Monthly Archives: November 2014

Consider this: Data Warehousing Without Tears

30 Sunday Nov 2014

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 Old advice is still good advice, if it is truly good advice.

It’s an older piece (from the nineties), but a lot of it is still relevant and pertinent.

So, here is a brief run-down on how to avoid crashing and burning Data Warehousing.

Understand that a Data Warehouse should only contain subject oriented, integrated, non-volatile and time-variant information to support strategic and tactical requirements of management – Keeping the purpose of the Data Warehouse highly focused will eliminate the dilution of a Data Warehouse solutions effectiveness. If what Bill Inmon said in this respect almost invariably results in successful DW projects – and that’s not speculation but proven fact – then I don’t see any rational reason at the moment to change our views on this.

Ensure High-level Business Sponsorship – A very old commentary by the Hurwitz group pointed to a Price Waterhouse Coopers survey that said that 67% of warehouses fail, and related successes to the fact that “successful warehouses received sponsorship from key business executives. Therefore, with the need to focus on answering business questions, data warehouses should be designed in a way that the information they contain and the structure that is used should be intuitive for business users to use.

Understand and Involve The Business User. Always – The Business End-Users of the Data Warehouse should form an integral part of the Data Warehouse project team – either directly, or in the case of a large user community, through adequate, appropriate and timely end-user representation. End-User participation in a project does not imply that everyone else can take a back seat. Every assistance possible must be given to ensure that the End-Users understand what is possible, how much it costs and how long it takes. Every relevant piece of data warehouse project data, information and knowledge must be made available to the End-User and when necessary explained to the End-User in terms they can understand. Don’t expect users to have all the answers or to be able to provide you with answers in precisely the form that you may be expecting those answers. Be understanding, be flexible, and also don’t forget that business is dynamic and in a state of almost constant change. Therefore, don’t just hypothesize about users changing their minds, one must expect it to happen. Anticipate change and prepare for it, embrace change and make it work for you. Let’s not ever forget that the building of a Data Warehouse is for the benefit of the whole business and a partnership in which everyone has a major stake.

Start with a Technology Pilot – One of the best ways to ensure the initial success of an Enterprise Wide Data Warehouse is to select an initial project that is:

  • Small enough to be achievable
  • Large enough to be significant
  • High business profile if successful

Don’t Make the DW an IT Project – I recommend that a Data Warehouse is first and foremost a Business Project that just happens to need information technology products and services. Don’t just hand-over all the responsibility for your Enterprise Data Warehouse project to the IT function – Make sure that the business is the DW owner and that End-Users drive the requirements specification.

Deliver Information Promptly – You should aim at delivering information to the End-User within a 3 to 4 month time-scale for the first iteration, and below a 3 month time-scale for subsequent iterations. There is nothing so successful in setting realistic user expectations and then delivering on them promptly and accurately.

Truly Empower The Business User – The data warehouse is a way to provide adequate, appropriate and timely information to the business so that users will be able to create all their own reports and information analysis. The data warehouse should be used to throw out many of the dependencies of Business Users on IT. The data warehouse avoids the need and cost of providing them with support, that inadequate and dependency building support that they themselves should not need if they are adequately trained, encouraged and empowered.

Use the Iterative and Agile Approach to the Max – Most companies are faced with enormous amounts of data, in many formats that could potentially be located in a data warehouse. But operational systems, for example, have large amounts of transaction-level data that may or may not be required for analysis. Trying to locate all this corporate data at once is generally not feasible – for logistical and cost reasons alone. If, however, a company can build its data warehouse by moving portions of the data incrementally, as needed to solve a specific business problem, the process becomes safer, more manageable, and less costly, providing a faster return on investment. For example, a telecommunication company can start by consolidating all its customer information in a data warehouse in order to understand how to maintain better relationships with existing customers.

The use of the iterative development approach is the most effective way to balance timely delivery with the complexities of the telecommunications environment – the iterative approach is an integral feature of the iniciativa/ISF methodology. There are five major drivers that lead us to an iterative development approach:

The value of information will change.

The complete value chain of information must be understood and delivered, this is known as a dynamic characteristic.

The business processes will continue to change and be refined

Scalable technology decisions will need to change and be refined.

A flexible organization must be supported.

Iterative development speeds the delivery of benefits to users. An initial iteration can deliver limited functionality to a select group of users. Later iterations can be built upon the work of the first, decreasing the amount of effort. The iterations can be carefully planned to deliver the complete value chain of information delivery using your own business priorities as drivers.

