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I had my imagination stumble into a scenario recently based on Jeremy Miller’s blog entry “My Game Plan for Starting a Project from Scratch”.  Imagine a development project where you get to start everything from scratch.  Imagine you can setup everything properly from the test servers to the virtual environment to the development platform to the continuous integration server to the methodology process.  What would you do?  What would you use? These are the questions that come…(read more)

So many ezines, so many pitches, so much color, so much urgency, so much of so much. And then along comes—let me check the name—yes, Gordon Daly with a little ezine that’s nothing but a short letter (look it up: letter!) and I actually read it.

I can’t explain. I don’t know what happens. It’s black on white with something colorful but not too big at the top. There are a couple of links in the second paragraph and below but not too many.

Today’s is the second one. I read the first one, too, but I brushed it off. A fluke, I said. Then I read today’s. Not a fluke. The guy has something. What is it?

He’s pitching for DataMentors. His signature identifies him as the director of marketing.

He writes simply with a hint of a story. No jargon meant to impress me (which just annoys me). No vague phrases that could apply to anything, anywhere.

Here’s yesterday’s first sentence: “If your database keeps adding the same customer records over and over again, it may be suffering from a severe technology affliction called Datadupitis (dā-tə-düp-ī-təs).” That’s funny. Not a side-splitter, but it works. It’s also a tiny surprise, just enough.

Next sentence: “The fundamental problem: your database(s) isn’t recognizing your customers.” I take off a half point for the “s” in parentheses, but I give him a full two points for getting me to read the second sentence. This is new territory.

Third sentence: “That’s a customer service wreck just waiting to happen. So, how can you expect to possibly develop a profitable relationship with them?” I get goosebumps just having read any ezine’s third sentence. More goosebumps for the simple writing.

Let me reveal something here. I don’t have anything like the problem he’s describing. I have FileMaker, and I enter everything by hand. Yet I’ve come all the way to the third sentence.

The fourth sentence gives me chills it’s so short, so simple. “A database is a wonderful thing.” Yes!! Not that a database is a wonderful thing. Sure, fine. It’s the simplicity!

Compare his opening with those of three other BI-related ezines I chose at random (and haven’t even opened before now):

• Ezine #1: Headline: “Improve Business Performance with an Open Business Intelligence (BI) Model.” Body: “A collaborative reporting architecture encourages participation across user and producer communities and fosters an iterative report development process which speeds development and adoption of the reporting application” and blah, blah, blah.
• Ezine #2: Straight to the body: “The scale and pace of today’s business change is challenging us all to do more - better, faster and with greater efficiency.”
• Ezine #3: A big, graphic headline reads, “Whitepaper of the day,” followed by a thick horizontal ad. The whitepaper’s title: “Optimizing Data Content To Improve Marketing Performance,” followed by, “The traditional data industry has not seen true innovation in decade [sic].”
• Ezine #4: Under the ezine’s name and issue number, it begins, “View these Online Events recently held on xxxx.com” followed by bullet points: “Executive Command & Control: Governance of Risk, Performance Assurance & Operational Excellence; Project Risk - Why are 50% of IT projects still failing; Improving Operational Efficiency and Business Performance in Midsize Retailers…”

Nothing concrete, no hint of a story, no surprises. They waste their bytes on me.

Good job, Gordon Daly.

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Estamos encantados de poder publicar en TodoBI.com un documento muy interesante realizado por una gran seguidora y lectora del Portal. Se trata de Ivette Marrero, de Cuba. De donde contamos con un nutrido grupo de lectores, además de colaboradores profesionales dado el gran nivel técnico de muchos de sus profesionales.

Además del Estudio que abajo reseñamos, tambien nos gustaría mencionar el gran esfuerzo que se está haciendo el la promoción del uso de la Inteligencia de Negocio, con eventos, como el celebrado hace poco: Intempres, donde la propia Ivette formaba parte del Comité Cientifico.

Estudio: La inteligencia de Negocios desde la perspectiva cubana: retos y tendencias

Se trata de un estudio muy pormenorizado del estado actual del uso de la Inteligencia de Negocios en las Organizaciones Cubanas, así como las principales tecnologías utilizadas.
Un estudio muy completo y actualizado, que nos gustaría se pudiera ir reproduciendo en otros paisese Latinoamericanos o en España, pues existe cierta carencia de este tipo de información objetiva e independiente. Como digo un gran trabajo para conocer el BI a nivel cubano, pero cuya metodología es extendible a cualquier otro país.

