Try Office 2007, or Vista on the Web, with just a browser!

Saw two of these links in the last couple of days....

Windows Vista Online Demos, etc.

You can now take Microsoft Office 2007 out for a spin without even installing it on your system - all you need is a browser. Check it out if you havent installed it yet at http://www.runaware.com/microsoft/en-us/office2007/td

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Data Management Body of Knowledge (DMBOK) Functional Framework

Interesting! And a good idea. This page includes a link to a powerpoint and pdf. At this stage it looks like just the broad outline is being defined, but I think everyone in the BI field, in particular managers and CIOs, needs to look through this information in detail.

The “body of knowledge” about data management is quite large and constantly growing. The Introduction to the Data Management Body of Knowledge document will provide a “definitive introduction/overview” to data management. It will present a standard industry view of data management functions, terminology and best practices, without detailing specific methods and techniques. The DMBOK does not attempt to be a complete authority on any specific data management function, but will point readers to widely recognized publications, articles and websites for further reading.

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Do You Know Your Business Intelligence?

Nice little quiz... a good read.

Through my work in the business intelligence field, I have come to realize that even though the term business intelligence (BI) has been around for some 15 years, there are still many business users that have no clue what it means. Therefore, I have prepared a questionnaire that can be used to evaluate how knowledgeable business users are about business intelligence. The results of this questionnaire can help to position business intelligence at work.

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Missing Pubs & Northwind?

Does your SQL 2005 Express feel lonely?

Is it missing pubs and northwind?

Dont fear, you can get the .sql files to recreate them here.

Your SQL 2005 Express will thank you for it!

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What Do SOA and ESB Mean in Business Intelligence?

A key point to note is that an SOA can interconnect resources that operate at the user interaction, application and data levels of an IT system. In a data warehousing environment, for example, a data validation service could be defined as a service provider and called by data integration application. Other examples of services providers include user authentication, search, data transformation, BI analysis, data mining models, legacy applications and business transactions. To support an SOA environment, most business intelligence and data integration vendors are building service interfaces to their products.

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Finding the Right Performance Measures for Contact Centers

With so much emphasis placed on improving customer satisfaction, it is surprising that so few centers can produce a customer-focused scorecard. The root cause lies in the complexity of the data sources present in a contact center, many of which are proprietary in nature and so are difficult to access. Vendors such as AIM technology, Enkata, HardMetrics and Merced Systems have developed tools that make it possible to get at this data and produce the business- and customer-related analysis that agents and center managers need to improve call handling. More complete information will enable agents to resolve more calls the first time, which in turn should lead to improvements in customer satisfaction and overall business performance.

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Replacing the IT Guy: A How-To Guide

Below is a quick summary of my personal recommendations for an a-la-carte menu of hosted services to replace IT Guy and the in-house Microsoft Exchange Server. For sake of argument, let’s assume IT Guy costs the company at least $100K, including salary, benefits, office space, and his server, software licenses, and training costs. My replacement plan cuts the annual cost in half, and that includes a nice budget for outside HTML jockeys to help the website survive the transition.

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Microsoft Targets the Analytic Applications Market

Analytic application vendors will likely claim to “welcome” Microsoft to the analytic applications market, at least until Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 is commercially available. Many of them will point to their own integration with current versions of Microsoft Office. But because Microsoft products are perceived by many as low-cost, easy-to-implement offerings, analytic application vendors will need to compete aggressively in terms of cost and implementation assistance. As they attempt to position any Microsoft analytic application as an entry-level solution, many prospects will also be thinking of how Microsoft has historically improved its offerings over time, in some cases dramatically, with each successive release.

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Analysis: Microsoft’s Business Intelligence Power Grab

The verdict is still out on that question, Schiff says, but if Microsoft delivers a PerformancePoint product that is both comparatively inexpensive and largely functional—with an essential reduplication of features for which Business Objects SA, Cognos Inc., and others charge a premium—the BI status quo will have been irrevocably altered.

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Part II of My Analysis Services Interview Questions: Cool Business Problems

I use an axiom in the classroom and with client personnel who are learning business intelligence: if you can’t articulate the answer, you don’t know it. Some will say, “I know the answer. It’s in my head but I can’t tell you what it is.” I repeat: if you can’t articulate something, you don’t know it. The only evidence of knowledge is its articulation, so let’s lay out a couple of rules.

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BI Documenter

Chris Webb runs what I would consider the best SQL 2005 blog out there...

