Google Revealed: The IT Strategy That Makes It Work - Management News by InformationWeek

Google Revealed: The IT Strategy That Makes It Work - Management News by InformationWeek: "To wring every ounce of performance from its hardware, Google writes custom software--lots of it. Major innovations include MapReduce, a programming model to simplify processing and create large data sets; BigTable, a system for storing and managing massive amounts of data; Sawzall, an interpreted programming language for analyzing large data sets in a distributed computing environment; Google File System, a distributed file system for data-intensive applications; and Google Workqueue, a system that groups queries and schedules them for distributed processing.

...

Google built its own CRM system to support its business of selling Internet ads billed by a mixture of bid price and click-throughs. But Google isn't dogmatic about building its own tools. For accounting, it uses Oracle Financials."

Analyst Corner - How CIOs Drive Change Using Visibility Pressure - Analyst Corner - CIO

Analyst Corner - How CIOs Drive Change Using Visibility Pressure - Analyst Corner - CIO: "CIOs Should Integrate Visibility into Everyday IT Operations

Visibility into IT activities won’t work as a one-time event. Instead, as CIO, you must integrate the use of visibility processes and pressure into all of IT operations. You must:
• Gather the information. You can’t make something visible that doesn’t exist. Use improved relationships with internal customers to motivate the tracking of requests and prioritization through a common process, capturing the information in a consistent format through common tools. The benefit is realized by formally representing to customers what they want and consistently demonstrating what IT is doing to meet those needs. This may be the most difficult part: the cultural change required to turn a hard-working but data-free development organization into a data-generating operation. So treat it like a business change, not a command-and-control decision.
• Publish on a regular basis. You don’t want to appear to hold a grudge. IT organizations are busy, so it is easy not to publish information except when it’s needed—for example, when trying to get a resistant business unit to join a cross-unit investment in a common inventory management system. But if the CIO brings data to bear only to support arguments, then the business execs may see visibility as a form of attack. Periodic publishing of the information on a monthly or quarterly basis means that it’s always available and only referred to in the heat of a debate.
• Warn execs when compromising data is coming. You don’t want to be their enemy. No one likes to be caught off guard looking bad, especially if the surprise could have been avoided. Make certain that the business execs are"

Insight into Business Process Visibility

Insight into Business Process Visibility: "The benefits of business process monitoring and management are not new. They are prerequisites for continued process improvement. The first step toward business process improvement is providing real-time visibility into business processes. Understanding first where the bottlenecks are helps with improving the process, but process improvement requires all levels of the company to have control and visibility. That includes business management, business operations and IT management."

3 Steps to Information Worker Nirvana

This looks like it will be worth an hour if you use Sharepoint for reporting...

Business intelligence, data warehousing and analytics editorial from DMReview: "Event Speakers:

Steve Williams, Senior Product Marketing Manager, Business Objects
Karl Dittman, Global Alliance Management, Microsoft"

The 24x7 Challenge: IOUG 2006 Survey on High Availability Trends

The 24x7 Challenge: IOUG 2006 Survey on High Availability Trends: "Continuous, 24x7 availability is no longer just a marketing slogan; it is now a necessity for eight out of 10 Oracle-based enterprises. With the rise of Internet-based business and service-oriented architectures that require that networks of applications and data be available to enterprise users when and where they need it, companies can no longer afford the luxury of taking their databases offline for any reason."

Business Intelligence and Different Cultures

Business Intelligence and Different Cultures: "The truth is that many business intelligence projects fail because the organization is not ready to implement or capable of implementing BI. The reasons are cultural, where each organization usually has its own quirks and ways of working. Cultural differences might also exist on a more global scale, where different countries tend to do things differently from each other.
For example, business intelligence in Scandinavia is quite up to date with the latest developments. Why? Probably because Scandinavian countries are relatively uncorrupted, transparent, equal and pragmatic. It might be boring, but then again, it works. Just like Swedish tennis players.
France, on the other hand, is altogether a different story. In order to live up to égalité, everyone gets to say something. This “something” is often quite lengthy, off the actual subject and probably with a touch of some earlier experience that no one else can recognize. In the end, the manager decides, and the project moves on. And on. And on. In the end, however, it might work, and everyone will then use the experience from this BI project when they give their opinion about the next project. "

