During the last few years, I have studied things related to time, processes and statistics in order to build support for process data warehousing and time-oriented KPI's in the Effektor product.
This blog post is a wrap-up of my learning experiences with online courses, books and the like, in case you are interested in learning about these topics yourself.
Using the excellent Coursera platform, I started studiyng basic statistics, regression analysis and analysis of variance in the course Statistics One, offered by Princeton. This course lays a great foundation for further studies. If this course is not offered, I would go for the MIT statistics introductory courses on edX,
I read about accumulation snapshot fact tables, the basic theory to work with process data warehousing, in chapter 5 in Kimball et als book on dimensional modeling. In Effektor, we implemented a generalization of this model as well as a modelling UI and an auto generator for data warehouse tables and ETL processes.
I read basic introductory books on Lean and Six Sigma to get examples of ways to utilize time-oriented KPI's, especially with respect to variance of intervals/activity lengths in processes. Visit Amazon and grab a couple of used ones. They are cheap and a good value. I can also recommend Niklas Modigs book "This is Lean".
Later, I took Coursera courses in operations management (Wharton Business School) and Process Mining (Eindhoven University of Technology). The former to get a standard vocabulary of process terms and to get inspiration for standard reporting on process data. The latter to get a feel of the maturity of the academic field of process mining to see how far this is from being a tool in a process oriented BI consultants toolbelt. Both courses were great, but very demanding with respect to time and complexity, so make sure to set aside enough time if you want to follow them.
Chris Date have recorded a master class on Data and Relational Theory, which I watched and got a lot of inspiration to learn more about the new temporal feature in SQL Server 2016 (where you should expect to see quite a few blog posts about during 2016).
Tomorrow, I enroll in my last Coursera course on these topics. The course Process Improvement promises to help me to "learn about managing organizational initiatives for continuous improvement and about implementing projects for making improvements to work processes. You will learn frameworks and techniques that are commonly used under Lean and Six Sigma process improvement initiatives." I'm looking forward to dive deeper into an understanding of Lean and Six Sigma and will write up a summary of the course later this month.
Read more about Coursera courses here:
Purchase Chris Dates master class on temporal here (no, I don't get a commision):
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