Category Archives: Snippet

Snippets of ideas, directions, reflections and analysis, liberally drizzled with a light sauce of speculation, opinion and inside information.

Snippets: What to do about misrepresentation in DW and BI?

14 Sunday Sep 2014

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People are getting more and more uncomfortable about the quality and quantity of a lot of self-styled data warehousing and business intelligence professionals – organizations and individuals. The perceived and increasing degradation of professionalism and integrity in my own areas of specialization, also finds echo in other aspects of Information and Communication Technology practice, but for now that is outside the scope of this piece.

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Snippets: Historic Threads of Data Warehousing

14 Sunday Sep 2014

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There is general consensus that Data Warehousing first appeared in the 1980s. However, the components of Data Warehousing were being thought-through and created as early as the 1960s. There are many different individuals credited with discovering Data Warehousing. Wikipedia has a great chronological timeline that provides a lot of context to the evolution of data warehousing methodologies.

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Snippets: Intentional Dilemma – Before honour comes humility

14 Sunday Sep 2014

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My original intention was not to write a book on the decline and fall of so many projects, but rather to pen a short essay, a sort of hard-hitting criticism of the litany of IT failures. Of course this is rarely enough, it wasn’t enough because it identified the issues without provoking debate, and it highlighted common issues without providing guideline suggestions, which meant that it appeared upon reflection to come across as too much like a hi-tech hit and run exercise, beating up on IT failures without actually offering tangible solutions.

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Snippets: To your own self be true

14 Sunday Sep 2014

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Far too few CEOs regularly think about IT on a habitual basis, and especially as something that is potentially integrated into everything their companies do and could do. This is however, not at all surprising, there is a general lack of time for any CEO to be always actively involved with what IT does and they will generally have some degree of misunderstanding of both the historic roles and the relative successes and failures of IT.

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Snippets: Landscape

14 Sunday Sep 2014

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From banking to airlines, through communications businesses to pharmaceutical companies, the IT landscape is littered with failures of Homeric proportions, lost opportunities and profligate waste. Across the spectrum of commercial business the IT bottom line is inevtiably familiar: in general, businesses expose themselves to unnecessary levels of disruption, and spend far too much time and money on IT projects, IT products and internal IT services that frankly suck.

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Snippets: Human Factors

14 Sunday Sep 2014

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Reality bites down hard when it wants to, and more often than not when we are least expecting it. IT is seldom given importance for any valid business reasons, such as its support of operational excellence or of quality support of valuable mission critical business – and bureaucratic reasons are not necessarily business reasons – but frequently find themselves at the forefront of business life for primarily negative reasons.

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Snippets: Investment in IT

14 Sunday Sep 2014

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As a CEO, CIO or student of Business Management you will understand that Information and Communication’s Technology (ICT, also known as IT) has become an essential and all pervasive element in the fabric of corporate life. What I mean by ICT encompasses three essential elements: Processes, Information and Technology. Indeed ICT – and more importantly Information, Processes and their Management (IM) –  should in my view should be viewed as essential corporate assets, they should be made to work as contemporary business enablers; they should bring about value-adding alignment in business; and, should therefore be managed as such. Although significantly, it typically doesn’t work in that way.

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