Actionable data insights allows organisations to identify capital savings improved profit margins and better serve their customers needs. Some organisations face regulatory scrutiny and must be accountable for their daily business operations. how to organisations of implementing new initiatives to try to reduce churn and increase conversions through casual footfall.
The most competitive businesses have a handle on their business data. not only do they collect information on; customers, stock, products, accounts, organisations need to have a handle on how their customers perceive them. This could be integrating online social media interactions understanding customer feedback from your own customer helpdesk online assistance.
We have built major data platforms for enterprises, and have created powerful reporting solutions for our clients. We combine our expertise in building software applications and our ability to create effective data models, to give clients cutting edge reporting for their internal and external facing customers.
Websites with databases behind them rarely have those databases designed by experts. Instead, most website developers build a database as an afterthought. The performance of a website that uses databases is heavily dependent upon the ability to use the advanced features of both website and database technology.
The most important feature of any reporting system is production of accurate data in a timely manner. with expertise across many database platforms application development and use of the right technology we have many ways to help improve performance for clients.
In today's marketplace it can be very tempting to go with high end Business Intelligence solutions and cloud providers, that can bring your IT budgets into the six, seven, and eight figures. We have seen that so many times, customers buy very expensive cost per seat licences for users that may check a report once a week once a month. Here are some very simple alternatives;
We build apps in node JS, React, and Knockout. These apps can interact with external web APIs such as MuleSoft, or that we develop in dotnet core MVC or Node JS. You get web applications that work with disparate data sources. Simple small applications that can display data in a few different data visualisation such as charts tables convert bring information to your audience. We can now start to build simple websites to highlight KPIs and Performance Indicators.
Giving you a customer near real time analytics on your website your companies activities is something never discussed by most this is intelligent solutions providers. Delivering data to your customers through distributing this information two web platforms become themselves offer data through API's and data dashboards is where organisations should be putting themselves. Capitalise on the value your data has.
A client's technology capacity needed improving and enhanced system performance. The system was a customer facing website running on Asp.Net MVC where is a sequel server database behind it. The system undertook two main functions one onboarding uploaded customer information, and secondly, processing this information to create reports for customers and others in general. It is these kinds of systems that are hardest to optimise because they are taking on information and at the same time trying to report it. There is contention on the database and many reports time out. external customers are frustrated with the system and the team is not able to meet existing enhancements and new feature requests.
Please note this is a common scenario. We have implemented performance enhancements across many sites on Business Intelligence platforms.
This is meant as no offence to application developers that may be lacking the capabilities in the database skills needed to build enterprise reporting solutions. Sadly we have seen a move towards trying to have developers cover more technology stacks, without appreciating just how challenging and specialised each technology stack is. Agile scrum methodology which is a project management approach turns to focus itself around having more developers being able to fulfil the same task for interchangeability. Businesses must understand that they are paying for enterprise grade technology and they should be maximising the use of more advanced features to give better return on investment.
In this situation they must have a database expert within their team. To expect developers who have a passion for application development to become database experts without true passion will not result in an optimal solution.
Building efficient database reporting systems requires strong understanding of the underlying database technology and the features available to optimise data processing and retrieval. We typically find that many application developers make mistakes such as passing in scalar parameters, note caching variables, adding too many indexes to a table, using the wrong kind of index, not taking advantage of more modern features provided by the enterprise database solution. We typically find duplicated code throughout the SQL code base. The most damning of the issues when we reviewed the code is the amount of code and the poor quality of the code. an example is where placing significant use of temporary tables, and transformation of values which will mean indexing is not used.
This may be thought to be highly contentious as Azure is a fantastic cloud hosting provider. Many organisations can save costs by hosting the infrastructure in the cloud, rather than doing it for themselves. The one big weakness we feel Azure has Is the lack of maturity of many of its resources. a good example is comparing Azure Data Factory with SSIS. We think ADF is brilliant in many respects, but an organisation being forced to move there data processing architecture to ADF when they have SSIS is not something to be undertaken lightly (Of course, we may not have to upgrade to ADF but this becomes a challenge). We found Azure SQL DB to be sub optimal compared to on premise sequel server. A simple example is the inability to create database maintenance plans within Azure. This makes it less accessible for developers lacking skills in database and ETL development.
Legacy systems to us, just means an application that existed for quite a long time. We tend to see internal patterns and approaches replicated as developers leave and new developers join. Managers are reluctant to implement new approaches because it is easier to simply copy, paste, and edit code. We call this Jenga driven Development, as one simple oversight may need to be reflected throughout the entire codebase. To be able to optimise this solution significant changes are needed to the codebase and to give competence to the business team before releasing this to their customers we need assurance that the system will not break - above normal user testing.
You can read more about this in our article here -
We are always happy to talk about data projects with clients - no commitment.
Data as a service is a philosophy in putting the data above the technology. Our design principle Instead use the right tool for the right job. There are certain approaches that almost all Solution Architects claim is the right thing to do, but in fact are highly costly to organisations.
Many times, enterprises buy one specific database provider, one specific reporting solution provider. Just as there is not one car for all types of driving, neither is there just one solution for reporting. Indeed many times enterprise reporting solutions providers keep adding more features in the hope to give more functionality to their audience, and stave off competition. This can lead to the deterioration of the core feature-set. Whilst it is generally accepted that enterprises should reduce the amount of different technologies they have if you have a specific business need and it seems to be too hard to do with existing architecture - do look elsewhere.
Enterprise that create solutions for their business focus on meeting business needs. They will not consider tooling and reusable code for their enterprise solution architecture. On multiple client sites we repeated repeatedly see software engineers building tools that already exists in the marketplace or could be developed by developers with better expertise. By outsourcing these components to third parties you are reducing the need to pull developers off of core business requirements.
We work with major enterprise Business Intelligence software vendors including Oracle, Microsoft, SAP, Dundas. As important, we identify lower cost open source solutions and lower cost proprietary software to create cheaper alternatives for clients with less capital. We build solutions for our own platforms that puts the data first and technology second. Info Rhino has built up an extensive set of partners we can call upon to add extra expertise to projects of any size.
The top ten questions Businesses face many hard questions that can be answered in many ways. We have found that clients that list 10 key questions about their business, will dramatically return their efficacy by focusing on their top three.