Well, the week of the DIG conference is finally here. Looking forward to the three days. My guess is that the week will go by quickly. Here are some random thoughts and things to look forward to:

1. The clinics on Tuesday should be a good opportunity to roll the sleeves up on some great topics. I will be helping out Glyn Heatley during his clinic on CPM and BI architecture. I took a look at the content this afternoon and there is a lot to cover in the 3.5 hours, but it should provide people with some follow up actions for their organizations! Mark Lorence’s talk on analytics is great, especially if you are struggling with what are the right measures for your organization (one thing to note, Mark’s clinic will be in the afternoon on Tuesday, not the morning). I am very interested and will be attending Jevon MacDonald’s and Thomas Vander Wal’s clinic on Enterprise 2.0. If you aren’t currently signed up for a clinic, there is still time to register!

2. If you didn’t notice the Twitter update box on the right side of the blog, take a look at the talkdig Twitter user. If you aren’t familiar with Twitter, it is a “micro-blogging” technology that uses text messaging to make posts. I have been using Twitter for about 3 months and it is a fun way to communicate with friends and colleagues. We are hoping that DIG attendees sign up and use it as a way to receive conference updates, ask questions during the Q&A, or simply try to informally organize with colleagues while at the DIG conference. It will also be a way to stay connected after the conference ends. Signing up is free and all you need to do is start “following” the talkdig user once you are setup.

3. We have one speaker change for Thursday. Bo Cowgill from Google will unfortunately not be able to join us, but instead we will have Mat Fogarty presenting on the topic of prediction markets. Mat is the founder of Xpree, which focuses on providing enterprise prediction market solutions. Prior to starting Xpree, Mat was the Director of Financial Planning on Electronic Arts where he was responsible for running prediction markets forecasting key metrics. Mat’s session will be titled “Using prediction markets to tap employee wisdom”. We are excited to have Mat speak at DIG!

4. On Wednesday, we have a “mega vendor” panel planned with our three platinum event sponsors Oracle, Microsoft and SAP/Business Objects. I am looking forward to have all three vendors on stage together in a moderated discussion on future technology trends. Since this is a bit of a unique opportunity to have them all together on stage at once, we are going to video tape the discussion and make it available in the coming weeks. Stay tuned.

5. Go Celtics - could you at least win one road game during the playoffs!!!

That’s it for now. Looking forward to seeing everyone in Las Vegas. Stay tuned for updates during the week. We plan on blogging at the end of the day and hopefully get some pictures posted.

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Rules of Thumb is a fine website for those of use who enjoy proxy metrics, the things you use to judge when you can’t judge the real thing.

Picking a restaurant is one obsession on the site. One rule attributed to CBS’s Andy Rooney says to avoid cute names because owners aren’t serious about food. Others say that newspaper reviews in the window signal one that’s neither too bad nor too snooty. Some people believe a “high class” joint is good. The smartest one says look first at the restroom.

There is a better way. My ex-wife managed restuarants for 22 years and knows the game. Put her anywhere in the world and the odds are 10 to 1 she’ll pick a good restaurant.

She says you have to keep in mind one thing: the biggest single factor in a restaurant’s quality is the attention to detail. Two restaurants with the same payroll, the same dining room, and the same ingredients can have much different quality. The difference is whether someone on staff is really paying attention.

Attention means keeping an eye on everything, even the small things. The quality-assurance route runs through the kitchen, the dining room and outside. A clean door, well-tended plants, and clean windows show that someone cared enough to keep them that way.

Next, see if the menu matches the season. Then go inside and sniff. Does it smell good? Do people seem happy?

The attention to what seems trivial indicates the level of attention paid to what you don’t see, such as ingredient selection, food storage and cooking.

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I have finally got around to reading SAS for Dummies by Stephen McDaniels and Chris Hemedinger  (well I flicked through it at least).

One of the tips has ended up saving me a lot of time lately.

When you are in Enterprise Guide and you have large flows in the project designer, you also typically end up with a large number of tables, result, logs, code blocks etc open as well as individual tabs.