Just come across this new tool for documenting SQL Server and Analysis Services 2005 databases called BI Documenter:
http://www.bidocumenter.com
A touch pricey perhaps, but looks quite slick and has some good features.

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BI in 2006: Advancing, Waiting, Retrenching

"Latency, context and actionable information are things we have been talking about over the last 20 years, but the reality is that a lot of technologies are now merging into tools and platforms that are not necessarily going to be coming from a status quo vendor. You're going to have to think outside the box, because these things might actually save you a day on a quarterly close, or increase customer satisfaction responsively by five days, or save churn and prevent regulatory headaches," Smith said.

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Enterprise-Wide BI and Data Warehouse Capability

One common response to the continuous changes is to distribute the development of reporting and analysis solutions to the functional areas of the business and/or across multiple IT groups. This approach is rarely accomplished with a plan in mind; thus, many discover silos all doing similar BI-related work, resulting in unnecessary and sometimes hidden costs related to:

Excessive hardware and software due to purchases of redundant software tools, compounded by the lack of purchasing power when buying software in smaller portions;
Uneven distribution of organizational BI investments;
Time and effort being spent on less valuable tasks instead of analyzing information, spotting trends in the business and recommending decisions;
Time and effort spent to keep existing reporting solutions running - instead of developing new BI solutions that help the company "move the needle";
BI projects taking longer to deliver, costing more and failing to deliver on expectations; and
Decisions based on incomplete and inaccurate information, resulting in missed opportunities for reducing costs or increasing revenues. This is the greatest hidden cost of a siloed, disconnected BI approach.

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Roger Sessions - A Better Path to Enterprise Architectures

A good Enterprise Architecture is critical to getting the maximum value out of your company's IT investments. For this reason, many companies spend lots of money trying to develop an Enterprise Architecture. All too often, the result is an expensive fiasco. This MSDN white paper by Roger Sessions looks at some recent spectacular failures of enterprise architectures, analyzes why these failures occurred, and discusses the important lessons your company can learn. The paper outlines a different approach to building an enterprise architecture based on probability theory and wartime combat analysis. A PDF version is also available from Roger's website.

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Redefining Big Data: Interview with Bill Inmon

A good intro interview... and Bill is right. Not the usual over-the-top metaphors either, just straight talk about changes in DW approaches that need to be addressed. I personally think SOA elements should also be part of DW 2.0...Bill Inmon: There are two reasons for DW 2.0 - the first is for the integrity of the definition because I feel there are too many definitions floating around. The second reason is the need for a vision for the future of data warehousing, which I believe a lot of people in the industry have wrong. It came from confusion and from vendors trying to sell products. There were people building transactional systems they were calling a data warehouse; people building federated versions of a data warehouse; people building data marts that they were calling a data warehouse. Those are just some of the renditions.

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Ten Ways to Improve Data Warehouse PerformancePart 1 – Building for Performance

Date: June 27, 2006
Time: 1 p.m. ET / 10 a.m. PT

Attendees on June 27th will learn how to…

Plan for changing needs with a comprehensive, flexible architecture and technology that can grow with the environment.
Design projects that deliver immediate value, show measurable ROI, and keep the business moving ahead.
Deliver reporting capabilities that address immediate demands and evolving needs.
Keynote presentation
Claudia Imhoff, Ph.D., President, Intelligent Solutions – Building Performance into Your Data Warehouse from the Get-Go

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Principles of SOA and other thoughts on a just-in-time world

My top ten principles for evaluating SOA preparedness:

SOA is real. It is not a quick fix. It is a ten year journey that requires considerable planning, just like an e-commerce implementation.
SOA is built upon 15 years of experiments in creating highly distributed computing environments that take into account everything from load balancing, software distribution, security, and data management including meta data management and registry.
SOA will only work if organizations lead with manageability. SOA by its very nature demands the aggregation of IP from many different sources. Scalability within SOA will come from management – not development.
SOA will only work if it is implemented within the context of a business process orientation.
SOA is predicated on leveraging business services that represent the component parts of your business.
SOA requires a container that creates a composite application.
SOA requires standards across all vendors implementations of SOA.
SOA assumes that you will begin to write applications differently – as a series of tightly defined services intended to be loosely coupled.
SOA assumes that each component part is equipped with a clearly implemented web services interface based on standards.
SOA dictates that change is the norm since this approach mimics the way a business operates.

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SOA is Here! Is Your Company Ready?