Drive a Corporation Data Source Audit – It may be a good idea to run a parallel sub-project to identify and catalogue all possible data sources throughout the enterprise. It may be a good idea to include as much meta-data type information as possible: data source, platform, database, predicted quality and reliability. In the audit process do not forget to take into account systems either in the planning, analysis or development stage. However, don’t let this task be an excuse for letting “analysis paralysis” damage your Data Warehouse project.

Give the users what they want but don’t create unrealizable expectations – the key to business success has been described as that of knowing what the users want and then giving them what they want. However, don’t promise focused, adequate, appropriate and timely information if you can’t deliver on that promise.

Ensure accuracy and understand Data Quality issues – Ensure that the information you supply to users is accurate enough to be truly useful and that your data quality standards are realistic and cost-effective.

Scalability and Architecture – If your data warehouse is successful it will grow – in terms of data volumes, number of users and processing demand. Ensure that the technological architecture chosen for your solution is capable of adapting to the evolving needs of the business and the ability to build an adaptive framework to evolve with the business requirements

Take Advantage of Others Knowledge, Experience and Technologies – But Don’t Be Taken Advantage of – Data Warehousing is a process that requires significant amounts of know-how and experience to get it right. It pays to work with people who have done Data Warehousing in Telecoms successfully before – even if there is generally an aversion to using 3rd party consulting services pick and match your needs with what is available. Don’t limit your ability to deliver the right solution on time by short sightedness or a not-invented-here syndrome. On the other hand, beware of companies that offer to build – for example – a customized generic Telecoms DW data model with three senior consultants in three months – for more information on Data Modeling in a Banking, Government or Telecoms contact you should contact Cambriano (martyn.jones@cambriano.es), or any other reputable consulting organization.

Understand, Plan For and Manage the Impact of the Data Warehouse of the IT Infrastructure – It is important to understand the impact of the Data Warehouse on the IT infrastructure and to plan accordingly. Moving large volumes of data from Operational Systems to the Data Warehouse – Extraction, Transformation and Transportation of data – and end-user usage of the Data Warehouse signifies additional and significant impact on the IT infrastructure, i.e.:

  • Additional processing loads on the source data OLTP systems
  • Additional traffic on the corporate network – do you upgrade the network for increased band-width and network speed?
  • Additional administration and support workload for IT Infrastructure staff
  • Additional users of the DW occupying network space
  • Additional availability demands on OLTP systems – e.g. Data Warehousing ETT demands may reduce ability to plan for OLTP batch job re-runs

Therefore, understanding and planning for the Data Warehouse and its impact on the IT Infrastructure in a critical success factor.

Transform and Structure – Take full advantage of the most appropriate ETT (now called ETL or integration) tools and DW data modeling techniques to provide integrated data and information in a form that business users understand and that is easy for them to use. Don’t be put off by the apparent simplicity of the Extract/Transform/Transport process for the first iteration, although the idea of hand-crafting ETT processes using 3GL code is aesthetically pleasing the process does get more complex to develop and maintain after iteration one. Bottom line: DIY ETT sounds simple, using an ETT tool sounds more complex, and the simplicity of DIY is as false as the simplicity of DW ETT process maintenance using an ETT tool is true.

End-User Tools that best match existing and known paradigms work well in the short term – End-users who are used to working with products such as MS/Excel will also find products such as BusinessObjects fairly easy to come to terms with. Some access to the information in the Telecoms Data Warehouse will almost invariably have to be provided via a canned interface.

Market the success of the Data Warehouse – Encourage Business Users to discuss why the Data Warehouse has improved their ability to fulfil their missions. Publish newsletters containing surveys, success stories and End-User guides to getting the best from the information in the DW. Start a competition to find a good name for your Data Warehouse and Data Warehouse project A short memorable name and a simple and effective logo will create a greater sense of identity and purpose.

Getting Users to Justify the Data Warehouse Success leads to more success – a product’s best salesperson is the customer (End-User) not the provider (iniciativa in Spain and South and Central America, and Cambriano Energy for USA and Europe or even your own IT organization).

Encourage users to justify why they need the Data Warehouse – keep business users and business stakeholders satisfied and encourage this DW justification from these users and stakeholders on an on-going basis.

Trust and Confidence Ensure that End-Users are satisfied with the quality of the data warehouse service and that they can trust the quality of the DW data.

Single Point Of Contact Provide your End-Users with a single point of contact for all routine queries – Allow them simple and effective means to escalate issues if they do not get satisfaction. Make sure they understand the process fully. Make sure your Single Point of Contact has the empowerment to be as flexible, dynamic and rapid in dealing with business customers.

Partner with an experienced and knowledgeable consulting team – one who will fully understand the wide range of aspects and components required to successfully deliver the advantages of Corporate Data Warehousing. A true partner that well understands the needs and the dynamics of your marketplace. Or better still, give me a call or drop me a line.

