I was recently invited to write a post for Datawatch’s blog.

Today you can read my new post on the Datawatch blog to find out what focus, specialists and Bill Gates have to do with how well your organization will succeed tomorrow based on what you do today, and how all of that impacts our entire society when we choose to excel with Monarch!

photo credit: batmoo

I know that this sort of statement makes me sound old, but it’s amazing that some things in the past seem like they happened only yesterday. It was in 1991 that Monarch software (for DOS) first appeared, on two 5 ¼ inch floppy disks, or a 3 ½ inch floppy if you were able to use one of those new devices. This was to be a very important product, and it would prove to lead the way for a young company named Datawatch Corporation.

Allow me to fast forward to 2011, and to the introduction of another leader. On February 14, 2011 Datawatch Corporation announced that Mr. Michael Morrison was the company’s new president and chief executive officer. In the past year, Datawatch has undertaken many changes and has shown significant growth, and not just in terms of revenues. The stock price has skyrocketed, reflecting investor confidence in the dealings of the company. A new version of the company’s flagship Monarch software was released, and —along with a Datawatch customer – was a winner of Ventana Research’s 2011 Leadership Awards.

Today, just over a year later, I’m pleased to welcome to Mr. Morrison to ExcelWithMonarch.com for an exclusive interview.

SC: Why did you want to join the Datawatch team?

MM: I saw in Datawatch a company with a great product portfolio, a passionate – and extensive – customer base, and an emerging market opportunity that I believed to be very big. Since I have been on board, all of these observations have been validated. Our Monarch family of products is a truly differentiated solution that delivers real ROI. Our customers are zealots, and some of our most influential supporters. And the market opportunity for our report analytics solutions is even bigger than I initially anticipated.

SC: Time flies. Congratulations on your first anniversary at the helm of Datawatch! How has the past year been for you and Datawatch?

MM: For me personally, it has been a very enjoyable year. I have had the opportunity to work with a terrific group of people and meet with a number of our customers and partners. We experienced a lot of change as we embarked on transforming Datawatch to a high growth company – and change is always difficult at some level. Nevertheless, our employees, our customers and our partners persevered and are leading from the front in this company transformation. The past year has been very good for Datawatch as well. The company is now on a growth trajectory. The financial markets have taken note of us. And industry analysts are paying attention to us again. All in all, it’s been a solid start for Datawatch in getting to a high-growth revenue model.

SC: Fiscal 2011 ended on a very positive note for Datawatch, but you really knocked it out of the park, as they say, with the Q1 FY2012 results. How did Datawatch achieve such a terrific quarterly result?

MM: Our Q1 FY12 results reflect our new go-to-market model, our new market positioning and the contributions of many of the new sales people that joined Datawatch in the past year. One good quarter doesn’t make for a trend, but it’s a positive momentum builder for us.

SC: In 2011, ExcelWithMonarch.com had readers in over 120 countries. Globally, it seems to me that there continues to be a need to easily acquire data and convert it into meaningful, actionable information. With offices around the world, does Datawatch also see this need?

MM: Absolutely. Access to and the ability to analyze corporate data is a universal problem. Despite decades of advances in business intelligence technologies, reporting is still broken. There is a ‘blind spot’ in reporting and analytics that Datawatch uniquely addresses. On one end of the data analytics spectrum, you have structured data, addressed by the traditional business intelligence solutions. On the other end, you have unstructured data, with an ever-increasing number of ‘Big Data’ vendors playing in that space. In between the two exists semi-structured and loosely structured data. Datawatch is the only company that solves the problem of analyzing that data in the middle.

Our ability to make information from diverse data sources and formats accessible, usable and valuable is unmatched. There is a global need for our solution and we are investing in our international operations to meet this need.

SC: I know that Monarch is offered in the English, German and French languages. With such worldwide interest in the product, has offering the product in other languages been considered?

MM: We are presently evaluating Spanish and Portuguese. As opportunities arise that require other languages, we will evaluate which ones make business sense. Our goal is to bring our Monarch report analytics solutions to as many people as possible.

SC: It seems that in North America, there are many opportunities to sell Datawatch solutions as a great method to extend the useful life of a customer’s legacy information system. But outside of North America, companies seem much more inclined to replace their older information systems altogether with integrated applications. Does Datawatch encounter this situation, and if so, how do the approaches to sales differ?

