DecisionFirst Technologies

During the summer of 2015 I interned with Decision First Technologies, a small Atlanta-based SAP parter for business intelligence consulting. I worked on three major projects. In addition to the three projects, I helped to design and build client dashboards.

The first project was to create an end-user installer for a Salesforce-BusinessObjects integration tool. This involved building a Java-based GUI and command line application to gather information from an existing BusinessObjects installation and use it to automatically configure a server. Additionally, we improved the process to create a specific salesforce installation.

The second was to build a specialized set of internal tooling for BusinessObjects dashboards. Specifically, a common client request was for dashboards to contain a table of database-bound key performance indicators along with summary analytics for them. The tool I created was a javascript extension to an existing BusinessObjects component that would allow the streamlined creation of KPI tables and the included charts (such as bulletcharts, sparklines, and other KPI indicators). The tool was built in javascript using d3 for visualizations.

The final project was an exploratory implementation of an alternate BusinessObjects backend. Instead of a Java and tomcat-based system, the interns suggested we design a python-based system built on Flask and SQLAlchemy because it would be both faster and easier to use. The system we designed was both, however it was difficult to impossible to deploy on client systems. We did use it to streamline the process of building and testing dashboards and visualizations.