Recent Blogs Posts

This week I read an interesting article at http://zd.net/Yg7VG6 that was entitled ‘Six Sigma killed Innovation …..” and it got me thinking about my previous views on this subject.

I am glad I watched the video clip all the way to the end, because it put things into perspective.

Six Sigma was a Jack Welch & Toyota initiative (mostly) to achieve zero manufacturing defect. However, when unqualified, this flies directly in the face of the ...

Let me start off by saying that I don’t have an answer, just more questions.
I also want to predict that whatever is being said today will be debunked a year from now. I still have a wait and see attitude towards returns from big data because there are many people and technology vendors that have figured out the HOW before there is a solid case for WHAT and WHY.


The whole idea of big data married to social analytics is very much in its birthing ...

Data Quality in Business as a whole is very important, but in the BI (Business Intelligence) implementation, it becomes the make-or-break factor. Let's expound on a few of the data quality issues we find in various BI implementations.

Physical schema is different from the data model
Yikes! If this was a house, it would not receive council approval. However in the world of BI, we often create a quilt patchwork that morphs from an original design to something that the original implementors ...

Today's subject is less technical but very relevant to anyone who has been an employee or an employer



The first subject area is the notion that a resume needs to have an objective. My thoughts are "why is this notion so popular?". My advice is to ditch it. Here is why:

• You’re trying to land a job.
• The job exists because the employer has a need to have a place filled.
• Primarily, the employer does not care too much about YOUR objective other than to see

...

One of the most frustrating things to deal with as an innovative BI software vendor is the lack of urgency that many prospective customers have towards their information delivery. They know they need the information, they know they could save so much time and effort if they had what they needed without employing an army of excel ninja's, but apathy keeps them from redirecting resources to getting clear, understandable, actionable information. The false sense of security in maitaining the status ...

Recently I saw this youtube clip, in which a woman who is walking and texting, fell into a fountain.



Here we have proof that if you focus on the urgent but ignore the important, you stand a good chance of getting yourself into trouble. I was relieved to see that this was not a motorway, building site or shooting range.

In business, we can manage what we measure, but is the focus right ?

There is a ...

I am often asked to define Business Intelligence to others. What can make this challenging is the audience's perception of what BI is or is not.

People ask me to clarify if BI is:

• Data Warehousing
• Master Data Management
• BPM (Business Performance Management / Monitoring
• Reports
• Dashboards / Scorecards
• Data Quality
• Cubes
• Alerts (part of BPM)

The truth is that it is all of the above. Let's use a different analogy.

Think of a cake. What is a cake? ...

You do NOT have to be the superstar every time !

I recently sat through a series of 'The Office' starring Steve Carell and laughed till my sides hurt from the management bumblings of Michael Scott, the self-obsessed, egomaniac character that Steve plays. In show after show, you can't help thinking 'what a jerk! I hope I never report to someone like him!'. Although it is littered with typical American slapstick humour (my opinion), it nonetheless invokes a feeling of sympathy from me ...

I've often come across the situation where some user has access to a star schema and decides that they want to run a query (let's say product sales by region for the last quarter, compared with the same period a year before. Data volumes make a huge difference here.

So the query in its simplistic form (for current selected period) might look something like this:
select p.Desc as Product, R.name as RegionName, sum(T1.Amt) as TurnoverAmount
from
FactSales T1 ...

I've seen a lot of informative BI systems, where graphs, reports and charts just keep appearing.

However, if organizations are to see a tangible benefit to BI, it needs to prompt us (the consumers of BI) into action, otherwise it is very much like looking at your temperature gauge in your car that is flashing red telling you it is overheating (imploring you to take action) and you not doing anything about it. Without some action, it's just noise and does nothing to prevent trouble, ...

This is going to be a lengthy post, so go grab a cup of coffee or tea and take this mini-journey with me. We'll discuss the reasons why so many Business intelligence deployments are flawed and why a lot of BI projects are eventually abandoned or taken up very slowly.

Lack of upfront planning

A common assumption in BI projects is that "If we build it, they will come".

Inconsistent implementations, lack of executive sponsorship, ...

The answer to this question might be given away in the form of other questions, like:

• How many top-class athletes do you see hanging out at greasy fast-food joints?
• How important is diet to an Olympic athlete?
• How important are good tyres (ok, tires for the US audience, there!) to racing car performance?

The GIGO (Garbage In --> Garbage Out) principle most certainly applies when it comes to data quality. For BI to be pervasive in the organization, the organization must firstly trust ...