MM: We see many varied use cases around the world, and do see some differences between North America and Europe in dealing with legacy systems. That said, even with the more modern transaction systems, we have customers using our technology to enable end users to be more self-sufficient and reduce the burden on IT. And every organization has to deal with reports and business documents that come into the organization from third parties. Even the most technologically and operationally advanced organizations struggle with incorporating report data from outside their four walls. On a related note, over the past year we have completely revamped our go-to-market model, which includes addressing the needs of local markets around the world. Our approach – regardless of geography – is to always engage the prospect and learn their unique pain points and specific data analytics needs. This allows us to assess how Monarch can help them. Even with the more modern transaction systems, we have customers using our technology to enable end users to be more self-sufficient and reduce the burden on IT. Another major factor is the integration and analysis of data coming into organizations from external sources. Even the most technologically and operationally advanced organizations struggle with incorporating data from outside their IT infrastructure and our technology plays a major role here for many Fortune 500 customers.

SC: Clearly the primary focus here at ExcelWithMonarch.com is your flagship Monarch product. Can you take a moment to tell the readers a bit about the role that Monarch plays in your suite of products, and how the skills that they develop with Monarch may be beneficial when moving to your other solutions?

MM: Monarch is the robust modeling engine for our Monarch Report Analytics platform. The Monarch Report Analytics platform also includes the capabilities to automate and validate the acquisition of data for the Monarch models (Monarch Data Pump) and the capabilities to distribute and archive the resulting Monarch reports in a secure, web-based, self-service analytic environment (Monarch Enterprise Server). Monarch Report Manager on Demand and Monarch Report Mining server offer the additional capabilities to archive and manage high volume reports and business documents and perform rich analytics on this stored content. The Monarch Report Analytics platform takes data from semi-structured and loosely structured diverse data sources and makes this information accessible, usable and valuable.

SC: My personal experience is that people tend to initially expect that Monarch is a tool for the Finance and Accounting group. Are you finding that Monarch is used primarily in that arena, or have other groups adopted it as well?

MM: We have many Monarch users in the office of finance. However, use of Monarch extends literally across the entire enterprise. We see many use cases in human resources, marketing, sales, procurement, IT and more. The elegance of Monarch and its ease of use make it an ideal solution for any business analyst.

SC: Clearly the need for more sophisticated and larger scale solutions increases with the size of the customer’s organization. Can you talk about some of the solutions that Datawatch offers larger customers?

MM: Our larger enterprise customers use the Monarch Report Analytics platform to address a variety of business challenges across all departments. Some specific examples include procure to pay (automating the matching of purchase orders to invoices to bills of lading), e-presentment (delivering settlement statements and commission statements to individual brokers generated by mainframe transaction systems) and audit analytics (performing forensics and reconciliations on a variety of internal and external reports).

SC: Datawatch has announced many new partnering arrangements over the last year. Will you be working towards developing more of these arrangements?

MM: A key element of our high growth strategy is aggressively expanding our partner ecosystem. We are engaging with implementation and reselling partners, OEM partners, geographic distributors and strategic alliance partners around the world. We have implemented a partner friendly business model that makes doing business with Datawatch easy and profitable for partners.

SC: My son happens to be entering high school next year, and in looking at his options recently, I was shocked at the business and computing classes that are available to young students today. Have you considered offering Monarch software to schools to introduce students to the benefits of the tool and familiarize them with your company, not unlike the strategy implemented by Apple Inc.?

MM: We make Monarch available to academic institutions today and intend to more broadly formalize this program for academic use of Monarch in the coming months.

SC: Speaking of education, many professional groups involved in everything from accounting to zoology have for many years now used certification to help market themselves as experts in their field. Indeed, certification markets not only the individual, but the field of expertise itself. Does Datawatch currently have any plans to implement such a programme for your users?

MM: Yes. We are currently developing a certification program for users of our Monarch solutions. Stay tuned for more details.

SC: Automation of Monarch processes has always been a focus point on ExcelWithMonarch.com, and has been appearing more and more of late on your MonarchForums.com. Do the automation features tend to assist sales of the software, or is it at times a distraction when proposing other scalable solutions?

MM: The automation capabilities in Monarch are being used in ways that we never intended and, at times, have led to issues with deployments and data fidelity. The automation capabilities in Monarch Data Pump and Monarch Enterprise Server are much more appropriate for business applications. We will continue to stress the value in automating your report analytic solutions with these enterprise offerings.

