Data Quality and Bandit Sheep?
It was widely reported this week that more than one out of every 100 Americans is a criminal. That’s nothing… There’s a country that I can’t name (but they play rugby and have lots of sheep). The national police force wanted a “single view of the criminal”, and so created a central data warehouse from a variety of operational and legacy systems. The ended up with a database of 4.5 million names. This was a problem,... [Read More...]
Why Build Your Own BI Platform?
Sure, you can cobble together your own BI platform, by combining data integration, data quality, metadata management, master data, query and reporting, analysis, publishing, etc. etc. But, just like the “make your own umbrella” kit above, it will seem increasingly ridiculous to do so. Read More →
Xcelsius Pac-Man?
An old pie chart joke, with Xcelsius reflections. Read More →
Who Really Wants Predictive Analytics?
The value of predictive analytics seems obvious: who wants to “drive looking out of the rear view mirror”? Several recent books, articles and blog postings point to a resurgence of interest in the topic, but what the term actually means is — as usual in our industry – subject to some debate. I’ve tended to use the term to refer to predictive models, overlapping with the term “data mining”,... [Read More...]
Data Quality and The Art of Despair?
Check out the deeply subversive management videos at the despair.com site. Here, Dr. E.L. Kersten uses a mailing list debacle to illustrate his Demotivators© organizational storytelling techniques. Remember — it could be worse… Read More →
Compare Yourself To a Hedge Fund Manager!
In an earlier post, I talked about the importance of benchmarking your performance against others. So, with tongue firmly in cheek, here’s a personal, interactive benchmarking model for you. Top hedge fund managers made over $657M in 2006. Use this handy calculator to work out how long it took them to make more than you do all year — the time to brush their teeth? Take a shower? Commute? (model below — you will probably have to... [Read More...]
What Executives Want from BI?
Joe McKendrick recently posted on the ongoing difficulties faced by companies trying to use business intelligence effectively, especially for executive users: Many of today’s BI solutions, in fact, ‘have only exacerbated the amount of information that is bombarding senior management and left it up to them to decipher, collate and try to find the nuggets of useful and relevant information for their particular responsibility.’ What... [Read More...]
Hansel and Gretel Explain Data Lineage?
The Camtasia Studio video content presented here requires JavaScript to be enabled and the latest version of the Macromedia Flash Player. If you are you using a browser with JavaScript disabled please enable it now. Otherwise, please update your version of the free Flash Player by downloading here. // The importance of data lineage is in the news. Here’s a quick look at how data lineage and metadata relate to BI and… Hansel... [Read More...]
BI 2.0 Buzzwords
Did I forget any buzzwords? You can download a powerpoint version here Read More →
Why Data Quality is Important…
A true story of data quality problems. Just for fun. (2 mins) The Camtasia Studio video content presented here requires JavaScript to be enabled and the latest version of the Macromedia Flash Player. If you are you using a browser with JavaScript disabled please enable it now. Otherwise, please update your version of the free Flash Player by downloading here. // More seriously, data quality is a real issue for today’s organizations.... [Read More...]
I was the eighth employee of 