Many thanks for reading. I hope it gave you some useful or though provoking take-aways.

File under: Good Strat, Good Strategy, Martyn Richard Jones, Martyn Jones, Cambriano Energy, Iniciativa Consulting, Iniciativa para Data Warehouse, Tiki Taka Pro

The Promise of Data Warehousing

30 Sunday Nov 2014

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I wrote this piece (actually it is part of a much larger document on Data Warehousing and Telcos) many years ago. But I thought it might give someone a chuckle, or even prompt some new ideas. So here you have it:

Getting the right information

To the right people

At the right time

And the right place

In the right form

First time, every time

Winning business strategies start with great ideas, sparks of imagination or just accidental encounters that can lead to an:

INITIATIVE

With all great business initiatives there comes a point in time when someone needs to make and take:

DECISIONS

And, the best business decisions are nearly always based on:

INFORMATION

And its correct:

INTEGRATION

Which drives the supply of adequate, appropriate and timely information and which has a usable:

STRUCTURE

Which adequately supports the business decision making process. In many cases most of this information has to be derived from:

DATA

Atomic detailed data, summary data and the meta-data. Which can be held in a number of places, both internal and external to the enterprise, but especially in internal operational systems, which constitute the major:

DATA SOURCE

From which the targeted data needs to be extracted, cleaned, normalized and classified as an essential part of the assurance of:

QUALITY

Of the data which needs to be moved from operational systems and external sources to the:

DATA WAREHOUSE

Via a transportation mechanism that provides the adequate:

INTERFACES

All of which must be provided in a controlled and affective manner, with the assistance of an effective:

INFRASTRUCTURE

Backed up by the effective and adequate assignment and utilization of:

RESOURCES

To carry out all this in a planned, efficient controlled manner we need to manage:

THE DATA WAREHOUSE PROCESS

Which implies the identification, anticipation and limitation of:

RISKS

And the successful delivery of agreed Data Warehouse services to agreed service levels which forms the:

DATA WAREHOUSE SOLUTION

The best way yet of providing Information for Strategic and Tactical Decision Making and in addition is the best way to begin together the disparate business strands that form the modern and diverse telco. This creates the reality of the unified and coherent:

ORGANIZATION

Whilst at the same time:

EMPOWERING

The most important users of information in the organization who are:

BUSINESS INFORMATION USERS

Who in turn translate corporate memory, information and visions into:

STRATEGIES

Which in turn, and with the aid of more information, is turned into management and corporate:

ACTION

Data Warehousing promises the best solution yet with which Telco’s can analyze, define and implement the mechanism for the repeatable delivery of appropriate, adequate and timely information derived from Operational Systems and External Systems. Data Warehousing is the key to provide End-Users with effective access to that information in an integrated, consistent and usable form.

A Telco normally has potentially useful data stored in a number of disparate systems – corporate wide. Data Warehousing provides “the best yet” solution architecture to host the information which we explicitly obtain as source data from those multiple, heterogeneous data sources (including ERPs), and to integrate and structure that data to meet the requirements and needs of disparate Business End-Users.

File under: Good Strat, Good Strategy, Martyn Richard Jones, Martyn Jones, Cambriano Energy, Iniciativa Consulting, Iniciativa para Data Warehouse, Tiki Taka Pro

Consider this: Business Process Intelligence

30 Sunday Nov 2014

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Business process intelligence

As for the future, your task is not to foresee it, but to enable it.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

The allure of future happiness

Companies the world over have been busily moving away from the more traditional function-based business structures, with their attendant silos of competence, overlapping roles and artificially limited responsibilities, to highly focused business-driven process models.

Well-bounded business process reengineering has often been a critical success factor in contemporary business strategies. So, new ways of looking at processes are introduced in order to bring about far greater levels of simplicity, marked improvements in service and product quality, new-found process robustness, greater customer intensity and intimacy.

This is accompanied by sea-change improvements in the ways that forward-looking organizations do business.

As part of this Information trend, businesses are working towards service-oriented business-process operating platforms, characteristically these new platforms are easily configured to capture and store a wide range of additional data, way above and beyond that which has been associated with more traditional in-house application developments and 3rd party Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) applications.

This new level of data intensity and process abstraction means that businesses can essentially record every step, state and decision point in a business process flow, from initiation to closure. Which notionally allows businesses to closely monitor service levels and key performance indicators right down to the finest level of granularity, and across the entire business organization.

Businesses can now look at who does what, when, where, and how, which allows for the accurate pinpointing of process hotspots and process bottlenecks, and the rapid initiation of corrective measures.