SC: Many have commented over recent years that the official Programmer’s Guide hasn’t been updated since it was released for Monarch v8. Will an updated Programmer’s Guide be published for Monarch v11? And on a related note, will there be an update to the Functions Reference Guide, which was last updated for Monarch v9?

MM: We do not intend to continue publishing a Programmer’s Guide. The Functions Reference Guide has been updated and is available on our website.

SC: Many software companies seem be jumping on the “cloud” bandwagon of late. Aside from Monarch Enterprise Server, does Datawatch envision a cloud-based, or perhaps a browser-based, Monarch offering?

MM: We do not have any current plans for a cloud-based or browser-based Monarch offering.

SC: Some foretell of a possible demise of green bar reporting, based on the proliferation of systems capable of PDF output. Given your experience in the marketplace, and an ever-growing list of PDF reader software, do you see Datawatch’s niche changing in regards to Monarch’s functionality to respond to marketplace changes? Simultaneously, how do you continue to further the status of Monarch as the “go-to” tool in all offices?

MM: Mainframe green bar reports are only a small fraction of the data sources that our customers access with Monarch. The sources and formats of reports that our customers can access with the Monarch Report Analytics platform are extensive: text, PDFs, Excel files, SQL databases, HTML, EDI streams, log files, business documents stored in a content management system, etc. In essence, the PDF output of current systems is really just another container for the same old “standard reports” we used to print. A G/L or Trial Balance looks just the same in PDF as on a mainframe green bar report – just with better fonts. Our ability to consume PDF in the same way as text reports means we bring our core competency to bear, which is the easy, end user-driven access, parsing, extraction and analysis of semi-structured business documents. As the market evolves, and new diverse data sources and formats become more relevant, Datawatch will continue to innovate to address the changing needs of the market. Our 20 years of experience and extensive customer base give us a great knowledge base from which to deliver to meet the demands of the market.

SC: In past years, we’ve seen announcements from Datawatch concerning acquisitions of companies and their products and technologies. Can you tell us a bit about what has happened with some of those products and technologies?

MM: The most important acquisition was Clearstory and the BDS solution. Last year, we re-branded this solution as Monarch Report Manager on Demand (RMOD). RMOD is a high volume report management and archive solution that is being used in some of the world’s largest organizations. Together, with our Monarch Report Mining Server solution, we offer the only end-to-end report management and mining solution in the market. RMOD has become an integral component of our overall Report Analytics offering.

SC: Thank you very much for your time and for sharing your thoughts with us today, Mr. Morrison. I hope that 2012 becomes a breakthrough year for Datawatch.

MM: Sandy, thank you for taking the time to speak with me. And thanks for your long-time support of Datawatch and Monarch. You are a great evangelist and advocate.

A Winning Team Is No Accident

Thanks again to Mr. Morrison for granting this interview and taking time out of his busy schedule. And thanks to all of the Datawatch team, who continue to develop new tools and solutions that enable all of us to excel with Monarch.

photo credit: IntelFreePress

I feel – and understand – your frustration.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve noticed that many visitors to ExcelWithMonarch.com have arrived by using their favorite search engines to find the elusive Monarch training book. They search for “Monarch for dummies”, “Monarch book”, “Monarch training book”, “learn Monarch guide”, and other variations of the same intention.

They all learn the same sad fact, though: that book doesn’t exist. And therein lies an interesting a story…

Meet Mr. Bond

I’d like to introduce you to my friend, Olly Bond, who you may have met as OllyinMunich on the Monarch Forums. He’s worked for Datawatch and for Datawatch customers, and now runs his consultancy www.greenbar.info. You might also have seen the “Invisible Data” webinar he presented for Datawatch on the advanced report functions of Monarch.

After having provided support to fellow Monarch users around the world on the Monarch Forums, at one point it became apparent to us that there were a large number of people who were looking for a book on Monarch. Many of the forum members complained that while they were interested in taking Monarch courses because they’d not yet had any formal training, they found it difficult to have their management approve of such expenditures. The most common reasons that we saw included the total costs of the training, and that they, the students, would be away from their work. They typically worked in a small group that couldn’t support such an absence, regardless of the future benefits.

Then there were those who wanted a reference book, and those who wanted to learn how to use the software on their own schedule.

