Category: Analytics

Moving from What Has Happened to What Will Happen

May 26, 2021

By Andrew Bilsdon, Delivery Lead – Altis Sydney The Analytics Industry often promises that we can predict what will happen, or discover hidden correlations between seemingly unrelated variables in datasets. My experience is that we still spend too much time on Operational Reports that tell users what has happened in a single data set or …

Qlik Excellence in Healthcare: Altis at the Department of Health

May 13, 2021

By Abhishek Kookana, Consultant – Altis Canberra The COVID pandemic brought with it uncertainty, change and the need for a complete reassessment of the work environment. In the midst of the ever-changing landscape, our consultants, along with the team at the Federal Government Department of Health, worked tirelessly to ensure that their client needs were …

Speed Up Report Development With Custom Power BI Themes

April 13, 2021

by Roger Light, Data & Analytics Consultant, Altis Consulting UK Ever spend time fiddling with obscure settings in your reporting tool to get things to look consistent? Sometimes the data modelling and visualisation layout are a breeze compared with ironing out those small distracting details to make your report look good. So why bother? Because …

Webinar: Get More Out Of Snowflake

March 17, 2021

by Brook Queree, Senior Consultant – Altis QLD So your organisation has moved its data into the cloud, now what? As businesses realise the benefits behind cloud data platforms such as Snowflake, more and more use cases discovered that would never have been possible before. This is the power of the cloud, adding accessibility and …

Webinar: Altis Snowstream – Stream Data Ingestion for Snowflake

February 18, 2021

by Anandraj Jagadeesan – Principal Consultant, Andrew Li – Senior Consultant & Mike Setterberg – Senior Consultant Organisations, looking for speed, reliability, cost savings and security, are migrating their applications to the cloud. Naturally, the data platforms must take the same path and migrate to the cloud. Altis is a leader in helping organisations …

Embedded Analytics with Power BI – Part 1

February 15, 2021

by Samuel Ward-Riggs, Principal Consultant- Altis UK Data visualisation tools like Power BI, Qlik, and Tableau help us to visualise data to support decision making, but can we provide those same capabilities to our customers? Embedded visualisations place best-in-class analytics seamlessly within your application or website. Analysts within your organisation, rather than software engineers, …

Effectively Delivering Data

December 9, 2020

by Andrew Bilsdon, Delivery Lead – Altis Sydney If you are involved in a data project, or the delivery of data as a service, this post is pitched at you. The recommendations are based on my 15 years of experience in data, information and analytics and are intentionally pragmatic. Self-service has arrived Unlike the …

Cloud Cost Management: Altis Billing Dashboard

October 14, 2020

by Margaret Chan, Principal Consultant – Altis NZ Being able to track and forecast spending on the Cloud Platform is one major challenge in cost management today. While the cloud offers scalability, consumption-based payment model can be hard to keep a tab on. The most common way is to utilise the cost management portal …

Cost-effective XML storage and querying at scale

October 31, 2019

by Aleck Kulabukhov, Managing Consultant Sydney Introduction XML parsing is a compute-expensive exercise. XML is quite a popular way to store unstructured data so we often face a “Big XML Dilemma” – we can either: pre-parse XML, extract the required fields and store them in a most efficient and fast-to-query way (such as Data …

Getting the most from Power BI – Attend a User Group

August 5, 2019

Ian Stuart, Principle Consultant, Altis UK I have been attending the London Power BI User Group for a few years now and I heartily recommend going along to it or to your local one. Mary Fealty was the main presenter at the last event and she described the London meetup as “the biggest on …

Why should we care about Data Sharing?

February 14, 2019

Nadine Hamilton – Principal Consultant, Canberra There are many reasons that organisations, both public and private should be sharing data, not the least is the significant potential it offers for social and economic benefits through better delivery of services, better and more informed decision making or policy setting, and to support research into current and emerging social, economic and environmental issues. The …

A Modern Data & Analytics platform

February 12, 2019

Richard Roose – Principal Consultant, Sydney What makes a Modern Data & Analytics (D&A) platform? Well, it turns out that much of what defined a traditional Data Warehouse is still required for a Modern Data & Analytics Platform. We still extract, clean, merge and load data but modern times have resulted in more variety of …

“Soft Skills” vs “Technical” problem solving. Whats the difference?

October 12, 2018

Neil Sparrow, Managing Consultant, Altis London When I started my career as a technical guy I firmly believed that “problem solving” in the realms of “technical” i.e implementing a specific system vs “soft skills” such as business analysis were worlds apart. Over the last decade, working in mixed projects covering both aspects, I have changed my …

The Future of Data Engineering

October 5, 2018

Neil Sparrow, Managing Consultant, Altis London Neil recently attended a fascinating meetup discussing how the nature of how we manage data could change. Hosted by the DataNinjas community and Blis group, he heard speakers from the web advertising, data hosting and data science sectors. These are his key takeaways: Data as Product We should treat Data as …

