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

Mohandas Gandhi

Martyn Richard Jones

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 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.

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 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.

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.

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