Nicholas Goodman on Business Intelligence

As a consultant working with companies and people throughout the world I need easy ways to connect with people to be effective. Presentations to potential customers, collaborators on open source projects, and of course day to day work with customer staff to do things “together” albeit offsite.

I can honestly say the 50 USD charge for the gotomeeting.com service is money WELL SPENT and I never look upon as anything but good value. It’s a quick, user friendly, and relatively robust meeting software that allows me to screen share with up to 10 people anywhere in the world within about 30 seconds. Their pricing is awesome, and allows for unlimited meetings (included phone conferencing) for just 50 USD.

I highly recommend it for anyone working with disparate groups of collaborators and organizations (ie, not all at the same company using the “corporate” eMeeting software) or any consultant on the national or international basis.

I’ve just had to turn comments on the site off, because of a (insert your favorite word for spammer here) who thinks people on my site like Viagra, Cialis, and shady financial offerings.

Suppose I’ll have to upgrade and see if there’s any word verification plugins for Movable Type. Know of any? Send me an email at “ngoodman” at the usual.

HAPPY HOLIDAYS!

It’s been more than 85 blog posts that my readers have been forced to read my partially useful, mostly correct, blah blah blah without a voice. That’s right, readers have been forced to accept what I write as gospel because I’ve been afraid to open it up to the masses that will correct me. Errr…. that, or I’ve been “crazy lazy” (that’s a technical Oracle term) about getting a couple of nice Comment Templates setup in my blogging software.

Well, enough is enough…

I’m leading a revolt of my own blog readers! Leave a comment below telling me just how much you’ve loathed me for not allowing comments. Or, you can just say HI! I leave it to you…
Rambling aside, comments are VERY MUCH welcome and many many apologies for my template lazy-ness.

My start page is my blog… Every time that Firefox launches there’s the bayon blog either
a) verifying that it’s still up, I’ve paid my domain fees, my ISP hasn’t crashed, and that everything is 5×5
-OR-
b) I haven’t posted anything of any consequence lately, my google page rank is lower, and overall I’ll feel like a slacker because I haven’t posted for a while

Unfortunately the past 6 weeks have very much been the latter instead of the former. My last post, on 8/7/2005 marked the starting week of a new “Paris” DW project that has kept me VERY busy (almost too busy). I’ve been queuing up several articles that just need the proper amount of time to take screenshots and write up… Here’s what I’ve got skeletons for:

• CDC Expert for 10gR2: I’ve built an Expert that generates a Change Data Capture set of OWB objects (tables and mappings). I’ll release it publicly as soon as the preview release “hits the shelves” but ahead of that I can post some screenshots, etc.
• OWB 10gR2 Transportable Modules: Using Data Pump and Transportable tablespaces one can do ETL at the speed of “copy”
• OWB 10gR2 Real Time Data Warehousing: I had a customer wanting to do some “message based” integration with their BI system so I have some screen shots from a demo I did for them.
• OWB 10gR2 What the Heck?: There some gotchas that could potentially break your OMB scripts, cause some of your perfectly valid 10gR1 operators to become invalid, etc. I’ll just post some of the gotchas I’ve found
• Code Generation for Data Warehousing: I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, and think there’s more opportunity here then most people think. I recently had a customer drop a spreadsheet with 300+ “master table” fields in front of me and asked what it would look like in a proper reporting (ie, Dimensional) model. I used OMB to generate 32 Dimensions (levels, keys, scd types, attributes) 8 cubes and all their corresponding measures and FKs in about a day. There’s opportunity to do more here…

Email me and let me know if you’d like to put a request a particular article… And check out the rittman.net article on Data Profiling!

It was one year ago today that the bayon blog was born, with a post about simple beginnings. It apologized in advance for misspellings, hasty or inaccurate assumptions which I think was well placed; my high school English teacher would cringe if he were to read my posts. The community has been quite accepting of my inattention to these details, and I thank them for allowing me to be a little sloppy in this area.

In the past year:

• The bayon blog has been picked up by some aggregators (OraBlogs, BI Blogs).
• There have been 72 entries in 365 days which means I post something use(less/ful) every 5 days.
• Mostly I post about Oracle. Here is the breakdown of entries by category (Oracle = 40, Open Source = 12, Tech Industry = 10, Professional = 10, General BI = 6, Grid/Distributed = 2).
  
