Category: IT
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No silver business intelligence bullets, but still a bright upside
When Tom Petty sang, “Hey baby, there ain’t no easy way out” he wasn’t referring to business intelligence (BI) reporting but he might have been. Current generation reporting engines, AKA data visualization or data discovery tools, market their products with statements like these, emphasizing quick development and ease of use: “The democratization of data is…
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Learning to learn
“A child of five could understand this. Send someone to fetch a child of five!” – Groucho Marx Recently my colleague Sara Shelton posted an article listing non-technical things we IT specialists need to do to maintain our careers. Each of the nine items on Sara’s list is a key to IT professional success. One…
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Why is your reporting project late?
In my experience, some BI projects ultimately finish as a success, but exceed budget and schedule targets and fall short of functional goals along the way. On projects like this, somewhere in the midst of report development, things get sticky and tasks fall behind schedule as the team runs into unexpected complexities.
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Be careful with agile methods if…
I’ve written a number of posts about agile techniques of project management on this site, all in a spirit of advocacy. A comment on the most recent reminded me that agile/scrum isn’t necessarily the right solution in all situations, and in some it may work but needs to be applied carefully. After that comment I thought it would be…
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So Agile/Scrum Really IS Like Rugby
OK, I’ve lost a five-metre scrum, my pack has been overrun, and the ref has raised his arm between the sticks for a penalty try. My colleague Margy Thomas, with support of fellow rugger Billy Tilson, has convincingly argued that agile development in fact is very like rugby union. Margy cleverly fended my meager one-point case with…
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Big Data opportunities and NoSQL challenges
As a relational database professional I couldn’t help but feel like something would be lost with the emergence of the new Big Data/NoSQL database management systems (DBMS). After about two years of buzz around the topic, I’m really excited about the emerging possibilities. However, I’m pretty sure we’ll miss the relational model’s strengths in requirements…
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The data quality challenge, in pictures
Data quality in most large organizations is commonly known to be rather lacking. Most would argue that things haven’t gotten much better since this 2007 Accenture study found that “Managers Say the Majority of Information Obtained for Their Work Is Useless”. To some, quotes like that are shocking, but if you think about how information…
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A QlikView QuickStart: first steps for learning QlikView desktop
QlikTech’s QlikView reporting and analysis tool is among a new class of Business Intelligence (BI) software tools. As Ben Harden reported in a recent blog post, BI vendors like SAP, Microsoft, and IBM have traditionally sold “to the IT enterprise, but companies like QlikTech and Tableau are targeting the business and bypassing IT. Their tools…
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Double test efficiency and build app dev culture at no charge
What if you could double the efficiency of your software testing process, and substantially reduce errors found during the test, deployment, and maintenance phases, without purchasing any tool or method? The November 28 InformationWeek offers just that in a reprint of a recent Dr. Dobbs article on formal inspections by Capers Jones and Olivier Bonsignour. …
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Project managers: is yellow the new green?
I’ve never understood the obsession with “green” status among IT application development project managers, and the intense pressure put on them to “stay green” by the program management offices (PMOs) they report to. We would benefit from a cultural shift away from avoiding yellow status. For those not in the field, it is in vogue…