It was apparent to us that there was a need for a Monarch book, and, after much discussion, we committed to developing it. We did everything that had to be done:

• We contracted a literary agent, who would help us navigate a business in which we beginners were unfamiliar.
• We prepared proposal documents for our book using the templates supplied by the major publishers.
• We had the commitment of Datawatch management at the time to assist with the project, should the publishers have wanted that involvement.
• We developed a detailed timeline and the initial chapters, all of which showed that we could deliver the book for the publishers.

With both of us having extensive experience with Monarch, and Olly’s experience with Datawatch’s Enterprise level solutions (all of which happen to use Monarch technology at their core) and my experience in developing automated solutions for Monarch, we believed that we’d be able to put together the definitive Monarch resource.

The project started off surprising well, and we quickly learned that our proposals had landed on the desks of representatives of several publishers who each were responsible for “pitching” book ideas to their respective review/approval committees. “Great, things are progressing nicely,” we thought.

But over the next weeks – it was shocking to learn how slowly these things move in some cases – our agent continued to inform us that the next publisher had opted to not proceed. The story was always the same: “The market’s too small.”

Who’s Protecting Whom?

Really? With well over 40,000 customers (including many Fortune 1000 companies) using Monarch software. Many of those customers have many users of the software, and you don’t think that enough users can use a good reference book? Well, again, we don’t have experience in your industry. Maybe you’re correct.

But it strikes me really funny that I can walk into most any bookstore and find volume after volume dedicated to very narrow market topics, and specific to computing, books on software that I’ve never even heard of, much less have ever used.

So what really happened? Of course we’ll never know for certain, but I do find it rather odd that the same publishers provide all kinds of books on the same general topic, that of Business Intelligence (and all things related), for applications sold by the big, long established BI tool providers.

Can you imagine the chaos that would ensue should a large number of people, people who just want to get on with their real jobs, learn how easy and inexpensive it is to get the information that they need? Surely there would be madness in the streets!

Alas, Olly and I realized that we weren’t going to win that first round of the fight. Subsequently, I convinced my partner that I still wanted to help the struggling Monarch modeler improve their skills, but without detracting from our still-not-yet-ruled-out Monarch book. That led to the “30 Days to Become a Better Monarch Modeler” training package, which is available until March 31^st 2012 for only $47 USD, after which time the price returns to $97 USD.

What would YOU like?

While I’m pleased with the feedback that I’ve received from those who’ve purchased my training, I have heard from many who want more of a step-by-step approach. The question then becomes: what is the best way in which to deliver such material? What would YOU like to use? An eBook? A printed book? Maybe videos? Something similar to my recent YouTube channel post perhaps, only which would provide much more detail? Maybe something altogether different?

Drop me an email, or leave a comment below. There are many ways in which we can all learn to excel with Monarch!

photo credit: pat7047

I’ve just come to learn of some very sad news.

A couple of weeks ago I noticed that the image for the MicroCharts product that I was linking to on the right side of my pages wasn’t appearing. I sent email off to BonaVista Systems asking if a replacement was available, but I hadn’t received a reply. Thinking that this was highly unusual, this evening I thought that I’d follow up, and visited the BonaVista Systems site, only to find the following:

I remembered that Andreas Lipphardt, who ran the company, had worked with the group at XLCubed.com, and there found the news that he had recently passed away. (I trust this information to be accurate, and have no reason to believe otherwise.)

For those who had purchased software (including MicroCharts) from BonaVista Systems, per the aforementioned news link, you’ll now want to contact XLCubed.com for any support issues that you may have. “Should MicroChart customers have issues then as a tribute to Andreas’ contribution to our company we will attempt to assist if and where we can.”

I tested my link to the page that let customers purchase the MicroCharts software, and it seems that the e-commerce provider that BonaVista Systems was using will still sell you a copy of the software. But knowing that support for it is probably not available in the long term, I’ve accordingly removed the links to purchase MicroCharts software from my site.

In memoriam.

Just a quick note to let you know that I’ve added a few books to my Recommended page. Check it out now for some new inspirations and different ways to excel with Monarch!

photo credit: the bbp

I’ve written here previously about the moment in which new Monarch software users recognize that they’ve just discovered the tool that they’ve always been seeking. This realization changes how they see not just business reports but practically any document; suddenly everything’s a data source! Knowing that you can quickly extract data from almost anything and convert it into actionable information is immensely empowering.