Hot Clicks! A Refresher on Clickstream Analysis

Hot Clicks! A Refresher on Clickstream Analysis: "One of our clients, a general merchandise retailer who has joined the e-tailing ranks, wants its Web site to be as “sticky” as possible and has begun analyzing clickstream data to surmise why customers might leave the site prematurely. The company has honed in on the value of abandoned shopping carts. When a customer leaves the site in the midst of a shopping trip, whatever the reason, the company looks to see what products were in the cart. The data is then compared with similar data from other abandoned carts to examine:

- How much revenue was represented by the abandoned carts? In other words, how much money did we lose by this customer leaving early?
- Whether the products in the cart were high-profit items or loss leaders.
- If the same products were found in other abandoned carts.
- How large were the carts that were deserted, including a rolling calculation of the average number of products in an abandoned cart?
- Whether the total bill for the abandoned carts consistently fell within a certain dollar range.

The result of this analysis can trigger some interesting theories. For instance, none of the products in the cart was appealing enough to a particular customer to motivate him to continue shopping. Or the customer was put off by frequent inquiries asking him whether he was ready to check out. Or that, at a particular dollar total, the customer thought better of the entire shopping trip and bailed. Or that a number or mix of products in a cart reminded the customer of another site that might offer a steeper discount for similar purchases. "

Establishing a Center of Excellence

Business Intelligence Review: "Simply put, a CoE is a team of people that is established to promote collaboration and the application of best practices. Three characteristics of the CoE that have a significant impact on its value and operation are its authority, role, and organization placement and staffing."

Amazon.com Amazon Web Services Store: Amazon EC2 / Amazon Web Services

Amazon.com Amazon Web Services Store: Amazon EC2 / Amazon Web Services

Wanted to pass this link along... these new services that are coming out threaten just about everything we take for granted... I think it could be a good service in the future to add in servers when needed. It's an Amazon service to host machines, and allow you to "fire up" identical machines on the fly when you need them. Done right, you could go from 1, to 10, to 50 very quickly, just by flipping a switch, and then turn them off just as fast when they aren't needed anymore. And you only pay for what you use, that's all.

The cost is cheap - 10 cents per hour pre machine, with no minimum. Cutting edge, but huge cost savings if done right.

For example, imagine a data mining app, where machines digest pieces at a time, and enough are brought up to solve a problem, then shut down again. Or a busy website, say for ecommerce, where down times, like at night, resources are turned off - and not paid for. Data warehouse ETL where only resources used are charged for, with no idle mongo servers lying around afterward.

Smart people are going to have a field day breaking old expectations when it comes to computing power requirements.

The BI Management Challenge: Creating an Environment for Business Success - Computerworld

The BI Management Challenge: Creating an Environment for Business Success - Computerworld: "Getting a business intelligence application up and running involves a great deal of advance planning, as well as additional follow-up work once the system is in place.

Episode 5 of Computerworld's webcast series on business intelligence discusses the challenges related to getting a BI implementation off the ground, ranging from coordinating application design to staff training."

A Database Journal Guide to MySQL 5 Certification: The DBA Stream

Wow great and comprehensive resource... read this, fill in your holes with the links, and you'll pass this exam easily.

Ian Gilfillan provides a reference for studying for MySQL 5 certification, including a list of topics covered in the exam, as well as resources from the MySQL site and Database Journal that you can use to enhance your studies.

A Database Journal Guide to MySQL 5 Certification: The DBA Stream

Operational Business Intelligence Application, Part I Infrastructure is the Key to Success

This is a great series of articles...

Operational Business Intelligence Application, Part I Infrastructure is the Key to Success: "An enterprise infrastructure for operational business intelligence applications consists of two major components:
Technical infrastructure, such as hardware, middleware and database management system (DBMS)


Non-technical infrastructure, such as standards, metadata, business rules and policies
A word of warning – don’t expect to buy an operational business intelligence turnkey solution. An operational BI environment evolves over time with its infrastructure!"

Business Metadata – Back to Basics

Business Metadata – Back to Basics: "The world of metadata has long been Thursday’s child of technology. It is there, it is a part of every environment, but it is always a back-burner project. Mysteriously, metadata – year after year – remains a technology that “we have to do something about one of these days.”"