The downside of this is it is a hassle scrolling left to go back to the procces designer view.

I thought I was being clever when I worked out I could just click on the project explorer view and then on project designer at the top of the tree.

Well all you need to do is press ‘F4′ and you will be taken to the project designer windows faster than a F1 Ferrari.

Ok, so I’m a day late! I had to catch a train back to Brussels, and considering I hadn’t seen my family since Monday morning, I didn’t spend last night blogging! Besides, the four days were fairly taxing. Whether you think you know everything about dimensional modeling or not, the material was fairly dense and Warren and Margy both moved fast.

If you are serious about data warehousing, and call yourself a data warehousing professional (especially if you are a “dimensional modeler”), then attending this and other sessions is a must. I learned more Warren and Margy directly than I could have from their books. And hearing about their various experiences added an extra dimension (no pun) to the education.

Now, if we can just convince them to create a certification exam…

ETL System

The entire morning was focused on ETL Design and Development. The first step in designing the ETL processes is to meet a basic set of requirements. These would include having all business requirements fleshed out; a “solid” dimensional model ready to go; data quality, archiving, lineage, and management infrastructures defined; compliance, latency, and security issues addressed; and finally a good understanding of all application requirements. With these in place, it is possible to create the ETL System.

Basically, the ETL system is in charge of converting source system data to the data warehouse database. Don’t get hung up on the acronym though. Depending on the circumstances, the process may feel more like ELT, or ELTL, or E&T, more T, some L, and more T.

Warren recommends using an ETL vendor tool mainly because the tools handle technical metadata requirements and likely have a lot of other very helpful functionality built in (logging, standard tasks, connection managers, dimension management, surrogate key lookup capability, in-memory pipelining, etc..).

As many of you know, I am an advocate of hand-coding ETL, especially using Visual FoxPro. VFP makes it easy to build in all the things that other ETL tools do with little effort. In addition, VFP is data centric and object-oriented, and if the ETL processes are designed correctly can be totally metadata driven. With that said, ETL tools are getting better and better. If you have a couple of developers in house that are experienced with FoxPro or another data-centric language, then by all means go for it. If not, then using an ETL tool is likely your best bet.

Regardless if you hand-code or buy, Warren defined the following steps that are needed to develop the ETL system:

1. Create a high-level plan for the target model
2. Install and learn the ETL tool!
3. Determine your default strategies
4. Drill down by target table
5. Develop the historical load for dimensions
6. Populate historical facts
7. Dimension table incremental processing
8. Fact table incremental processing
9. Aggregate and OLAP loads
10. ETL operation and automation

Nothing earth-shattering, but I have seen first-hand how ETL systems can stall and flutter along because one or more steps were ignored or done out of order. The Kimball Group has spent a long time together developing their best-practice and practical techniques so that we can all benefit. This list is just another example; it’s a simple pattern to follow that will likely lead to greater successes.

Name and Address Fun

As part of our ETL discussion, we spoke of data cleansing and conforming. One major challenge that data integrators have is dealing with very dirty data from multiple source systems. One good example is the challenges associated with name and address matching.

Warren showed us a series of slides with scanned address labels delivered (miraculously in some cases if you saw the slides) to his house. His name was butchered in every which way. Some had his name as Thorn. Another had him as a woman. It goes to show that data quality and name and address cleansing is very hard to do. When you consider that some companies spend millions on their mailings, this is a big deal: And they can’t even get it right!

BI Applications

After lunch, we dove right into a discussion on Business Intelligence (BI) Applications. One thing Warren said really stuck out to me, and it is something I wrote in big letters on my copy of the presentation slides: BRANDING.

BI Applications are in fact a way for us — as DW/BI professionals — to brand our services. We create our image through the BI Application layer. Despite all the background and expertise we need to do all other phases of the LifeCycle, the executives, managers, and users will see us through our applications.

I admit, I had an “ah-ha” moment when this came up. Everything from Portal design to reporting templates to our logo (yes, we need a logo too!) is equally as important as cleansing and conforming data, designing a perfect data model, and conducting hours upon ours of requirement-gathering interviews.

I only wish that we had more time to spend on this topic. An entire day would have been great.