Monarch is the Universal Translator

That particular major paradigm shift (defined as a fundamental change in approach or assumptions) has already been experienced by thousands of people. What was previously a technically challenging and time consuming task best left to some dedicated systems expert could now be done by anyone who needs the data lock in that static document, without requiring any direct access to the system that created the document. Powerful stuff.

Imagine a world where anyone could readily capture data from the documents that they have at hand, those that they use to perform their work in their chosen field, regardless of what that field is. Then they could transform that raw data into meaningful information upon which they could base their important decisions.

Nah, it’ll never happen. Well, not “never”, just maybe not soon. In the meantime, we’ll keep Monarch as our little secret. It’ll be our competitive advantage until the day when the rest eventually catch up with us.

So that’s one successfully implemented paradigm shift. What’s the other? Ah, the other has yet to pass, but it came oh so close to reality.

The Monarch Remote Control

As a self-confessed techie, I like to follow the goings-on of the consumer electronics industry, in particular the Audio Visual side of things. A recent story on Audioholics.com about the lack of simplicity of today’s AV equipment reminded me of an exchange that I had with someone involved with the development of Monarch software.

I argued that with the new look and feel of Monarch v11, which at the time was still being developed, now was the time to shake up the status quo a little. Not so much in its functionality, but in the interface: the way that the user interacts with the program.

To get my point across, I compared the tried and true approach of the “File, Edit, Template, Options, Window, Help” menus and their ribbon equivalents to having a coffee table full of remote controls. One remote controls the TV, another controls the CD player. Then there’s the DVD player remote, the personal video recorder remote and finally the surround sound receiver remote. Basically, to operate the system properly you’ve got to know the nitty-gritty details of each device and remote, or menu and feature, to get what you want done.

So I thought that now was the opportune time to introduce a new paradigm to Monarch, based on the better universal remote controls available for AV gear. These remotes can be setup to be activity based, so that you’ll have a button for “Watch TV” or “Play DVD”. All that you need to do is hit one button and the remote automatically sets the right input on your TV, the right input on your AV receiver, starts the DVD player and might even dim the lights in your room. No fussing with a handful of remotes for what should be a simple task.

Getting back to the proposed Monarch change, instead of displaying Report, Table, and Summary ribbon tabs I envisioned workflow based tabs named “Acquire”, “Model”, “Analyze”, “Summarize” and finally a “Share” tab.

• The “Acquire” tab would have icons for opening any data source, a model or a project.
• The “Model” tab would have icons related to building Monarch models, including access to the template editor, linked objects, and the project and model information dialog.
• On the “Analyze” tab, icons would let you build calculated fields, sorts, filters, user-defined functions, address blocks, and external lookups.
• The “Summarize” tab would include icons for building and controlling summaries and charts.
• The “Share” tab would be the place to go for exporting your data into files that could be shared with others, be it for a single file export, or with project exports.

I argued that existing Monarch users would adapt quickly enough to this new presentation. Heck, the ribbon itself was a significant change. Why not capitalize on the current change? And new Monarch users would be able to better find their way; just like using one universal remote is a better experience than is juggling six of them.

But clearly my argument fell on deaf ears this time, and Monarch v11 didn’t change “radically”. Oh well, there’s always next time.

What do you think? Would you liked to have seen this configuration in Monarch v11? Or do you find that it is fine just as it is? Or would you prefer the choice to use whichever ribbon style that you like?

What’s Your Next Paradigm Shift?

Given that you can use Monarch to tackle virtually unstructured data or structured data source, for any type of content, what’s the Next Big Thing that you intend to do with Monarch software to benefit your organization? Hopefully whatever that is will be completely unlike the purpose that you’re using Monarch for now.

When a drastic change in how you view Monarch changes how you see your organization, these new perceptions can accomplish tremendous things together. Amid all of this change, there’s one constant that remains: it’s still exciting to excel with Monarch.

photo credit: Moucha

As you now know, I’ve been ill for quite some time. To be honest, this has taken a toll physically and emotionally, not just on me, but rather unavoidably, on my family as well. It’s been a tough time, and I’ll always be grateful to the many of you who read my various ramblings here who contacted me to enquire as to my status over the past months. My son, who’s 12, and my daughter, who’s seven, were both quite amazed to learn that daddy had friends in so many distant places that he had yet to meet.

