13 Saturday Dec 2025
Posted in accountability, Ask Martyn, awareness, Best principles, governance, leadership, public, technology
My sister was part of a group that offered support to the striking miners of Wales, Scotland and England.
They organised a public fundraiser and invited the politician Tony Benn to speak.
Continue reading25 Thursday Nov 2021
I am quite a fan of many aspects that sit under the Data Mesh umbrella. However, when it comes to a proper fact-based understanding and analysis of the history, place and architecture (business, data and technical) of Data Warehousing, the leading exponents of data mesh have it woefully wrong.
Therefore, the purpose of this blog article is to set the record straight.
23 Sunday Dec 2018
Posted in Assets, awareness, behaviour, Best principles, Brexit, ethics, goodstrat, Martyn Jones, Martyn Richard Jones, Offshoring, Outsourcing, Politics, Remain, statistics, The Guardian
Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com
Martyn Richard Jones
Madrid, Sunday 23rd December 2018
What’s all this fuss about Jeremy Corbyn and Labour’s Brexit strategy?
Despite Liberal Democrats, Blairites and most of the national media ramping up the righteous outrage about Corbyn stating the bleeding, bloody obvious (see e.g. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/dec/23/labour-remain-jeremy-corbyn-brexit ) nothing has changed.
So, what are the facts?
03 Monday Nov 2014
Posted in Ask Martyn, Best principles, Data governance
Tags
Big Data, Business, business intelligence, data governance, data management, Data protection, Data Warehouse, privacy, Strategy
There was a time, Martyn Richard Jones
When absolute discretion was an essential maxim in the relationship between a liberal professional (doctor, banker, solicitor, architect, etc.) and their clients, but times have changed. They are continuing to transform at an ever-increasing pace.
Continue reading
03 Monday Nov 2014
Posted in accountability, Ask Martyn, Best principles, deceit, pain
Tags
accountability, aspiring tendencies in IM, ethics, good job, information management, Information Technology, IT business, Organisational Autism, organisational awareness, professionalism
“Anger is the enemy of nonviolence, and pride is a monster that swallows it up.”
Mohandas Gandhi
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 recognising that there are grave problems within IM; then, by slowing down and halting the toxic trends, carelessness and bad practices; and, subsequently, by reversing, through intelligence, perseverance and integrity, the ingrained and decrepit habits that still trouble the profession.
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 subjected to an avalanche of contemptible claims from rogue IM evangelists, DW neophytes and unsophisticated opportunists, who choose to simply make things up as they go along.
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
12 Sunday Oct 2014
Posted in Architecture, Ask Martyn, Banking, Best principles, Big Data, Business Intelligence, Creativity, Data Warehouse, Dogma, Knowledge, Peeves
Tags
Banking, Behavioural Economics, Big Data, Bill Inmon, business intelligence, data integration, Data Marts, Demagogism, Dogma, enterprise data warehousing, hadoop, Information and Technology, information management
This weekend I read a piece on the Information Management website by Steve Miller with the title of Big Data vs. the Data Warehouse. It’s an old piece, from March 2014.
It was in response to a piece by Bill Inmon titled “Big Data or Data Warehouse?” Turbocharge Your Porsche – Buy an Elephant, in which he singled out for criticism the ad campaign of a big-data and Hadoop promoter.
10 Friday Oct 2014
Posted in Ask Martyn, awareness, Best principles, Big Data, business, Business Intelligence, Data Warehouse
Tags
Big Data, business intelligence, Commercial IT, Corporate IT, Data Warehouse, IT business, IT Strategy, Pimps, Pundits
The IT business suffers a malaise, it also affects other businesses. In IT, like in other lines of business, much of what has been made is eventually sidelined and forgotten. If it was ever on the radar in the first place. Continue reading
09 Thursday Oct 2014
Posted in Analytics, Best principles, Business Intelligence, Executive, Extract, Knowledge, Offshoring, Outsourcing
Tags
Behavioural Economics, Big Data, Business Enablement, business intelligence, Business Management, business strategy, Challenges, Creativity, Data Warehouse, Organisational Autism
We analysed all the big data and discovered that the biggest reason for IT project failure is people – Big Data Informs…
We had failed at Data Warehousing, Business Intelligence, Core Competence, and quite a few other things, so some bright spark decided to give Big Data a shot.
The first task was to identify the reasons for IT project failure globally.
09 Thursday Oct 2014
Posted in Ask Martyn, Best principles, Creativity, Excellence, Methodology
Tags
Behavioural Economics, Business Enablement, Business Management, Information Technology, Strategy
Martyn Richard Jones
Remastered for 2026
I came into IT at the tail end of the seventies, joining one of the original computing pioneers.
It was a conservative company led by veterans, engineers, accountants, and sales professionals, with many ties to the US administration, the Department of Defence, and intelligence agencies.
My interests at the time were in philosophy, politics and economics. I liked meeting people and talking, and I also enjoyed helping people solve real-life business problems, so I was always engaged with corporate staff and executive management rather than with the real hard-core technicians and engineers.
The thing is, I had no idea what constrained IT, so I never had that baggage when thinking about solutions.
08 Wednesday Oct 2014
Posted in Ask Martyn, Best principles, Business Intelligence, Strategy, tactics
What triggers a review of organisational strategy?
Well, typically organisations usually shy away from major strategy reviews when things are just ticking over quite nicely. The old axiom of “if it isn’t broke don’t fix it”, has a lot of power of persuasion, even in cases where the logical and coherent thing to do would be to continually review strategy.
GOOD STRATEGY 