Mastering OLAP Reporting: Prototype KPIs in Reporting Services

Mastering OLAP Reporting: Prototype KPIs in Reporting Services: "As I have stated since the charter article of the series, published about the time Reporting Services was first publicly released, my conviction is that Reporting Services will commoditize business intelligence, particularly in its role as a presentation component within an integrated Microsoft BI solution. Having been impressed from my first exposure to this exciting application, when it was in early beta, my certainty in its destiny grows stronger by the day, as I convert formerly dominant enterprise business intelligence systems, such as Cognos, Business Objects / Crystal, MicroStrategy, Hyperion, and others, to the Reporting Services architecture. I receive constant requests to conduct strategy sessions about these conversions with large organizations in a diverse range of industries – the interest grows daily as awareness of the solution becomes pervasive. Indeed, the five- to six-plus figures that many can shave from their annual IT budgets represent a compelling sweetener to examining this incredible toolset."

Oracle RAC Administration - Part 3: Administering the Clusterware Components

Oracle RAC Administration - Part 3: Administering the Clusterware Components: "The Oracle Clusterware is comprised primarily of two components: the voting disk and the OCR (Oracle Cluster Registry). The voting disk is nothing but a file that contains and manages information of all the node memberships and the OCR is a file that manages the cluster and RAC configuration. Let's take a quick look at administering the voting disks and the OCR."

Show Them the Money - Editorial - CIO

Show Them the Money - Editorial - CIO: "Because value-added services are information based, the CIO is a key enabler of them. CIOs are best equipped to design ways to collect information about customer needs. And CIOs understand best how to present this information to the people in their companies who deliver new services to customers."

If this is what your CIO is reading, there's a great opportunity to contribute as a DBA.

Making IT Work: When Technology Projects Break Down and What to do About It, Part 1

Making IT Work: When Technology Projects Break Down and What to do About It, Part 1: "I define a successful technology project or initiative as one that makes a real difference in the quality of people's lives and that delivers as promised, on time and under budget. This series of articles is organized around an examination of real-world projects that have worked and those that have not, and what the differences are between those that succeed and those that fail."

AOL hunts for spammer's gold - U.S. Business - MSNBC.com

Truth is stranger than fiction...

AOL hunts for spammer's gold - U.S. Business - MSNBC.com: "WASHINGTON - AOL is preparing to dig for buried gold and platinum on property in Massachusetts owned by the parents of a man it sued for sending millions of unwanted spam e-mails to its customers."

Chris Webb's BI Blog: Debunking the Beer and Diapers Story

Damn, I use this example all the time.

Chris Webb's BI Blog: Debunking the Beer and Diapers Story: "Mark Whitehorn (of 'Fast Track to MDX' fame) debunks that old 'beer and diapers' story that I've used plenty of times in data mining presentations in the Register today:
http://www.regdeveloper.co.uk/2006/08/15/beer_diapers/
Not that I'm going to let the small matter of the truth get in the way of a good story in future presentations!"

Database Mail in SQL Server 2005

Database Mail in SQL Server 2005: "The SQL Mail problems, that we faced in SQL Server 7.0 and 2000, are no more. SQL Server 2005 supports and uses SMTP email now and there is no longer a need to MAPI client to send email. In SQL Server 2005, the mail feature is called Database Mail. In this article, I am going to demonstrate step-by-step, with illustrations, how to configure Database Mail and send email from SQL Server."

Survey: CIOs Put Out Help-Wanted Sign for Business-Savvy IT Professionals

Survey: CIOs Put Out Help-Wanted Sign for Business-Savvy IT Professionals: "Finding 3: CIOs are looking for business-savvy technologists to build new systems.
Large and midsize companies are ramping up hiring in programming and systems development; also in demand are professionals in project management, business-process redesign, business analysis and systems integration. The message to IT professionals is clear: A need exists in the U.S. for talented technicians who can be businesspeople, too, especially if they can function in a global economy. "

Microsoft Certified Architect : A sample question for infrastructure MCA candidates

Interesting question!

Microsoft Certified Architect : A sample question for infrastructure MCA candidates: "The information about review board questions is still too vague and hazy? You need a specific example? OK, here we go...

Automatic software updating is one of the critical knowledge areas for any infrastructure architect. Grab a marker and sketch your proposed architecture for the planetary-scale patch dissemination service. It has to be fast, effective, massively scalable and capable of patching up to a billion of globally connected computers every month. Think Windows Update service on steroids.