I’m fortunate enough to have had disability insurance. But if you’ve ever had the unfortunate circumstance to need it, or know someone who has, you know that this means you’re merely receiving a portion of your normal income. I’m not a wealthy man. Over time, things get more difficult financially.

Announcing a Sale Price

With this in mind, today I’m announcing that effective immediately and only until March 31, 2012, I’m reducing the price of my 30 Days to Become a Better Monarch Modeler training package by over 50% from $97 to $47.

If you’ve been considering purchasing the package to maximize your Monarch skills, but the price was perhaps a concern for you, now you can get the same package that others had used to their benefit. People from literally around the world have accelerated their Monarch learning with this package, and I’m thrilled to continue to offer a full money-back guarantee for a full thirty days after you get your package, just in case you find that it’s not for you.

Since I introduced the 30 Days to Become a Better Monarch Modeler training package, I’ve had exactly one person request a refund, which he received immediately. Taking that into account, I think that the package continues to offer a great value, even at the regular price.

The package was built for Monarch v10, though there’s very little there that’s version specific. In fact, if you review the table of contents, you’ll see that there even chapters and exercises that don’t require using Monarch at all. So while a new version of Monarch has been released since the 30 Days package was made available, the training is still applicable and beneficial to the users of Monarch v11.

I encourage you to take advantage of this limited time offer and in 30 days you too will excel with Monarch.

photo credit: piermario

The irony is not lost on me.

In my last post here (in October 2010!), I wrote about how Datawatch was focusing on the healthcare industry. Well, since then I’ve had my own focus on the healthcare industry.

You see, since my last post, I’ve become a cancer patient.

Shortly after my last post I began to feel that something wasn’t quite right, but it wasn’t until March that I was diagnosed. In June I began a regime that included both chemotherapy and radiation treatments. As this was a head and neck cancer, the treatment was a difficult process and the recovery from the treatment itself continues to have its challenges, though I’m sure that cancer in any location is no fun. Both physically and mentally, this has been a trying time for me and my family, and I’m sorry, but writing about software and techniques has not been a priority for me of late.

But the mental fog has lifted somewhat, and I’m beginning to feel much better physically now, eating normally and getting regular exercise, so it’s time to attempt to return to some semblance of normalcy.

During my absence from ExcelWithMonarch.com, there have been a number of developments that we can discuss. For today, let’s have a look and perhaps you can take a moment to write a comment to share your thoughts.

New Management

Perhaps the most important change is the new management team at Datawatch. Almost exactly a year ago today, Mr. Michael Morrison was named as the new President and Chief Executive Officer of the company. Since then, the company has made a number of changes that the market clearly seems to believe have improved its fortunes. As if to reinforce the point, new partnering announcements are practically regular events.

The once annual Datawatch User Conference has been announced, and will take place in Las Vegas this year. Will you be attending?

A wholesale makeover was performed on the main Datawatch web site, and there’s now a focus on the new terminology, “report analytics”, which to me better represents the goal of the company’s flagship software than did the “data mining” terminology. Of course, it should be of no surprise that the new terminology would be my preference as I’ve been espousing Monarch’s analytical abilities online on this site since 2007, and elsewhere well before that.

Monarch v11

A long awaited upgrade to Monarch arrived last year, and due to a number of lingering issues, a few patches (upgrades) have already been released, the latest bringing Monarch to v11.1. Have you implemented v11? If so, what are your thoughts? What do you like? What could be improved?

Time Hasn’t Cured All

Though over a year has passed since my last post here, I’m certain that not all of our data problems have been solved. What problems do you continue to battle? How do you plan to overcome the roadblocks that you face this year? Will Monarch become more a part of your solutions package, or less so? If I were to hazard a guess I’d say that there’s just as much of an opportunity for Monarch to be a critical part of your toolkit now as there ever has been, in fact perhaps even more so. With the technical improvements developed with Monarch v11 in both 32-bit and 64-bit editions, a new foundation has been established for a whole new generation of Monarch; one that will hopefully add many new useful abilities that will make each new version leaps and bounds better than its predecessors.