Excitement, elation and enthusiasm

The separation of operational support and strategic decision support, using a combination of data warehousing and business intelligence, is being blurred. Suddenly senior management can really have their finger on the business pulse.

The digital nervous system now promises to become a reality.

Ae we are moving boldly forward into the realms of business intelligence that will not only tell companies what they have done wrong in the past but will assist decision-makers to formulating winning strategies for the future of organizations.

What senior executive could possibly turn down the opportunity to be on top of all aspects of the business that they are ultimately responsible for?

Benefits and features

Industry experts and pundits alike are heralding a significant shift in the usefulness of Business Intelligence, a premonition which frequently leads to assurances that we are witnessing the beginning of the end of Data Warehousing as we know it, the removal of a major capital expenditure burden from corporate IT budgets, and the unchaining and liberation of Business Intelligence, from the terrible drug-like dependency on the Data Warehouse paradigm. The promise of new-age BI is compelling and simple to comprehend, and assures accruable benefits far surpassing anything witnessed in the data warehousing and business intelligence world to date; for example:

  1. Business intelligence will become an integral part of business process applications and on-line transactional processing.
  2. Management will be able to see, at any point in time, exactly how the business is doing.
  3. Management will be able to plan ahead using the rich set of information that the new synergistic integration between BI and business process applications.
  4. There will no longer be a need to constrain the freedom of business intelligence by tying it to data warehousing.
  5. Far more sophisticated BI tools, technologies and techniques will appear in the coming twelve to eighteen months, driving a wedge between bleeding edge information systems and more traditional approaches to information, analytics and their management.
  6. BI will support embedded data analytics, real-time data visualization, and universal use – anyone within an organization will be able to use future-proofed BI.
  7. Data warehousing in business organizations will become redundant. (It’s daft, but it needed to be stated).

Hitches, glitches and biting reality

There are a number of issues that may affect the usefulness of the new-age business process oriented business intelligence:

  1. The newly reengineered business processes may not in fact be well designed, appropriate, or workable.
  2. The performance of operational application platforms may well seriously deteriorate if the same platforms are also used to collect large volumes of disparate process data and at the same time also be used to support unpredictable ad-hoc querying by sophisticated new-age business intelligence tools.
  3. There might be difficulties in coming to agreement on service level and key performance indicator measurements, especially if the process paths are complex and full of many decision points, process activities and tasks, and parallel operations.

Failure, despondency and desolation

Someway down the road with your newly found faith in new-age business intelligence you might start to question your belief.

Typically this will come about for one or all of the following reasons:

  1. Your business intelligence isn’t giving you an accurate picture of what happened in the past.
  2. The quality of data is such that no one in their right mind would use it to try and predict the future, never mind analyse the past.
  3. The future-proof promises of BI and claims about being able to predict the future are not turning out as planned.

Bottom-line comments

 The only way you can predict the future is to build it.

Alan Kay

Okay, let’s be frank and earnest here, and try and keep it simple without making it brainless. Let’s assume for one moment that all that has been claimed for new-age business intelligence is possible, and maybe it is, we may intuitively feel a sense of déjà vu, and dismiss the position out of hand as so much frivolous nonsense and sentimental belief, but let’s take a more balanced view, and instead pose some questions:

  1. Which organizations can afford to hire the required number of staff in order to be able to effectively visualize and analyse all of the sheer volumes of data and the new wealth of rich business process data that is being produced day in and day out, by businesses all over the globe?
  2. Who is really going to use all the data collected by the business processes?
  3. Who is going to trust the largely unverifiable new data?
  4. Who is going to get the real benefits, if any, which might be accruable from the analysis of the data?

There are some who might think that the claim that business intelligence can happily exist without data warehousing is the biggest load of nonsense ever conceived in the field of information management, and that it beggars belief that “expert” BI consultants seem to confuse “finger on the pulse” with “finger on the trigger of the gun held to the head of business”. The actuality of the real business world is at odds with so much of the BI hype and hyperbole being spun so crudely, so freely and so easily, with scant regard for the business consequences of sowing so much opinion and speculation and spreading the nonsense around like a happy farmer with a truck load of bullshit.

On reading the comments of some business intelligence experts, one could be forgiven for thinking that the intention is to convert commercial businesses into experiments in the creation of technology based busy-work. Let’s be down to earth now, do BI “experts” really think that businesses can afford the luxury of having teams of business analysts dedicated to looking at process data via business intelligence tools, all day and every day?