Sketch the conceptual design of proposed system with enough detail to enable the discussion around the following questions:

How many physical tiers would you design into a proposed architecture? Why?
What non-functional (systemic) qualities of the system would be the most important? Why?
What traffic properties would you expect? How would you measure the patterns and how would you make the system adaptable to unforeseeable spikes?
What is your signalling strategy to inform all subscribed computers on time without choking the distribution?
What is your preferred patch dissemination strategy? What would be good alternatives? Why?
Compare the patch distribution system with traditional content distribution (such as Web content). What are the major differences?

Try to VERBALIZE the answers. Be short and to the point. Keep the structure of answers and balance the conceptual view with enough of supporting details. Would you be persuasive and influential enough to satisfy a picky CIO of massive ISP and the group of his closest advisors?

Now go and read the following article: http://research.microsoft.com/research/pubs/view.aspx?tr_id=1129."

Triggers: A Key Tool for B2B Marketing and Risk Management

Triggers: A Key Tool for B2B Marketing and Risk Management: "Another way to refine a trigger-based strategy is to deploy multiple triggers. A lender or B2B raw material provider may wish to watch for score changes greater than 10 points but not prospects for which there has been a UCC filing. That allows credit providers to drill down further to the exact set of desired customers. For example, a business seeking credit might be likely to respond but undesirable if that business is desperately applying for many loans. The use of multiple triggers and thresholds helps weed out likely responders that are unlikely to be approved.
The bottom line is marketing cost savings. For example, consider a company that requests a list of all businesses that have a new lien or judgment in a month, which produce 27,000 businesses. Assume the average cost for a direct-mail piece, including postage and creative work, is 43 cents per piece. If the criteria exclude marketing to anyone who has a lien or a judgment, triggers can help the company avoid dropping that mail piece on those 27,000 businesses - translating into a savings of $11,610. Not only is the cost of the mailing saved, but the cost of processing a claim that results in a 'no' also is avoided."

Information Brokers: The Missing Link?

Information Brokers: The Missing Link?: "In my previous article, SAP Business Intelligence and the Conservation of Complexity, I introduced the concept of an “information broker.” I made the point that a major reason many companies fail to realize the full potential of the information housed in their various application systems is because end users are unable to effectively deal with the high level of complexity presented to them. Even in a warehouse environment such as SAP BW where data has been cleansed, sanitized, de-normalized, and supposedly made fit for human consumption, it can be a daunting task for the rank-and-file user base to access mission-critical information. "

How to cluster SQL Server 2000 Analysis Services in Windows 2000 and in Windows Server 2003

How to cluster SQL Server 2000 Analysis Services in Windows 2000 and in Windows Server 2003: "This article provides step-by-step instructions on how to set up SQL Server Analysis Services 2000 as a clustered service. Although Analysis Services is not a cluster aware application, you can install and configure Analysis Services as a generic service on a cluster."

Webex: Appliances Are Here to Stay and Are Revolutionizing the Data Warehouse Industry!

Might be worth a look to seee the latest hype...

Event Detail: "Data warehouse appliances are taking the industry by storm! Appliances are making a big impact on the data warehouse market as more data-intensive organizations evaluate, adopt and deploy these solutions in support of their business analytics needs. And Netezza is at the forefront of this revolution. What’s driving this appliance trend?

In its recent report, “Business Analytics Appliances are Here to Stay,” independent industry analyst firm IDC found that data warehouse appliances are gaining in popularity. What is it about appliances that are making them an attractive option to traditional data warehouse systems? How do you differentiate the various appliance approaches currently in the market and determine which offers the benefits your organization needs? And what is it about Netezza’s approach that addresses what data-intensive organizations are looking for? "

Chris Webb's BI Blog: Announcing the Analysis Services Stored Procedure Project

Chris Webb's BI Blog: Announcing the Analysis Services Stored Procedure Project: "
Back in April, I posted an entry on Analysis Services stored procedures asking if anyone would be interested in joining me to create a few useful examples that people could download. I had a good response and now, after several months of work behind the scenes, I'm happy to announce that you can see beta 1 of the fruits of our labours here:
http://www.codeplex.com/Wiki/View.aspx?ProjectName=ASStoredProcedures
I won't go into any detail about what's in there - it's reasonably well documented, and you can download the source code as well as the dll. Suffice to say that there are several cool functions to extend MDX and hopefully you'll find at least one or two useful ones. If you have any feedback, suggestions, bugs to report etc then please do so on Codeplex rather than here.