BI Toolkit

We need a BI Toolkit. A vendor-neutral, general discussion on what it means to deliver BI Applications to our users. I talked with both Margy and Warren about this and both seemed to agree (as does their publisher). It’s been in their sights for some time now, I suppose. While the other toolkit books have been an invaluable reference for the entire community — this book could literally change the way data warehousing teams and businesses consider BI, BI Applications, and the various possibilities that BI offers.

Personally, I would like this book to take more time delving into user requirements. I don’t want it to tell me why I need one p-value over another, nor do I want it to tell me to use Business Objects because it can support feature X or Y. I need a reference that reminds me that developing a scorecard requires multiple business processes, that building a reporting template to pass around to business users can be a great tool to flesh out design decisions, and that perhaps a “BI Matrix” needs to be developed so that each BI Application can be resolved against each underlying business process dimensional model. Ideally, it would be a book that a business sponsor can read and digest, while providing the Data Warehousing team with enough technical knowledge to appropriately evaluate tools, build strategies, and formulate roll out plans that give the user the biggest and quickest return on their investments.

Lastly…

It’s a bummer that Warren had to race through the deployment and maintenance materials. We really did have a good class though, and a lot of great questions were asked. You can tell that most people in the room really “get it”, and their questions all reflect that. Of course, this led to a few diversions and a tangent or two. We paid for that in the last section. Thankfully, I have a brand new, 2cnd Edition Lifecylce Toolkit book to refer to!

…

This was a great experience for me, and I met a lot of great people. If you haven’t been to one of these courses, I recommend it no matter the cost.

If you have questions or comments for me, don’t be shy. I will be writing more and more about these topics in future postings, and I’ll also be picking up where I left off with my postings on the ETL Subsytems 1 through 34. So if there is something you would like me to address first, let me know!

As Darren Cunningham already mentioned, Rob Ashe (general manager of IBM’s business intelligence and performance management unit) commented that “BI doesn’t lend itself to SaaS” in an interview. His explanation is:

“Every company is different because even if transaction systems are the same the decision making process is different. Unlike Netsuite or a CRM application where everyone does the same basic things, BI uses a different model at every company.”

For the past decade, the notion that ‘every company is different’ has been the rallying cry of any traditional software vendor trying to brush aside the SaaS trend. When I was at salesforce.com in 1999, the traditional CRM vendors were claiming that CRM doesn’t lend itself to SaaS, because every company has a unique sales process, everyone has a different sales organization structure, and everyone manages their pipeline differently. To some extent, that’s true. But, there is enough similarity between enough companies that SaaS CRM works as long as the SaaS vendor provides the ability to configure the solution to account for the differences. So, every SaaS CRM solution lets you configure the sales stages to match those of your company, and define the reporting structure that your sales organization uses.

The exact same argument holds true for BI. I ran a BI consulting company for many years, and we built lots of typical analytic solutions such as sales and pipeline analysis, marketing analysis, and financial analysis. We learned that though the specific way companies would word their questions about a specific business area were often different, the types of questions they asked about that business area were very similar. For example, let’s looks at sales analytics. There are typical questions that people want to ask no matter what company they’re in, such as which deals are moving through their pipeline and which ones are stuck, how has their pipeline has changed over time, how are their sales reps performing across a range of common metrics, what are the trends in new versus repeat business, etc.

That is, there is enough similarity between the types of questions people ask about their business to make SaaS BI work very well, as long as the vendor gives you the ability to configure the solution to account for the specifics of how your company works (such as being able to include in the analysis custom fields that exist in a transactional system).

Need proof that it works? Check out salesforce.com’s AppExchange to see the customer success that LucidEra’s customers are having with on-demand analytics. How does Rob Ashe explain that?

The Our Latest Discovery blog just discovered the SAS point of view on anti-money laundering software.

If you’re interested in similar discoveries, check out these video points of view from other SAS thought leaders:

• Jonathan Hornby’s POV on performance management.
• Jeff Gilleland’s POV on customer intelligence.
• Stuart Rose’s POV on the insurance industry.
• Ellen Joyner’s POV on the banking industry.
• Clark Abraham’s POV on fair banking.
• Mark Moorman’s POV on fraud management.

These are definitely more scripted than the videos you may have see on our YouTube Channel, but the videos, in most cases, are still enlightening. Each provides answers to questions about industry trends, business challenges and customer results.
our point of view? What long-term trends are you facing in your industry?

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