Author: Bob Lambert
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The ERwin Model Mart Access Problem
On two successive client assignments as a data modeler I’ve waited while client technicians wrestled with getting access to the ERwin Model Mart. In short, clicking on File, Mart, Connection, and logging in to the Model Mart failed every time, with various error messages. In both cases the teams lost literally months, in spite of…
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Jürgen Klinsmann’s Waterfall to Agile Transition
How does this sound as advice for an app dev manager leading his or her team from waterfall to Agile? Clearly articulate a compelling end-state vision Work from a position of authority Weather the storms Reward creativity while fostering improvement A post at scrumsource.com lists leadership, organizational culture, and people as three of the five…
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Data Management: So Easy a Caveman Can Do It?
I recently stumbled upon one of The Martin Agency’s hilarious Geico caveman ads and wondered, rather geekily, why they didn’t do one about data analysis. I think if a caveman suddenly arrived in the 2010s he or she would see parallels between his life and the activities of today’s knowledge worker. When I thought it through,…
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A New Framework for Data Management?
I hold a strong prejudice that IT paradigms are useful for about 30 years. The PC was dominant from 1980 to 2010, “online” mainframe systems from 1970 to 2000, and so on. If that’s the case then time’s up for Bill Inmon’s data warehousing framework. So far no widely held pattern has emerged to help…
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Data Governance Begins At the Spreadsheet
Data management professionals have long and sometimes rather Quixotically driven organizations to “get past the spreadsheet culture.” Maybe that’s misguided. The recent furor over a widely read social science paper may show how we can look to scientific peer review for a way to govern data, spreadsheets and all. Recently, it was found that a…
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Followership IV: How to criticize your boss
This is the latest entry in an occasional series on followership. The premise, as stated here, is that not everyone gets to be a leader, and most leaders are also followers in their own right. The project manager follows instructions from the project sponsor, the CEO from the board, the politicians from the polls, and…
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A Fist Full of Agile Critiques
Out of curiosity I recently reviewed articles critical of Agile Methodologies. I had expected agile-versus-waterfall arguments and attacks from vendors selling new alternatives, but even given the reputation that advocates have for flaming well-intentioned critics, I wasn’t prepared for the level of emotion I found. My opening position was that Agile techniques are great, but…
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Relational DB Pros: The Times They Are A-Changin’
Recently I read a thoughtful post at the PASS Business Analytics Conference site discussing how different the world is now for database professionals. Author Chris Webb focuses on the data science side in this post. His analysis made me think of the challenges and opportunities “big data” serves up to relational database designers. To me these…
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Data Design Matters
As important as it is, data modeling has always had a geeky, faintly impractical tinge to some. I’ve seen application development projects proceed with a suboptimal, “good enough”, model. The resulting systems might otherwise be well-architected, but sometimes strange vulnerabilities emerge that track directly to data design flaws. Recently I saw an example where a…
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What Driving Dogs Tell Us About Learning
Recently the BBC posted this video. On first view it is just funny, but watching those dogs learn to drive really reminded me of personal experiences with IT teams making big learning transitions. To represent those real situations let’s consider a fictional team of SQL developers facing the daunting task of deploying a functional Hadoop-based…