Typical systems architectures such as that shown in Figure 1 have several important disadvantages when trying to implement agile, adaptable systems. In the figure, all of the systems are tightly coupled with one another. Tight coupling basically means that system interfaces are proprietary, unique and single-use; they only serve one application's specific needs. In addition, protocols for the interfaces are explicit and technology-dependent. This means that there is absolutely no transparency between systems.

This leads to constant reinvention of similar programs and functions. For example, every function that retrieves a specific piece of information is duplicated in every one of the application systems. Each platform must implement its own application-specific method of retrieving and using the same enterprise data.

What will be the result of implementing this type of architecture if additional enterprise information becomes necessary to communicate among all of these systems? Every one of the interfaces between these systems must be changed to accommodate the new enterprise information that must be shared. This is terribly inefficient and costs a significant amount of both time and money.

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Analysis: Isn't that for smart people?

Here's an example of applying all 3 in an example process improvement project. Let's assume your company is looking into reducing shrinkage. The first thing you do on such a project is develop some hypotheses where the shrinkage is taking place and design a project to collect process knowledge and process performance data to confirm or drop these hypothesis. The first step I call scoping a project, the second step is capturing the current state. The data you collected you use for determining the key shrinkage numbers by the different nodes (functions such as manufacturing, warehousing, transportation, retail store, etcetera) in your supply chain. Determine where the highest shrinkage occurs to focus your improvement efforts. For this you normally use analytical tools such as sample size, Pareto analysis, and scatter diagrams. These all fall in the performance class. You now know where to find the biggest bang for the buck.

But what is causing the shrinkage? Hopefully the process knowledge you collected in the second step can help you out. The process information you collected should have highlighted several processes that are causing shrinkage. Reviewing your processes for gross disconnects will help identifying the key issues. Expensive parts may 'walk out of the door' because there is nobody responsible for issuing these parts. Insufficient training may lead to a high damage rate to parts during the installation process. And constantly moving the product around increases the risk of damage. These are the structural analytical techniques. You now know what to solve.

How to solve these? That's where the practices can help out. Be assured that in most cases you are not the first company trying to solve the causes you found. And you may not even be the first division or business unit in your company trying to solve them. A best practices assessment in your company may help you identify workable solutions for your root causes. And as a bonus you may also find people that have experience in implementing those practices. Many companies use consulting companies for the practices. Consulting companies are exposed to many different ways different companies have implemented the same processes and they can objectively compare the effectiveness of those different versions of the same process.

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Customer Analysis Using Pictures and Patterns

The Value of Film Study
In business as in sports, behind-the-scenes analysis is the foundation for on-the-field success. That is the promise of business intelligence – and the reality of film study in the National Football League (NFL).

NFL coaches and players spend hours analyzing film to identify the strengths and weaknesses of their opponents. Coaches scour video for opponents’ tendencies and use this knowledge to build their game plan. For players, film study gives them understanding that lets instinct take over on the field. Consider some of the techniques involved:

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Demonstrate Results

I found it difficult to get my company to conduct post-implementation audits. A major reason is that these can't be done just by IT. They depend on a collaboration between IT and the user department; the cost savings can be identified only by the users. The best way to achieve this is to make post-implementation audits a best practice within your company (and ensure that top management requires them). Making post-implementation reviews a function of a third-party organization such as internal audit helps to encourage all parties to participate.

When I have been able to do it, it has achieved the desired effect of proving the business case. For example, when Ace implemented a data warehousing system, our CEO demanded that the user departments quantify the long-term benefits before he approved the project. Once the system was implemented, he required the major users to report quarterly to the executive officers what benefits they were realizing from the system. By holding users accountable for the results, this approach ensures that future cost/benefit analyses will be more accurate.

If we can get users to understand that they must engage in pre-system development and post-implementation audits, we will ensure a higher degree of successful system delivery and accountability for results. Only when our colleagues know what to expect from us, when they understand what we do, and when they trust we understand their needs, will we begin to change many of the stereotypes that have followed us from the early days of computing.

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Louisiana Stamps out Food-Stamp Fraud

In an illegal activity called trafficking or discounting, customers sometimes sell their food stamp benefits to a store for cash, often receiving only half of the face value of the benefits. The retailer buying the food stamps, meanwhile, redeems them for the full value and pockets the difference.

In the past, investigators had few tools at their disposal—relying heavily on tips called in to their office that would identify potentially thieving retailers. So, Louisiana's Fraud and Recovery Section began exploring technological solutions that would lower the odds of successful swindles.

To achieve its goals, the Louisiana DSS gathered an array of technological partners to help.

