The Seven Success Factors of Time Intelligence
The article outlines seven essential time intelligence capabilities for effective business intelligence tools, emphasizing the need for database-resident and on-the-fly date-time groupings, code-free creation of calculated objects, parameter-driven date ranges, measure-independent date-time calculations, customizable queries, and minimal coding to enable comprehensive and flexible date-time analysis for comparing business progress across different periods.
Date-time analysis is a central pillar of modern analytics. Every business needs to track progress over periods of time, and more importantly, compare and evaluate that progress between two time periods. Obvious examples include comparing the fourth quarter of a year to the same quarter of the previous year, or comparing this month to last month.
In data science there are two different types of date-time functions:
- 1.Date-time groupings – Where data is bucketed for the purpose of further analysis.
- 2.Date-time calculations – Where totals are calculated according to different time periods like year-to-date, month-to-date, etc.
An effective BI tool requires seven key time intelligence capabilities. Without these, you simply have the wrong tool.
- 1.Database-resident definitions of buckets – During the modeling process, you must be able to create time intelligent fields in the database based on date fields.
- 2.On-the-fly definitions – Where it’s not possible to write back to the database, which is often the case, you must be able to create on-the-fly definitions for date buckets.
- 3.Code-free calculated objects – You must be able to click and create calculated objects like year-to-date, month-to-date, etc.
- 4.Parameter-driven date ranges – You must be able to input dates that drive all related calculations, with the ability to define date ranges on the fly.
- 5.Measure-independent date-time objects – You must be able to define a date-time calculation object and it should then work for all measures automatically without having to code for each measure—e.g., sales, expenses etc.
- 6.Custom calculations – The BI tool must be able to expand and adjust date-time calculations for a specific user query (e.g., what were year-to-date sales two years ago).
- 7.Code-free solution – The less code required to answer standard questions, the better.