Pushing the Boundaries

September 24, 2018

Sean Ryan, Senior Consultant, Sydney Overview of Spatial Capabilities in PowerBI: It has only been in the last 5-10 years that mapping capabilities have made a transition from specialised GIS (Geographic Information Software) software into mainstream tools that are being utilised by a far wider audience across organisations that never had a dedicated spatial team …

Three great projects developed in 46 hours for GovHack 2018

September 14, 2018

Our Canberra and Sydney teams recently participated in GovHack 2018. In Canberra, the teams developed Communities Skin Health – A mobile application that identifies skin conditions Insolvencies Fact or Spin – A model that predicts personal insolvency using a deep learning algorithm In Sydney, the team developed ‘Beat the Heat’ – a dashboard to communicate …

Learn the art of Storytelling with Data

September 6, 2018

Learn the art of Storytelling with Data, presented by Amazon best selling author, Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic. For the first time in Auckland, Sydney & Melbourne, Cole will be delivering her training. This 1-day workshop will enable you to bring data to life and use it to communicate a story to an audience, with a focus …

Brand and Campaign Management analysis with Twitter data in 60 minutes?

August 24, 2018

Garry Farrell – Managing Consultant – Altis Consulting Have you ever wondered whether your tweets on Twitter are having an impact on your followers and clients? If you have, the good news is that Microsoft has created an easy to use template to help you get your Twitter analysis up and running in just one …

Azure Data Factory Templates with Data Lake

August 16, 2018

Altis have been working on a number of projects to assist our customers move their data and analytics workloads to the Azure Cloud. In this blog, James Mitchell from our Canberra office shares some project details and insights into one of these successful projects, where we established a new data warehouse environment in Microsoft Azure …

Can you tell the difference

August 7, 2018

Developing a mobile-based computer vision prototype for seed classification by Jarred Wynan and Martyn Upton, consultants in our Canberra office. We were recently asked to work on a short project to develop a proof of concept using Microsoft’s cognitive services to identify species of seeds using a mobile phone and its built-in camera capabilities. As daunting as this sounds, within …

Project, programme, portfolio management, data and the possibilities

August 1, 2018

Ian Stuart from our London office, has again been featured on the APM website, outlining the outcomes from his latest webinar. I recently presented at an APM webinar entitled “Taking portfolio benefits management to the next level with modern analytics”. The feedback was very positive – see some of the comments below: It would seem, from this …

Powering modern analytics with Power Bi

July 27, 2018

By Khai Tan, Managing Consultant Altis recently assisted BAI Communications (BAI) in Australia with the implementation of their new Reporting and Analytics Platform. On the new platform, we delivered their first Power BI dashboard to monitor Digital Television (DTV) service performance at all Broadcast Australia (a BAI communications company) tower sites. Information is presented using ArcGIS maps …

Portfolio benefits management and modern analytics

July 12, 2018

Creating value out of data is one of the highest priorities in business across all industries and services in the private and public sectors alike. Ian Stuart of our London office gives an overview in a blog and webinar he recently presented for the Association for Project Management . Current state Data and analytics is a …

Fast Track Your Azure Data Factory v2 ETL Development

July 5, 2018

By Dawie Kruger, Azure Practice Lead, Australia In my previous blog Using SSIS within Azure Data Factory v2, we looked at using the Azure Data Factory SSIS Runtime and how the Altis ETL Jumpstart Kit was easily ported to run in the new environment. In this blog I will take you through some new …

Making the most of your smart meters from day 1

June 28, 2018

Altis partners with a number of water utilities across Australia, deploying a range of data and analytics solutions to reduce costs, improve decision making and expedite corporate & regulatory reporting. A growing trend that we are seeing is the implementation of smart metering trials, pilots, rollouts or at least planning for these implementations. Smart meters are an …

How to better understand the socio-economic information of your students

May 2, 2018

How to Incorporate GeoMap: Use Case 2 – University Students GeoMap is a newly introduced address verification tool allowing individuals, companies and institutes to better take control of their addresses. But GeoMap is more than just a simple verification tool. Through GeoMap’s capabilities, our clients can geocode, validate and gain socio-economic insights into any physical …

How to easily get socio-economic data for an address

April 19, 2018

How to Incorporate GeoMap: Use case 1 – Application Assessment Improving application processing through easy-to-use, efficient geocoding. GeoMap is a newly established Australian address verification tool that allows for geocoding and socio-economic insight into all Australian addresses. Over a three part series we will explore the ways in which businesses and institutes can incorporate GeoMap …

Image Classification

April 10, 2018

Paul Butera, Altis Data Scientist, Melbourne In the space of image classification, not much has changed for years. Up until recently, even utilising deep learning, the pinnacle of multiclass object detection remained, at most, detecting one or two different kinds of objects within a single frame. Put more simply, we have been able to train …

Using Machine Learning and ElasticSearch to discover unstructured Gold

March 13, 2018

Mythili Baker, Head of Innovation Our client, a large distributor of electricity and gas, had a wide range of responsibilities and tasks managed via their call centre. Their call centre data repository was vast and contained a high volume of rich unstructured text. They hypothesis was that this data contained valuable insights that they were …

Depression and Anxiety Treatment in England: Does the level of care depend on where you live?

