Tag: Alignment
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On DW federation, whac-a-mole, and integrating business data
Information Management recently sent around their pick of best IM blog articles of 2009. Among them was Forrester’s James Kobelius’s reaction to Bill Inmon’s “incineration of a straw man concept that he refers to as ‘virtual data warehousing (DW).’” According to Mr. Inmon, virtual data warehousing reminds him of the carnival game called whac-a-mole. He…
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Stuck inside of problems with the business blues again?
Many see IT as application of technology to solve business problems. Of course, this is true but it leaves out the third element, which is to apply the right architectural pattern to solve the problem. For example, when the business problem is that reporting is slow and reports from different departments don’t match, the astute…
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Cloud databases and business/IT alignment
Today, the foundation of most of our custom-built systems is a relational dbms. While development frameworks vary, they overwhelmingly access and maintain data in relational tables and columns. As I write I routinely save this post in a MySQL database, and at work I tend SQL Server applications. Millions of others develop, use, and extract…
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BI Business Case Basics: Three Things to Remember
Here are three things to remember when putting together a BI business case: Intangible benefits don’t count. BI has no inherent value. Senior managers often make decisions about future outcomes with insufficient data.
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Don’t forget to get it done
In a recent article at Information Management, Maria Villar and Theresa Kushner offer 4 Steps to Create an Effective IT and Business Partnership, a very useful list of ways to ensure “strong partnership between IT and business”. To the authors this partnership “is the most important, and often overlooked, component to successfully managing critical business…
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Got chaos? Manage to milestones with risks and issues
“When you are in the middle of a story it isn’t a story at all, but only a confusion; a dark roaring, a blindness, a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood; like a house in a whirlwind, or else a boat crushed by the icebergs or swept over the rapids, and all aboard powerless to…
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Coming soon: data like money
It is a commonplace to say we should manage data like a resource. But when you think about it, data is an asset but not a resource. Data isn’t a thing like real estate, employees, or customers, but rather it represents all of those things. In data-geek-speak, data is a meta-resource that holds information about…
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Study data early to improve application alignment
A recurring theme in the literature on IT over the years has been frequent failure of IT projects. Most studies lay the bulk of the blame on requirements (examples here and here). One way to improve accuracy and fit-to-purpose of requirements, and thereby promote project success, is to include data analysis as well as process…
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DQ, he isn’t so dumb he just needs glasses
In a recent very thoughtful post on data quality, Paul Erb plays out an analogy comparing data users with Don Quixote and data quality professionals with Sancho Panza, then reverses the analogy to cleverly coin the “Sancho Panza” test of data quality professionals. He encourages data quality professionals promoting the critical role of data quality…
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IT should own the misalignment problem
In a new post at Insurance Networking News Ara Trembly provides a balanced perspective on IT/business misalignment (Business/IT Misalignment: Whose Responsibility?). He describes the problem as cultural, more amenable to relational than management solutions. His conclusion sums it up: “Take a geek/suit to lunch today!” To me (speaking as an IT professional) IT should take…