So here is a roundup of our position with regard to “data warehousing without a data warehouse” and new-age business intelligence:

  1. The problem still isn’t lack of data, companies have more data coming out of their “processes” than most business executives have time to shake a stick at. People are virtually drowning in the damn stuff. So, the problem is not lack of data, or lack of data richness, the problem is still lack of appropriate, adequate and timely information.
  2. As the father of data warehousing might say, the recurrent idea that you can have a successful data warehousing process without a real DW crops up like the flu virus; it comes around each and every year, and the same damn thing happens year in and year out, some people catch it, quite frankly far too many people – and then don’t know how to let go of it, even if it makes them, and everyone who comes into contact with them, pretty sick and as dumb as rocks.
  3. Monitoring business processes, collecting a humungous expanse of data, and then pushing it through a BI tool, will tell you less about future market directions, client behaviour, next year’s fashions and fads, and your real customer satisfaction levels, than a session with, for example, Madame Molotova, the flamboyantly extravagant eastern European clairvoyant.
  4. Fourthly, the only blurring of the boundaries between operational applications and data warehousing is in people’s heads, this fuzzy reasoning has led to fuzzy practice, often called pragmatism, in an effort to compound the ill-informed stupidity, but at the end of the day, they are still two sides of the same coin, but they are certainly not the same sides of the same.
  5. Next generation business intelligence requires next generation business process applications, based on a comprehensive mix of service oriented architectures, message brokerage, enhanced metadata, and intelligent information interchange (extended mark-up languages etc.) as well as comprehensive process monitoring technology, otherwise you will only reap a relatively very small benefit from the exercise.

The Bullet:

The BI “experts” are at it again, the little sods – trying to bury the principles of well-engineered data warehousing and complementary business intelligence, and denouncing the well proven approaches as being passé, anachronistic, or simply inappropriate.

Business Intelligence doesn’t fail because of data warehousing, this is a load of old nonsense spread by mischievous marketers and useful idiots – useful for helping to sell crap that no one really needs; it fails either because of an absence of a well-engineered data warehouse, carefully aligned to business wants, or because of the adoption of the “pragmatic approach” to data warehousing, which usually means a collection of what are euphemistically termed “data marts” – an approach that seems to have more adherents amongst the technologically light-weight and principle free, both in terms of vendors, and in terms of competence in your everyday business organisations.

Tip for today:

Trying to do comprehensive Business Intelligence without a well architected data warehouse (see W. H. Inmon: DW 2.0, and the Corporate Information Factory,) is simply stated, the strategic, tactical and operational decision support approach of fools.

BI implementations are complex and expensive, and trying to successfully implement BI without the use of a Data Warehouse is like taking on the challenge of diving from a airplane, one mile high, without the cumbersome overhead of having a parachute to slow you down.

BI “experts” who are focusing on the vague and peripheral crapola on the margins of BI, and to the detriment of core information management issues, are not adding any value, au contraire, they are rehashing naïve and sentimental approaches that should have been put to bed a long time ago.

File under: Good Strat, Good Strategy, Martyn Richard Jones, Martyn Jones, Cambriano Energy, Iniciativa Consulting, Iniciativa para Data Warehouse, Tiki Taka Pro

Consider this: Ten thoughts on Data Warehousing

30 Sunday Nov 2014

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More than 80% of advertising is ignored. More than 50% of Data Warehouse projects fail in one way or another. The information explosion has been accompanied by a massive increase in the ranks of the willfully stupid.

  1. The term is “Data Warehousing”. Data Warehousing does all the heavy lifting which Business Intelligence selection, analysis and visual presentation tools can then exploit.
  2. Data Warehousing is strategic, tactical and exploratory, all other information supply is either operational or superfluous, and should be provided by your operational systems and 3rd party providers, such as the big ERP vendors (SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, and etcetera).
  3. Data Warehousing is fundamentally about business process and should be solely driven by business imperatives. Without business imperatives there is no reason for the existence of a Data Warehouse.
  4. To understand Data Warehousing you must be also capable of understanding business process.
  5. An adequate understanding of business process is not typically taught in classes on ETL, UNIX, RDBMS or Middleware, etcetera.
  6. The four key defining features of Data Warehousing were first documented by Bill Inmon[1], and should be the first criteria to be tested in each and every iteration of a Data Warehouse.
  7. Ralph Kimball is the most visible and successful advocate of the very useful ‘star schema’ dimensional model.
  8. Data Warehousing is about improvement through business driven innovation and creative use.[2] Data Warehousing isn’t about “expanding the menu”.
  9. A data warehouse business process must be continually subjected to testing, including risk and requirements based testing.
  10. Data Warehousing is part of an organization’s intellectual capital, and must be handled as the asset that it is. For example, although many businesses do this, the outsourcing and especially offshoring of your intellectual capital processes, initiatives and projects is always abject folly.

So, thanks for reading and until next time. Ciao!

