BI and HR share one key aim; to best utilize and organize the resources available to them. In HR this involves initially selecting the best personnel often out of a large pool of candidates and then ensuring they are focused, motivated and productive. Parallels can be drawn with BI whereby it is key to identify the most relevant and useful data and then transform it into something useful. Thus the next questions are: where within HR and how to utilize BI?

Without BI finding the best candidates could turn into a game of Guess Who!

Whilst it is true that BI is indispensable for HR departments, it’s often not employed. Why? One of the key reasons is that Human Resources data is often some of the most highly classified in terms of confidentiality, and is often difficult to get access to, even at managerial level. Modern business intelligence solutions acknowledge and help overcome this problem by means of flexible security levels. For example, Bime is sophisticated enough to enable users to filter levels of access to analyses and underlying data, and this is imperative for a HR department with sensitive employee data. One of the most important features of modern BI is being able to tailor access to sensitive data.

Another reason for lack of business intelligence deployment not only in the HR department, but across other departments too, is that previously, traditional forms of BI often required training and special knowledge to use. The recent growth towards self-service BI has made BI easier to use and easier to deploy.

We believe that analyzing the demographics of a workforce could become an increasingly important HR function in the future. Companies, particularly in the more traditional markets, face the problem of an ageing workforce and thus, with the advent of the ‘global employee’, there is often intense competition for the best new talent. Using BI to make sense of this data will give HR a central role in adapting to the ever-changing market dynamics.

Building on this, BI has become a key instrument in analyzing the true value of the human capital within a company, as BI helps link people to a company’s financial performance. HR must analyze the key skill sets and demographics of their existing workforce, assess whether it is best helping them to meet their central business targets and then identify whether HR is doing the correct things to help the company progress. We believe that taken further, BI can be used to predict future personnel trends and used to help draw, stimulate and retain the best candidates.

To summarize, we’ve listed some of the main potential benefits of adopting BI throughout the HR department:

• ANALYZING HR SUCCESS – To link employee performance to financial performance and identify areas for change / improvement and compare with industry benchmarks.
• SICK DAYS AND HOLIDAY – To get useful information and analyze why and when employees are taking a leave of absence. Evaluate any trends for example key demographics.
• ENHANCED COMPENSATION – To understand how compensation impacts on performance, to make sure compensation is level and fair throughout the company and to make sure performance related compensation is in line with the company’s key strategic objectives.
• WORKFORCE OPTIMIZATION – Using analysis throughout the company, top and bottom performers can be identified and then moved up or down. This could be used to inform future spending on training and to identify learning needs of employees.

We firmly believe that BI is becoming increasingly useful for a wide range of people. HR can use BI to improve results across the whole organization and this synergy will play an increasingly central role as companies look for new ways to adapt to rapidly changing market conditions.

Click here to see an example HR dashboard or sign up for a free trial to see how Bime could help your HR department realize its true potential.

Sources: Business Intelligence for Human Resources explained, Business Intelligence for HR, Business Intelligence: realizing the promise of HR technology

Something you probably want to know is how mobile trends affect the organization as a whole.

Using Bime, you can easily segment to show only mobile devices. Then choose a visualization that will show you clearly the proportion of your measure each mobile device is attributed to, such as the pie chart.  Choose a measure such as revenue (if you are tracking e-commerce or goals with a monetary value) or visits.

This will show you where your revenue (or visits etc.) is coming from. Say 50% of your revenue from mobile traffic is attributable to iPhones. You can use this information to make sure your site is optimized properly for iPhone users, or even run a campaign for iPhones.

A cool feature of Bime is the groups feature. I put all Blackberry devices in the same group, and eveything else in a group called “Other”. See the screenshot below.

What else should you look at? Look at the total revenue mobile traffic brings in. Is it worth spending time and money building a mobile site? By looking at these figures you can be more sure that you are making the correct investments.

There are many ways you can use your GA data to reveal trends that can help you optimize your offering. The trick is just to know where to look!

Tweet

• standard mac book pro 2Gb of Rams.
• Database is Sql Server 2005 that runs in a virtual machine on the same machine.
• 3,5 millions of rows. The dataset has dimensions with a pretty low cardinality.
• We skipped data retrieve time. We use standard JDBC here. However, we have a small performance impact above JDBC as we need to marshal data between Flex and Java.

For Flex developers interested in what’s happening under the wood, we used heavily vectors to build the OLAP engine. It would be impossible to achieve this level of performance with standard Array. We used green thread to optimize the rendering. Merapi is used for the bridge between Java and Air…

To help us, we build an application, open source (MIT), the “AS3 performance tester”, that takes some operations (such as incrementing a variable) and measure the time consumed by the different options you can use to achieve the operation.

There are a lot of resources on the web about AS3 performance but none seem to embrace the whole problem. Enter the AS3 performance tester. With it, we are trying to build a comprehensive tool that demonstrates (with tests) which syntax for a particular task is the most performant in AS3.

But first things first with the usuals:

More Computing sins are committed in the name of efficiency than any other reason including blind stupidity”–W.A. Wulf

“Premature Optimization is the root of all evil.”-Hoare and Knuth

“Bottlenecks occur in surprising places, so don’t try to second guess and
put in a speed hack until you have proven that’s where the bottleneck is.”-
Rob Pike

Nevertheless, here we talk of the basic of the AS3 language. Things you do in your everyday programming. Do you know the faster way to loop over an array ? Do you know that division is slower than multiplication and slower than bitwise operations ?

Most of the time, to provide accurate metrics, we loop on the operation a number of times and we calculate the mean. This application will evolve to include more robust tests.

We also used the D.eval library to allow the user to enter 2 scripts and compare performance on the fly. It uses a kind of eval() function so the code is much slower than actual compiled code. Nevertheless, our tests, so far, show that the proportions are right: a script slower with the eval() will be slower when compiled. Nevertheless, we mark this feature as highly experimental as my understanding of what the D.eval do can give improper results.

the application

the source

the lighthouse project