Category: Editorial
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Sequent Values and Principles
During the early 90’s I had the honour and pleasure to work with a great group of people at Sequent Computer Systems. The company had a set of great set of values and principles and I often refer to them and sometimes am asked for a copy. In the absence of being able to find…
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Addressing Business Intelligence Data Quality
A friend of mine posted a link to Michael W. Dobson’s TeleMapics Blog entitled Google Maps announces a 400 year advantage over Apple Maps about Apple’s problems with the release of their own mapping solution with iOS6. These problems are well documented elsewhere but Michael’s post highlights problems not just associated with mapping data but common across…
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Inspirational Data Visualization
Data visualization has come of age – there is now no excuse for not only having good information but also for presenting it in an engaging and informative way. Here we look at a number of sites that can inspire and inform the way you present your information. Nathan Yau has a blog called Flowing Data that gathers…
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Password Security
An article in the Metro newspaper I picked up on the tube recently once again made the point about just how easy it is to hack most peoples web accounts. I know this is true because, even though I know better, a little over a year ago I was sharing a password between multiple sites…
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Business Intelligence – BPR by the back door?
In a recent discussion with a client I was asked how come we knew, as a Business Intelligence company, so much about business process and operational systems. My reply is a sincere view that I have held for some time – developing good Business Intelligence means implementing Business Process Re-engineering (BPR) to enable the organisation…
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At last someone we understand …
It is rare with all the background reading and research that I have to do that I read a contemporary book and say “Yes, this guy gets it” – notice that I say contemporary. There are plenty of good books about the day-to-day business intelligence problems that I see which were written over 20 years…
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Data Warehouse Appliances – Fad or Future?
This article was originally written for Conspectus Magazine in December 2006 and has been updated in November 2009 by the original author Despite all the hype from vendors the basics of data warehousing have remained fundamentally unchanged – extract data from multiple source systems, reformat the information into an easy to query structure, load it into a…
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Analysis by ETL …
Performing source-system analysis by writing ETL is just about the most expensive way you can do it; but many organisations do exactly that. Why? Because they “can’t afford” to do their analysis the cheaper way. No, this does not make sense. This is how it works… In most data warehousing projects, business analysts are separated…
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The project wiki – a cost reduction tool
Some readers will be familiar with TED: Ideas Worth Spreading a series of talks on just about everything worthwhile in Technology, Education and Design. I recently revisited Yochai Benklers talk on the new open-source economics from 2005 where he explains how collaborative projects like Wikipedia and Linux represent the next stage of human organisation. The principle discussed is one…
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Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practise to deceive!
The deception in our case is the accuracy of the data and the return on investment of the data warehouse solution. Too often projects make compromises in the implementation of a business intelligence solution that create massive cost and user dis-satisfaction downstream that lead to the failure of BI projects: For example: * In the…
Data Management & Warehousing 
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