[1] Subject oriented; integrated; time variant; and, non-volatile.

[2] “Innovation’ isn’t what innovators do….it’s what customers and clients adopt.” – Michael Schrage

File under: Good Strat, Good Strategy, Martyn Richard Jones, Martyn Jones, Cambriano Energy, Iniciativa Consulting, Iniciativa para Data Warehouse, Tiki Taka Pro

The management and architecture of Information Assets: Ask Martyn!

15 Saturday Nov 2014

Posted by in Ask Martyn, Data governance, information

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The management and architecture of Information Assets

For more than two decades I have tried to convey the importance of treating information and knowledge as potential assets.

Around the world, the response has usually been mixed.

It is understandable that there is frequent reluctance to accept that information might have real value. Continue reading →

Responsible Use of Corporate Data

03 Monday Nov 2014

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IMGThere was a time, when absolute discretion was an important maxim in the relationship between a liberal professional (doctor, banker, solicitor, architect etc.) and their clients, but times have changed, and are continuing to transform at an ever increasing pace. Continue reading →

Information Management Manifesto: The founding discussion document

03 Monday Nov 2014

Posted by in code of conduct, deceit, ethics, professionalism, Strategy

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Republished in order to re-open the debate.

Document basis

“Service to others is the rent you pay for your room here on earth”

Mohammed Ali

This paper was written as the first discussion document of the nascent IM Manifesto Initiative.

The purpose of the Information Management Manifesto is to arrive at a draft Information Management Manifesto (a declaration of principles for IM professionals) that will be used as a continually evolving working document.

In order to reach consensual agreement on the content of a first draft distribution of the manifesto, we will be borrowing from more “agile” approaches to participation and contribution and influencing, by leveraging as much of the social networking and technology landscape as we can possibly leverage. In this way we ensure that the essence of what drives this initiative remains intact, while opening up the debate to the whole of the IM community and to those who rely on IM, in one way or another.

The current proposed time frame to reach the first draft of the Information Management Manifesto is this:

From To Activity
23.02.2012 23.04.2012 General discussions on the nature of the initiative (social media)
23.02.2012 23.06.2012 Structuring of draft Manifesto – definition of sections and content
30.04.2012 25.05.2012 Insertion of content into draft manifesto
25.05.2012 Distribution of draft manifesto
26.05.2012 15.06.2012 Peer review of draft
16.06.2012 18.06.2012 Preparation of first general issue of IM Manifesto
23.06.2012 First electronic distribution of first issue

This is with best endeavours. Of course, the ideal will be to squeeze timeframes as much as possible to ensure that people have some time to ponder the contents of the first issue before formally and publicly committing their own good names, and even the names of their companies and organisations, in support of the IM Manifesto.

Preamble to the first declaration

“Hold faithfulness and sincerity as first principles”

 Confucius

We are uncovering better ways of improving the professionalism, integrity and effectiveness of Information Management, by creating, deploying and refining proven best principles, sound business, project management, architectural, analysis, modelling/design, development, quality assurance, testing, deployment, acceptance, operational continuity and evaluation practices.

Through this work we have come to value:

  1. Respecting individual proven knowledge and experience, over… opinion, speculation and tools.
  2. Agile and coherent solution approaches that work – repeatedly – over… vapourware, vendor hype and “make it up as you go along” methods.
  3. Up close and intimate customer collaboration, over… dissonance, fear of the customer and capability immaturity.
  4. Responding to change coherently by unleashing the power of iterative and agile IM, over… fighting fires with cooking oil, coal and gasoline.
  5. An acute ability to lesson effectively, comprehend rapidly and do the right thing, over… sign a contract, bill the customer, fail to deliver, then run away.
  6. Honesty, integrity, humility, intelligence and effort… over, suckering the punter.
  7. Being true to ourselves and others about the extent and limits of our knowledge and experience, over… misguiding peers and customers with speculation and opinion dressed up as facts and first-hand knowledge.

Please note: © 2012, the above authors, this declaration may be freely copied in any form, but only in its entirety and only through this notice. What about the IM Manifesto signatories?

The Information Management Manifesto makes it morally incumbent upon signatories to:

  1. Adhere to the spirit of the professional and ethical guidelines for Information Management practitioners.
  2. Seek to dissuade and deter, through reason and intelligence, any professional malpractice that may damage the reputation of Information Management and have a negative effect on the professional standing of those who work in it.
  3. Help set and follow standards for carrying out Information Management work.
  4. To ensure that professional and ethical integrity is maintained, even if this means exceeding that which is contractually or explicitly required.
  5. Evangelise the principles of the IM Manifesto.
  6. Avoid making the IM Manifesto an obsession. 

IM Professional obligation to whom?

