What if there was a way for you to easily determine where your child should go to college? Which streets get more parking tickets? Which superhero would win in a battle? Business Intelligence Software can give you those answers. While “normally” used for corporate insights, business intelligence can be used in a number of ways. In fact, here’s a list of our Top Five Unconventional Uses of Business Intelligence Software. This list was not actually generated using Business Intelligence Software, but is designed to give you a sense of the wide range of data mining projects one can tackle using BIS. … Continue reading below the video >
5. Where should my child apply for college?
The college selection process can be overwhelming. For example, the upcoming version of the Princeton Review contains information on 368 different schools. If you’re a student (or the parent of a student) anxious about how to manage this flood of information, Business Intelligence Software could be very valuable for sorting schools by traits like size, reported student sentiment, selectivity, region, and average classroom size. Once you have this data, you could examine and sort the pros and cons of each college to determine a manageable list of potential colleges.
4. What streets get the most parking tickets?
Are parking tickets a matter of random chance? A meter reader just happens to walk down the street you are parked on, when your meter just happens to expire? Or are there patterns to meter readers’ movements, and streets with faster meters? Business intelligence software can sort through the data of a city’s parking tickets and graphically display streets with larger numbers of tickets. It can also map this information based on time, pinpointing the streets where and when you are most likely to receive a ticket.
3. Which superhero would win in a fight?
While superheroes may not be as serious to most people as college applications, determining which would beat all others in a fight certainly fits the bill of being “unconventional.” That said, imagine if you were to enter their many strengths and weaknesses into a computer and analyze them side-by-side. Even if it can’t answer the age-old questions, it sure beats arguing for three hours over whether Batman could beat Spider-man with the only “evidence” consisting of people shouting “You’re wrong, he’s way stronger!” Incidentally, this all-important debate and supporting analysis is up on youtube.
2. Who should be the college football national champion?
We could use Business Intelligence to figure out how to create a playoff system that finally crowns a true college football champ. If Congress wants to get involved because it says that the decision-making process isn’t working, you know something is wrong. The process of creating a playoff system to determine the best team is, after all, not so different from picking the top contractors or vendors to submit a bid for providing a service or product to your business.
1. Who should I pick for my Fantasy Football team?
Playing fantasy football may not be ‘business,’ for most people but it certainly has a large following that are all-business about the trading process. You can use BIS and past statistics together to predict the value of a football player in the upcoming season. You could even downgrade a player if he happens to be a New York Giant and you’re from New England. To help you with your fantasy football picks, TIBCO Spotfire has teamed up with NFL All-Pro and three time Superbowl winner Roger Craig to create the ultimate fantasy football league analytics tool.
So, even if using enterprise-level Business Intelligence Software might be overkill for some of these projects, you can see the possibilities that BIS provides and facilitates. You can also see that nobody should ever mess with Wonder Woman.
Brian DeRoy and Kelley Kassa
Spotfire Blogging Team