Thanks are due to Jon Axon, Christian Wade, Mosha Pasumansky and especially Greg Galloway and Darren Gosbell for the effort they've put in to this. "

Business Intelligence Pipeline | News | Gartner Names Hot Technologies With Greatest Potential Impact

Business Intelligence Pipeline News Gartner Names Hot Technologies With Greatest Potential Impact: "Researcher Gartner Inc. on Wednesday identified the technologies it believes will have the greatest impact on businesses over the next 10 years, naming such hot areas as social-network analysis, collective intelligence, location-aware applications and event-driven architectures. "

Racing to market with SOA | InfoWorld | Analysis | 2006-08-09 | By Galen Gruman

Good real world SOA how-to:

Racing to market with SOA InfoWorld Analysis 2006-08-09 By Galen Gruman: "For Noy, the answer lay in SOA (service-oriented architecture). Its abstracted, modular approach is fundamentally about designing for extensibility and adaptation to new business needs. “It lets you build a framework that can incorporate unknowns, providing a cohesive platform even when developing rapidly — without later requiring a re-architecting,” Noy says. "

Oracle 10g: A Self Managed Database?

Oracle 10g: A Self Managed Database?: "This article has discussed two concepts which are an integral pieces of the server self manageability functionality, AWR and AST (Automatic System Tasks). As you know, these features reduce the cost of managing the IT environment by greatly reducing configuration and intuitive day-to-day administration but it does require someone who is familiar with this architecture. The pressure of cost reduction no longer allows the growth of a DBA's staff in the enterprises to keep pace with database growth rate, which results in what some refer to as the 'Management Gap'. DBAs need better tools that increase their productivity and help automate many of their manual tasks. Irrespective of how many tasks are being automated, it is critical to both large and small companies that there is always going to be a need for someone who understands how the database server actually works, especially where organizations push the database to its limits."

Blog: Stephen Few: The Graph Hall of Shame

On the subject of graphs, here's some funny stuff -

"Last, but not least, the sequence of months along the X-axis is a rather creative way to display time. I can't think of any situation in which an alphabetical arrangement of months would make sense. "

Blog: Stephen Few: The Graph Hall of Shame: "I thought that it would be fun to use this blog as a forum for sharing really bad examples of graph design, especially examples found on the Web sites or in the user documentation of business intelligence vendors. This serves two purposes: 1) It illustrates ineffective graph design practices, to help you learn what to avoid, and 2) it hopefully embarrasses the vendor that created the graph enough to pay more attention to what they show their customers as examples of graph-based communication. I'll share fresh examples from time to time, but please feel free to send me examples that you've found as well, which I can then share with the other readers of this blog. You can send examples directly to me at sfew@perceptualedge.com."

Balancing the Art and Science of Marketing: Using Analytics for Maximum Marketing Effectiveness

Balancing the Art and Science of Marketing: Using Analytics for Maximum Marketing Effectiveness: "Don't get too fancy too fast. If you do, you run the risk of losing sight of your analytics objectives. It's easy to get more caught up in how you are solving a problem than in reaching an actual solution. Consider simplifying analytics to align with basic business rules. You don't always need to employ the most sophisticated analytics methodology or technique to generate results that are right for your business. Even the most basic analytics tools can take your company far."

Graph Designs for Rapidly Assessing Budget Performance

Lots of good ideas here... if you design reports for others, you can never get enough of seeing how other people succeed in designing something that does an exemplary job of communicating the information the information consumer needs to know.

Graph Designs for Rapidly Assessing Budget Performance: "Here are some of the highlights that made Dylan’s solution stand out:
Budget performance is directly expressed a variance percent.


It is easy to compare the overall performance of departments to one another using the ranked bar graph at the top.


It is easy to examine the performance for a specific department month by month throughout the year.

It is easy to visually link a selected department’s overall performance in the upper graph to its monthly performance in the corresponding graph at the bottom simply by pointing to a bar in the upper graph, which automatically highlights all associated bars in the corresponding small graph below.