“It is every man’s obligation to put back into the world at least the equivalent of what he takes out of it.”

 Albert Einstein

With whom do we have a professional obligation? Simply stated, it is as follows:

  1. Employers
  2. Employees
  3. Clients/Customers
  4. Peers – relations of collegiality, specific expectations of reciprocity
  5. Other stakeholders
  6. The Information Management Profession as a collective
  7. Society – a clear responsibility to serve the public interest

Purpose?

The organization of individual IM professionals, who wish to work in an ethically permissible way, into a global peer group, with the aim of supporting the ideal of serving individual and organizational Information Management needs, with integrity, honesty, coherence and professionalism.

These special standards are morally binding to “professed” members of the profession. If a member freely declares (or professes) herself to be part of a profession, she is voluntarily implying that she will follow these special moral codes. If the majority of members of a profession follow the standards, the profession will have a good reputation and members will generally benefit; if the majority of members violate these voluntary standards, professed members of a profession will be at a disadvantage or at the least receive no benefit from declaring a profession.[1]

Pertinent references and guidelines

Viewpoints and examples

The issues of codes of conduct, statements of principles, ethics codes, and the like, have taken on a new importance in a world suffering from the toxic effects of hubris, lack of principles, lack of ethics and lack of integrity, to say nothing of lack of professionalism.

The following information was included to encourage discussion, act as a catalyst to new ideas and suggestions, and to help focus on the goals.

The aim is not to create the holy book of IM professionalism, but to create a succinct, exhaustive and easily understandable set of principles and ethical guidelines that any coherent, intelligent and honest IM professional should be comfortable in following.

Professional Competence and Integrity

The British Computer Society defines Professional Competence and Integrity as meaning that a professional shall:

    1. only undertake to do work or provide a service that is within your professional competence.
    2. NOT claim any level of competence that you do not possess.
    3. develop your professional knowledge, skills and competence on a continuing basis, maintaining awareness of technological developments, procedures, and standards that are relevant to your field.
    4. ensure that you have the knowledge and understanding of Legislation* and that you comply with such Legislation, in carrying out your professional responsibilities.
    5. respect and value alternative viewpoints and, seek, accept and offer honest criticisms of work.
    6. avoid injuring others, their property, reputation, or employment by false or malicious or negligent action or inaction.
    7. reject and will not make any offer of bribery or unethical inducement.[2]

Public Interest

The British Computer Society also defines Code of Conduct in terms of Public Interest. In that its members shall:

    1. have due regard for public health, privacy, security and wellbeing of others and the environment.
    2. have due regard for the legitimate rights of Third Parties*.
    3. conduct your professional activities without discrimination on the grounds of sex, sexual orientation, marital status, nationality, colour, race, ethnic origin, religion, age or disability, or of any other condition or requirement
    4. promote equal access to the benefits of IT and seek to promote the inclusion of all sectors in society wherever opportunities arise.

Software Engineering Code of Ethics and Professional Practice (Short Version)

The Software Engineering Code of Ethics and Professional Practice of the Association of Computer Machinery[3], along with the Agile Manifesto, is what we are trying to aim for in terms of length, scope, accessibility and style. Here is the short version of their code of ethics and professional practice:

The short version of the code summarizes aspirations at a high level of the abstraction; the clauses that are included in the full version give examples and details of how these aspirations change the way we act as software engineering professionals. Without the aspirations, the details can become legalistic and tedious; without the details, the aspirations can become high sounding but empty; together, the aspirations and the details form a cohesive code.

Software engineers shall commit themselves to making the analysis, specification, design, development, testing and maintenance of software a beneficial and respected profession. In accordance with their commitment to the health, safety and welfare of the public, software engineers shall adhere to the following Eight Principles (We have changed the term Software engineer for that of IM professional):

  1. PUBLIC – IM professionals shall act consistently with the public interest.
  2. CLIENT AND EMPLOYER – IM professionals shall act in a manner that is in the best interests of their client and employer consistent with the public interest.
  3. PRODUCT – IM professionals shall ensure that their products and related modifications meet the highest professional standards possible.
  4. JUDGMENT – IM professionals shall maintain integrity and independence in their professional judgment.
  5. MANAGEMENT – IM managers and leaders shall subscribe to and promote an ethical approach to the management of IM development and maintenance.
  6. PROFESSION – IM professionals shall advance the integrity and reputation of the profession consistent with the public interest.
  7. COLLEAGUES – IM professionals shall be fair to and supportive of their colleagues.
  8. SELF – IM professionals shall participate in lifelong learning regarding the practice of their profession and shall promote an ethical approach to the practice of the profession.