  Notice the sum surpasses the total because of posts being categorized to multiple categories; an issue familiar to dimensional modelers and quite challenging to boot.
• Traffic is steadily increasing… 10k page views per month is starting to breach respectable traffic! Which is thanks to…
• Google as my biggest referrer. Nearly half of all my traffic is referred from Google. rittman.net/biblogs/orablogs contribute significantly to bayon blog traffic as well!
• People are Googling for OPEN SOURCE (ETL/OLAP). I’ve written only a bit about these subjects, but it is by far the biggest driver to bayon blog
• I’ve met bloggers/colleagues/customers and been able to connect with people of similar interest. This has been quite exciting.
• I’m still quite lazy and have not enabled site comments. Perhaps I’ll make this a birthday present to bayon blog

Thanks for tuning in and I do hope readers find the content useful. Email me requests and feedback on the site content, usability, etc.

Out of town, friends in town, and also a couple of days of crash studying for:

Check, Done, In the Bag, Finito.

The next Oracle Warehouse Builder workshop in Seattle is Tuesday. The PSOUG let me know there are still a couple of seats available if anyone is interested email me.

I’ve just wrapped up reading the “World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Centry” by Thomas L. Friedman, and highly recommend it for anyone trying to navigate the very interesting, exciting, and startling 21st century world! It’s a must read, and was pleasantly surprised to find there is a great deal in there for those in the technology industry; I was expecting a pure political/globalization play but found there was quite a bit of substance on tech companies, players, and stories. The book is lengthy (496 pages), but consumable with stories and great factoids that make it a quick, interesting read.

Following on that was a serendipitous chance to hear Daniel Pink, of Free Agent Nation fame, chat about the substance of his new book “A Whole New Mind.” As I was listening to Pink’s presentation, which was both informative and entertaining, I noticed some overlapping themes from the two authors. No denying, it is a new world economy and the digital age has enabled globalization and a true globabl community. It’s a whole new ball game; we all need to embrace this change. It’s coming, there is no stopping it (whether to is purely ideological, not realistic)!

Any significant change emotes a variety of reactions… FUD will lose out to immense opportunity, eventually, if we can dig deep inside for growth and possibility.

They’re both great reads! The sooner you read them, the quicker you’ll have greater understanding of the dynamics of the 21st century and an increased chance of success. What’s interesting, I thought, was they both evaluate the landscape and point out the dynamics perfectly in sync, then they draw somewhat different conclusions. Closely related, but they definitely prescribe slightly different methods for success in the new world.

I’ve noticed some puzzled looks to the Title I’ve taken in my company (bayon) of “Principal Business Intelligence Consultant.” This usually comes when they realize that I’m what is more commonly called a Data Warehouse Consultant, Data Warehouse Architect, or Data Warehouse Developer. People tend to think of Business Intelligence Consultants as those who define the accounting rules and metrics that will appear in report X, or those that help develop and track the strategic intelligence metrics required by an organization. They don’t typically think these are the people that are installing and configuring the database software, or building the physical applications that will breathe life into those metrics and business rules.

I think this is intriguing, since traditionally Titles are supposed to say what you do. Our industry might be a bit carried away with a focus on tools (any big surprises here?) instead of capabilities and skills. If we base our most fundamental labeling (a Title is the individual equivalent of the company elevator speech) on what software we use, instead of what we do does that say something profound about our industry?

The CHEF does not describe themself as a Cuisinart/KitchenAid Practitioner, but rather as a “Modern Chef.’
A PARALEGAL uses the term for their card, not the fact they are a “ParaLegal Software Version 1.1 Operator.”
CARPENTERs are not called “Hammering and Sawing Consultants.”

Don’t get me wrong, the tools and methodologies you use are important. My bio says that I use Oracle(and am certified), which helps people know if I can “do” what I “do” in their IT ecosystem (they use Oracle). In fact, in some environments it might be the paramount concern:

“Call yourself whatever you like but if you know how to write PL/SQL that builds dynamic SQL using execute immediate then you are our PERFECT fit.”

It’s not just important, it’s very important. However, it’s just not what a Title should be.

Bringing actionable intelligence to people is what I do. I deliver salient intelligence to business stakeholders so they can make decisions faster, and with greater likelihood of beneficial results. That is what I do. The method I use to accomplish this is almost always a Data Warehouse built using a variety of tools (who am I kidding, it’s almost always Oracle). That is how I do it; an architecture and tools.

What I do (Business Intelligence), has value. How I do it (Data Warehousing), is a cost center.

Anyone think I’m missing the mark? Please send me thoughts on the subject. I really need to get comments going on the site.

btw, I’m considering changing my Title. Customer is king, and I’m finding most think in the “how/tools” view of the world.

I had finished all three exams a while ago, but thought it prudent to refrain from any public displays until the paper certification was in hand. Don’t count your chickens until they hatch, right?

Wishing you and yours a Merry and Happy Holiday Season! May you be healthy and prosperous in the New Year!

Warmest Wishes,
Nicholas A. Goodman
Founder - bayon technologies, inc.