytics?. (you can't use Google Analytics here - since you can't insert an html tag into the S3 parts of your site).  That information is worth quite some $$ if you can use it to optimize the way you work with Amazon S3. For instance, you can compress a file, or find out that a lot of files are addressed from a lesser wanted source, and change something about the way your website works.

     

    The SiSense team has given this some serious thought for the following reasons.

    • First of all, we're Amazon S3 users ourselves.
    • Second, as a bunch of guys developing business intelligence software, we've become obsessed with analyzing stuff
    • Third - our goal is to connect as many data sources as possible to our software.

     

    A note on the data sources: we try to connect to any valuable store of data:

    • Excel 2003
    • OLAP sources
    • Oracle
    • SQL
    • SQL analysis services
    • MySQL
    • We're about to add csv files, excel 2007 and other goodies I can't tell you about yet...

     

    So we configured a custom S3 dashboard, using our software (which allows you to create any dashboard). This saves the Amazon S3 user all the work. You just download our software with the pre-configured S3 dashboard, connect it to Amazon S3 - and, voila - it works. It shows you anything you'd like to know about your S3 use, and has already, for our data, generated some real efficiencies.  Just don't take too long a time period the first time around because the data transfer might be slow.

     

    And we're offering this, free of charge, as a private beta accessible here. If you'd like to join the private beta email us here

     

    Update:  Jason Kincaid just covered our Amazon S3 Dashboard release in TechcrunchIT.