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When preparing reports, we repeatedly face the challenge of processing large quantities or complex information in a way which is clear and comprehensible for the report's consumers. Visualizations in the form of diagrams and charts can serve as an effective means here.

In this article, I would like to point out some important aspects which need to be taken into consideration when creating visualizations in reports, so as to achieve meaningful communication.

The other day, I played "Guess Who?", the classic game for children from about 6 to 9 years, with my six-year-old son. While we were playing, we both tried to work out the best way to win the game. This article series is the result of our search for an effective game plan. Part 1 is aimed at the whole family. OK - let's find out how to win!

Having tested Exasol's "lift and shift" migration approach, b.telligent consultant Simon explains step by step how to migrate to the cloud with confidence

Algorithms for Personalized Recommendations

Users do not always leave behind enough personalized information along their customer journey. For instance, new customers can be acquired or existing customers might browse an e-commerce website without being logged in. Non-personalized recommendation systems, such as those based on proposals for products frequently purchased together, still offer recommendation opportunities for companies in this case. However, the more individually these are tailored to the customer, the better.

Anyone who evaluates data using well-known visual analytics tools such as Tableau or Qlik Sense wants to create, quickly reach the limits of applications — at the latest as soon as he works with unstructured or incomplete data sets. To avoid frustration, we tested both tools for their data preparation options and created a short list of best practices.

How much does it cost me to use the tool? Who should work with it: marketeers or IT professionals? And can I also manage my data in the cloud? Many factors play a role in choosing the right tool for visual analytics. b.telligent consultant Daniel Erlhöfer explains the technical side of Tableau and Qlik Sense in this blog post: What are the differences in the data preparation of both tools?

Starting Situation

One may expect widespread approval when describing the objective of modern campaign management today as follows: The focus of marketing must be the individualized and consistent interaction with the customer via his/her preferred channels - self-evidently containing relevant messages at the respective best time. While this statement is not very surprising nowadays, it still shows that behind each of these adjectives, there is a potential source of errors for a customer-oriented campaign strategy.

Neural Networks for Tabular Data: Ensemble Learning Without Trees

Neural networks are applied to just about any kind of data (images, audio, text, video, graphs, ...). Only with tabular data, tree-based ensembles like random forests and gradient boosted trees are still much more popular. If you want to replace these successful classics with neural networks, ensemble learning may still be a key idea. This blog post tells you why. It is complemented by a notebook in which you can follow the practical details.

More than a year after introduction of the general data protection regulation (GDPR), many enterprises still find it hard to reconcile the topics of data warehouse (DWH) and data privacy. Customer-centric data modelling prevailing at enterprises poses a special challenge here. It leads to major conflicts with many GDPR requirements in virtually any data-driven process. But why is it so hard to unify the two topics?

As a business intelligence package, SAP BW provides many opportunities for efficient reporting – but also contains numerous barriers which significantly slow down performance. Using the example of report filters available in the application, this article shows how the smallest adaptations impair SAP BW performance, and how efficient settings for filtering options can improve results.

Reinforcement learning has a bad reputation for being extremely data-hungry – so data-hungry it can only realistically be trained in simulation-generated data, e.g. in a computer game. We discuss how this can be cured using Bayesian Statistics, using an easily accessible small example. In the second part of this blog series, we see how this can be done in practice using TensorFlow Probability, a hot new tool from Google.

In previous years, there were repeatedly reports and rumours about the future of SAP BusinessObjects.

Some interesting new details have emerged in the meantime:

News on SAP Business Objects BI 4.2 SP07

On 04.03.2019, SAP issued support package 07 for the SAP Business Objects Business Intelligence Platform 4.2 (SBOP BI 4.2). According to SAP, this is the last feature pack for release 4.2 . Though support package 08 is planned, it will constitute purely a maintenance release containing "only" bug fixes but no new functional extensions.

At last: The starting shot for digitization strategy has been fired, and marketing is meant to be an important component of this strategy. In the course of implementation, a decision was made to use a customer data platform (CDP) to form a 360-degree customer view and automate marketing journeys in a real-time environment. This decision, in addition to an investment which is not small, has significantly influenced marketing processes and areas (online, e-mail, e-commerce and CRM) at an enterprise. In this third and last part of my CDP-series I would like to focus on the appropriate selection and evaluation of the suitable CDP-tool.