A Year Later

Perhaps I’m mistaken, but in the year that’s passed I don’t see that the need for, nor the benefits of, Monarch have diminished or have been replaced by something better. In fact, the opposite has occurred. Monarch v11 offers the ability to work with even greater data sets, and while it might not have immediately added a cartful of obviously new features, it has been rebuilt in such a way, if I understand it correctly, that facilitates future development. It’s going to be exciting to see what happens with it. I don’t have a crystal ball to gaze into to foretell the upcoming year, but I think that it will be an exciting time. Will this be the year in which you choose to excel with Monarch?

photo credit: bb_matt

You may have previously read here on ExcelWithMonarch.com about the many benefits that Monarch technology provides to the healthcare industry.

It seems that the potential advantages of utilizing the right BI software are so significant and vital to the healthcare sector in particular that Datawatch Corporation recently appointed Mr. Tom Callahan to better service those important customers.

Today an interview with Mr. Callahan was posted on ITBusinessEdge.com, in which he discusses the many ways that BI technology can be employed by those in healthcare. Among the discussion points are:

• The types of providers that can benefit from BI, and the impact the HITECH Act (Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act) is having on the industry
• Three real-world examples of BI solutions at work in healthcare
• Prioritizing wish-list items and what can be accomplished affordably today

This is Important for You

You may not currently, or ever, work in the healthcare industry, but developments such as these can absolutely have an effect on your personal future. In fact, they may be crucial to your long term success.

As more and more organizations (and even entire industries) recognize the fantastic return on investment and ease of implementation and use that Datawatch’s suite of products built on Monarch technology deliver, the opportunities for you personally will only continue to increase when you excel with Monarch.

photo credit: a.drian

We’re in the age of the omnipresent Apple iPod. Portable media players such as Apple’s iconic devices allow many people to now have literally thousands of songs at their fingertips everywhere they go. They can enjoy their favorites and experience new music at their whim. But this ability has fundamentally changed how we listen to the music that we purchase.

Way back when, the most popular format for recorded music was the vinyl record. As a typical listener, you’d begin with the first song on the first side and listen until you had to flip the record over, and then listen to that side.

Cassette tapes and 8-track cartridges each had their day in the sun, but ultimately didn’t have the staying power of the vinyl record. Along the way, the Sony Walkman cassette player made people realize that listening to recorded music could be a portable experience.

But with the introduction Compact Disc, the entire experience of listening changed. Most CD players offered the ability to skip certain tracks on the CD, or to randomize the order in which the songs were played. Some multi-disc players even randomized the songs on multiple CDs so that they would play a song on one CD and then play a song on a different CD until all of the songs had been played.

People began to get in the habit of listening to only the songs that they liked, or in a different sequence than that which the artist designed.

Can you imagine how some of the biggest selling and most well-known pop and rock albums, for example, of the last 50 years would be different if the order of the songs were different? Maybe the Rolling Stone’s Tattoo You didn’t begin with Start Me Up, or A Day in the Life wasn’t the last song on The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band but was the second song? Or “concept albums” such as The Who’s Tommy, that told a story from beginning to end had jumbled the story? And what of Pink Floyd’s masterpiece Dark Side of the Moon, which is really best enjoyed in an uninterrupted session. Would those have the same impact and success if their stories had been different?

It’s All About the Story

I wonder if this change in listening habits, and how we’re all accustomed to the quick track and the “sound bites”, has actually affected how we use software such as Monarch. If you’re thinking that I’ve been listening to a bit too much Floyd, please give me a moment.

More often than not I see that people want to get going and do a quick data capture and export that data to some other document or database, and that’s it. In. Out. Done. Just like listening to few random tracks on an iPod.

Monarch is of course more than able to support such a work style. But you’ll be missing out on its real potential if you don’t listen to the album all the way through. That is, if you don’t use Monarch as the powerful analysis tool that it is.

Do you regularly add calculated fields to your extractions to not just improve the quality of the extraction but to add further abilities with which to analyze the source data and let it tell its story?

Do you add not just one or two filters to build the correct data set, if there were difficulties in the original template traps due to the layout of the report, but many filters to really find the shining stars in the vast universe that is the entire data set?

Do you build multiple summaries with various combinations of key fields to help your data show you what’s really going on? Do you use summaries in order to reveal well hidden information that could be critical to your organization?

The iPod in the Age of Monarch

Yes, it’s a hectic and fast-paced world today. There’s much to do, and seemingly less time to do it in.

Stop the world for a few extra minutes. Listen to the entire album as it was meant to be heard and you’ll excel with Monarch.

photo credit: DerkT