One of the most soul-destroying moments in the life of a data warehouse professional is when a key decision maker (usually backed by other key decision makers) decides to radically alter course, and “in a dance as old as time”, snatches defeat from the jaws of victory.
This can happen in various ways, but the most gut-wrenching of all is this…
As legal sources close to the Westminster Bar would have it, an alleged fan of Stewart Lee, a leading English social commentator, writer, director, musician and stand-up comedian, has called on the power of big data outcomes to highlight changing demographics and to place hot-topic issues of people and society in the public forum. (more…)
You may well have seen all the climate change events around the world. 23rd September saw the biggest ever Climate Change awareness march the world has produced to date. Al Gore was there, Ban Ki Moon was there, Leonardo DiCaprio was there… even Prince Chuck was there.
Young Einstein was awaiting the birth of his sister. His mother and father had been telling him for months to look forward to having somebody to play with. When Einstein eventually got to see his sister, he exclaimed disappointedly “But, it doesn’t have wheels!”
That happens a lot in IT. Young Einstein had a very good excuse, we don’t.
In a city centre office block, somewhere in Scotland, the conversation between the IT Business Manager (Bill) and the Information Management Manager (Richie) is in full swing,, Bob is irate because his successfully delivered data mart has been derided as unusable rubbish by the business people it was meant to serve.
Let’s join the conversation: (more…)
It’s 9:45 on a cold and wintry Monday morning; crowds of people are huddled around the water fountains as gossip spreads throughout the building like wildfire. There has been a multiple data pile up in the Widget and Wodget data centre, there are a few casualties but no reported fatalities. No one knows what quite is going on, as shadowy rumour hints at flying pigs, rebellious ducks and rolling heads.
It was to be a big day for Widget and Wodget, “your neighbourhood’s favourite Prime Brokers”, it was billed as the Senior Mega Monday to end all Mega Mondays. A mega coup for the hallowed financial institution of W&W; today would be the day that would herald in the culmination of two major IPOs and one multi-billion global M&A deal signed off, as well as the launch of a raft of CDOs.
For more than 34 years I have been trying to convince IT organisations that it is not in their best interests to play Santa Claus, especially when it comes to strategy and data management.
I have tried – again and again, to make people pay attention to this advice, because I think that acting upon this take-away in an intelligent manner is absolutely central for the success of IT, for the benefit of business, and ultimately for the effective realization of Information Management; whether that is Data Warehousing, Business Intelligence, Data Integration, Decision Support, Data Analytics, Big Data or MDM.
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There is a general consensus that Data Warehousing first appeared in the 1980s. However, the components of Data Warehousing were being developed and implemented as early as the 1960s. Many individuals are credited with discovering Data Warehousing. Wikipedia has a great chronological timeline that provides a lot of context for the evolution of data warehousing methodologies.
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, however, is not at all surprising; there is a general lack of time for any CEO to be actively involved in 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.
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 enterprise, the IT bottom line is inevitably 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.