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OMB Data Visualization Tool Requirements Analysis: Microsoft

Dr. Brand NiemannDirector and Senior Data Scientist

Semantic Communityhttp://semanticommunity.info/

AOL Government Bloggerhttp://breakinggov.com/author/brand-niemann/

July 19, 2013http://semanticommunity.info/Data_Science/Free_Data_Visualization_and_Analysis_Tools/Microsoft

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Background• DRAFT White Paper for OMB Pittsburgh, July 11, 2013.• Start With the End in Mind, Avoid Tool Wars, and Develop Well-

designed Spreadsheets That Can be “Dragged and Dropped” Onto a Tool That Creates Statistics and Visualizations in the Public and Private Clouds.

• Focus on Requirements Analysis by First Comparing Magic Quadrant Leaders on Common Data Sets.

• Spotfire Was Able to Reproduce Birst, Tableau, and QlikView Data Visualizations With Dynamically Linked Visualizations.

• Broaden This Requirements Analysis to Include More Sample Data Sets and Tools.

• Microsoft Is a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant.

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Gartner BI Magic Quadrant: MicrosoftMicrosoft Strengths and Cautions Excerpts

• The company's strategy has been to enhance the BI capabilities in three of its core offerings with each release — including Microsoft Office (specifically Excel), Microsoft SQL Server and Microsoft SharePoint — to increase their value and drive upgrades.

• Office 2013, Excel is no longer the former 1997, 64K row-limited, tab-limited spreadsheet. It finally begins to deliver on Microsoft's long-awaited strategic road map and vision to make Excel not only the most widely deployed BI tool, but also the most functional business-user-oriented BI capability for reporting, dashboards and visual-based data discovery analysis. Over the next year, Microsoft plans to introduce a number of high-value and competitive enhancements to Excel, including geospatial and 3D analysis, and self-service ETL with search across internal and external data sources. These enhancements, along with planned support for analyzing large and diverse data (PolyBase, Microsoft's platform to enable a single query across relational and Hadoop data sources, is due in the first half of 2013).

• Building on the in-memory capabilities of PowerPivot in SQL Server 2012, Microsoft introduced a fully in-memory version of Microsoft Analysis Services cubes, based on the same data structure as PowerPivot, to address the needs of organizations that are turning to newer in-memory OLAP architectures over traditional, multidimensional OLAP architectures to support dynamic and interactive analysis of large datasets.

• Multiproduct complexity is a challenge. Because Microsoft's BI platform capabilities exist across three different tools (Office, SQL Server and SharePoint) that also perform non-BI functions, integrating the necessary components and building the applications is left to the organization. Microsoft's do-it-yourself approach puts more of the BI solution's development and integration onus for the platform components on customers, compared with the all-in-one purpose-built BI platforms offered by most other vendors in the BI market.

• Microsoft lags behind most other BI vendors in delivering mobile BI capabilities. It has been slow to deliver BI on mobile devices.Note: Bolding by the author to highlight key points.

Source: http://www.gartner.com/technology/reprints.do?id=1-1DYKLUR&ct=130206&st=sb

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Semantic Community• Microsoft Office (specifically Excel) – Yes (and Access and

Powerpoint)– My Note: Access (Multiple Tables and Queries) can be saved to Excel

and imported into Spotfire.• See Nwind.mdb in

http://semanticommunity.info/Data_Science/Free_Data_Visualization_and_Analysis_Tools/QlikView

• Microsoft SQL Server – Yes (via Spotfire)– My Note: SQL Server can be accessed via Spotfire.

• See: http://spotfire.tibco.com/en/getting-started/5-5.aspx

• Microsoft SharePoint – No (MindTouch)– My Note: MindTouch is open source and more versatile than SharePoint

for mashups.• See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MindTouch

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Principles and Practices for a Federal Statistical Agency: Knowledge Base

http://semanticommunity.info/CNSTAT/Principles_and_Practices_for_a_Federal_Statistical_Agency

My Note: Federal Digital GovernmentStrategy Compliant with “all content as data”.Well-defined URLs to each content type,sub-documents like PDF, and attachments.

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National Statistics for Scotland: Web Page

http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Publications/2012/08/2023/0

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National Statistics for Scotland: Excel Graphic

http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Publications/2012/08/2023/27

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National Statistics for Scotland: Excel Table

My Note: “Tall and Narrow” Instead of “Short and Wide”.

http://semanticommunity.info/@api/deki/files/24898/ScotlandEnvironmentalStats2012.xls

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National Statistics for Scotland: Excel Graphic

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7Drinking water quality:1991-2011

Total coliform bacte-ria

Percentage of samples at consumer's taps failing test

http://semanticommunity.info/@api/deki/files/24898/ScotlandEnvironmentalStats2012.xls

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Spotfire – a new, innovative way to display water quality information

http://www.sepaview.com/2013/06/spotfire-a-new-innovative-way-to-display-water-quality-information/

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National Statistics for Scotland: Excel Table for Spotfire

My Note: Reformatted Because “Short and Wide” Instead of “Tall and Narrow”.Also Deleted . . Very Important!

http://semanticommunity.info/@api/deki/files/24898/ScotlandEnvironmentalStats2012.xls

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Scotland Environmental Statistics2012: Spotfire Cover Page

https://silverspotfire.tibco.com/us/library#/users/bniemann/Public?ScotlandEnvironmentalStatistics2012-Spotfire

My Note: This is essentially a mashup ofeverything in one web application file!

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Scotland Environmental Statistics 2012: Spotfire Drinking Water Quality: 1991-2011

https://silverspotfire.tibco.com/us/library#/users/bniemann/Public?ScotlandEnvironmentalStatistics2012-Spotfire

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Some Conclusions and Recommendations

• Semantic Community Was Able to Build the Complete Scotland Environmental Statistics 2012 in Spotfire Using MindTouch and Excel.

• Some Modifications to Excel Tables Are Necessary to Effectively Use Them in Spotfire.

• MindTouch and Spotfire Are More Versatile Than SharePoint and Excel For Mashups.

• Semantic Community Will Continue to Use The Gartner BI Magic Quadrant Leader Tools and Their Sample Data Sets and to Recreate Visualizations and Dashboards.