The fact that December data isn’t included is clear from its omission in the small month-level graphs. The partial month of November has also been excluded. It could have been included but displayed differently than the other months (for example, by using a dimmer color of blue for that bar), but Dylan correctly reasoned that it would not make much sense and might create confusion to express the percentage variance to budget for only a half-month’s worth of data, which would look like good performance even if there were a large under-budget variance.


The small graphs at the bottom – one per department – can be compared to one another because they use a consistent quantitative scale."

Q&A: Former Sleepycat CEO touts Oracle open-source moves

Sleepycat is BerkleyDB - a simple, free database easy to embed in other programs. You may remember, they also own a key patent used by MySQL (that caused alot of concern when Oracle bought them, and it, last year.)

Q&A: Former Sleepycat CEO touts Oracle open-source moves: "With just 25 employees, is Sleepycat helping to bring open-source values to Oracle? I've been in the database industry since 1986. I'm well aware of the sometimes fairly negative reputation that Oracle has, of being a fearsome competitor. My experience inside the company so far has been fairly good. There are a lot of innovative, hardworking people. And I have seen such people assume leadership roles and drive the company forward, irrespective of their actual titles. Oracle is a company where the individual contribution matters. Moreover, there is a legacy of open-source involvement at Oracle and by its employees. We have just done a pretty bad job of talking about it."

~gux (Gustavo Larriera) : SQL Server 2000 will not be supported on Vista/Longhorn

~gux (Gustavo Larriera) : SQL Server 2000 will not be supported on Vista/Longhorn: "SQL Server 2000 (and also MSDE) and earlier versions will not be supported on Windows Vista. Please see details on this announcement."

SQL Server Executive: Security in SQL Server 2005

A good issue of DMReview this month - if you don't get this magazine (and BIReview) you should - they are free for DBAs and their ilk.

SQL Server Executive: Security in SQL Server 2005

Career Considerations in the Field of Business Intelligence

Career Considerations in the Field of Business Intelligence: "Never has there been a better time to have a career in business intelligence (BI) than the present. "

Job Posting - For Oracle BI/Fusion

I get these every now and then, and I think I am going to start posting them... Below is a company, Solbourne, looking for an Oracle Bi person... and if I do say so it sounds like an enviable opportunity. (and btw, I never heard of Solbourne before).

Have any jobs you'd like me to post? Feel free. This blog continues to get a good deal of traffic, and has alot of RSS readers too. And I've decided I will post the jobs. Just send them to my hotmail account: duncan_lamb@hotmail.com



--------------------
Solbourne is a leader in delivering innovative enterprise solutions to governments and businesses for Oracle and PeopleSoft Applications. We have a 12 year record helping more than 250 Public Sector and Rocky Mountain Commercial customers achieve their operational and financial objectives. An Oracle Certified Advantage Partner and 2002 Oracle Partner of the Year, we have delivered more Oracle implementations for State and Local Government than any other Oracle Partner. We are currently deploying high-profile Fusion Middleware solutions and are positioned well for supporting early adopters of Fusion Applications. Our approach is based on business process expertise, knowledge transfer and alliance oriented communication.

As we own our own client projects, we value teamwork and excellence and offer career growth and a hands-on management supported environment. All our consultants live in their respective metro areas and travel 80% to client sites across the nation. Yes, we’re on par with the larger consulting firms but as a smaller company we’re making a better impact: for our customers and your quality of life! This is a full-time employee, traveling consultant position.
Position Responsibilities:
6+ years of experience incorporating both technical and functional aspects in a project with a focus on implementations than development. Experience building data warehouses from scratch to implementing out-of-the-box DBI/BI dashboards and reports; has implemented various modules of DBI (for example, Projects DBI and Financials DBI) and on various Apps platforms (for example, eBiz suite 11.5.9 and 11.5.10) preferred. Has broad functional and technical apps experience in financials, manufacturing, purchasing, inventory, projects. Focus to make customer successful. Versatile, with industry product knowledge.

Prefer knowledge of a blend of Oracle technology (DBI, Balance scorecard, EPB – enterprise panning and budgeting) and Oracle BI tools (Warehouse builder, Discoverer 10g, OLAP, Portal - tools for creation of dashboard, financial analyzer), Siebel Analytics tools and/or non-Oracle tools (TIBCO, Informatica, Business Objects). Some experience designing data warehouses, but more on how data is pulled from various sources, what the data is and what it means. Knowledge of OLAP, do queries, design dashboard.