February 15, 2018

by Olu Omodara “Mental health has never had a higher profile. More than ever before, people are being encouraged to talk openly about their mental health and to share their experiences. More people than ever are receiving treatment and care for mental health conditions; in part due to a reduction in the stigma associated with …

Using SSIS within Azure Data Factory V2

January 30, 2018

Dawie Kruger recently led a data warehousing project, that was implemented using all Azure PaaS components. Azure Data Factory version 2 was used to transform data from the on-premises data sources into to Azure SQL DB, and in this blog Dawie reviews the new SSIS functionality in Azure Data Factory. Overview SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) has been the ETL tool provided with SQL Server …

Amazon’s Machine Learning platform SageMaker has been released – First thoughts

December 13, 2017

One of our Melbourne Data Scientists, Jeremiah Mannings, shares his thoughts on Amazon’s Machine Learning platform, SageMaker. AWS has finally released SageMaker! (https://aws.amazon.com/sagemaker/) catching up in the market to other offerings such as Azure ML Studio. In typical Amazon style, they have taken all the good aspects of other automated Machine Learning cloud environments, improved …

Credit Controllers are Data Analysts too

November 27, 2017

Ian Stuart from our London office, has recently had an article published in the Credit Control Journal, one of the world’s leading research journals dedicated to the advancement of asset risk management, credit analysis and corporate risk. Credit Controllers are data analysts too, explains Ian. Yet, most organisations fail to realise the role that Business …

What we can do with data

November 15, 2017

In a follow up to his previous article, analysing BHPA (British Hang Gliding and Paragliding Association) incidents, Ian Stuart from our London office had another article published in Skywings this month, showing the possibilities that are opened up with good electronic flight logging. His personal flight logging dashboard is insightful and has attracted very positive …

Watson Conversation WCS Intent design

October 19, 2017

By Jeremiah Mannings Consultant in Melbourne Introduction This series of articles is designed to offer a useful overview of the capabilities and functions of the Watson Conversational API to use in your own projects. For the next few articles, a banking/finance type demo will be used to explain the concepts. There will be a number …

Effort and BI – Is the Focus Shifting?

October 10, 2017

Neil Randall, a consultant in our London office, shares his thoughts on how technology is shifting the focus in the way data warehouse and BI solutions are being delivered. Platforms such as Microsoft Azure and Amazons’ AWS offering may well be on the way to shifting the balance of where we put our time and …

Image Analytics with Machine Learning

September 25, 2017

by Jeremiah Mannings Image analytics, deep learning and neural networks are terms thrown around all day on platforms like LinkedIn, but what can they really do for your business? Here at Altis, we have been working to provide an answer to that problem. Sure, the technology is really cool, but it would be even cooler …

TDWI Conference 2017

August 23, 2017

Earlier this month, Richard Roose, one of our senior Sydney consultants, attended the TDWI conference in Anaheim. He gives us a recap of the main topics below. As you might expect, a broad spectrum of topics were covered, with some of the hotter ones being around: Self-service BI & Analytics Data Science & Advanced Analytics …

Thoughts from Introduction to Data Science – Melbourne – June 2017

June 30, 2017

A team in Melbourne recently completed our Introduction to Data Science course with Altis’ Head of Data Science – Isaac Reyes. In this interview Richard Marris, a consultant from our Altis Canberra office, shares some of his takeaways on how analytics is adding to the skills and techniques that a modern analyst needs. What is …

Big Data Navigational Aids

June 22, 2017

Altis’ CEO, John Hoffman, shares some insights into how to successfully navigate the Big Data landscape. I am sure many of you flinched when you first saw this graphic on the Big Data landscape when it was published by Matt Turk in April. For those of you who missed it, have a look and weep. …

The Truth about Paragliding and Hang Gliding Incidents

May 18, 2017

Ian Stuart, one of our London based consultants, used the BHPA’s incident database to reveal some interesting insights. Free flying is exhilarating but it comes with a health warning. We recently published our analysis of incidents in “Skywings” – the membership magazine for the British Hang Gliding & Paragliding Association (BHPA). We looked at some …

Altis Chatbot

May 11, 2017

In our previous blog on “The World of Bots” we discussed some use cases for Bots. In this blog we will talk about a Bot that we created internally, the Altis Chatbot and some of the lessons we learnt in developing the Bot. The Altis Chatbot is a resource and skill planning solution. It has …

Altis obtains two additional AWS Service Delivery Accreditations

May 4, 2017

After obtaining AWS Redshift Service Delivery Accreditation earlier this year, Altis has obtained a further two accreditations for AWS EMR and AWS Lambda. Altis was the first AWS Consulting Partner in ANZ to obtain this recognition for RedShift and for EMR. In combination, these three AWS services represent the backbone of modern big data …

The world of Bots

April 27, 2017

We are starting to see the real-world application of artificial intelligence and in particular Bots becoming more common in the business world. Often when meeting with our clients the conversation turns to Bots and what and how can they help businesses. In fact, according to Gartner’s top 10 near-term predictions for technology By 2020, “the …