Summary

“You gotta be careful if you don’t know where you’re going, otherwise you might not get there”

 Yogi Berra

The Information Management world is in a poor state. Levels of professionalism are at an all-time low; disciplines such as Data Warehousing and Decision Support are awash with chancers, charlatans and dogma, and as time moves on, the worse the reputation of the profession becomes.

Information Management desperately needs an ethical and professional revolution, one that all professionals can contribute to and support. To this end, we as professionals need to create a democratic, global and self-imposed constitutional code of ethic that professional people of integrity will abide with and will feel that adds real value to the profession.

During 2012, the IM Manifesto Initiative will be working together with partners, clients, collaborators, vendors, service providers and peers in shaping and defining a DW / DSS Manifesto, which we consider to be a necessary and imperative initiative for promoting visible ethical and professional integrity in the DW / DSS discipline.

To this end we have established a series of touch points through which people can engage in, initiate and contribute to debates, discussions and discourse on ideas, suggestions and proposals for an IM Manifesto, initially focusing on the areas of DW and Decision Support (BI, MIS, KM).

IM Manifesto Initiative Touchpoints

  1. Twitter: @IMMANIFESTO
  2. Linkedin group: http://www.linkedin.com/groups?about=&gid=4299867
  3. Facebook group: http://www.facebook.com/groups/339430782746340/
  4. Associated Linkedin page for the IM*NET – the IM, DW and BI professional network group: http://www.facebook.com/groups/292721250763469/
  5. Blogspot blog: http://immanifesto.blogspot.com/
  6. IM Manifesto Initiative 2012 – The founding document: http://cambriano.es/content/manifesto/imManifestoDiscussion.001.20120212.pdf

Martyn Richard Jones-Lovering

The IM Manifesto Initiative

Bamberg, Bayern, Germany, January 2012

[1] Center for the Study of Ethics in the Professions at IIT (Illinois)

[2] http://www.bcs.org/category/6030 BCS – The Chartered Institute for IT

[3] http://www.acm.org/about/se-code

File under: Good Strat, Good Strategy, Martyn Richard Jones, Martyn Jones, Cambriano Energy, Iniciativa Consulting, Iniciativa para Data Warehouse, Tiki Taka Pro

Aspiring Tendencies in IM: Strength and Innocence

03 Monday Nov 2014

Posted by in accountability, Ask Martyn, Best principles, deceit, pain

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“Anger is the enemy of nonviolence and pride is a monster that swallows it up.”

Mohandas Gandhi

Aspirational trends

The predominance of strength and innocence, better known as ignorance and arrogance, is undermining Information Management, and in turn is ensuring that many Data Warehousing and Decision Support initiatives are disappointments.

2015 will again give IM professionals the opportunity to regain some dignity and professional integrity.

First, by recognizing that there are grave problems within IM; then slowing down and halting the toxic trends, carelessness and bad practices; and then in subsequently, reversing, through intelligence, perseverance and integrity, the ingenuous and decrepit habits that still trouble the profession.

Present indications

In the rush to the bottom we throw excellence in analysis, architecture, engineering and business understanding, under the bus. In IM as well as in many other branches of IT (Information Technology), mediocrity has become the new excellent, regular the new exceptional, and shoddiness the new normal.

Whether it is in Data Warehousing, Big Data, Business Intelligence, Analytics, Decision Support or Data Integration, we see that professional integrity and ethical behaviour – already enough of a rarity in IT – is being repeatedly trumped by short-term expediency, wilful witlessness, and the cultivation and perpetuation of dogmas, dysfunctional behaviour and dubious doings.

The Information Management sector is rife with elaborate charlatanry, partisan expediency and wilful self-deception. There is not a day that goes by in which we are not submitted to an avalanche of contemptible claims from rogue IM evangelists, DW neophytes and unsophisticated opportunists, who chose to simply make things up as they go along.

Manifest requisites

It is in the best interests of IM to raise the profession out of the ditch; to reform the profession from the inside; to drive sea-change improvements in knowledge, quality and professional integrity; to ensure a drastic reduction in destructive hype, deception and dogma, and, to show the artless charlatans, chancers and snake-oil merchants the door.

Data Warehousing and Decision Support – if done right, and for the right reasons – can deliver tangible benefits to many organisations. Simply stated, if business information has a value in the realm of business and strategy then it should be treated as an asset, if it is an asset then it should be managed and nurtured as such, which means aiming to do the right thing right, first time, every time, whilst focusing on maximising confidence, availability and agility.

File under: Good Strat, Good Strategy, Martyn Richard Jones, Martyn Jones, Cambriano Energy, Iniciativa Consulting, Iniciativa para Data Warehouse, Tiki Taka Pro