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Winning Hearts and Minds (and Money) with Data Quality

You've invested money in a data profiling tool and you have software to standardize and match records in the data warehouse. You've established a governance committee with data stewards from key business units. You have secured budget dollars to extend your data quality platform to support new systems. However, if you are like many practitioners responsible for providing reliable, accurate information, you might now be struggling with seemingly intractable issues such as:

We've discovered several serious anomalies in the source data, but we don't know what to do about them.
We know that data problems are causing serious problems, but upper management doesn't seem to get it.
We need to integrate systems globally, but we don't know how to rationalize data captured in multiple languages.
Even though we perform thousands of transformations as data flows into the warehouse, the users still complain that results are inaccurate.

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Free Integration Services Performance Webcast

If you've looked into anything about Integration Services in SQL Server 2005,, you will have come across the name Donald Farmer. He is the Group Program Manager for Integration Services and what he doesn't know about SSIS isn't probably worth knowing.

He is doing a level 400 (very technical) webcast on SSIS Performance on Tuesday, June 13. You can register here

http://msevents.microsoft.com/cui/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?EventID=1032298086&EventCategory=4&culture=en-US&CountryCode=US

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Learning from the Amazon technology platform

Incredible interview with Amazon's CTO - must read to understand the transformation an SOA platform can bring to a business.

Amazon.com started 10 years ago as a monolithic application, running on a Web server, talking to a database on the back end. This application, dubbed Obidos, evolved to hold all the business logic, all the display logic, and all the functionality that Amazon eventually became famous for: similarities, recommendations, Listmania, reviews, etc. For years the scaling efforts at Amazon were focused on making the back-end databases scale to hold more items, more customers, more orders, and to support multiple international sites. This went on until 2001 when it became clear that the front-end application couldn't scale anymore.

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Get Voicemail In Your Email Inbox: GotVoice

Nothing to do wih OLAP, but too cool to pass up if you live in the US...

It doesn’t have a fancy design or well throught through navigation. I can’t find a single use of Ajax or javascript on the site (although there is some use of Flash). And that’s ok, because GotVoice does something I love - it converts voicemails from my home and cell phone into MP3s and sends them to me by email.

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Governance Dashboard for Enterprise Storage

Growth in data, estimated by many analysts at between 30 and 70 percent yearly, has put the capability and maturity of enterprise management on a high-visibility, rapid-growth path. We see this in the increasing awareness of needs and benefits that come from the internal service provider model and the disciplines of cross-functional policies and workflow standard operating procedures.

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Why Your Future Depends on Open Source -- Part 3

The first reason you need to begin using open source software is that IT budgets suffer from two simultaneous imperatives: low-growth and increasing demand. One important way to respond to these imperatives is to lower your cost of delivering technology. Open source can be an enormous help in this response.

The second reason for using open source is that the software industry itself is undergoing change and will increasingly resemble the open source model: the software itself being freely downloadable, but with far fewer ancillary services delivered by the vendor for free. Beyond the obvious service cuts -- no free proof-of-concepts, architecture roadmap presentations, and so on -- other, less obvious services will be trimmed as well -- things like informative advertising, vendor-sponsored analyst reports. The effect of these changes is that IT organization will need to take more responsibility for technology decisions and processes -- a hallmark of the open source world.

Now, let's discuss the third reason you need to jump on open source -- and this one extends the impact past the confines of the IT organization: open source can offer competitive advantage to the overall organization -- in other words, open source can help businesses perform better financially.

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BPEL in a Service-Oriented Architecture

A good example of BPEL here....

In order to illustrate what problems BPEL addresses and how it relates to SOA, we'll consider an example from the travel industry. Consider a company offering travel services over the Web. The operations might include:

getAvailableHotels: Takes an input of an airport code and returns a list of hotels near that airport.
getDescription: Takes an input of a hotel identifier and returns a description.
getRate: Takes as input a hotel identifier and the type and number of rooms and the date and provides a quote for the rate.
makeReservations: Takes an input of the hotel identifier and the dates.
cancelReservation: Takes a confirmation number and cancels the reservation.

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Enterprise Data Backups: Are They Compromising Your Security Strategy?

Recently, a number of widely publicized data security breaches have gained international attention. Bank of America, Time Warner, MasterCard, LexisNexis (a division of Reed Elsevier) and Tiscali have all experienced loss or exposure of sensitive data. After such an incident, bringing a system into compliance with security regulations, notifying and appeasing unhappy customers and rebuilding confidence in a brand can be both a costly and time-consuming process. The companies mentioned have found this out the hard way, with costs spiraling into the millions of dollars.

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