Senior SOA position additional skills needed:
· Leader for our delivery organization on developing competencies around reporting architectures (business intelligence) and integration architectures (Service Oriented Architectures) using Oracle technology
· Good knowledge of Service Oriented Architectures (web services)
· Expertise with SOA and/or BI tools (WebSphere, Business Objects, Hyperion, Informatica, WebLogic, etc)
· Expertise with Oracle SOA and/or BI (Daily Business Intelligence, Balanced Scorecard, Portal, Discoverer, Application Server 10g, etc.)
· Understand Oracle Fusion Middleware
· Ability to direct customers to develop enterprise strategies, and communicate at both technical, business and executive levels

For this job contact:

Michelle Rawicz
Corporate Recruiter
303-417-6692 (o)
mrawicz@solbourne.com

Creating Effective KPIs

Business Intelligence Review

Benchmarks for BI and Data Warehousing Success

Business Intelligence Review: "The independent data marts architecture scored lowest on the success metrics, followed by the federated architecture. Interestingly, the bus, hub-and-spoke and centralized architectures scored similarly on the success metrics for information quality, system quality, individual impacts and organizational impacts. Consequently, the scores were combined to provide benchmark numbers that can be used with any of the three architectures. Figure 1 lists the success metrics and the average scores based on the responses from 454 companies."

Is a Data Warehouse Appliance Right for You?

Is a Data Warehouse Appliance Right for You?: "The dilemma is this: Where do appliances starting below $150,000 fit in the data warehousing universe where built-to-requirements solutions typically exceed a few million dollars per system? "

Good question!

Why Customer Data Integration Projects Fail – 3 Reasons

: "Customer data integration (CDI) initiatives that build and deliver transactional data hubs have become one of the top five priorities for most Fortune 500 Chief Information Officers. Customer data hubs are a strategic driver for organizations that need to gain a unified view of their customers.
However, CDI projects continue to be risky ventures—and many of them fail during the implementation stage. While there are some common organizational reasons for failure, such as poor planning, under staffing, etc., the technical reasons for failure are less understood. The purpose of the Why Customer Data Integration Projects Fail white papers are to outline these technical risk factors…
Why Customer Data Integration Projects Fail—an essential 3-Part Series

Part I:
Not Addressing Scalability

Part II:
Data Model Inflexibility

Part III:
Poor Data Governance "

Free VMWare Machines - VMTN Virtual Appliances Directory

If you have read this blog a long time, you know that I love virtualization. I have seen it ease administration burdens in many environments. And using them to try new versions or new software is great.

Now it is getting easier and easier to experiment, especially since VMWare and Microsoft Virtual PC are both free, for both the client and server versions. truly amazing.

A couple of years ago I posted about some free, preconfigured machines VMWare had on their website that allowed anyone to fire up a working machine. At the time, there were only about 5.

On Digg today, that number is now over 100, and it is impresive all the machines that are available. From a DBA's perspective, there's a few cool ones, like MySQL, PostGres, FireBird, and others that allow anyone to quickly start messing with these new servers without taking a day out of their lives learning how to install from scratch.

Probably most interesting, there is an Oracle 10g w/RAC machine out there for download. Want to try it out? Cool!

Here's the main link to all of them: - VMTN Virtual Appliances Directory

Obviously, Microsoft is not represented well (although they do provide some VPS demos of products, but only through the Partner network), all of them are open source OSs.

Event-Based Analytics: Getting it Right

Event-Based Analytics: Getting it Right: "More advanced event-based analytics marketing involves the use of transaction data. A significant purchase at Home Depot could mean significant investment in renovations and a potential customer for offers around renovation including loans and installation services. Getting in front of the potential customer before the competition significantly increases the potential for the sale. Transaction data not only provides timely information, but also a rich picture of a person's spending habits, making it an ideal asset for event-based analytics."

ITIL: 4 Experts Share Keys to Success

ITIL: 4 Experts Share Keys to Success: "Q: What benefits can a company realize from ITIL?
A:
Streamlined, centralized ways of doing things that bring process efficiency. There's less chaos when everyone's on the same page doing things.
Cost savings with process improvement, particularly when you start by showing improvement in the areas of 'pain' in an organization.
Increased knowledge of 'end-to-end' processes