Month: March 2009
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Do your homework before presenting a BI business case
Before starting the Business Intelligence business case, the BI advocate should do the homework required to ensure its success, including these essential steps: 1. Know the organization’s goals and objectives. 2. Identify a BI champion. 3. Identify and work with BI stakeholders. 4. Identify an application with tangible business value. 5. Define and quantify a…
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Grow your own row-level security
Data security is not optional in today’s business environment. High-visibility hacking and fraud, Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA regulations, and the Patriot Act all reinforce the need to present the right data to the right users and prevent the wrong ones from gaining access. Typically, “row level security” (RLS) is one requirement: to allow or permit access to…
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Someone’s integrating your data
Here’s a little-recognized fact about data integration: if you run a business or any sizable chunk of one, someone is integrating your data. In my professional life I have on occasion suggested data integration efforts. Sometimes my suggestions have been accepted and sometimes not. As an IT professional I understand that different managers have different…
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Big project coming up? Learn to two-step.
History is littered with IT application projects that end late, go way over budget, or abandoned altogether. I was fortunate enough to see one work out really well (almost – please read on). It was no mistake. It came down to a simple method advocated by a gentleman named named John Carpenter. The project was…
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Beware the devils in the details of data integration
Much of today’s IT application development – custom or off-the-shelf – involves integrating data from legacy systems, third- party software products and external data sources such as demographics or mail lists. More often than not, data integration is unexpectedly complex, either due to data quality issues or the nature of the data integration itself.